This week Microsoft announced that it would invest 3.2 billion ( 3.5 billion) in Germany over the next two years. The U.S. tech giant will use the money to double the capacity of its artificial intelligence and data center infrastructure in Germany and expand its training programmes, according to Microsoft vice chair and president Brad Smith. The move follows a similar announcement from November 2023, when Microsoft said it would invest 2.5 billion ( 3.2 billion) in infrastructure in the U.K. over the next three years. Both countries hailed the investments as significant steps that would permit them to compete on the world stage when it comes to AI. However, the investments are dwarfed by investments made by U.S.-based cloud service providers elsewhere, particularly in the U.S. As AI becomes increasingly economically and militarily important, governments are taking steps to ensure they have control over the technology that they depend on.

Have you ever wanted to know what two golden retrievers podcasting on top of a mountain might look like? Or perhaps watch a bicycle race on the ocean with different animals riding the bicycles? OpenAI's latest generative artificial intelligence offering, Sora, can generate breathtakingly realistic videos that are up to a minute long from text prompts. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced the model's creation on X on Thursday. Sora is not yet available to the public. For now, OpenAI is only granting access to red teamers--individuals employed to look for issues--who will assess potential risks associated with the model's release, as well as a limited number of "visual artists, designers, and filmmakers to gain feedback on how to advance the model to be most helpful for creative professionals," according to a blog post.

Each year, the TIME100 Most Influential Companies list recognizes businesses making extraordinary impact around the world. Enter your company here today. As investors were wowed by ChatGPT and the rapid progress made by artificial intelligence in recent years, money poured into the industry. Generative AI and AI-related startups raised nearly 50 billion in 2023, according to Crunchbase, a business data provider. Already in 2024, share prices for firms that play a role in manufacturing the advanced chips required for the most powerful AI models have skyrocketed, with Nvidia, AMD, and Arm share prices up 27%, 51%, and 82% respectively.

TikTok is launching an in-app Election Center to mitigate the spread of online misinformation during the 2024 European Parliament elections. In a blog post published on Wednesday, Kevin Morgan, Head of Safety and Integrity for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, said the ByteDance-owned social media platform will host local language centers for each of the 27 E.U. countries to help viewers "separate fact from fiction." The tool is set to be available for TikTok's 134 million monthly European users to access in March, ahead of the bloc taking to the polls in early June. The centers will aim to inform European voters about the elections, and videos linked to the electoral process will be clearly signposted and guide users to the relevant center. TikTok also noted that it has a team of 6,000 people working to moderate E.U. languages content.

When I met my husband, who happens to be white, he told me that he was always seeing women with blonde hair on Tinder and he's not really into blondes. No matter how many times he had swiped left on blondes, the algorithms were always recommending them to him, presumably because pop culture dictates that white men prefer blondes. Luckily for us, the algorithms' tendency to stack blonde women in his swipe deck worked out in our favor because I'm a black woman who, at the time, had blonde hair. In nearly 10 years of swiping through profiles on Tinder, Bumble, Hinge, and OkCupid, I learned that dating apps can provide pathways for finding friendship, adventure, romance, and sometimes, love. But there was one aspect of dating app culture that I couldn't ignore because it was often the first thing matches wanted to talk about: race.

Meta's chief AI scientist, Yann LeCun, received another accolade to add to his long list of awards on Sunday, when he was recognized with a TIME100 Impact Award for his contributions to the world of artificial intelligence. Ahead of the award ceremony in Dubai, LeCun sat down with TIME to discuss the barriers to achieving "artificial general intelligence" (AGI), the merits of Meta's open-source approach, and what he sees as the "preposterous" claim that AI could pose an existential risk to the human race. TIME spoke with LeCun on Jan. 26. This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity. Many people in the tech world today believe that training large language models (LLMs) on more computing power and more data will lead to artificial general intelligence.

In 1976, Frank Collin, an ambitious leader in the small but resilient Nazi party of the United States, planned a march in Skokie, Illinois--an attempt to raise the profile of his organization and build support for his cause. The town, many of whose residents were Jewish and had lived through the war, vehemently opposed the demonstration, and the case went to the courts. The American Civil Liberties Union came to the legal defense of Collin and his fellow Nazis on First Amendment grounds--a move that would be almost unthinkable today. Aryeh Neier, the national executive director of the ACLU at the time, received thousands of letters condemning his organization's decision to defend the free speech rights of Nazis. Neier was born into a Jewish family in Berlin in 1937 and fled from Germany to England along with his parents as a child.

The top U.S. artificial intelligence companies will participate in a government-led effort intended to craft federal standards on the technology to ensure that it's deployed safely and responsibly, the Commerce Department said Thursday. OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft Corp., Meta Platforms Inc. and Alphabet Inc.'s Google are among more than 200 members of a newly established AI Safety Institute Consortium under the department, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said. Also on the list are Apple Inc., Amazon Inc., Hugging Face Inc. and IBM. The top industry players will work with the National Institute of Standards and Technology, a body within Commerce, along with other technology companies, civil society groups, academics, and state and local government officials to establish safety standards regarding AI. "President Biden directed us to pull every lever to accomplish two key goals: set safety standards and protect our innovation ecosystem," Raimondo said in a statement. Major tech companies have been engaging with the Biden administration and policymakers in Washington on regulating AI as the technology rapidly advances and is poised to disrupt industries.

Early on the morning of June 1, 2022, Alex Karp, the CEO of the data-analytics firm Palantir Technologies, crossed the border between Poland and Ukraine on foot, with five colleagues in tow. A pair of beaten-up Toyota Land Cruisers awaited on the other side. Chauffeured by armed guards, they sped down empty highways toward Kyiv, past bombed-out buildings, bridges damaged by artillery, the remnants of burned trucks. They arrived in the capital before the wartime curfew. The next day, Karp was escorted into the fortified bunker of the presidential palace, becoming the first leader of a major Western company to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky since Russia's invasion three months earlier. Over a round of espressos, Karp told Zelensky that he was ready to open an office in Kyiv and deploy Palantir's data and artificial-intelligence software to support Ukraine's defense. Karp believed they could team up "in ways that allow David to beat a modern-day Goliath." In the stratosphere of top tech CEOs, Karp is an unusual figure.

They flag offensive content on social networks and delete spam from our inboxes. At the hospital, they help convert patient--doctor conversations into insurance billing codes. Sometimes, they alert law enforcement to potential terrorist plots and predict (poorly) the threat of violence on social media. Legal professionals use them to hide or discover evidence of corporate fraud. Students are writing their next school paper with the aid of a smart word processor, capable not just of completing sentences, but generating entire essays on any topic.