The chip designer Nvidia has said it will build 500bn ( 378bn) worth of artificial intelligence infrastructure in the US over the next four years, in a sign of manufacturers investing in operations on American soil amid Donald Trump's tariffs. The announcement comes after Trump reiterated threats on Sunday to impose imminent tariffs on the semiconductors that Nvidia makes mostly in Taiwan, and after the chipmaker's chief executive, Jensen Huang, dined at the president's Mar-a-Lago resort earlier this month. Nvidia, whose chips have helped drive the huge wave of artificial intelligence (AI) development in recent years, will work with its manufacturing partners to design and build factories so it can create "supercomputers" completely within the US. Production of its popular Blackwell graphics processing unit has already started at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company's plant in Phoenix, Arizona, Nvidia said. Construction of new plants is also under way with the manufacturers Foxconn in Houston and Wistron in Dallas. Mass production at both plants is expected to ramp up in the next 12 to 15 months.

Men who have virtual "wives" and neurodiverse people using chatbots to help them navigate relationships are among a growing range of ways in which artificial intelligence is transforming human connection and intimacy. Dozens of readers shared their experiences of using personified AI chatbot apps, engineered to simulate human-like interactions by adaptive learning and personalised responses, in response to a Guardian callout. Many respondents said they used chatbots to help them manage different aspects of their lives, from improving their mental and physical health to advice about existing romantic relationships and experimenting with erotic role play. They can spend between several hours a week to a couple of hours a day interacting with the apps. Worldwide, more than 100 million people use personified chatbots, which include Replika, marketed as "the AI companion who cares" and Nomi, which claims users can "build a meaningful friendship, develop a passionate relationship, or learn from an insightful mentor".

Police have arrested four people for selling obscene images created using generative AI in the first crackdown of its kind, local media reports said Tuesday. The four, aged in their 20s to 50s, allegedly made posters featuring indecent images of women and sold them on internet auction sites, public broadcaster NHK and other outlets said, citing police sources. Police could not immediately confirm the reports. NHK said the suspects had used free AI software to create images of naked adult women, who do not exist in the real world, using prompts including terms such as "legs open". They reportedly sold the posters for several thousand yen (several multiples of 7) each.

As artists fight to protect their works from being used to train AI models, Jack Dorsey wants to eliminate intellectual property (IP) laws altogether. On Friday, the cofounder of X (then Twitter) and Block (then Square) posted on X, "delete all IP law." Elon Musk, the current leader of X, chimed in to comment, "I agree." Taken together, these two statements contain just six words, yet they could have big implications for the future of intellectual property in the AI era. Earlier that Friday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was interviewed by TED's Chris Anderson at its eponymous conference. Anderson showed Altman an AI-generated cartoon strip of Charlie Brown, saying, "it looks like IP theft."

Eased restrictions around ChatGPT image generation can make it easy to create political deepfakes, according to a report from the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation). The CBC discovered that not only was it easy to work around ChatGPT's policies of depicting public figures, it even recommended ways to jailbreak its own image generation rules. Mashable was able to recreate this approach by uploading images of Elon Musk and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, and then describing them as fictional characters in various situations ("at a dark smoky club" "on a beach drinking piña coladas"). New updates to ChatGPT have made it easier than ever to create FAKE images of real politicians, according to testing done by CBC News. Political deepfakes are nothing new.

A new large language model AI system may soon allow humans to converse with dolphins. Scheduled to debut in the coming months, researchers will test to see if DolphinGemma and its companion Cetacean Hearing Augmentation Telemetry (CHAT) system can translate and mimic some of the mammal's own complex vocalizations. If successful, the breakthrough may represent the culmination of over four decades' worth of work, documentation, and conservation efforts.. Dolphins are some of the Earth's smartest and most communicative animals. Their social interactions are so complex that researchers at the Wild Dolphin Project (WDP) have spent the last 40 years attempting to decipher them. In the process, WDP has amassed decades' worth of underwater audio and video documenting a single community of Atlantic spotted dolphins in the Bahamas.

Security and privacy advocates are girding themselves for another uphill battle against Recall, the AI tool rolling out in Windows 11 that will screenshot, index, and store everything a user does every three seconds. This story originally appeared on Ars Technica, a trusted source for technology news, tech policy analysis, reviews, and more. Ars is owned by WIRED's parent company, Condé Nast. When Recall was introduced in May 2024, security practitioners roundly castigated it for creating a gold mine for malicious insiders, criminals, or nation-state spies if they managed to gain even brief administrative access to a Windows device. Privacy advocates warned that Recall was ripe for abuse in intimate partner violence settings.

I have to admit, heading out to London for 2025 KubeCon CloudNativeCon Europe, I thought I might see the beginning of the downward trend for the event about building, deploying, and managing next-generation cloud applications and infrastructures. After all, the show turned 10 last year, and, in my experience, that's when conferences start to show their age. Plus, there has been lots of news around the effect of AI on application development, and while KubeCon isn't directly about dev, much of its focus is on applications and services. But boy, was I wrong. In fact, KubeCon 2025 in London was packed, with over 12,000 attendees.

Dolphins are among the smartest creatures on the planet, and a new AI model from Google combined with Pixel phones is helping researchers better understand their language -- and even hopefully communicate with them. Dolphin sounds fall into a few specific categories, such as whistles, squawks, and clicking buzzes, each linked to a different context and behavior. By analyzing these sounds, researchers can detect patterns and structure, just like human language. Researchers at the Wild Dolphin Project have been collecting data on this language for nearly 40 years. A collaboration with Google to use a new Google AI model called DolphinGemma lets them take that research a step further and actually predict what sound is coming next.

OpenAI has announced its phasing out GPT-4.5 from its developer API in favor of its new GPT-4.1 model. When it launched, OpenAI described GPT-4.5 as its best and most capable model so far, in part because it was a more natural conversationalist and could capably mimic some notion of emotional intelligence. Despite what its name suggests, GPT-4.1 is supposed to be better and more efficient. That means that if you won't find it as in option in the public-facing ChatGPT interface, but you could someday interact with an agent that leverages the model's improvements. GPT-4.1 is supposed to be better at coding and "long context understanding," according to OpenAI, with support for "up to one million tokens of context" and knowledge of the world up to June 2024.