All posts tagged: artificial intelligence

Genesis Mission launches 278 AI-powered projects across the US

Genesis Mission launches 278 AI-powered projects across the US

Published by skeptic

A total of 278 projects have been chosen following what the DOE described as the largest response ever received for one of its funding opportunities. The selected teams span all 50 US states and will focus on developing AI-enabled scientific workflows to advance research in energy, discovery science, and national security. The Genesis Mission aims to combine advanced AI, high-performance computing, and the expertise of leading researchers to increase scientific productivity. The selected projects will now move into the development phase, supported by specialised computing infrastructure and AI tools designed to speed up research and innovation. US Secretary of Energy Chris Wright commented: “America has no shortage of bold ideas or talented scientists, and the response to the Genesis Mission proves that. “The 278 projects selected today represent the very best of our nation’s scientific enterprise. “The remarkable number of high-quality proposals we received demonstrates that America’s innovation pipeline is strong, and it points to even greater opportunities for future investment and continued expansion of the Genesis Mission portfolio.” Record response drives nationwide research effort The …

How AI is transforming EU public procurement transparency

How AI is transforming EU public procurement transparency

Published by skeptic

The CEDAR project harnesses artificial intelligence (AI) and Common European Data Spaces to detect fraud and bring accountability to over €2tn in annual EU public spending Public procurement is the engine room of the European economy, approximately 14% of the EU’s GDP, over €2tn annually. Yet for decades, this vast expenditure has been managed through fragmented, localised systems that often lack transparency, leaving the process vulnerable to inefficiency, fraud, and corruption. The CEDAR project (Common European Data Spaces and Robust AI for Transparent Public Governance), a Horizon Europe initiative running from 2024 to 2026, is designed to revolutionise the full lifecycle of procurement data management. By leveraging advanced AI and the transformative power of Common European Data Spaces (CEDS), CEDAR goes beyond digitising records to build a cross-border intelligence layer that ensures public money is spent accountably and effectively. From fragmented data to FAIR intelligence The primary hurdle in public governance has never been a lack of data, but rather its siloed nature. Procurement notices, contract awards, and invoices are often scattered across thousands of …

Remember Jibo? Its Successor Is a Wearable That Turns Your Life Into AI Slop

Remember Jibo? Its Successor Is a Wearable That Turns Your Life Into AI Slop

Published by skeptic

Gu and the company aren’t ready to share specific details about what the iKairos will be capable of. In its press release, Lingverse says the iKairos will “continuously observe both you and your surroundings” and “begin to act as a personal AI guardian,” but did not clarify how that would function. iKairos works as both a wearable and a mounted home device, so it can collect data from the wearer’s perspective and from a stationary position. Put the device on the mount, and it will watch you and gather data about how you interact in the world. Having the option of those different viewpoints aims to give the iKairos more of a holistic sense of what is happening around it. Those details, apparently, can then be transformed into AI-generated images. After announcing its funding on Wednesday, Lingverse’s website for the iKairos now describes it as an “AI journal,” with the slogan “Every starred moment becomes a capsule. iKairos watches for what matters, then seals it.” What that seems to mean—based on the visual imagery on …

The White House Is Trying to Figure Out What to Do About Chinese AI

The White House Is Trying to Figure Out What to Do About Chinese AI

Published by skeptic

The Trump administration is split over how to respond to the rapid rise of China’s leading AI models, according to multiple people familiar with deliberations. The debate is broadly divided between parts of the White House, which has pushed for stricter controls on Chinese AI that may soon rival the most powerful US models, and the Commerce Department, which has viewed those restrictions as unworkable. The conundrum has become the latest flash point for the administration over AI, after China’s Moonshot AI lab last week released its Kimi K3 model that rivals the top US models from Anthropic and OpenAI. In recent days, senior White House officials have discussed possible measures to stop China’s AI labs from developing their models by training them on US models, a practice known as distillation, the people say. The White House is expected to take some sort of presidential action after Anthropic last month alleged the Chinese tech company Alibaba had carried out the “largest known distillation attack” against it to date. This action is not currently expected to …

Earnings at Musk’s Car Company Fall as Research Spending Cuts Into Profit From Selling Cars

Earnings at Musk’s Car Company Fall as Research Spending Cuts Into Profit From Selling Cars

Published by Sam Flores

Tesla said Wednesday that its profits fell last quarter as the car company run by Elon Musk shoveled more money into research and development, cutting into profits from a sharp increase in vehicle sales. The Austin, Texas, company reported second-quarter net income of $1.11 billion, or 32 cents per share. Excluding certain items, earnings were 33 cents per share, well short of the 53 cents per share forecast by Wall Street analysts, according to FactSet. Revenue rose 26% to $28.24 billion, beating analysts’ forecast of $26.42 billion. While the core car business had a solid quarter, Tesla is now focused on building out the infrastructure and AI software that underpins its robotaxis and robotics businesses, which Musk has said are the future of the company. And doing so requires a lot more spending. Research and development spending surged about 49% from a year earlier to $2.37 billion — higher than its been going back at least four quarters. “We’re investing a lot in growing the core business and really preparing for the future,” Musk said …

China’s Open AI Models Are Challenging Silicon Valley’s Playbook

China’s Open AI Models Are Challenging Silicon Valley’s Playbook

Published by skeptic

The AI industry is not quite experiencing a DeepSeek 2.0 moment, but it feels very close. The leading Chinese AI labs have been on a roll lately, releasing a series of almost cutting-edge open-source models. Z.ai released GLM 5.2 in June, Moonshot AI released Kimi K3 last week, and Alibaba released Qwen 3.8 this Monday. Silicon Valley and Washington started talking about the models immediately, especially K3, which is widely seen as the best of the bunch. David Sacks, a venture capitalist and AI adviser to President Donald Trump, called the performance of Moonshot’s model “concerning.” Earlier this week, Commerce Secretary Scott Bessent suggested the US might impose sanctions on Chinese AI companies. On Wednesday, Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, alleged that the Trump administration has “information that Moonshot AI distilled Anthropic’s Fable for the development of its K3 model,” which he said amounted to “stealing proprietary US technology and undermining American research” and was “unacceptable.” (Moonshot AI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.) …

Substack promotes human content with ‘scan for AI’ feature

Substack promotes human content with ‘scan for AI’ feature

Published by Sam Flores

Substack AI feature Substack has partnered with AI plagiarism checker Pangram to introduce a new ‘scan for AI text’ feature. On any Substack post published after 4.30pm on the 21 of July 2026, readers can now select the “scan for AI text” tile from the drop-down menu in the top right corner of the web version and it will give the percentage of AI content in the article. Substack co-founder and CEO Chris Best said in an article announcing the move that lack of journalistic transparency around AI usage “undermines trust in authorship and threatens the livelihoods of writers.  “The problem is when there is a mismatch between a reader’s expectation and reality, especially when they unwittingly invest their attention in something with no human thought on the other end.”     A fierce debate has been sparked in the comments section of the post.  One Substack writer, Monica Herbet, criticised the new addition, saying: “I use AI. I also bring the stories, memories, opinions, arguments, humor, lived experience, and final judgement. My readers seem perfectly capable of recognising that a real woman is present… The …

Unreliable AI answers are ‘good enough’ for most users of platforms

Unreliable AI answers are ‘good enough’ for most users of platforms

Published by Sam Flores

ChatGPT. Picture: Shutterstock If internet users accept convenient, plausible-sounding AI answers as “good enough” en masse, it harms the publishers that provide the primary sources used to generate those answers. This second of three articles covering the AOP’s newly launched ‘Artificial Intelligence Publisher Impact Study’, looks at the behavioural impacts of AI on how users seek information online, as revealed by a nationally representative UK study conducted by Ipsos. The first article in this series examined the 7.1% average reduction in referral traffic to premium UK publisher domains in the first half of 2025 and revealed how this reduction varied widely across various content topics and types. So why is this happening? The decline in referral traffic to UK publishers is no surprise when we look at the rise of ‘stop here’ behaviours caused by AI. This is when the user, having retrieved their desired information, does not interact further. We found that the presence of an AI Overview on a search results page causes an 18% reduction in a user’s propensity to click through …

How artificial intelligence is transforming space situational awareness

How artificial intelligence is transforming space situational awareness

Published by skeptic

As orbital activity continues to grow, artificial intelligence is becoming an essential tool for detecting, tracking, and understanding the increasingly complex space environment The number of objects orbiting Earth has increased dramatically over the past decade. Thousands of operational satellites now share the space environment with spent rocket bodies, inactive spacecraft, and millions of fragments of orbital debris. At the same time, society has become increasingly dependent on space-based infrastructure. Navigation, communications, weather forecasting, Earth observation, scientific research, and national security all rely on satellites operating safely and reliably in orbit. Monitoring this increasingly complex environment is the role of Space Situational Awareness (SSA). Modern SSA systems combine observations from optical telescopes, radar networks, and space-based sensors to detect, track, and identify Resident Space Objects (RSOs), building an evolving picture of activity in Earth orbit. However, as the number of space objects and observations continues to grow, so too does the volume of data that must be processed. Utilising artificial intelligence for SSA data processing is possible, but the challenge lies in extracting meaningful information …