Author: Jaxon Bennett

OpenAI is betting on a suite of new AI products, building its own data centres and a crucial partnership with Apple to supercharge its next phase of growth, as it targets reaching 1 billion users over the coming year.The San Francisco-based group, whose popular ChatGPT chatbot has rocketed to 250mn weekly active users since its launch two years ago, plans to expand further through launching so-called AI “agents”, its own AI-powered search engine and ChatGPT’s integration with Apple devices. “[In 2025] we will be coming into our own, as a research lab serving millions . . . hoping it can be billions of…

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Will mental health concerns sink social media platforms? A US politician has called TikTok “digital fentanyl”. Some schools are suing social media companies alleging that the platforms have caused a youth mental health crisis. Yet the companies warn that cutting off young people could also damage mental health. A world-first law banning social media for children under 16 was passed in Australia. Other countries could well follow.Under the law, Australians under 16 will be banned from opening accounts on all major social…

In 2024, artificial intelligence is consistently front-page news. From Nvidia hitting a trillion-dollar market cap to the growing energy usage of data centres, it is the most discussed technology of our time. And it is a technology that the US dominates, with three of the most valuable AI start-ups, Anthropic, OpenAI and xAI, based there.But here’s the confounding thing — the global race to build artificial general intelligence was initiated by a London-based start-up, DeepMind, founded in 2010 — well before Anthropic or OpenAI existed.How did Europe lose its lead? And how can it stop that from happening again?It’s a…

Donald Trump is set to begin his second term in the White House surrounded by China hawks. His pick for secretary of state, Marco Rubio, has campaigned against Chinese influence and championed crackdowns on tech groups such as Huawei. Michael Waltz, the incoming national security adviser, calls China an “existential threat”. However, one of the president-elect’s closest advisers has a much more complicated relationship with China: Elon Musk. The South Africa-born billionaire and self-styled “first buddy” to Trump has emerged as a potentially significant yet unpredictable player in the relationship between the world’s two superpowers. Musk’s business empire sits across…

Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Technology sector myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.At an FT event a few years ago, Microsoft’s co-founder Bill Gates was asked what painful lessons he had learnt when building his software company. His answer startled the audience back then and is all the more resonant today.Gates replied that in his early twenties he was convinced that “IQ was fungible” and that he was wrong. His aim had been to hire the smartest people he could find and build a corporate “IQ hierarchy” with the most intelligent employees at the…

Hello from California, this is Yifan, your #techAsia host this week. Happy Thanksgiving to those who celebrate. In many American households, US President-elect Donald Trump will likely dominate the conversation around the dinner table on Thursday, and it’s no exception here in Silicon Valley.It has been an unusually busy holiday season here as tech executives, investors and analysts all try to assess the likely impact of the incoming Trump administration. As one venture capital investor told me: It’s the season of joy and endless speculation on what’s going to happen in the next four years.Trump has already caused a panic…

Omny Miranda Martone was not surprised when computer-generated images and videos purporting to show their naked body started to appear on social media in January.As the founder of the Washington-based Sexual Violence Prevention Association, Martone — who uses non-binary pronouns — had spent the previous year working with people who had suffered non-consensual intimate image abuse, widely known as deepfake pornography. So the real shock was not the synthetic images and videos themselves, although these were alarmingly realistic. It was the sense of powerlessness. “All of the knowledge that I have in this field, all my experience of laws and policy, and…

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.The computational “law” that made Nvidia the world’s most valuable company is starting to break down. This is not the famous Moore’s Law, the semiconductor-industry maxim that chip performance will increase by doubling transistor density every two years. For many in Silicon Valley, Moore’s Law has been displaced as the dominant predictor of technological progress by a new concept: the “scaling law” of artificial intelligence. This posits that putting more data into a bigger AI model — in turn, requiring more computing…

Sequoia Capital’s former China unit has accelerated its push for global deals, investing in celebrity-backed start-ups such as Kylie Jenner’s Vodka seltzer company, as it struggles to deploy its $9bn cash pile in a sluggish domestic market and tightening US controls.HongShan, which split off last year from one of the world’s largest venture capital firms amid rising geopolitical tensions, has ratcheted up its hunt for deals in Europe and North Asia after facing shrinking options in China. The Chinese investment group has done deals with celebrity-backed consumer groups such as Jenner’s Sprinter, one of the US reality TV star’s newest…

Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the US & Canadian companies myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.Shares in Symbotic, a SoftBank-backed provider of warehouse automation software, plunged by more than a third on Wednesday after cutting its revenue forecast and disclosing errors in its accounts. The group, which went public in 2022 in New York via a Spac, said that it had identified errors related to the recognition of revenues in its accounts covering the first nine months of 2024. As a result, Symbotic said it had been unable to file its annual report on time.In…