Saudi and UAE sovereign AI plans still rely on Nvidia and US technology
Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have spent the past year trying to prove that enough capital can purchase a way out of a monopoly.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Artificial intelligence in practice — what it changes, who it concentrates power for, and how it lands in the businesses and policies of the technology economy.
910 articles · Artificial Intelligence (AI)
The companies building AI — OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Anthropic — co-signed a letter on Monday warning that their own technology could trigger an economic transformation larger than the Industrial Revolution, unfolding so fast that existing institutions have no realistic path to keep up without immediate action
On Monday, 13 July, a coalition of economists, AI researchers and technology executives issued an unusually compressed warning about the economic consequences of increasingly capable artificial intelligence.
A 2025 MIT report estimated that roughly 95% of task-specific enterprise generative-AI initiatives had yet to produce measurable business returns. The researchers argued that the main obstacle was not the underlying models, but tools that failed to learn from feedback, fit existing workflows or solve clearly defined operational problems.
The useful reading of the MIT finding is not that generative AI has failed.
A MIT-OpenAI study of nearly 40 million chats found the heaviest ChatGPT users reported more loneliness, dependence, and less time with real people, though researchers warn the link is correlation, not cause
We are writers and editors, not clinicians, psychologists, or therapists.
We picture AI as weightless, but by one 2025 estimate a single year of GPT-4o's replies may need enough freshwater to cover the drinking needs of 1.2 million people
Every time you type a question into a chatbot, the reply feels weightless.
Every playful AI picture carries a hidden price — making just one image can use about as much energy as fully charging your smartphone, one study found
As MIT Technology Review put it, "generating an image using a powerful AI model takes as much energy as fully charging your smartphone." That figure came from a single study and describes one particularly heavy model, not image generation in general but a striking comparison is it.
China's AI boom isn't producing the next Jack Ma — it's producing a generation of one-person businesses running on generative agents, and Silicon Valley is misreading what that actually means
In one example from Shenzhen, a former product manager laid off from a major platform company is now running what she calls a business of one, using generative AI to write ad copy, design storefronts, and produce short-form video dramas from a repurposed industrial park where the rent is subsidised by the local government.
Sam Altman's pitch to hand every American family $320 in OpenAI equity is being debated as generosity, but the actual math reveals it was never really about the money
The number that emerged from a leaked negotiation this month was $320. That is what each American household would receive, in equity, if Sam Altman's proposal to hand the US government a 5% stake in OpenAI were distributed evenly across American families.
We assume tech clusters form around talent, but the AI boom is increasingly chasing cheap power — how Northern Virginia, Iowa and Ireland became data-centre capitals
Where the internet physically lives is being redrawn, and what's pulling it isn't engineers — it's electricity.
We tend to think using AI well is a technical skill, but the evidence from early adopters suggests it is almost entirely a clarity skill — the people getting extraordinary results are simply unusually clear about what outcome they are actually after
We tend to treat being good at AI as a technical skill, something to do with clever prompts, the right settings and a stock of secret phrases.
I use an AI as an external hard drive for my own memory, and the strange part is how much better my thinking got once I stopped asking my brain to store everything
I started using AI as an external memory.
I asked ChatGPT for an honest five-year plan — what came back was less a plan and more a set of harder questions
Every so often you get to a point where the same three or four questions have been circling for months and none of them are getting answered.