US data analytics firm Palantir, valued at $375bn, faces growing criticism for its AI-driven software used by governments and corporations globally, including the NHS and US military. Concerns range from data privacy and potential misuse to its CEO's controversial statements and its role in geopolitical tensions.
Pope Leo XIV has warned of "new forms of slavery" emerging from artificial intelligence, urging greater regulation and for AI to be "disarmed" and "human-friendly." He cautioned against a "race for ever more powerful algorithms" driven by geopolitical or commercial dominance.
Wirestock, a platform pivoted from stock photography to AI data provision, raises $23M in Series A to supply multimodal creative data (images, videos, 3D assets) to AI labs, with $40M annual revenue and $15M paid to contributors.
Malware repositories vx-underground (30TB) and VirusTotal (31PB) are visualized in terms of stacked hard drives, comparing their heights to landmarks like the Eiffel Tower and Burj Khalifa.
Malware repositories vx-underground (30TB) and VirusTotal (31PB) are compared in scale by hypothetically stacking 1TB hard drives, revealing VirusTotal's data would form a structure nearly as tall as the Burj Khalifa.
China’s coastal aquaculture ponds are shrinking due to environmental policies while India’s are expanding at the fastest rate of any country, according to a new bird’s-eye view of fish farms worldwide. The conclusions are based on a fresh dataset compiled from millions of satellite snapshots of coastal aquaculture around the world in 2022. From 1990 to 2016, the global pond area for aquaculture expanded rapidly. After 2017, the overall area declined, but changes varied between countries. The...
Eurail, the Dutch company selling Interrail passes, suffered a data breach in December exposing personal data of over 300,000 European travelers. This week Eurail revealed that stolen data including passport numbers, names, phone numbers, email addresses, home addresses and dates of birth is being offered for sale on the dark web, with a sample published on Telegram. Affected customers in the UK and Denmark are being told to cancel and replace their passports at personal expense, with UK replacement costing £102 and Danish over £200. Customers are demanding compensation under GDPR Article 82.
Researchers from Caltech, Google Quantum AI, Oratomic, and MIT have developed a method allowing quantum computers to process massive AI training datasets with reduced memory requirements. The approach prepares quantum states during processing rather than loading entire datasets into quantum memory first. A system with about 300 logical qubits could outperform classical computers on certain tasks, while roughly 60 logical qubits could begin outperforming classical systems on some AI data-processing tasks—though such systems do not yet exist.
