The Liberal Democrats will fight the next general election on a promise to cut taxes for millions of workers, Sir Ed Davey has said in a speech to his party conference. The Lib Dem leader said that if he gained power, he would raise the annual tax-free personal allowance to £15,000. He would also raise the 40p income tax threshold from £50,270 to £56,000, in a £17bn package funded by the economic boost he says would come from the UK rejoining the EU single market and customs union. He claimed the plan would mean a £680 cut for most taxpayers but it would not come into full effect until the fifth year of a Lib Dem government - potentially up to eight years away. The announcement was greeted with sustained applause by Lib Dem MPs and activists in the Brighton conference centre.

Unions who donate to Labour will meet John Healey on Thursday to press home their demands ahead of next month's Budget. Unite, the UK's second biggest union, has called for a reversal of the freezing of tax thresholds, that see the lowest paid drawn into paying tax. The union's leader, Sharon Graham, said she told Andy Burnham that the cut to the winter fuel allowance, carried out under former Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, was a disgrace, adding: What to you need to do is winter fuel in reverse - something that says to everyday people I am on your side. The call is one of a number of policy proposals unions are taking to the chancellor, including increased taxes on tech companies. Unions say they believe Healey's first budget will define Andy Burnham's direction of travel as prime minister.

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. AI is cheaper than workers. Could an AI token tax keep businesses from replacing human jobs? The idea is gaining traction, and the Microsoft co-founder says he's on board. AI is about to change everything, and we're not ready.

Creator Playbook Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Mashable Voices Look Up Trending Now Say More Mashable Selects Safety Net Versus Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List Switch Off In My Bag All Series Bill Gates proposes a'token tax' on AI to protect human workers In a wide-ranging interview with the New York Times, Gates said that some jobs should be Human Reserved. Former Microsoft head Bill Gates has a few ideas on how to deal with AI replacing human workers. As anti-AI sentiment continues to spread, one tech industry leader is now floating an idea for how to deal with it. In a 6,000-word essay posted on his Gates Notes website, billionaire and former Microsoft head Bill Gates explains his fears about artificial intelligence and offers a few proposals for addressing them. Gates also discussed his concerns in a wide-ranging interview with the .

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Why $370bn tech group Palantir pays 1.4 percent tax rate: Report Palantir Technologies, the United States data analytics and artificial intelligence company which has contracts with the country's military and intelligence apparatus, has "engineered its corporate structure" to pay no US federal corporate income tax, according to a new report. The study by the Centre for International Corporate Tax Accountability and Research (CICTAR) comes as Palantir reports soaring revenues, driven partly by government contracts, while it faces continued criticism for providing technology to the Israeli military amid the genocide in Gaza. What does the report show? Earlier this week, Palantir reported second-quarter revenue of $1.94bn, up 93 percent from a year earlier. But despite its rapid growth, CICTAR said its global effective tax rate was just 1.4 percent in 2025.

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Things to Do in L.A. Tap to enable a layout that focuses on the article. This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here . See more from the L.A. Times in Google Search. More than three dozen California legislators are calling for Gov. Gavin Newsom to exempt the state's film and TV production incentive program from a recently approved cap on corporate tax credits, warning that without action it will be "significantly kneecapped."

Direct preference optimization (DPO) is widely used as a simple and stable method for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. This paper investigates a generalized DPO loss that enables a policy model to match the target policy from a likelihood ratio estimation perspective. The ratio of the target policy provides a unique identification of the policy distribution without relying on reward models or partition functions. This allows the generalized loss to retain both simplicity and theoretical guarantees, which prior work such as f-PO fails to achieve simultaneously. We propose Bregman preference optimization (BPO), a generalized framework for ratio matching that provides a family of objective functions achieving target policy optimality.