Everything over the last 30 years, according to Sir Jony Ive, has led to this moment: a partnership between the iPhone designer and the developer of ChatGPT. Ive has sold his hardware startup, io, to OpenAI and will take on creative and design leadership across the merged businesses. "I have a growing sense that everything I have learned over the last 30 years has led me to this place, to this moment," he says in a video announcing the 6.4bn ( 4.8bn) deal. The main aim will be to move on from Ive's signature achievement designing Apple's most successful product, as well as the iPod, iPad and Apple Watch. The British-born designer has already developed a prototype io device, and one of its users is OpenAI's chief executive, Sam Altman.

Artificial intelligence systems could account for nearly half of datacentre power consumption by the end of this year, analysis has revealed. The estimates by Alex de Vries-Gao, the founder of the Digiconomist tech sustainability website, came as the International Energy Agency forecast that AI would require almost as much energy by the end of this decade as Japan uses today. De Vries-Gao's calculations, to be published in the sustainable energy journal Joule, are based on the power consumed by chips made by Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices that are used to train and operate AI models. The paper also takes into account the energy consumption of chips used by other companies, such as Broadcom. The IEA estimates that all data centres – excluding mining for cryptocurrencies – consumed 415 terawatt hours (TWh) of electricity last year.

The Cannes film festival isn't typically associated with video games, but this year it's playing host to an unusual collaboration. Lili is a co-production between the New York-based game studio iNK Stories (creator of 1979 Revolution: Black Friday, about a photojournalist in Iran) and the Royal Shakespeare Company, and it's been turning heads with its eye-catching translocation of Macbeth to modern-day Iran. "It's been such an incredible coup to have it as the first video game experience at Cannes," says iNK Stories co-founder Vassiliki Khonsari. "People have gone in saying, I'm not familiar playing games, so I may just try it out for five minutes. The Cannes festival's Immersive Competition began in 2024, although the lineup doesn't usually feature traditional video games. "VR films and projection mapping is the thrust of it," says iNK Stories' other co-founder, Vassiliki's husband Navid Khonsari. But Lili weaves live-action footage with video game mechanics in a similar way to a game such as Telling Lies or Immortality. Its lead, Zar Amir Ebrahimi, won best actress at Cannes three years ago. Lili focuses on the story of Lady Macbeth, here cast as the ambitious wife of an upwardly mobile officer in the Basij (a paramilitary volunteer militia within the Islamic Revolutionary Guard in Iran). As in the play, she plots a murder to secure her husband's rise. "I think that the narrative of Lady Macbeth is that she's manipulative, and that's exactly what got us interested," says Navid. "The social limitations based on her gender forced her to try to attain whatever leadership role she can," he continues. "If she was a man, she would have been one of the greatest kings that country would have ever experienced, but because she was a woman she had to work within the structure that was there for her.

OpenAI is buying an untested startup for 6.4bn, the ChatGPT maker's biggest acquisition yet. The hardware startup, called io, was founded by Apple design guru Jony Ive, known best as one of the principal architects of the iPhone. Ive and OpenAI's CEO, Sam Altman, said in a blog post that their partnership has been two years in the making. "A collaboration built upon friendship, curiosity and shared values quickly grew in ambition," they wrote in the blog post, which offered scant details on upcoming devices. "Tentative ideas and explorations evolved into tangible designs."

The lifespan of a games console has extended a lot since I was a child. In the 1990s, this kind of technology would be out of date after just a couple of years. There would be some tantalising new machine out before you knew it, everybody competing to be on the cutting edge: the Game Boy and Sega Genesis/Mega Drive in 1989 were followed by the Game Gear in 1990 and the Super NES in 1991. Five years was a long life for a gaming machine. The Nintendo Switch 2 will be released in a couple of weeks, more than eight years since I first picked an original Switch up off its dock and marvelled at the instant transition to portable play.

US chip exports controls have been a "failure", the head of Nvidia, Jensen Huang, told a tech forum on Wednesday, as the Chinese government separately slammed US warnings to other countries against using Chinese tech. Successive US administrations have imposed restrictions on the sale of hi-tech AI chips to China, in an effort to curb China's military advancement and protect US dominance of the AI industry. But Huang told the Computex tech forum in Taipei that the controls had instead spurred on Chinese developers. "The local companies are very, very talented and very determined, and the export control gave them the spirit, the energy and the government support to accelerate their development," Huang told media the Computex tech show in Taipei. "I think, all in all, the export control was a failure."

Hacked AI-powered chatbots threaten to make dangerous knowledge readily available by churning out illicit information the programs absorb during training, researchers say. The warning comes amid a disturbing trend for chatbots that have been "jailbroken" to circumvent their built-in safety controls. The restrictions are supposed to prevent the programs from providing harmful, biased or inappropriate responses to users' questions. The engines that power chatbots such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude – large language models (LLMs) – are fed vast amounts of material from the internet. Despite efforts to strip harmful text from the training data, LLMs can still absorb information about illegal activities such as hacking, money laundering, insider trading and bomb-making.

The short-lived firing of Sam Altman, the CEO of possibly the world's most important AI company, was sensational. When he was sacked by OpenAI's board members, some of them believed the stakes could not have been higher – the future of humanity – if the organisation continued under Altman. Imagine Succession, with added apocalypse vibes. In early November 2023, after three weeks of secret calls and varying degrees of paranoia, the OpenAI board agreed: Altman had to go. After his removal, Altman's most loyal staff resigned, and others signed an open letter calling for his reinstatement.

Google on Tuesday unleashed another wave of artificial intelligence technology to accelerate a year-long makeover of its search engine that is changing the way people get information and curtailing the flow of internet traffic to other websites. The next phase outlined at Google's annual developers conference includes releasing a new "AI mode" option in the United States. The company says the feature will make interacting with its search engine more like having a conversation with an expert capable of answering a wide array of questions. AI mode is being offered to all users in the US just two-and-a-half months after the company began testing with a limited Labs division audience. Google is also feeding its latest AI model, Gemini 2.5, into its search algorithms and will soon begin testing other AI features, such as the ability to automatically buy concert tickets and conduct searches through live video feeds.

Artificial intelligence can do just as well as humans, if not better, when it comes to persuading others in a debate, and not just because it cannot shout, a study has found. Experts say the results are concerning, not least as it has potential implications for election integrity. "If persuasive AI can be deployed at scale, you can imagine armies of bots microtargeting undecided voters, subtly nudging them with tailored political narratives that feel authentic," said Francesco Salvi, the first author of the research from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. He added that such influence was hard to trace, even harder to regulate and nearly impossible to debunk in real time. "I would be surprised if malicious actors hadn't already started to use these tools to their advantage to spread misinformation and unfair propaganda," Salvi said.