AI has entered the classroom - but is it the solution for overworked teachers? Schools across the UK are trialling the use of deepfake teachers and even employing remote staff to deliver lessons hundreds of miles away from the classroom. It comes as the use of AI is becoming increasingly prevalent in schools. The government says AI has the power to transform education, and improve teacher workload, particularly around admin for teachers. The BBC has spoken to teachers, school leaders and unions who seem divided on what the future of the UK's classrooms should look like.

For anyone looking to gauge the mood of the UK games industry in 2025, there has been only one place to hang out this week: the bar of the DoubleTree by Hilton hotel in Brighton. It's in this building that the annual Develop conference has been bringing together developers, publishers, students and journalists since 2006 – and during the three days of talks, roundtables and keynotes, it's in the bar that everyone meets and unloads their theories and concerns about the state of the business. This year, after many months of cuts and closures, the mood has been dour. On Tuesday, I spoke to many coders, artists and studio heads who have had games cancelled, staff axed and deals obliterated; several senior developers predicted that the recent savage cuts to staff numbers and game projects will lead to a gaping black hole in the release schedules of many triple-A publishers in late 2026 and 2027. Grand Theft Auto VI was always going to be huge; now it's looking like the only game in town.

Dragonfruit AI, retail's first massively scalable video AI platform, is pleased to announce that Ray Cooke most recently SVP at Hanwha Techwin America – has joined the company as Vice President of Business Development. Dragonfruit's Frontier was custom-built for Retail Loss Prevention/Asset Protection (Video Summaries, ORC Investigations, OSHA Compliance, Slip/Fall, Liquid Spill), Store Operations (Checkout Metrics, Point-of-Sale Analysis with Video Verification) and Marketing/Merchandising (In-store Commerce Funnels). Designed from the ground-up for multi-location retailers, Frontier combines a powerful Base Station leveraging the Apple M1 architecture with advanced cloud intelligence. Starting at just $900/location/year, Frontier provides the flexibility for retailers to start solving their most pressing needs and add on more capabilities as required. In his new role, Cooke will help large-scale retailers use Frontier to derive insights from their video to address pivotal challenges – such as optimizing staffing, detecting unsafe conditions, accelerating investigations, managing store layouts and streamlining operations.

IN THE UK, essential workers are now among those being sent home testing kits for coronavirus. This involves swabbing the inside of your own nose and the back of your throat, but how useful are the results? Studies from early in the outbreak in China have suggested that swabs taken by healthcare professionals may give a 30 per cent "false negative" rate, where infected people are told they don't have the virus (NEJM, doi.org/ggmzsp; medRxiv, doi.org/dvfr). This has prompted claims that self-testing will give even more false negatives and could raise the risk of infected people spreading the virus. No test is perfect – swabbing technique and analysis errors can lead to inaccurate results.

AI investment funds are not all about mega-caps like Alphabet, but about companies in other sectors using AI to increase competition, finds Fiona Rintoul. If you were to ask artificial intelligence (AI) how to save the planet, it would probably tell you to kill all humans, because they cause the pollution that creates climate change. But that would not be the response you wanted; therefore, you must recalibrate. "We need to ask the right questions of AI," says Rani Piputri, head of automated intelligence investing at NN Investment Partners. "In this situation, AI will nudge people to have fewer children."

The next few years are going to be lively ones for the datacenter, with more than half of new infrastructure being deployed in edge locations, half of core enterprise datacenters and two-thirds of the major edge IT sites leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), more than half of datacenter infrastructure running "as-a-service" solutions, and a steadily growing number of companies relying on colocation partners. Those were a few of the predictions offered by the industry watchers at IDC last week with the release the analyst firm's first annual "Futurescape" forecast focused on the datacenter. Emphasizing trends emerging in 2020, the report was presented in part during a webcast led by some of its authors. "At the core of all of our predictions is the reality that technology is very rapidly moving from the back office to the front office," said Jennifer Cooke, research director of IDC's Cloud to Edge Datacenter Trends and Strategies research team. "And a lot of this is about the boundaries between an organization's internal operations and external ecosystem of customers, partners and markets. These boundaries are just disappearing."

To help news industry use Artificial Intelligence (AI) in more innovative ways, Google has announced a partnership with Polis, the international journalism think-tank at London School of Economics and Political Science, to create "Journalism AI". Part of the Google News Initiative (GNI), the "Journalism AI" project will focus on research and training for newsrooms on the intersection of AI and journalism. "As part of'Journalism AI', next year, we'll publish a global survey about how the media is currently using -- and could further benefit from -- this technology," Google said in a statement on Friday as it organised GNI Innovation Forum here. "We'll also collaborate with newsrooms and academic institutions to create a best practices handbook and produce free online training on how to use AI in the newsroom for journalists worldwide," informed Matt Cooke, Head of Partnerships and Training, Google News Lab. After testing with partners over the last two years, Google also introduced a new tool called Google Earth Studio which is an animation tool for Google Earth's satellite and 3D imagery.

Google has collaborated with Polis, the international journalism think-tank at London School of Economics and Political Science, to create "Journalism AI". This new AI technology wants to help journalists fight fake news. Journalism AI" project will focus on research and training for newsrooms. To help news industry use Artificial Intelligence (AI) in more innovative ways. Part of the Google News Initiative (GNI), the "Journalism AI" project will focus on research and training for newsrooms on the intersection of AI and journalism.

Memrise, a UK startup whose eponymous language-learning app employs machine learning and localised content to adapt to users' needs as they progress through their lessons, has raised another $15.5 million in funding to expand its product. The funding comes after a period of strong growth: Memrise has now passed 35 million users globally across its 20 language courses, and it tipped into profitability in Q1 of this year. Ed Cooke, who co-founded the app with Ben Whately and Greg Detre, told TechCrunch that this places it as the second-most popular language app globally in terms of both users and revenues. This round, a Series B, was led by Octopus Ventures and Korelya Capital, along with participation from existing investors Avalon Ventures and Balderton Capital. Memrise is not disclosing its valuation -- it has raised a relatively modest $22 million to date -- but Cooke (who is also the CEO) said the plan will be to use the funding to expand its AI platform and add in more features for users.

Designers get to have a lot of fun with self-driving cars. After all, things get wild when the human inside doesn't have to drive, or even look at the road, anymore. But when you take the human out of the car altogether, the design department can fully let loose. "We want people to see this like a Tron, or an Oblivion, or a Star Wars spaceship," says Justin Cooke, chief marketing officer of Roborace. Roborace, if you haven't figured it out, is the company starting the world's first motorsports serious for driverless cars.