Picture this: a team of camera-clad cleaners and a private chef to boot, all wired with high-tech recording apparatus show up at your home. You are not part of a reality TV show, and have not woken up in an Aldous Huxley or Margaret Atwood novel. Instead, you are a resident of New York City, where AI companies are sending free cooking and cleaning staff straight to people's doors. But, there is a catch: this AI company is gathering data to train the next generation of cooking and cleaning robots, and every inch of your apartment is now being recorded. The initiative, dubbed Shift by AI firm Micro AGI, is part of a growing number of companies developing the next generation of autonomous robots, which tech bosses hope will be able to do everything from the washing up to serving as live-in personal carers.

Dozens of students walked out of their Stanford University graduation ceremony as Google CEO Sundar Pichai took the stage to deliver a keynote address. Video filmed by the BBC shows the students protesting against the company's controversial work with the US government. A group named Stanford Students for Justice in Palestine encouraged the walkout. This follows other recent campus protests against tech leaders, but those have largely focused on artificial intelligence and concerns about jobs. Pichai largely sidestepped the issue of AI in his remarks, though he appeared to make light of the expected protests.

At SXSW London last week I gave a talk called "Five things you need to know about AI," in which I shared what I think are the biggest themes in AI right now. I pulled a few things from our first AI10 list, an annual guide to the most important trends in this buzzy world, but I also veered off on a number of tangents. In my half-hour slot, I tried to cover the key talking points that I think help to make sense of what's going on in tech--and thus the economy--today.

Silicon Valley is turning to ethicists to shape the future of AI. Philosophy has long suffered an unfortunate reputation as pedantic and abstruse. In one of the most prominent debates of the 20th century, philosophers spent a great deal of energy arguing over what means. Paul Graham, the legendary tech investor, studied philosophy as a college student, which seemed "an impressively impractical thing to do," as he later wrote. But over time, Graham became disillusioned: "I kept taking philosophy courses and they kept being boring," he explained .

Donald Trump's new AI order is a lot of nothing. For months now, the White House has hinted that it may try to rein in the AI industry. Just two weeks ago, the nation's top tech executives--including Sam Altman and Dario Amodei--were invited to attend a ceremony for the signing of a long-anticipated executive order on AI. But just hours before the ceremony, Donald Trump scrapped it. America is leading the world in the AI race, the president told reporters at the time, "and I don't want to do anything that's going to get in the way of that lead."

I avoid AI tools because thinking is supposed to be hard. It's what makes us human Long before the age of multi-billion-dollar AI companies promising to disrupt the field of software development, I was learning to code the hard way. It was the mid-2000s, and I was a child with unmonitored access to the family computer. With the help of a basic text editor program, I learned how to make websites - first basic, then increasingly complex - from scratch. The results were never as beautiful or polished as in my imagination, but I could live with that, because I was learning a craft. The painstaking hours of debugging and poring over arcane documentation for projects that I eventually abandoned never felt wasted.

Americans really don't want AI data centers close to their homes Americans really don't want AI data centers close to their homes AI companies are spending astronomical sums of money on building data centers as quickly as possible in order to increase their compute power. But the majority of Americans don't want that infrastructure close to their homes, according to a Gallup survey . The polling company asked 1,000 adults across the US about their views on AI data centers, and 71 percent were against having one in their local area. Almost half of the respondents (48 percent) were strongly opposed. On the flip side, just seven percent were strongly in favor of having a data center close to their home.

WhatsApp launches totally private'incognito' conversations with its AI chatbot WhatsApp has introduced private chats with its AI chatbot which not even the tech company will be able to read in a new incognito mode. It means neither the user nor the AI's responses will be monitored if the feature is activated, and past conversations will disappear from the chat for the user. Will Cathcart, the head of WhatsApp, said he felt people wanted to have private conversations with AI on sensitive subjects including health, relationships and finances and didn't want them to be accessible. But a cyber security expert has told the BBC this could lead to a lack of accountability for WhatsApp if things go wrong, as they would have no access to chat history. WhatsApp is owned by Meta, which also owns Instagram, Facebook and Messenger.

Daron Acemoglu is more cautious than most about predictions of a jobs apocalypse. A few months before he was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics in 2024, Daron Acemoglu published a paper that earned him few fans in Silicon Valley. Contrary to what Big Tech CEOs had been promising--an overhaul of all white-collar work--Acemoglu estimated that AI would give only a small boost to US productivity and would not obviate the need for human work. It's okay at automating certain tasks, he wrote, but some jobs will be perfectly fine. Two years later, Acemoglu's measured take has not caught on. Chatter about an AI jobs apocalypse pops up everywhere from Senator Bernie Sanders's rallies to conversations I overhear in line at the grocery store.

A former OpenAI board member has explained how her unconventional personal relationship with Elon Musk evolved into having four of his children. Shivon Zilis testified in a federal courtroom in Oakland, California for hours on Wednesday as part of Musk's lawsuit trying to reverse OpenAI's change to a for-profit company. The focus of Zilis's appearance was her direct involvement in early talks with Musk around the company becoming a for-profit, but also how she worked for and became involved with Musk as she advised OpenAI. I still really wanted to be a mum and Elon made the offer around that time and I accepted, she said, explaining Musk in 2020 had offered to donate sperm. He was encouraging everyone around him at that time to have kids and he'd noticed I did not.