When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. What else can AI do? 7 uses beyond chatbots and image generation You can do a lot with local AI, especially on a gaming PC with a powerful graphics card. While cloud-based AI solutions are all the rage, local AI tools are more powerful than ever. Your gaming PC can do a lot more with AI than just run large language models in LM Studio and generate images with Stable Diffusion and unlike with cloud-based AI tools, you maintain full control over your data and have complete privacy. Here's a taste of the cool AI stuff you can do on a desktop PC right now.

The head of Amazon Web Services has big plans to offer AI tools to businesses, but says that replacing coders with AI is "a non-starter for anyone who's trying to build a long-term company." Amid the breathless coverage and relentless AI hype of recent years, one of the world's biggest tech companies--Amazon--has been notably absent. Matt Garman, the CEO of Amazon Web Services, is looking to change that. At the recent AWS re:Invent conference, Garman announced a bunch of frontier AI models, as well as a tool designed to let AWS customers build models of their own. That tool, Nova Forge, allows companies to engage in what's known as custom pretraining--adding their data in the process of building a base model--which should allow for vastly more customized models that suit a given company's needs. Sure, it doesn't quite have the sexiness of a Sora 2 announcement, but that's not Garman's goal: He's less interested in mass consumer use of AI and more interested in enterprise solutions that'll integrate AI into all of AWS's offerings--and have a material impact on a corporate P&L. For this week's episode of, I caught up with Garman after AWS re:Invent to talk about what the company announced, whether he feels behind in the AI race, how he thinks about managing huge teams (and managing internal dissent), and why he's not convinced that AI is (or should be) the great job thief of our era. We always start these conversations with some very quick questions, like a warmup. If AWS had a mascot, what would it be? We have a big S3 bucket sometimes that goes around, so we'll call it that. Sorry, what is an S3 bucket? An S3 bucket is like a thing that you store your S3 objects in, but we actually have a large foam big bucket that walks around and actually looks like a paint bucket. So you do have a mascot. Well, S3 has a bucket, it has a mascot. It's probably the closest we have, and I like it. What's the most expensive mistake you've ever made? Personally, the most expensive mistake I ever made was playing basketball too long and I tore my Achilles. So that cost me about nine months of being able to walk. I probably should have known that into my thirties I was well past basketball-playing age.

A.I., of course--but there were also other, less obvious stories and trends that are going to shape how we understand the news. Media is a famously myopic and sclerotic industry. The big changes that take place within it often go unnoticed, at first, by the people who are paid to set its future course. Sometimes, the stuff that we in the industry miss out on is obvious to the rest of the world. We were not the first to notice, for example, that features and news stories were being cannibalized by social media, slowly at first, and then thoroughly.

Musicians are deeply concerned about AI. So why are the major labels embracing it? Companies such as Udio, Suno and Klay will let you use AI to make new music based on existing artists' work. T his was the year that AI-generated music went from jokey curiosity to mainstream force. Velvet Sundown, a wholly AI act, generated millions of streams; AI-created tracks topped Spotify's viral chart and one of the US Billboard country charts; AI "artist" Xania Monet "signed" a record deal. BBC Introducing is usually a platform for flesh-and-blood artists trying to make it big, but an AI-generated song by Papi Lamour was recently played on the West Midlands show.

Quantum navigation could solve the military's GPS jamming problem The rise of GPS vulnerability is putting more resilient, atom-based navigational tools on the map. The Royal Navy partnered with Infleqtion to test a quantum clock on the uncrewed submarine XV Excalibur. In late September, a Spanish military plane carrying the country's defense minister to a base in Lithuania was reportedly the subject of a kind of attack --not by a rocket or anti-aircraft rounds, but by radio transmissions that jammed its GPS system. The flight landed safely, but it was one of thousands that have been affected by a far-reaching Russian campaign of GPS interference since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The growing inconvenience to air traffic and risk of a real disaster have highlighted the vulnerability of GPS and focused attention on more secure ways for planes to navigate the gauntlet of jamming and spoofing, the term for tricking a GPS receiver into thinking it's somewhere else. US military contractors are rolling out new GPS satellites that use stronger, cleverer signals, and engineers are working on providing better navigation information based on other sources, like cellular transmissions and visual data.

A campaign fronted by popstars including Elton John and Dua Lipa to protect artists' works from being mined to train AI models without consent has received a boost after almost every respondent to a government consultation backed their case. Ministers subsequently dropped that preference in the face of a backlash. Liz Kendall, the secretary of state for science, innovation and technology, told parliament on Monday there was "no clear consensus" on the issue and the government would "take the time to get this right", and promised to make policy proposals by 18 March 2026. "This means keeping the UK at the cutting edge of science and technology so UK citizens can benefit from major breakthroughs, transformative innovation and greater prosperity. "It also means continuing to support our creative industries, which make a huge economic contribution, shape our national identity and give us a unique position on the world stage."

Ben & Jerry's row deepens as three board members removed Three members of Ben & Jerry's independent board will no longer be eligible to serve in their roles, after the ice cream company introduced a new set of governance practices. These include a nine-year limit set on board members' terms. Chair Anuradha Mittal, who earlier said she had no plans to resign under pressure, is among those affected. The move was criticised by the company's co-founder Ben Cohen, who called it a blatant power grab designed to strip the board of legal authority and independence. His remarks are the latest in a long-running row between Ben and Jerry's and its owner over the Cherry Garcia maker's social activism and the continued independence of its board.

Three years after ChatGPT made OpenAI the leader in artificial intelligence and a household name, rivals have closed the gap and some investors are wondering if the sensation has the wherewithal to stay dominant. Investor Michael Burry, made famous in the film The Big Short, recently likened OpenAI to Netscape, which ruled the web-browser market in the mid-1990s only to lose to Microsoft's Internet Explorer. OpenAI is the next Netscape, doomed and hemorrhaging cash, Burry said recently in a post on X, formerly Twitter. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever. By subscribing, you can help us get the story right.

What is in the 28-point US plan for Ukraine? 'Ukraine is running out of men, money and time' Can the US get all sides to end the war? Why is Europe opposing Trump's peace plan? A Russian drone attack killed a 62-year-old Ukrainian man as he was riding a bicycle in the Velyka Pysarivka community of Ukraine's Sumy region, Governor Oleh Hryhorov said in a post on the Telegram messaging app. Russian forces launched 850 attacks on Ukraine's Zaporizhia region in a single day, injuring 14 people and damaging houses, cars and infrastructure, Governor Ivan Fedorov said on Telegram.

Hannah Wong told staff she is moving on to her “next chapter.” The company will be running an executive search to find a replacement, according to a memo.