Nintendo projected weaker-than-expected initial sales of its upcoming Switch 2 game console, a reflection of how uncertainty over U.S. tariffs is weighing even on a company fielding record-setting demand. The Kyoto-based company expects shipments of the long-awaited Switch 2 to reach 15 million units in the year to March, shy of the 16.8 million average estimated by analysts. Nintendo forecast its annual operating profit to reach 320 billion ( 2.2 billion) during the period, also significantly short of analyst expectations. That is despite overwhelming preorders for the 450 gadget and market expectations that the Switch 2 would be the fastest-selling console in history. In Japan, the console will sell for 49,980 ( 350), though an edition that supports only the Japanese language.

Since Donald Trump launched his chaotic trade war earlier this year, it has become a truism to say he has plunged the world economy into crisis. At last month's spring meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund in Washington, where policymakers and finance ministers from all over congregated, the attenders were "shellshocked", the economist Eswar Prasad, a former senior IMF official who now teaches at Cornell, told me. "The sense is that the world has changed fundamentally in ways that cannot easily be put back together. Every country has to figure out its own place in this new world order and how to protect its own interests." Trump's assault on the old global order is real. But in taking its measure, it's necessary to look beyond the daily headlines and acknowledge that being in a state of crisis is nothing new to capitalism. It's also important to note that, as Karl Marx wrote in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon: "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please."

U.S. President Donald Trump's administration plans to rescind and modify a rule introduced by his predecessor that curbed the export of sophisticated artificial intelligence chips, a spokeswoman for the Department of Commerce said on Wednesday. The regulation was aimed at further restricting AI chip and technology exports, dividing up the world to keep advanced computing power in the United States and among its allies while finding more ways to block China's access. The Framework for Artificial Intelligence Diffusion was issued in January, a week before the end of the administration of former President Joe Biden. It capped a four-year effort by the Biden administration to hobble China's access to advanced chips that could enhance its military capabilities and to maintain U.S. leadership in AI.

Is this really what ChatGPT thinks of me? You may have seen the latest viral ChatGPT image trend: "Create an exact replica of this image, don't change a thing." Users then redo that process 99 more times, with the image shifting slightly in each iteration. People have been plugging in their own photos to test out the results, and a mutating image of Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson has also gone viral on Reddit and X. When you make a copy of a copy of a copy, the results naturally degrade over time.

The government of Singapore released a blueprint today for global collaboration on artificial intelligence safety following a meeting of AI researchers from the US, China, and Europe. The document lays out a shared vision for working on AI safety through international cooperation rather than competition. "Singapore is one of the few countries on the planet that gets along well with both East and West," says Max Tegmark, a scientist at MIT who helped convene the meeting of AI luminaries last month. "They know that they're not going to build [artificial general intelligence] themselves--they will have it done to them--so it is very much in their interests to have the countries that are going to build it talk to each other." The countries thought most likely to build AGI are, of course, the US and China--and yet those nations seem more intent on outmaneuvering each other than working together.

Footage reportedly shot at an undisclosed Chinese factory appears to show a robot violently "lashing out" at workers in a clip that's since gone viral. The security camera video shows a robot, which resembles a Unitree H1, initially sitting dormant as it hangs from a crane-like mechanism. Two men are seen conversing in its vicinity. Suddenly, the robot begins flailing its limbs around as the men attempt to get out of its way. It appears to knock a computer monitor, among other objects, to the floor during its rampage.

The New Yorker staff writer Katy Waldman joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss Donald Trump's fondness for A.I.-generated memes and what it tells us about our current political climate. They talk about how Trump uses these images to bend the cultural narrative to his will, why the MAGA aesthetic is tailor-made for the age of A.I., and how the proliferation of A.I. slop is damaging our brains. "Trump Is the Emperor of A.I. Slop," by Katy Waldman "How Is Elon Musk Powering His Supercomputer?," by Bill McKibben "Is This the End of the Separation of Church and State?," by Ruth Marcus "How Russia and Ukraine Are Playing Trump's Blame Game," by Joshua Yaffa

The California State Bar's botched roll out of a new exam -- a move that the cash-strapped agency made in the hopes of saving money -- could ultimately end up costing it an additional 5.6 million. Leah T. Wilson, executive director of the State Bar, told state lawmakers at a Senate Judiciary hearing Tuesday that the agency expects to pay around 3 million to offer free exams to test takers, an additional 2 million to book in-person testing sites in July, and 620,000 to return the test to its traditional system of multiple-choice questions in July. Wilson, who announced last week she will step down when her term ends this summer, revealed the costs during a 90-minute hearing called by Sen. Thomas J. Umberg (D-Orange), chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, to find out what went so "spectacularly wrong." Chaos ensued in February when thousands of test takers seeking to practice law in California sat for the new exam. Some reported they couldn't log into the exam because online testing platforms repeatedly crashed.

The US Patent and Trademark Office has refused one of Tesla's initial attempts to trademark the term "Robotaxi" because it believes the name is generic and already in use by other companies, according to a filing spotted by TechCrunch. Tesla was hoping to trademark the term in connection to its planned self-driving car service, but now it'll have to reply with more evidence to change the office's mind. The main issue outlined in the USPTO decision is that "Robotaxi" is "merely descriptive," as in its an already commonly used term. A robotaxi typically refers to the self-driving cars used in services like Waymo. As long as Silicon Valley has believed money could be made selling autonomous vehicles (and the rides you can take in them), the term has been in use.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg thinks you don't have enough friends, but his solution isn't socializing more - it's talking with more robots. During a conference hosted by technology company Stripe, Zuckerberg suggested that it may actually be better for people to seek out friends, therapists, and even lovers that are all powered by AI. As part of his reasoning, the 40-year-old cited a 2021 study which found that the average American has fewer than three friends. Instead of lobbying for people to escape their digital bubbles, Zuckerberg claimed that AI can actually do a better job of knowing the likes and preferences of lonely humans than a real fresh-and-blood companion. 'I think people are going to want a system that knows them well and that kind of understands them in the way that their feed algorithms do,' Zuckerberg said Tuesday.