Lanyard-clad attendees with branded tote bags and pink-shirted volunteers flowed through London's Brick Lane on Monday, marking the launch of the inaugural SXSW London festival. Taking place over multiple stages and venues in Shoreditch and Hoxton, SXSW London has officially kicked off its first full day of panels, keynotes, demonstrations, movie premieres, and music gigs. And luckily, Londoners are no strangers to a queue, with SXSW's penchant for long lines outside Austin venues replicated in the UK capital. Playing to the strengths of fellow conferences, the biggest topics of SXSW London are the impact of AI on essentially anything you could think of, the creator economy and online communities, and self-driving tech -- I spied a Wayve autonomous vehicle carefully navigating the pedestrian-filled Brick Lane (with a human driver behind the wheel, just in case). London mayor Sadiq Khan officially launched the festival with a speech Monday morning, championing London as "a global centre for AI investment and innovation," emphasising a focus on ethical and accessible AI development, and playing to the audience with a ChatGPT anecdote.

SAVE 61%: As of June 2, you can get the Amazon Echo Buds (2nd gen) with active noise cancellation for just 54.99, down from 139.99, at Amazon. If you're looking for an affordable pair of earbuds that'll help you block out your surroundings on your morning commute, during a workout, or just in the office, we found a pretty good deal at Amazon. As of June 2, you can get the Amazon Echo Buds (2nd gen) with active noise cancellation for just 54.99, down from 139.99, at Amazon. Not too bad for ANC earbuds released in 2021. You can get the 2023 Amazon Echo Buds (no ANC) for 34.99, down from 49.99, if you're looking for something a little bit cheaper.

SAVE 38%: As of June 2, you can get the MOVA P10 Pro Ultra robot vacuum and mop for 499, down from 799. It's also the lowest price we've seen on this model so far. One of the best purchases you can make for yourself is a robot vacuum or, even better, a robot vacuum-mop combo. These little gadgets make cleaning your house so much easier, especially if you have pets or children. Right now, Amazon's got quite a few robot vacuum deals going on.

They look like folded art, but act like machines. These metamaterials combine origami design with advanced geometry to create structures that change shape, respond to their environment, and could reshape construction and robotics.

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TL;DR: Create anything, even NSFW art, with a lifetime subscription to Imagiyo for only 29.68. Digital creativity has never been more accessible, yet many of us remember the days when crafting a single image meant wrestling with layers and plugins for hours on end. Now there's a way to generate stunning visuals in seconds, simply by typing a description of what you have in mind. Imagiyo (on sale for life for 29.68) uses Stable Diffusion AI alongside FLUX AI to turn text prompts into high-quality images ready for commercial use, and there aren't many limits to what you can create. What do you want to make first?

According to new internal documents review by NPR, Meta is allegedly planning to replace human risk assessors with AI, as the company edges closer to complete automation. Historically, Meta has relied on human analysts to evaluate the potential harms posed by new technologies across its platforms, including updates to the algorithm and safety features, part of a process known as privacy and integrity reviews. But in the near future, these essential assessments may be taken over by bots, as the company looks to automate 90 percent of this work using artificial intelligence. Despite previously stating that AI would only be used to assess "low-risk" releases, Meta is now rolling out use of the tech in decisions on AI safety, youth risk, and integrity, which includes misinformation and violent content moderation, reported NPR. Under the new system, product teams submit questionnaires and receive instant risk decisions and recommendations, with engineers taking on greater decision-making powers.

Google's AI Gemini will now automatically summarize long email threads for some users, the company said in a blog post. Previously, users had to tap "Summarize this email" for Gemini to generate key points. Now, if users have smart features in Gmail, Chat, Meet, and Workspace turned on, they'll automatically appear "where a summary will be helpful," like with long threads or exchanges with several replies. For now, this feature is only available in English. If you're using Gmail with an Admin, like a company or school, then the Admin can turn these smart settings on or off.

For his feature-length directorial debut Mountainhead, Succession creator Jesse Armstrong treads familiar territory. Like Succession, Mountainhead turns its gaze on the rich and powerful, this time satirizing tech moguls in the vein of Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Sam Altman. The film mimics Succession formally, too, boasting its documentary-style cinematography, as well as a thrumming score from Succession composer Nicholas Britell. And of course, it comes with its fair share of WTF-worthy turns of phrase. Well, now you won't be able to forget it.)

This week, DeepSeek released an updated version of its R1 model on HuggingFace, reigniting the open-source versus closed-source competition. The updated version, called DeekSeek-R1-0528, has 685 billion parameters, an upgrade from January's version, which had 671 billion. Unlike OpenAI and Google's models, which are famously closed-source, DeepSeek's model weights are publicly available. According to the benchmarks, the R1-0528 update has improved reasoning and inference capabilities and is closing the gap with OpenAI's o3 and Google's Gemini 2.5 Pro. This is an example of a lightweight model that is less capable but also requires less computing power.