Smart Glasses Help Train General-Purpose Robots

General-purpose robots are hard to train. The dream is to have a robot like the Jetson’s Rosie that can performing a range of household tasks, like tidying up or folding laundry. But for that to happen, the robot needs to learn from a large amount of data that match real-world conditions—that data can be difficult to collect. Currently, most training data is collected from multiple static cameras that have to be carefully set up to gather useful information. But what if bots could le

From Stanley Tucci’s imperious tech titan to Lex Luthor’s distractingly hot CEO and Elon Musk-esque blowhards, films this year took us inside the billionaire mindsetBetween the slash-and-burn US government reboot led by a dank meme fan and the relentless pushing of AI by venture capital-backed blowhards, 2025 has felt like peak obnoxious tech bro. Fittingly, jargon-spouting, self-regarding digital visionaries also became Hollywood’s go-to baddies this year in everything from bl

In today’s newsletter: Covering everything from Donald Trump to AI, and Gaza to Ukraine, award-winning cartoonist and illustrator Ben Jennings shares his favourite caricatures of 2025, and we share ours too.Good morning. It’s been one of those years where the news cycle felt almost too surreal to caricature. From Jeff Bezos commandeering Venice for his lavish wedding at a time of a growing backlash over inequality, to the spectacle of Donald Trump returning to office for a second ter

Our magic bullets are increasingly rare and ineffective. The golden age of discovery is over and the way we develop and use drugs needs to changeDuring her tenure as director general of the World Health Organization, Dr Margaret Chan used to say that all of the “easy” antibiotics had already been found. Her point was that in responding to the urgent threat of antibiotic-resistant infections, we would struggle to find new medicines – or preserve the ones we have &

Anja Cradden proposes ways of managing tech companies before we reach crisis point. Plus letters from Mike Scott and Gerry Rees “When the AI bubble bursts, humans will finally have their chance to take back control”, says the headline on Rafael Behr’s article (23 December). I think it’s more likely that when the AI bubble bursts, the creators of the crisis, along with other wealthy economic actors, will be in the rooms with the politicians telling them how to “rescu

Acquisition would further expand SoftBank’s investments in artificial intelligence as it tries to center itself in the boomSoftBank Group will acquire digital infrastructure investor DigitalBridge Group in a deal valued at $4bn, the companies said on Monday, as the Japanese investment firm looks to deepen its AI-related portfolio.The acquisition would expand SoftBank’s exposure to digital infrastructure as the Japanese conglomerate is positioning its portfolio to focus on artificial

New head of preparedness at OpenAI will face unnerving in-tray amid fears from some experts that AI could ‘turn on us’The maker of ChatGPT has advertised a $555,000-a-year vacancy with a daunting job description that would cause Superman to take a sharp intake of breath.In what may be close to the impossible job, the “head of preparedness” at OpenAI will be directly responsible for defending against risks from ever more powerful AIs to human mental health, cybersecurity a

Fewer children are reading for fun - but parents are trying everything from AI to dramatic voices to keep them engagedIt’s been a tough year for our brains. Merriam-Webster dictionary editors chose “slop” as 2025’s word of the year. New York Magazine recently dropped its “Stupid Issue”, with a cover story exploring America’s collective “cognitive decline”. There are big problems in the humanities: reading test scores are down for students nat

Candidates will have to sit assessments in person unless there are exceptional circumstances, says ACCABusiness live – latest updatesThe world’s largest accounting body is to stop students being allowed to take exams remotely to crack down on a rise in cheating on tests that underpin professional qualifications.The Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA), which has almost 260,000 members, has said that from March it will stop allowing students to take online exams in al

Forecasting tool predicts when demand will be highest, allowing NHS trusts to better plan staffing and bed spaceHospitals in England are using articificial intelligence to help cut waiting times in emergency departments this winter.The A&E forecasting tool predicts when demand will be highest, allowing trusts to better plan staffing and bed space. The prediction algorithm is trained on historical data including weather trends, school holidays, and rates of flu and Covidto determine how many

Republican senator Katie Britt also proposes AI companies be criminally liable if they expose minors to harmful ideasUS senator Bernie Sanders amplified his recent criticism of artificial intelligence on Sunday, explicitly linking the financial ambition of “the richest people in the world” to economic insecurity for millions of Americans – and calling for a potential moratorium on new datacenters.Sanders, a Vermont independent who caucuses with the Democratic party, said on CNN

Online audiences seeking out authentic and passionate voices as antidote to AI-generated contentFor years, social media fame has been associated with the red carpet glamour of the Kardashians and Cristiano Ronaldo’s megawatt sporting celebrity, but millions of users globally are increasingly turning their attention to unassuming heroes drawn from everyday life.TikTok says a range of accounts, from a bird enthusiast to an Italian grandmother and a doubledecker bus fan, have grown in popular

More young people are following the money and going into trades like construction where AI can’t easily replace themWhile standing on the sideline watching a high school soccer game, my friend, who owned a small and successful construction company, complained that his son – a senior – was starting at a respected local university that fall, which would cost roughly $200,000 over the next four years.“I could take the same money and set him up in a contracting business,&rdqu

The chipmaker’s sprawling partnerships are driving extraordinary growth but also bank its future on the AI boom paying off quicklyNvidia is, in crucial ways, nothing like Enron – the Houston energy giant that imploded through multibillion-dollar accounting fraud in 2001. Nor is it similar to companies such as Lucent or Worldcom that folded during the dotcom bubble.But the fact that it needs to reiterate this to its investors is less than ideal. Continue reading...

From companionship to psychotherapy, technology could meet unmet needs – but it needs to be handled responsiblyThere is much anxiety these days about the dangers of human-AI relationships. Reports of suicide and self-harm attributable to interactions with chatbots have understandably made headlines. The phrase “AI psychosis” has been used to describe the plight of people experiencing delusions, paranoia or dissociation after talking to large language models (LLMs). Our collecti

Productivity is up in retail and other low-paying sectors as tech replaces relatively expensive humans Walk through a supermarket and the technology is everywhere. Self-service checkouts, electronic shelf labels, handheld barcode scanners and the video screens showing you – caught by AI facial recognition cameras – leaving the shop.In an economy struggling for growth, the encroachment of these machines in our everyday lives could be an early sign of a new dawn – a tech-driven r

Productivity is up in retail and other low-paying sectors as tech replaces relatively expensive humans Walk through a supermarket and the technology is everywhere. Self-service checkouts, electronic shelf labels, handheld barcode scanners, and the video screens showing you – caught by AI facial recognition cameras – leaving the shop.In an economy struggling for growth, the encroachment of these machines in our everyday lives could be an early sign of a new dawn – a tech-driven

Low-quality AI-generated content is now saturating social media – and generating about $117m a year, data showsMore than 20% of the videos that YouTube’s algorithm shows to new users are “AI slop” – low-quality AI-generated content designed to farm views, research has found.The video-editing company Kapwing surveyed 15,000 of the world’s most popular YouTube channels – the top 100 in every country – and found that 278 of them contain only AI slop.

Flood of unreality is an endpoint of algorithm-driven internet and product of an economy dependent on a few top tech firms In the algorithm-driven economy of 2025, one man’s shrimp Jesus is another man’s side hustle.AI slop – the low-quality, surreal content flooding social media platforms, designed to farm views – is a phenomenon, some would say the phenomenon of the 2024 and 2025 internet. Merriam-Webster’s word of the year this year is “slop”, referri

Merlin has been trained to identify the songs of more than 1,300 bird species around the worldWhen Natasha Walter first became curious about the birds around her, she recorded their songs on her phone and arduously tried to match each song with online recordings. After a friend recommended Merlin Bird ID, a free app, she tried it in her London garden and was delighted to discover the birds she assumed were female blackbirds – “this is how bad a birder I was” – were actual

West Somerset Lagoon would harness renewable energy for UK’s AI boom – and create ‘iconic’ arc around Bristol ChannelThe architect of the London Eye wants to build a vast tidal power station in a 14-mile arc off the coast of Somerset that could help Britain meet surging electricity demand to power artificial intelligence – and create a new race track to let cyclists skim over the Bristol Channel.Julia Barfield, who designed the Eye and the i360 observation tower in

Danyah Miller responds to a pass notes column about companies that are hiring people to ‘own the narrative’Your article on the rise of storytelling as a corporate skill (Pass notes, 17 December) highlights something that storytellers have always known – that people crave meaningful human connection. This is intensifying as we encounter a world awash with data and distraction. Professional communications teams may now package storytelling as strategy, but the craft of storytelli

Elon Musk’s net worth increased by nearly 50% to $645bn with founders of Google and Amazon also seeing huge wealth gainsA stock market boom in artificial intelligence companies has added more than half a trillion dollars to the wealth of America’s tech barons in the past year, data shows.The top 10 US founders and bosses of some of the world’s largest technology companies saw their finances swell to nearly $2.5tn, up from $1.9tn, in the year to Christmas Eve, according to figur

Since the Enlightenment, we’ve been making our own decisions. But now AI may be about to change thatThis summer, I found myself battling through traffic in the sweltering streets of Marseille. At a crossing, my friend in the passenger seat told me to turn right toward a spot known for its fish soup. But the navigation app Waze instructed us to go straight. Tired, and with the Renault feeling like a sauna on wheels, I followed Waze’s advice. Moments later, we were stuck at a construct