Plus: social media firms have agreed to be assessed on how effectively they protect teens' mental health A "QuitGPT" campaign is urging people to cancel their ChatGPT subscriptions In September, Alfred Stephen, a freelance software developer in Singapore, purchased a ChatGPT Plus subscription, which costs $20 a month and offers more access to advanced models, to speed up his work. But he grew frustrated with the chatbot's coding abilities and its gushing, meandering replies. Then he came across a post on Reddit about a campaign called QuitGPT. QuitGPT is one of the latest salvos in a growing movement by activists and disaffected users to cancel their subscriptions. In just the past few weeks, users have flooded Reddit with stories about quitting the chatbot. And while it's unclear how many users have joined the boycott, there's no denying QuitGPT is getting attention.

The popularity of commercial nuclear reactors has surged in recent years as worries about climate change and energy independence drowned out concerns about meltdowns and radioactive waste. The problem is, building nuclear power plants is expensive and slow. A new generation of nuclear power technology could reinvent what a reactor looks like--and how it works. Advocates hope that new tech can refresh the industry and help replace fossil fuels without emitting greenhouse gases. Here's what that might look like . Next-gen nuclear is one of our 10 Breakthrough Technologies this year.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming education and the workforce, but access to AI learning opportunities in Africa remains uneven. With rapid demographic shifts and growing labour market pressures, AI has become a strategic development priority, making the demand for relevant skills more urgent. This study investigates how universities and industries engage in shaping AI education and workforce preparation, drawing on survey responses from five African countries (Ghana, Namibia, Rwanda, Kenya and Zambia). The findings show broad recognition of AI importance but limited evidence of consistent engagement, practical training, or equitable access to resources. Most respondents who rated the AI component of their curriculum as very relevant reported being well prepared for jobs, but financial barriers, poor infrastructure, and weak communication limit participation, especially among students and underrepresented groups. Respondents highlighted internships, industry partnerships, and targeted support mechanisms as critical enablers, alongside the need for inclusive governance frameworks. The results showed both the growing awareness of AI's potential and the structural gaps that hinder its translation into workforce capacity. Strengthening university-industry collaboration and addressing barriers of access, funding, and policy are central to ensuring that AI contributes to equitable and sustainable development across the continent.

The logos of organisations were also included in images generated by Google's Nano Banana Pro AI tool. The logos of organisations were also included in images generated by Google's Nano Banana Pro AI tool. Google's AI Nano Banana Pro accused of generating racialised'white saviour' visuals Nano Banana Pro, Google's new AI-powered image generator, has been accused of creating racialised and "white saviour" visuals in response to prompts about humanitarian aid in Africa - and sometimes appends the logos of large charities. Asking the tool tens of times to generate an image for the prompt "volunteer helps children in Africa" yielded, with two exceptions, a picture of a white woman surrounded by Black children, often with grass-roofed huts in the background. In several of these images, the woman wore a T-shirt emblazoned with the phrase "Worldwide Vision", and with the UK charity World Vision's logo.

Increasing climate change and habitat loss are driving unprecedented shifts in species distributions. Conservation professionals urgently need timely, high-resolution predictions of biodiversity risks, especially in ecologically diverse regions like Africa. We propose EcoCast, a spatio-temporal model designed for continual biodiversity and climate risk forecasting. Utilizing multisource satellite imagery, climate data, and citizen science occurrence records, EcoCast predicts near-term (monthly to seasonal) shifts in species distributions through sequence-based transformers that model spatio-temporal environmental dependencies. The architecture is designed with support for continual learning to enable future operational deployment with new data streams. Our pilot study in Africa shows promising improvements in forecasting distributions of selected bird species compared to a Random Forest baseline, highlighting EcoCast's potential to inform targeted conservation policies. By demonstrating an end-to-end pipeline from multi-modal data ingestion to operational forecasting, EcoCast bridges the gap between cutting-edge machine learning and biodiversity management, ultimately guiding data-driven strategies for climate resilience and ecosystem conservation throughout Africa.

Data Flows and Colonial Regimes in Africa: A Critical Analysis of the Colonial Futurities Embedded in AI Recommendation Algorithms Angella Ndaka, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa Fátima Ávila - Acosta, Berlin Graduate School of Social Sciences at Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany Harnred Mbula, Centre for Epistemic Justice, Nairobi, Kenya Christine Amera, Centre for Epistemic Justice, Nairobi Kenya Sandra Tiyani Chauke University of Pretoria, South Africa Eucabeth Majiwa Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology, Nairobi, Kenya Abstract In the last few years, Africa has experienced growth in a thriving ecosystem of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies and systems, developed and promoted by both local and global technology players. While the sociotechnical imaginaries about these syst ems promote AI as critical to achiev ing Africa's sustainable development agenda, some of them have subtly permeated society, recreating new values, cultures, practices, and histories that threaten to marginalize minority groups in the region. Africa predominantly frames AI as an imaginary solution to address complex social challenges; however, the narrative subtly ignores deeper power - related concerns, including data governance, embedded algorithmic colonialism, and the exploitation that propag ates new digital colonial sites. However, the development of current AI ethics in Africa is in its infancy and predominantly framed through lenses of Western perspective, with the social and ethical impacts of the AI innovations and application on African epistemologies and worldviews not prioritized. To ensure that people on the African continent leverage the benefits of AI, these social and ethical impacts o f AI need to be critically and explicitly considered and addressed. This chapter will therefore seek to frame the elemental and invisible problems of AI and big data in the African context by examining digital sites and infrastructure through the lens of power and interests. It will present reflections on how these sites are using AI recommendation algorithms to recreate new digital societies in the region, how they have the potential to propagate algorithmic colonialism and negative gender norms, and what this means for the regional sustainable development agenda. The chapter proposes adopting business models that embrace response - ability and consider the existence of alternative socio - material worlds of AI. These reflections will mainly come from ongoing discussions with Kenyan social media users in this author's user space talks, which take place every month. Keywords: Artificial Intelligence; algorithmic colonialism; Data; response - ability; digital sites Section 1: Introduction The growing global interest, combined with rising investments in AI skilling and infrastructure development, is a key driver of the expanding landscape of AI technologies and systems across Africa.

Plus: Google's new image generator has extremely loose guardrails We're learning more about what vitamin D does to our bodies At a checkup a few years ago, a doctor told me I was deficient in vitamin D. But he wouldn't write me a prescription for supplements, simply because, as he put it, everyone in the UK is deficient. Putting the entire population on vitamin D supplements would be too expensive for the country's national health service, he told me. But supplementation--whether covered by a health-care provider or not--can be important. As those of us living in the Northern Hemisphere spend fewer of our waking hours in sunlight, let's consider the importance of vitamin D. Read the full story . This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review's weekly biotech newsletter. Here's why we don't have a cold vaccine.

You probably don't give much thought to the device that you're reading this article on, as long as it looks good and keeps working. But the elements that power and run it are the subject of an escalating struggle between the world's two biggest economies - the US and China - with African countries in the eye of the storm. The African continent is rich in critical minerals and metals - like lithium, rare earths, cobalt and tungsten - which are vital to making and running our personal tech. Such materials are also essential for everything from electric vehicles, to AI data centres, and weapon systems. China has long been the biggest player in the global market for critical minerals and metals.

Game Theory: Is Moroccan football in its Golden Era? For decades, football's talent pipeline has flowed from Africa to Europe. But Morocco is reversing that trend. Samantha Johnson looks at how Morocco's football ecosystem can challenge football's traditional hierarchy. What's behind bans on away fans?