• Tech companies’ access to UK ministers dwarfs that of child safety groups

    Exclusive: Amazon, Meta and X among firms holding hundreds of meetings with people at heart of government, data showsTech companies have been meeting government ministers at a rate of more than once per working day, enjoying high-level political access that dwarfs that of child safety and copyright campaigners, who called the pattern “shocking” and “disturbing”.Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and Elon Musk’s X, whose Grok AI image generator has sparked outrage with its sexu
  • Trump’s failed energy bill pledge leaves US households struggling: ‘It’s obscene’

    A year after then candidate Trump promised to cut energy bills in half, rising costs are pushing many Americans’ household budgets to the brinkBefore she sat down to speak with the Guardian, Zattura Sims-El leaned over to plug a table lamp into the wall.“I keep everything in this house unplugged when I’m not using it, because I heard that as long as it’s plugged into the wall, it’s costing you,” she said. “The only things I don’t unplug are my stov
  • ‘We could hit a wall’: why trillions of dollars of risk is no guarantee of AI reward

    Progress of artificial general intelligence could stall, which may lead to a financial crash, says Yoshua Bengio, one of the ‘godfathers’ of modern AIWill the race to artificial general intelligence (AGI) lead us to a land of financial plenty – or will it end in a 2008-style bust? Trillions of dollars rest on the answer.The figures are staggering: an estimated $2.9tn (£2.2tn) being spent on datacentres, the central nervous systems of AI tools; the more than $4tn stock mar
  • My picture was used in child abuse images. AI is putting others through my nightmare | Mara Wilson

    I was a child actor, exploited by strangers on the internet. Now millions of children face the same dangerWhen I was a little girl, there was nothing scarier than a stranger.In the late 1980s and early 1990s, kids were told, by our parents, by TV specials, by teachers, that there were strangers out there who wanted to hurt us. “Stranger Danger” was everywhere. It was a well-meaning lesson, but the risk was overblown: most child abuse and exploitation is perpetrated by people the chil
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