The international technology exhibition CEATEC 2026 opens at Makuhari Messe in Chiba on Tuesday. CHIBA - Artificial intelligence and other cutting-edge digital technologies are on display as the CEATEC international exhibition opened on Tuesday at the Makuhari Messe convention center in Chiba, joined by 821 companies and organizations from Japan and abroad. "As societal challenges become increasingly complex, it is important not only to create new technologies, but also to change the future of industries, society and people's lives for the better," Takashi Niino, chair of the Japan Electronics and Information Technology Industries Association, an industry group that organizes the four-day event, said in a speech at an opening ceremony. Among the exhibitors, Mitsubishi Electric demonstrated AI technology capable of identifying abnormal sounds and human voices in noisy manufacturing environments. Hitachi presented its efforts to improve the efficiency of social infrastructure operations, including railways and power systems, using AI, while NEC showcased a service designed to protect organizations from cyberattacks.

The head of the British Museum has apologised for the experience some visitors have had at its blockbuster Bayeux Tapestry exhibition. The London institution has announced changes to how visitors see the historic work over concerns of overcrowding. Anyone that doesn't have a good experience, we're really sorry about that and we want to put it right, Nicholas Cullinan told the BBC's culture and media editor Katie Razzall. The new plans include longer opening hours, an audio guide, additional seating and clearer signage. Some people reported waits of up to two hours.

The British Museum has announced changes to how visitors see the Bayeux Tapestry exhibition after concerns over long queues and overcrowding. The measures include plans for longer opening hours, as well as an audio guide, additional seating and clearer signage. A museum spokesperson said the public response to the 11th Century embroidery had been extraordinary, but acknowledged that some visitors had waited longer than they would have wanted. Some people reported waits of up to two hours, while hundreds of ticket holders were reportedly turned away due to backlogs when the museum closed early last week due to a private event. Some ticket holders took to social media to complain about the disruption. One disappointed visitor said the trip had been a big event they had looked forward to, while another wrote she had been waiting since she was seven to see the Bayeux Tapestry, and bought tickets only to be turned away after queuing.

Does AI actually belong in an art museum? For several months, something discomfiting has been creeping onto San Francisco's lampposts, bulletin boards, and restaurant windows: more and more signs, for run clubs and a July 4 parade and tacos, all of which are obviously entirely produced by generative AI. But does it bother me? A ChatGPT-generated poster for a garage sale seems legitimately dispiriting compared with a handwritten flyer, or even a haphazardly formatted Word document. What about a bodega using an AI-generated image of a hamburger instead of a random piece of clip art pulled from the internet?

This story appears in the August 2026 print edition. While some stories from this issue are not yet available to read online, you can explore more from the magazine . Get our editors' guide to what matters in the world, delivered to your inbox every weekday. Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst believe the future doesn't have to belong to slop. The art was way too heavy. In mid-March, the artists Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst were preparing an installation to coincide with the Venice Biennale, the prestigious international art festival, but the execution was becoming tricky. They wanted to suspend sculptures of a trippy cityscape upside down from the ceiling of an 18th-century palazzo. But the construction material they envisioned-- 3-D-printed sand--would weigh tons, which was more than the antique building could bear. The sculptures, they realized, might fall and crush someone. Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read. This was a rather analog problem for a married couple widely seen as technological prophets. Herndon, 46, and Dryhurst, 41, have reached the upper echelons of the art world thanks to a media-spanning output--music, images, software, and reams of commentary--with a cybernetic bent. They are high culture's most influential exponents of artificial intelligence, an invention that many people believe spells doom for the arts but that they think could lead to a renaissance. I met them on a cold, bright Tuesday in Berlin.

Why is Anthropic sponsoring an exhibition about Monet? Shower thoughts are typically best left in the shower. Such as: What might Claude the AI chatbot have to say about Claude Monet? Earlier this month, San Francisco's de Young Museum unveiled its newest exhibition, "Monet and Venice," which is dedicated to the impressionist painter's beautiful and meditative canvases of the floating city. And Anthropic, perhaps having seized on a marketing opportunity, is one of the show's lead sponsors.

'It was like a phone call suddenly connecting' Ai Weiwei. 'It was like a phone call suddenly connecting' Ai Weiwei. 'Was I scared going back to China? He has been jailed, tracked and threatened by China's government. What was it like pay a visit home?

The exhibition is scheduled to continue through Friday. Rapidus, Japan's government-backed semiconductor developer, is betting on artificial intelligence-enhanced design tools to give it an edge over its competitors, in an effort to speed up its chip-design process and minimize costs. The firm made the announcement during Semicon, a semiconductor-industry event being held in Tokyo from Wednesday to Friday at the Tokyo Big Sight convention center. Rapidus' newly announced suite of offerings, which will be rolled out next year, includes Raads Generator, an AI-assisted design tool modeled on large-scale language models -- AI systems trained on datasets -- and optimized for 2-nanometer chip manufacturing. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever.

Like The New Yorker, I was born in 1925. Somewhat to my surprise, I decided to keep a journal of my hundredth year. The author, who was born on December 17, 1925, notes that the magazine's first issue came out ten months before he did. Old age is no joke, but it can feel like one. You look everywhere for your glasses, until your wife points out that you're wearing them. I turn a hundred this year. People act as though this is an achievement, and I suppose it is, sort of. Nobody in my family has lived this long, and I've been lucky. I'm still in pretty good health, no wasting diseases or Alzheimer's, and friends and strangers comment on how young I look, which cues me to cite the three ages of man: Youth, Maturity, and You Look Great. On the other hand, I've lost so many useful abilities that my wife, Dodie, and I have taken to calling me Feebleman. Look, up in the sky! No, it's Dodie doesn't want me to know how old she is, but she's nearly three decades younger than I am, and I become ...

LLMscape is an interactive installation that investigates how humans and AI construct meaning under shared conditions of uncertainty. Within a mutable, projection-mapped landscape, human participants reshape the world and engage with multiple AI agents, each developing incomplete and provisional accounts of their environment. Exhibited in Shanghai and continually evolving, the work positions AI not as deterministic tools but as embodied co-witnesses to an unstable world, examining the parallels between human and artificial meaning-making and inviting reflection on our shared epistemic limits.