Silicon Valley let out a sigh of relief on Wednesday when it learned that President Donald Trump's tariff bonanza included an exemption for semiconductors, which, at least for now, won't be subject to higher import duties. But just three days later, some US tech companies may be finding that the loophole actually creates more problems than it solves. After the tariffs were announced, the White House published a list of the products that it says are unaffected, and it doesn't include many kinds of chip-related goods. That means only a small number of American manufacturers will be able to continue sourcing chips without needing to factor in higher import costs. The vast majority of semiconductors that come into the US currently are already packaged into products that are not exempt, such as the graphics processing units (GPUs) and servers for training artificial intelligence models. And manufacturing equipment that domestic companies use to produce chips in the US wasn't spared, either.

A pro-Palestinian protest by Microsoft employees has interrupted the company's 50th anniversary celebration, the latest backlash over the tech industry's work to supply artificial intelligence technology to the Israeli military. The protest began on Friday as Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman was presenting product updates and a long-term vision for the company's AI assistant product, Copilot, to an audience that included Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and former CEO Steve Ballmer. "Mustafa, shame on you," shouted Microsoft employee Ibtihal Aboussad as she walked towards the stage and Suleyman paused his speech. "You claim that you care about using AI for good but Microsoft sells AI weapons to the Israeli military. Fifty-thousand people have died and Microsoft powers this genocide in our region."

Yet another user put into words a pattern he seemed to have spotted in Altman's recent social media posts - and a question that seems to be on many Indian users' minds. "Over the past few days, you've been praising India and Indian customers a lot. How did this sudden love for India come about? It feels like there's some deep strategy going on behind the scenes," he wrote on X. While the comment may sound a bit conspiratorial, there's some truth to at least part of it.

At least 14 people, including six children, have been killed in a Russian missile attack on a residential area of the central Ukrainian city of Kryvyi Rih, according to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, making it one of Moscow's deadliest strikes this year. Friday's attack on Zelenskyy's hometown, which comes as United States President Donald Trump is pushing for a ceasefire in the war, damaged residential blocks and caused fires, Dnipropetrovsk Governor Serhiy Lysak wrote on the Telegram messaging app. The dead and wounded could be seen lying on the pavement, one of them by a playground, in unverified videos circulating on Telegram as grey smoke rose into the sky. At least 50 people were wounded, the emergency services said, adding that the figure was growing. More than 30 people, including a three-month-old baby, were admitted to hospital, Lysak said.

If you use an AI image or text generator to make a work of "art," does it belong to you? That's a huge question hanging over the heads of anyone tempted to use AI tools for commercial products. Crucially, simply plugging prompts into an AI image generator or text generator does NOT meet this burden. Because the author (or artist, or other relevant creative term) of a work is defined as "the person who translates an idea into a fixed, tangible expression," an AI system cannot meet this burden, even though it's using input from a human to generate its output. Commenting on established case law, the report says that "…the Supreme Court has made clear that originality is required, not just time and effort."

US president Donald Trump's massive, sweeping tariffs sent global stock markets tumbling yesterday, setting the stage for a worldwide trade war and ratcheting up the dangers of a punishing recession. Experts fear that the US cleantech sector is especially vulnerable to a deep downturn, which would undermine progress on reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. Agents are the talk of the AI industry--they're capable of planning, reasoning, and executing complex tasks like scheduling meetings, ordering groceries, or even taking over your computer to change settings on your behalf. But the same sophisticated abilities that make agents helpful assistants could also make them powerful tools for conducting cyberattacks. They could readily be used to identify vulnerable targets, hijack their systems, and steal valuable data from unsuspecting victims.

Artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots like ChatGPT have been designed to replicate human speech as closely as possible to improve the user experience. But as AI gets more and more sophisticated, it's becoming difficult to discern these computerised models from real people. Now, scientists at University of California San Diego (UCSD) reveal that two of the leading chatbots have reached a major milestone. Both GPT, which powers OpenAI's ChatGPT, and LLaMa, which is behind Meta AI on WhatsApp and Facebook, have passed the famous Turing test. Devised by British WWII codebreaker Alan Turing Alan Turing in 1950, the Turing test or'imitation game' is a standard measure to test intelligence in a machine.

"I think ultimately we're going to live in a world where the majority of cyberattacks are carried out by agents," says Mark Stockley, a security expert at the cybersecurity company Malwarebytes. "It's really only a question of how quickly we get there." While we have a good sense of the kinds of threats AI agents could present to cybersecurity, what's less clear is how to detect them in the real world. The AI research organization Palisade Research has built a system called LLM Agent Honeypot in the hopes of doing exactly this. It has set up vulnerable servers that masquerade as sites for valuable government and military information to attract and try to catch AI agents attempting to hack in.

Stanley Zhong had a 4.42 grade point average, a nearly perfect SAT score, had bested adults in competitive coding competitions and started his own electronic signing service all while still in high school. When it came time to apply to colleges, Zhong's family wasn't overly concerned about his prospects even amid an increasingly competitive admissions environment. But, by the end of his senior year in Palo Alto in 2023, Zhong received rejection letters to 16 of the 18 colleges where he applied, including five University of California campuses that his father had figured would be safety schools. "It was surprise upon surprise upon surprise, and then it turned into frustration and, eventually, anger," his father, Nan Zhong, told The Times in a recent interview. "And I think both Stanley and I felt the same way, that something is really funky here."

Look beyond the actions and theatre of the Trump White House to the macro trends of the 21st century. There is the migration of economic and political heft to the East. There is the migration of many, many people towards the West, digitally savvy about the relative riches here, climate change and conflict among the push factors for some too. There is the internet revolution upending business models and working patterns, inventing social media and concentrating vast wealth and influence among a clutch of global behemoths like Apple, Meta, Amazon and X. And there is the artificial intelligence revolution in the infancy of its influence.