Author: Jaxon Bennett

Before Emily Bender and I have looked at a menu, she has dismissed artificial intelligence chatbots as “plagiarism machines” and “synthetic text extruders”. Soon after the food arrives, the professor of linguistics adds that the vaunted large language models (LLMs) that underpin them are “born shitty”. Since OpenAI launched its wildly popular ChatGPT chatbot in late 2022, AI companies have sucked in tens of billions of dollars in funding by promising scientific breakthroughs, material abundance and a new chapter in human civilisation. AI is already capable of doing entry-level jobs and will soon “discover new knowledge”, OpenAI chief Sam Altman…

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.The UK’s grocery watchdog has launched an investigation into whether Amazon has been delaying payments to food suppliers after preliminary “evidence” was brought to its attention. The Groceries Code Adjudicator, which helps ensure the UK’s largest grocers treat suppliers fairly, said in a statement on Friday “it has reasonable grounds to suspect” Amazon had delayed payments to suppliers between March 2022 and June 2025. Amazon sells groceries in the UK through its own website and a small chain of Amazon Fresh convenience…

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.The writer is a partner at Thoma Bravo and head of the firm’s European operations.Many global software investors are still treating Europe as an afterthought to their core strategies. I believe this represents a significant misallocation of investment attention.The numbers reveal a growing ecosystem that has been hiding in plain sight: in 2024 alone, software spending in Europe grew 11 per cent, according to Gartner research. The firm expects this to slow to just under 9 per cent this year but the…

Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Media myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.The BBC is threatening legal action against artificial intelligence search engine Perplexity, in its first effort to clamp down on tech groups scraping its vast troves of content to develop the cutting-edge technology.In a letter to Perplexity chief Aravind Srinivas seen by the Financial Times, the British national broadcaster says it has evidence that the US start-up’s “default AI model” was “trained using BBC content”.The letter states it could seek an injunction unless the San Francisco-based company ceases scraping all BBC content, deletes…

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.For Elon Musk, tech’s great showman, this weekend’s long-awaited launch of a Tesla robotaxi service will be notably short of razzle-dazzle.The autonomous ride-hailing service is scheduled to hit the roads in Austin, Texas, with only about 10 cars. And far from the broadly capable self-driving vehicles that Musk has long promised, the taxis will be geo-fenced to avoid the city’s most challenging intersections and come with backup teleoperators poised to intervene if problems occur.At more than $1tn, Tesla’s stock market value leans…

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.X chief executive Linda Yaccarino has said that users will “soon” be able to make investments or trades on the social media platform, as she outlined a push into financial services in owner Elon Musk’s quest to build an “everything app”. “You’ll be able to come to X and be able to transact your whole financial life on the platform,” Yaccarino said in an interview with the Financial Times at the Cannes Lions advertising festival. “And that’s whether I can pay you for…

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.By the time I joined the FT in 2021, business cards had mostly fallen out of fashion. Colourful stacks of embossed cards sat on the desks of my colleagues, gathering dust. Here in San Francisco, the custom of exchanging printed contact details has long been replaced by the high-tech alternative of holding iPhones together to automatically swap numbers.  At tech events, I am often provided with a lanyard that has a QR code that lets other people find my LinkedIn profile. Or a…

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Google’s hopes of overturning a record EU competition fine was dealt a severe blow on Thursday, following a ruling that supports findings by Brussels regulators that the tech giant had used its Android mobile phone operating system to squash rivals.Juliane Kokott, advocate-general of the European Court of Justice, the EU’s highest court, said that a €4.124bn fine issued against the US company should be upheld. While not legally binding, the majority of such opinions are followed by the EU’s highest court. The win…

Hello from Yifan in California, your #techasia host this week.I’ve been thinking a lot about the future of my job ever since Google’s I/O event in May, where the US tech giant laid out an ambitious plan to define what search will look like in the future.Some users in the US may have already seen the rollout of AI mode, a new segment on the search page that directs them to a ChatGPT-like interface where an AI assistant provides the answers they were looking for. Google is actively nudging users to try out this new mode of search, and it’s…

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Late last year, California almost passed a law that would force makers of large artificial intelligence models to come clean about the potential for causing large-scale harms. It failed. Now, New York is trying on a law of its own. Such proposals have wrinkles, and risk slowing the pace of innovation. But they are still better than doing nothing. The risks from AI have increased since California’s fumble last September. Chinese developer DeepSeek has shown that powerful models can be made on…