Author: Jaxon Bennett

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Meta has invested $15bn into data-labelling start-up Scale AI and hired its co-founder Alexandr Wang, as part of its bid to attract talent from rivals in a fiercely competitive market. The deal values Scale at $29bn, double its valuation last year. Scale said it would “substantially expand” its commercial relationship with Meta “to accelerate deployment of Scale’s data solutions”, without giving further details. Scale helps companies improve their artificial intelligence models by providing labelled training data.Scale will distribute proceeds from Meta’s investment to…

Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Artificial intelligence myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.Mattel and OpenAI intend to make artificial intelligence part of children’s playtime with a partnership between the Barbie-maker and the tech group behind ChatGPT.The two companies on Thursday said they had formed a “strategic collaboration” for Mattel, which also makes Hot Wheels and Uno card games, to use OpenAI’s technology to “bring the magic of AI to age-appropriate play experiences”. The companies did not provide examples of how the tech could be married with Mattel’s toy line-up but said they would emphasise…

Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Electric vehicles myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.Chinese carmaker Xpeng says it has developed chips for autonomous driving that are more powerful than Nvidia’s products and it expects Volkswagen and other auto rivals to be customers.He Xiaopeng, Xpeng’s co-founder and chief executive, said it was working to integrate its self-designed Turing artificial intelligence chip into select car models VW planned to launch in China next year. “Developing chips is fundamentally a long-term commitment, as Xpeng envisions doing a lot of things across cars, aircraft and robotics. We need a…

Hello everyone! This is Lauly, sending my greetings from summery Taipei.It’s been a very fruitful few weeks for me. Although I caught a bad cold during the annual Computex trade fair in mid-May, I was able to talk to numerous suppliers about their latest AI server solutions, from advanced liquid cooling systems and power supplies to cables, GPU boards and final assembly. Being able to touch all those components and parts, and hear directly from experts how these technologies come together to make the world’s most powerful AI supercomputers was a priceless experience.That being said, the highlight of the past…

The world’s leading artificial intelligence companies are stepping up efforts to deal with a growing problem of chatbots telling people what they want to hear.OpenAI, Google DeepMind and Anthropic are all working on reining in sycophantic behaviour by their generative AI products that offers over flattering responses to users.The issue, stemming from how the large language models are trained, has come into focus at a time when more and more people have adopted the chatbots not only at work as research assistants, but in their personal lives as therapists and social companions. Experts warn that the agreeable nature of chatbots can…

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Oracle shares jumped following an upbeat forecast on Wednesday when it said its pipeline of cloud computing contracts would more than double next year. Shares in the company rose nearly 8 per cent in after-hours trading in New York as the tech company reported fiscal fourth-quarter revenue rose 11 per cent to $15.9bn, broadly in line with analysts’ expectation of $15.8bn. Chief executive Safra Catz said the company’s cloud infrastructure business was expected to grow more than 70 per cent in the…

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Dystopian thriller “Soylent Green” ends with the hero discovering that the mystery food that sustains New York’s citizens, and whose name the movie bears, is actually made of human beings. Reports that Meta Platforms may acquire 49 per cent of artificial intelligence company Scale AI for $15bn illustrate a similar plot twist. AI, too, is people.So far, building AI has mostly been an exercise in managing scarce resources of the inanimate kind. Top-end chips, for example, are in short supply; power constraints…

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.The writer is former vice-president Europe at Breakthrough Energy and a former director-general of the European Commission No EU entrepreneur has been able to create a European listed start-up with a market cap of more than €100bn in over 50 years. SAP, founded in 1972, was the last company to reach such commercial highs. Other recent success stories such as Spotify, which has a market cap of around €124bn, are listed across the Atlantic on the New York Stock Exchange. The story…

Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Artificial intelligence myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.Nvidia chief Jensen Huang said Europe’s shortfall in computing power for artificial intelligence “will be resolved” soon, as the continent pushes to catch up with the US and China in the race to capitalise on the fast-developing technology. At least 20 AI data centres are planned across Europe in the next few years, Huang said at the VivaTech conference in Paris on Wednesday, as he predicted a tenfold increase in the region’s data centre capacity within the next two years. This will…

Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Artificial intelligence myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.Sam Altman’s eyeball-scanning digital ID project is being rolled out in the UK, giving Britons access to verification services that the entrepreneur claims are essential for distinguishing between human and artificial intelligence.Altman’s World project has developed an orb “that confirms humanness” by scanning people’s eyes, generating a digital credential that can be used to access goods and services online, as well as the group’s own cryptocurrency, Worldcoin. This week, World is opening a number of locations in London where people can scan…