Author: Jaxon Bennett

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Elon Musk has responded to pressure to stop users of his Grok AI model from generating fake sexualised images of real people, following an outcry over the proliferation of the content on his X platform.The billionaire entrepreneur came under scrutiny last week after thousands of users began using his Grok AI model to generate sexualised deepfakes of women and, in some cases, children, sharing them on his X social media platform as well as the separate Grok app, both of which are…

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.The writer is deputy chief investment officer at Richard Bernstein AdvisorsMeta’s 40-year bond sale last year was widely seen as a vote of confidence in Big Tech and artificial intelligence given the strong demand for the debt. Investors lined up to lend for four decades to a company considered among the world’s most financially secure. But what looks like confidence may instead be complacency. Corporate bond investors are quietly absorbing enormous speculative risk and that is unlikely to bode well for equity…

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence chatbot has generated sexualised images of children that have been shared on social media platform X, raising concerns about the safety of a model used by millions. Over the past few days, users have been able to get Grok, the AI chatbot developed by Musk’s xAI, to create sexual images of children, which goes against the company’s own user guidelines. Grok on Friday blamed the issue on “lapses in safeguards”, and said the images had been removed. In a…

Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Artificial intelligence myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.Meta has bought Chinese-founded artificial intelligence start-up Manus, as Mark Zuckerberg pours billions of dollars into the fast-developing technology in an effort to compete with OpenAI and Google.In a statement on Monday, Meta said that it planned to “operate and sell the Manus service” while integrating its technology into its own products, such as its Meta AI chatbot. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. The start-up is one of the “leading autonomous general-purpose agents” and its tools can perform tasks that…

Before she joined Logitech two years ago, chief executive Hanneke Faber submitted herself to a boot camp: 48 hours of computer gaming, coached by her 20-something son in Detroit. “He gave me a test afterwards,” says Faber, “which I passed.”Gamers are core customers of the Swiss technology hardware group. Its gaming brand, Logitech G, which has its own website, sells G Hub software and high-specification hardware, including specialised headsets, keyboards and a bewildering array of mice — the product the company is still best known for.Founded in 1981 and headquartered in Lausanne, Switzerland, with offices and innovation centres from San…

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.OpenAI has reached a deal with tax and accounting software company Intuit to feed personal financial data into ChatGPT, as the start-up seeks to expand the uses of artificial intelligence and its sources of income.Intuit’s apps, which include TurboTax and Credit Karma, will be available in OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot under the terms of the $100mn multiyear deal, opening up data from Intuit’s roughly 100mn users to the AI start-up. The software company, which also owns QuickBooks and Mailchimp, would pay OpenAI for use of…

This article is an on-site version of our Europe Express newsletter. Premium subscribers can sign up here to get the newsletter delivered every weekday and fortnightly on Saturday morning. Standard subscribers can upgrade to Premium here, or explore all FT newslettersGood morning. If Russia attacked Nato, would the continent’s crumbling bridges, mismatched rail tracks and border bureaucracy prevent troops, tanks and other reinforcements from across the Atlantic reaching the front line in time? Our visual investigation takes you through the onerous 45-day military journey across Europe.Today, our Berlin bureau chief previews a joint Franco-German effort to swing behind a pan-European…

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Amazon is seeking to raise $12bn in its first US bond sale in three years, becoming the latest big tech group to turn to debt markets to fund a spending spree on artificial intelligence infrastructure.The Seattle-based ecommerce and cloud computing giant launched the bond sale on Monday and is targeting approximately $12bn across about six investment-grade bonds, according to a person close to the deal.Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley are managing the sale, according to regulatory filings. Amazon said: “Like…

Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Technology sector myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.Elsewhere on the internet today, tech blogger Ed Zitron has an interesting post about OpenAI’s cash burn. The gist is that OpenAI’s running costs may be a lot more than previously thought, and that its main backer Microsoft’s doing very nicely out of their revenue share agreement.The post cites data purportedly showing OpenAI’s inference spend on Microsoft’s Azure web-hosting platform. Inference is the process by which applications such as ChatGPT call on large-language models to generate responses. Pre-publication, Ed was kind enough…

The European tech industry is often said to have fallen behind its Chinese and American counterparts. However, it could be the key to boosting growth in the continent’s economies.Of the 300 companies surveyed as part of the Financial Times report into Europe’s Long-term Growth Champions, tech businesses made up almost 20 per cent — the largest proportion of any sector.Virta, an electric vehicle charging company, which says its platform provides access to more than 550,000 charging points in more than 65 countries, is top of the overall list. The Helsinki-based company’s co-founder Jussi Palola, says the company’s ability to navigate…