Tech giant Meta is feeling the heat, no matter how relaxed its leader Mark Zuckerberg might appear. Despite the waves of bad news buffeting his company, CEO Zuckerberg is surfing ahead with a new relaxed persona. We tell you more in this edition of Tech 24.
Tech executives have lined up to congratulate Donald Trump on his US presidential election win. But behind the scenes, they’re frantically trying to work out what a second Trump term means for their business. We take a closer look in this week's Tech 24.
As we approach the US presidential election, the safety of the candidates, their families and their running mates is paramount, particularly as Republican candidate Donald Trump has already survived two assassination attempts during this election campaign. According to an investigation published by French daily Le Monde, that safety has been compromised, along with the safety of other world leaders. The culprit? The running app Strava, used by bodyguards and members of the Secret Service.
With the public demo of Anthropic's "computer use" feature for its Claude chatbot, this was the week that AI "agents" – which can carry out many tasks rather than just answer questions – became viable. FRANCE 24's Tech Editor Peter O'Brien tells us more.
"Assassin's Creed" played a starring role in the Paris Olympics Opening Ceremony, with a masked figure dressed like the protagonist running across the rooftops of Paris with the Olympic flame. Now, the game's developer Ubisoft is rumoured to be in talks to be taken private, in a possible acquisition by Chinese gaming giant Tencent.
Two Harvard students, Caine Ardayfio and AnhPhu Nguyen, say they have hacked a pair of Meta Ray-Ban Smart Glasses and installed facial recognition software, so that merely looking at someone's face will bring up their name, address, age, biography and any other information available on online databases.
OpenAI, the world's most valuable AI startup, has just lost another executive. Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati is one of more than 20 key staff who have departed this year, leaving CEO Sam Altman with just one of his fellow co-founders.
This week’s attacks on Hezbollah pagers and radios have spread anxiety among Lebanese people, and a sense that no electronic device is safe. Amid some confusion over how the explosions were triggered, you might be wondering whether you can trust the phone in your pocket, or the headphones on your ears. On this week's Tech 24, we break down how the attacks were done, how they compare to other massive hardware hacks like Stuxnet and An0m, and whether you should be worried about your own device.
The most ambitious mission yet in the billionaire space race saw Jared Isaacman become the first non-professional astronaut to walk in space on Thursday, in partnership with Elon Musk's SpaceX. The Polaris Dawn mission has been welcomed by the aerospace community for pushing the boundaries of 21st-century spaceflight, but dismissed by some in the general public as just another vanity project for the rich. On this week's Tech 24, we discuss what the mission has achieved, and its lofty hopes for the future.
It’s been another wobbly week for the global semiconductor industry. Nvidia suffered the biggest one-day loss in stock market history, while Intel kept making headlines for its plans to cut costs.
It’s one of the logistical questions hanging over the Paris Olympics, two weeks from the Opening Ceremony: will there be flying taxis?
A French AI lab has released a demo of a voice chatbot with practically immediate response times. OpenAI, the world's third most valuable start-up, has been teasing a similar feature for its own voice bot since mid-May.
At Euro 2024 in Germany, referees are souped up with data and artificial intelligence, players' bodies are scrutinised to within a square inch by a grid of cameras, and even the ball has been fitted with a special sensor. In this edition of Tech 24, Peter O'Brien explains why football tournaments are a playground for cutting-edge monitoring and surveillance technology.
In the UK's general election, Steve is running to be MP for Brighton. In Wyoming in the United States, Vic is running to be mayor. Both of them are not in fact human, but created by artificial intelligence. On this week's Tech 24, we interview AI Steve to find out what these robot candidates mean for democracy (and whether he's going to turn us all into paperclips). We also look at the election campaigns that have recently come to a close in India and the EU, where the deluge of AI-generated disinformation that some were predicting did not come to pass.
Top AI engineers at defence technology companies defended the need for autonomous weapons on Thursday, amid a push for a ban on so-called "killer robots". More than 115 countries and 250 non-governmental organisations are calling for an international treaty to ban weapons that use artificial intelligence to identify and engage human targets, technology which United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has called "morally repugnant."
A slew of announcements from OpenAI and Google this week brought us to the brink of human-like AI assistants. Generative artificial intelligence is getting faster, and being applied to an increasing number of tasks. But without a major breakthrough to the models underpinning such projects, it has led some to emerge from the parapets and ask whether the technology will continue getting smarter given its exponential hunger for data. One of them is Dr. Michael Pound, Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Nottingham.
OpenAI will announce plans for a search engine powered by artificial intelligence on Monday May 13, Reuters reports. It's the latest challenge to search king Google and comes just one day before the tech giant's annual developer conference. On this week's Tech 24, Peter O'Brien looks at what might get Google sweating, amid changing search habits, a federal antitrust trial and smart new AI "answer engines". One of these is Perplexity AI. Speaking to FRANCE 24, CEO Aravind Srinivas says its results "cut through the noise" that comes up on a traditional Google search.
On Sunday, Chinese President Xi Jinping will come to Europe for the first time in five years, staying in France until Tuesday. Aside from the Ukraine war, technology – computer chips and green tech in particular – could be the most important talking point on the agenda. FRANCE 24's Peter O'Brien tells us more in this week's edition of Tech 24.
US President Joe Biden signed a law this week giving TikTok's Chinese owner ByteDance nine to 12 months to sell the popular video-sharing app or face a ban. The company has vowed to fight this in the courts. How might the showdown play out, and what does it mean for TikTok users globally? FRANCE 24's Tech Editor Peter O'Brien tells us more.
Legal proceedings began in the Nigerian capital Abuja on Thursday, targeting the cryptocurrency exchange Binance and two of its executives on charges of money laundering and tax evasion. Tigran Gambaryan, a US citizen and Binance's head of financial crimes compliance, appeared alone in court after Nadeem Anjarwalla, a British-Kenyan and the company’s regional manager for Africa, escaped custody and fled. Gambaryan's family is asking for the US to do more to secure his release. Find out why Nigeria is cracking down on crypto in this week's edition of Tech 24.