ai project
Tech leaders say AI means less work - their staff say they work up to 90 hours a week
For years now, executives at companies that are pouring hundreds of billions of dollars a year into developing various artificial intelligence tools have insisted that the technology will ultimately mean people will spend less of their time working. An engineering director at Google said four years ago that AI would deliver a four-day work week by 2025, external . Earlier this year, and just one year after that engineering director's prediction, OpenAI took up the challenge, in a manner of speaking. It formally urged companies to start testing out a four-day work week (with no change in pay), claiming that AI will soon be able to speed up so much human labour that the corporate world should prepare itself. However, a former OpenAI technical employee who left the company last year told the BBC the firm never actually trialled the four-day work week it suggested others should try while they were there.
Mark Zuckerberg announces new 'Meta Compute' initiative for its data center and AI projects
Mark Zuckerberg announces new'Meta Compute' initiative for its data center and AI projects Newly appointed exec Dina Powell McCormick will play a key role in the effort. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg attends a dinner hosted by US President Donald Trump with tech leaders for a dinner in the State Dining Room of the White House in Washington, DC, on September 4, 2025. On the heels of Mark Zuckerberg announcing that Meta's former board member, Dina Powell McCormick, would be formally joining the company as president and vice chairman, the CEO has shared new details about her purview at the company. The executive will play a key role overseeing Meta's sprawling infrastructure investments as part of a newly announced initiative called Meta Compute. Meta is planning to build tens of gigawatts this decade, and hundreds of gigawatts or more over time, Zuckerberg said in an update .
Ai, Japanese chimpanzee who counted and painted, dies at 49
Ai, a female chimpanzee famous for her cognitive skills has died at 49, according to the Japanese institute where she lived. The Kyoto University's Center for the Evolutionary Origins of Human Behavior said Ai died on 9 January of old age and organ failure and that she was surrounded by staff when she died. Ai was born in western Africa and arrived at the Japanese institute in 1977. There, she became the namesake of the Ai Project, a research programme into the chimpanzee mind. Among the institute's noteable findings were the fact that Ai was able to use numbers and identify colours.
Creating psychological safety in the AI era
Trust in AI begins when leaders admit what they do not know, address fears, and help people adapt. Rolling out enterprise-grade AI means climbing two steep cliffs at once. And second, creating the cultural conditions where employees can maximize its value. While the technical hurdles are significant, the human element can be even more consequential; fear and ambiguity can stall momentum of even the most promising initiatives. Psychological safety--feeling free to express opinions and take calculated risks without worrying about career repercussions1--is essential for successful AI adoption. In psychologically safe workspaces, employees are empowered to challenge assumptions and raise concerns about new tools without fear of reprisal.
Superintelligence Strategy: Expert Version
Hendrycks, Dan, Schmidt, Eric, Wang, Alexandr
Rapid advances in AI are beginning to reshape national security. Destabilizing AI developments could rupture the balance of power and raise the odds of great-power conflict, while widespread proliferation of capable AI hackers and virologists would lower barriers for rogue actors to cause catastrophe. Superintelligence -- AI vastly better than humans at nearly all cognitive tasks -- is now anticipated by AI researchers. Just as nations once developed nuclear strategies to secure their survival, we now need a coherent superintelligence strategy to navigate a new period of transformative change. We introduce the concept of Mutual Assured AI Malfunction (MAIM): a deterrence regime resembling nuclear mutual assured destruction (MAD) where any state's aggressive bid for unilateral AI dominance is met with preventive sabotage by rivals. Given the relative ease of sabotaging a destabilizing AI project -- through interventions ranging from covert cyberattacks to potential kinetic strikes on datacenters -- MAIM already describes the strategic picture AI superpowers find themselves in. Alongside this, states can increase their competitiveness by bolstering their economies and militaries through AI, and they can engage in nonproliferation to rogue actors to keep weaponizable AI capabilities out of their hands. Taken together, the three-part framework of deterrence, nonproliferation, and competitiveness outlines a robust strategy to superintelligence in the years ahead.
Stargate: What is Trump's new 500bn AI project?
US President Donald Trump has announced a private sector investment to fund infrastructure for artificial intelligence, with the goal of outpacing rival nations in the business-critical technology. Calling it the largest AI infrastructure project in history "by far", Trump said the joint venture called Stargate will build data centres and create more than 100,000 jobs in the United States. These companies, along with other equity backers of Stargate, have committed billions of dollars for immediate investment, with the remaining investment expected to occur over the next four years. Here's what you need to know about what Trump called "a resounding declaration of confidence in America's potential": It's a joint venture between OpenAI, Oracle, SoftBank and MGX that plans to invest up to 500bn over the next four years to build up new data centres needed for the development of AI projects in the US. A first injection of 100bn will start "immediately," according to an OpenAI statement.
Moving generative AI into production
Yet, difficulty successfully deploying generative AI continues to hamper progress. Companies know that generative AI could transform their businesses--and that failing to adopt will leave them behind--but they are faced with hurdles during implementation. This leaves two-thirds of business leaders dissatisfied with progress on their AI deployments. And while, in Q3 2023, 79% of companies said they planned to deploy generative AI projects in the next year, only 5% reported having use cases in production in May 2024. "We're just at the beginning of figuring out how to productize AI deployment and make it cost effective," says Rowan Trollope, CEO of Redis, a maker of real-time data platforms and AI accelerators.
TikTok owner sacks intern for allegedly sabotaging AI project
The owner of TikTok has sacked an intern for allegedly sabotaging an internal artificial intelligence project. ByteDance said it had dismissed the person in August after they "maliciously interfered" with the training of artificial intelligence (AI) models used in a research project. Thanks to the video-sharing app TikTok and its Chinese counterpart, Douyin, which rank among the world's most popular mobile apps, ByteDance has risen to become one of the world's most important social media companies. Like other big players in the tech sector, ByteDance has raced to embrace generative AI. Its Doubao chatbot earlier this year took over from the competitor Baidu's Ernie in the race to produce a Chinese rival to OpenAI's ChatGPT.
TikTok owner sacks intern for sabotaging AI project
"The individual was an intern with the [advertising] technology team and has no experience with the AI Lab," ByteDance said in a statement. "Their social media profile and some media reports contain inaccuracies." Its commercial online operations, including its large language AI models, were unaffected by the intern's actions, the company added. ByteDance also denied reports that the incident caused more than 10m of damage by disrupting an AI training system made up of thousands of powerful graphics processing units (GPU). Aside from firing the person in August, ByteDance said it had informed the intern's university and industry bodies about the incident.