Merge Labs, a brain-computer interface startup that seeks to read brain activity using ultrasound, is being spun out of Forest Neurotech, a Los Angeles nonprofit. Samuel Altman, CEO of OpenAI, testifies in Washington, DC, on May 16, 2023. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's new brain-computer interface startup, Merge Labs, is being spun out of the Los Angeles-based nonprofit Forest Neurotech, according to a source with direct knowledge of the plans. It will focus on using ultrasound to read brain activity. Along with Altman, WIRED has learned, Forest Neurotech's CEO Sumner Norman and chief scientific officer Tyson Aflalo are among the cofounders of Merge Labs, which is still in stealth mode.

'China is going to win the AI race,' Nvidia CEO says: report Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang attends a reception for the 2025 Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, at St James' Palace in London on Wednesday. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has warned that China will beat the United States in the artificial intelligence race, the Financial Times reported on Wednesday. China is going to win the AI race, Huang told the newspaper on the sidelines of the Financial Times' Future of AI Summit. As I have long said, China is nanoseconds behind America in AI, Huang said in a statement posted on X late on Wednesday. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever.

A deadly drone attack in an impoverished area of Haiti's capital, Port-au-Prince, which killed at least 11 people, including eight children, is being blamed on the government, as the country's use of the UAVs in its war on gangs comes under increasing scrutiny. The incident happened on Saturday night in Cite Soleil, one of Port-au-Prince's most dangerous neighbourhoods, in the city's west along the coast, as Albert Steevenson, known as Djouma or "King Jouma", who is a suspected gang leader, was celebrating his birthday. One of the group's leaders and most notorious figures, Jimmy Cherizier, known as Barbecue, promised to avenge the attack. Claudia Bobrun, 30, whose daughter was killed in the attack, showed The Associated Press news agency a video of the eight-year-old in a pool of blood, as she burst into tears. Merika, another four-year-old victim of the attack, was playing with other children at 8pm in the Simon Pele neighbourhood, in Cite Soleil, where the suspected kamikaze drone exploded.

In a statement to the BBC, Nvidia also said: "America cannot repeat 5G and lose telecommunication leadership. America's [artificial intelligence] tech stack can be the world's standard if we race." Under the agreement, Nvidia will pay 15% of its revenues from H20 chip sales in China to the US government, while AMD will give the same percentage from its MI308 chip revenues, which was first reported by the Financial Times. Charlie Dai, vice president and principal analyst at global research firm Forrester, said this agreement is "unprecedented". "The arrangement underscores the high cost of market access amid escalating tech trade tensions, creating substantial financial pressure and strategic uncertainty for tech vendors", he added.

The British semiconductor designer Arm is reportedly planning to launch its own chip this year, after landing Meta as one of its first customers. The move represents a major overhaul of the SoftBank-owned group's business model of licensing its chip blueprints to the likes of Apple and Nvidia. Rene Haas, Arm's chief executive, is set to unveil the first in-house chip as early as this summer, according to a report in the Financial Times citing people familiar with the plans. Get set for the working day – we'll point you to all the business news and analysis you need every morning More than 300bn chips based on Arm designs have been shipped since the company was founded in 1990, with almost all the world's smartphones being based on Arm technology. Moving from designing chips to making its own complete processor could also put Arm into competition with some of its biggest customers in the 500bn semiconductor industry.

China has sanctioned Skydio, America's largest drone maker, for providing unmanned aerial vehicles to Taiwan's national fire service. Skydio CEO Adam Bry publicly acknowledged the sanctions on Wednesday. "A few weeks ago, China announced sanctions on Skydio for selling drones to Taiwan, where our only customer today is the National Fire Agency," Bry wrote in a blog post. As first reported by the Financial Times, the ban has sent Skydio racing to find alternative battery suppliers. Although the company manufactures its drones in the US and sources many of the components that go inside of them from outside of China, Skydio had been wholly dependent on a single Chinese provider for batteries before October 11, when the country's government imposed the embargo.

My task for our AI overlords was simple: help me crack the New York Times Spelling Bee. I had spent a large chunk of a Saturday evening trying to shape the letters G, Y, A, L, P, O and N into as many words as possible. But three hours, 141 points and 37 words -- including "nonapology", "lagoon" and "analogy" -- later, I had hit a wall. A few more words was all I needed to propel myself into Spelling Bee's "genius" echelon, the title reserved for those who unscramble 70 percent of all possible words using the given letters, and the point at which the puzzle considers itself, effectively, solved. My human mind was clearly struggling, but this task seemed like child's play for AI, so I fired up ChatGPT, told it I was trying to win the Spelling Bee, gave it my letters and laid out the rules.

Why not try a conversation with the leader of China? There's a new chatbot in town and it's based on Xi Jinping. As a matter of fact, it was trained using the'thoughts' of the Chinese leader. I put thoughts in quotes because researchers didn't use some kind of new mind-reading technology. Chinese officials just used a bunch of his books and papers for training purposes, according to a report by The Financial Times.

The Financial Times has become the latest news organization to strike a deal with OpenAI. In a joint announcement on Monday, the Financial Times and OpenAI said that maker of ChatGPT will use the Financial Times' journalism to train its AI models and collaborate on developing new AI products and features for the publication's readers. "It is right, of course, that AI platforms pay publishers for the use of their material," said Financial Times CEO John Ridding in a statement and added that the Times is "committed to human journalism." Neither company disclosed the financial terms of the agreement. Earlier this year, The Information reported that OpenAI offers publishers between 1 million and 5 million a year to license their content to train its AI models.

Microsoft is teaming up with media website Semafor on a new project that uses ChatGPT to aid in the creation of news stories, The Financial Times has reported. Semafor, co-founded by former Buzzfeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith, will create a feed called "Signals" that will be sponsored by Microsoft for an undisclosed but "substantial" sum, the report states. It will highlight breaking news and analysis, offering a dozen or so posts per day. All stories will be written entirely by journalists, with the AI effectively acting as a research tool. Signals responds to the deep and continuing shifts in the digital media landscape and the post-social news moment, and to the risks and opportunities posed by artificial intelligence, Semafor wrote.