The discovery likely dates back to the continent's gold rushes. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. A metal detector hobbyist discovered a centuries' old coin while scouring an abandoned sports field--and the coin is especially rare for the area. In the southern Australian province of Victoria, treasure hunting enthusiast Angus James recently spotted a well-preserved 100 Mon Tenpō Tsūhō, a 19th century Japanese coin likely deposited during Australia's decades' long gold rush. "You never know what you'll find next," James posted to social media on January 25th, along with photos of his recent haul.

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. When classic films undergo 4K restorations, the results can divide fans. Look around Hollywood and you'll find numerous examples of movie rereleases featuring controversial uses of digital noise reduction, motion smoothing, and other post-production tools. Meanwhile, the proliferation of AI- and machine learning-based upscaling programs has only complicated the debate. When approached properly, though, the technique has helped revive some of Hollywood's oldest--and for a long time, inaccessible--movies.

Popular artificial intelligence tools are becoming more covertly racist as they advance, says an alarming new report. A team of technology and linguistics researchers revealed this week that large language models like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini hold racist stereotypes about speakers of African American Vernacular English, or AAVE, an English dialect created and spoken by Black Americans. "We know that these technologies are really commonly used by companies to do tasks like screening job applicants," said Valentin Hoffman, a researcher at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence and co-author of the recent paper, published this week in arXiv, an open-access research archive from Cornell University. Hoffman explained that previously researchers "only really looked at what overt racial biases these technologies might hold" and never "examined how these AI systems react to less overt markers of race, like dialect differences". Black people who use AAVE in speech, the paper says, "are known to experience racial discrimination in a wide range of contexts, including education, employment, housing, and legal outcomes". Hoffman and his colleagues asked the AI models to assess the intelligence and employability of people who speak using AAVE compared to people who speak using what they dub "standard American English".

When Nintendo announced via Twitter/X that Shigeru Miyamoto had been working for years on a live-action The Legend of Zelda movie with the producer Avi Arad, I immediately felt a little queasy. Not because I'd just browsed Arad's production credits, which really do run the gamut, but because like most adults who love video games, I grew up in the era of game movies so unbelievably dreadful that I still sometimes think angry thoughts about them when I'm trying to get to sleep. It was the era of Jean-Claude Van Damme in Street Fighter, of the fascinatingly terrible 1993 Super Mario cyberpunk nightmare starring Bob Hoskins, of Uwe Boll. Like a kicked dog, I am instinctively fearful. The Zelda series has produced several of the most important, acclaimed games of all time, centred on their mute protagonist, Link, and the various eternally retold and remixed myths of the Kingdom of Hyrule and its royal family (that's Zelda).

It has been called the new gold rush – a rush to catch up with China in producing and refining the materials needed in everything from computers to cars: but has it come too late to save Europe's car industry? Deep inside a former East German town lies the first fruits of the EU's grand plan to "de-risk" and wean itself off dependency on imports for the green revolution. In Bitterfeld-Wolfen, 140km south-west of Berlin, an Amsterdam-listed company is scrambling to complete construction of a vast factory that will be the first in Europe to deliver battery-grade lithium. There is now a race across Europe to both mine the silver-white soft metal and manufacture its refined form, lithium hydroxide – the key ingredient in the batteries that power electric cars, robot vacuum cleaners and mobile phones. "Everybody wants to get access to lithium. This is maybe why they call it the white gold, because it is like a gold rush," says Stefan Scherer, chief executive of AMG Lithium.

It's not often that the jaws of Wall Street analysts drop to the floor but late last month it happened: Nvidia, a company that makes computer chips, issued sales figures that blew the street's collective mind. It had pulled in $13.5bn in revenue in the last quarter, which was at least $2bn more than the aforementioned financial geniuses had predicted. Suddenly, the surge in the company's share price in May that had turned it into a trillion-dollar company made sense. But how had a company that since 1998 – when it released the revolutionary Riva TNT video and graphics accelerator chip – had been the lodestone of gamers become worth a trillion dollars, almost overnight? The answer, oddly enough, can be found in the folk wisdom that emerged in the California gold rush of the mid-19th century, when it became clear that while few prospectors made fortunes panning for gold, the suppliers who sold them picks and shovels prospered nicely.

There's an old saying that the surest path to profit in a gold rush is to bet on the companies supplying the pickaxes -- and that idea is now igniting the toolmakers and wholesalers of today's generative AI boom. Why it matters: It's comparatively easy to see a broad tech trend on the horizon, but often much harder to home in on who will win and over what timeframe. Netscape and BlackBerry serve as cautionary tales. Software veteran Tom Siebel, who now runs enterprise AI firm C3.ai, sees a wide swath of the tech industry benefiting from the AI boom. Here are three categories of companies that serve as the modern-day axe vendors for AI.

It's been a whirlwind few months in the world of large language models (LLMs), better known to most people as chatbots. Since the release of ChatGPT by OpenAI in Nov. 2022, we've seen billions upon billions of dollars being poured into the development and implementation of generative AIs such as Google's Bard and Microsoft's Bing chatbots--and it's easy to see why. Chatbots like ChatGPT or image generators like DALL-E and Midjourney can feel like magic. With the right prompts, you can get it to do things you wouldn't have imagined a few years ago like craft late night monologue-ready jokes and creating award-winning pieces of "art." It's no surprise that since the public launch of ChatGPT, tech companies have been working to cash in on this modern-day gold rush.

Whether it's based on hallucinatory beliefs or not, a gold rush has started over the last several months to make money from generative AI models like ChatGPT. You can practically hear the shrieks from corner offices around the world: "What is our ChatGPT play? How do we make money off this?" But while companies and executives want to cash in, the likely impact of generative AI on workers and the economy on the whole is far less obvious. Will ChatGPT make the already troubling income and wealth inequality in the US and many other countries even worse, or could it in fact provide a much-needed boost to productivity?

From OpenAI's ChatGPT to Google's creation of its own ChatGPT version (Bard), artificial intelligence is set to revolutionise everything in the modern world. How much are corporate investors willing to put their money at risk with AI technology? And which companies get the lion's share of these investments? To answer these questions, writerbuddy.ai The data was collected from CrunchBase, NetBase Quid, S&P Capital IQ, and NFX.