Premium AI News

To realise his dream for economic growth, Keir Starmer must seize the reins of technological powerSir Keir Starmer doesn’t do visions. But last Monday he broke the habit of a lifetime in a speech delivered at University College London. It was about AI, which he sees as “the defining opportunity of our generation”. The UK, he declared “is the nation of Babbage, Lovelace and Turing”, not to mention the country “that gave birth to the modern computer and the world wide web. So mark my words – Britain will be one of the great AI superpowers.”Stirring stuff, eh. Within days of taking office, the PM had invited Matt Clifford, a smart tech bro from central casting, to think about “how we seize the opportunities of AI”. Clifford came up with a 50-point AI Opportunities Action Plan that Starmer accepted in its entirety, saying that he would “put the full weight of the British state” behind it. He also appointed Clifford as his AI Opportunities Adviser to oversee implementation of the plan and report directly to him. It’s only a matter of time before the Sun dubs him “the UK’s AI tsar”. Continue reading...

Anthropomorphizing AI creates dangerous blind spots in business decision-making beyond simple operational inefficiencies.

AutoGen represents Microsoft’s latest attempt to address the challenges of building multi-agent systems for enterprise applications. This article explores what this means for the state of agentic AI today, and how it compares to other major frameworks like LangChain and CrewAI. This article unpacks the implications of AutoGen’s update, explores its standout features, and situates it within the broader landscape of AI agent frameworks, helping developers understand what’s possible and where the industry is headed.

A stilted AI Parky proves that interviews are a two-way process. Plus, the strange story of a woman who kept faking pregnancy and a gripping true crime taleVirtually Parkinson Night Train DigitalThe Con: Kaitlyn’s Baby BBC World Service/BBC SoundsThe Pitcairn Trials WonderyTurtle Diary by Russell Hoban Radio 4/BBC SoundsIn new podcast Virtually Parkinson, an AI version of Michael Parkinson interviews celebrities. Or, if we’re being snotty – and, OK, I am – an AI Parky asks questions at celebrities. Not to them. At them. Continue reading...

If you missed the recent live, subscriber-only Q&A about money and AI scams with WIRED’s advice columnist Reece Rogers, you can watch the replay here.

As LLMs become more capable, many RAG applications can be replaced with cache-augmented generation that include documents in the prompt.

The model excels in rendering advanced textures, natural lighting and complex compositions, providing more flexibility.

Devin 1.2 will help developers with accelerated workflows and less cognitive load in file searches, understanding codebases or fixing code. 

AI is a backward-looking technology that reinforces old biases, warns Natalie Bennett, while fuelling energy-hungry AI data centres will leave the green transition in tatters, writes Christopher Tanner. Plus letters by Philip Ward, Kevin Donovan and Giles du BoulayThere are at least three major concerns to raise with the government’s apparent betting the future of the UK on so-called artificial intelligence (‘Mainlined into UK’s veins’: Labour announces huge public rollout of AI, 12 January).First, as Prof Shannon Vallor at the University of Edinburgh has pointed out in her book The AI Mirror, generative AI is not creative; it only looks backward. It can only remix and reproduce what we have done before, the same errors, failures and biases that have got us into our current mess. Continue reading...

Making Artificial Intelligence systems robustly perceive humans remains one of the most intricate challenges in computer vision. Among the most complex problems is reconstructing 3D models of human hands, a task with wide-ranging applications in robotics, animation, human-computer interaction, and augmented and virtual reality. The difficulty lies in the nature of hands themselves, often obscured while holding objects or contorted into challenging orientations during tasks like grasping.

Queen Elizabeth Hall, LondonThis hypnotic tale of an orbiting spaceship ponders big questions about what it means to be humanIn this sci-fi dystopia, Earth has been destroyed and a spaceship is orbiting an unknown planet. The setup, too, is unfamiliar, challenging many of the usual rules of theatre: the audience can at times walk on to the stage, film the performance and take pictures.Based on the Booker International-shortlisted novel of the same name by the Danish author Olga Ravn, and staged in Polish (with English surtitles) by Warsaw-based company Studio teatrgaleria, The Employees tells the story of humans and humanoids living together. There is a cube-like structure representing their ship, objects from the planet in glass cabinets with special – perhaps dangerous – powers and an unseen bureaucratic power called the Organisation with shades of Big Brother. Continue reading...

Studies have long shown that men are more likely to interrupt, particularly when speaking with women. New research by Johns Hopkins engineers reveals that this behavior also extends to AI-powered voice assistants like Alexa and Siri, with men interrupting them almost twice as often as women do. The findings are published in Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction.