AI in Business

Zelda Williams’ emotional plea on Instagram – begging fans to stop sending her AI-generated videos of her late father, Robin Williams – strikes at the heart of a growing ethical crisis. ‘It’s dumb, it’s a waste of time and energy, and believe me, it’s NOT what he’d want,’ she wrote. Her anguish arrives alongside the launch of OpenAI’s Sora 2 video model, an advanced AI-powered video generation tool that can create highly realistic deepfakes – synthetic media manipulated by artificial intelligence to make it appear as though someone said or did something they never did. While Sora restricts deepfakes of living people without consent, the deceased face no such protections. Legally, this exists in a gray zone: ‘You can’t libel...

As software systems grow in complexity, securing them against ever-evolving cyber threats has become a monumental challenge. Traditional methods struggle to keep pace with the volume and sophistication of vulnerabilities, especially zero-day vulnerabilities – a term referring to security flaws exploited by attackers before developers are aware of them, leaving no time for a defense. Enter Google DeepMind’s CodeMender, an AI agent for code security designed to autonomously identify and repair security weaknesses in software code. This groundbreaking system leverages advanced techniques like fuzzing, an automated testing method that inputs random or invalid data to uncover hidden bugs such as memory leaks or crashes. Remarkably, CodeMender has already made significant strides, contributing 72 security fixes to established open-source projects in...

In a move that reverberates through Silicon Valley and beyond, California has officially entered a new era of artificial intelligence oversight. Governor Gavin Newsom has signed into law SB 53, a landmark piece of legislation establishing the United States’ first comprehensive AI safety regulations. This pioneering bill specifically targets the industry’s most powerful players, including giants like OpenAI, Meta, and Anthropic, imposing stringent new requirements for transparency and safety protocols. At its core, SB 53 mandates that these large AI developers must be open about their safety measures and report any critical incidents, creating a new standard of accountability. The reaction from the tech world has been starkly divided, immediately drawing battle lines between advocates for regulatory guardrails and proponents...

Can your AI security stack profile, reason, and neutralize a live security threat in approximately 220 milliseconds – without a central round-trip? This is the core promise of a new cybersecurity paradigm from researchers at Google and the University of Arkansas, who propose an AI ‘immune system’ built from lightweight, autonomous agents. This model relies on Sidecar AI agents; in cloud computing, a ‘sidecar’ is a small, helper application that runs alongside a main application, meaning a dedicated AI agent is attached to each service to monitor and protect it directly. This decentralized strategy provides real-time threat response, a stark contrast to traditional methods dependent on a SIEM (Security Information and Event Management). A SIEM is a cybersecurity tool that...

In a startling development that blurs the lines between privacy and profit, a new call recorder application has rocketed to the top of the mobile charts with a controversial proposition: it pays users to record their phone calls. The app, Neon, has rapidly become the #2 social app on the US App Store by offering cash in exchange for audio conversations, which it then sells to AI companies for model training. This business model raises immediate questions about legality, particularly concerning the differences between one party consent states and two party consent states. This meteoric rise is as stunning as its business model. On Wednesday, Neon was spotted in the No. 2 position on the iPhone’s top free charts for...

In the heart of the AI revolution, California serves as both the engine of innovation and the epicenter of the debate over its potential dangers. It was here that State Senator Scott Wiener staged his first major legislative battle for AI safety with SB 1047. The bill’s dramatic failure, crushed under the weight of fierce industry opposition and a decisive veto from Governor Gavin Newsom, seemed to be a clear victory for Big Tech. But the fight was not over. Wiener has returned to the political arena with a renewed push: SB 53, a successor bill crafted with the lessons of the first defeat. This time, the reception from Silicon Valley is surprisingly muted, even supportive in some corners. The...

It’s a figure so vast it borders on the abstract. Worldwide, around $3tn will be spent on data centres that support AI between now and 2029, according to an estimate from Morgan Stanley [1]. To put this colossal sum into perspective, it’s roughly equivalent to the entire annual economic output of France. This tidal wave of capital is funding the physical backbone of the artificial intelligence revolution – a global construction and technology project of unprecedented scale and expense, with half the cost going to buildings and the other half to the specialized hardware inside. But what exactly makes these new AI facilities so fundamentally different from the traditional data centers that already power our digital lives? And as the...