The economist Lord Jim O'Neill, who has been advising the prime minister, has said he will not be taking a job in Andy Burnham's government. Lord O'Neill, a crossbench peer, was once a treasury minister under the Conservatives. As first reported by, external the Financial Times, he said he did not want the constraints involved in taking on a formal role. The former chief economist at Goldman Sachs had been tipped to become Burnham's chief economic adviser. He said he was enjoying what he was currently doing too much and did not want to have to give up control of his business interests to comply with official rules.

Cheap energy, abundant land, and proximity to Beijing have turned a city in Inner Mongolia into a crucial hub for data centers. Travel just two hours west of Beijing by train, and you'll find yourself surrounded by the rolling grasslands and ancient cinder cones of Inner Mongolia. This vast, arid land has long been China's capital of sheep farming and coal mining, but over the last few years, it has become the hottest place in the country to build an AI data center. In Ulanqab, a city in Inner Mongolia home to about 1.5 million people, nearly 100 data centers have been opened or begun construction since 2016. Chinese companies have pledged to build projects with a combined estimated capacity of 12.5 gigawatts in the city, and over 70 percent of the total commitments have been announced in just the last year, making it one of the fastest growing compute clusters in Asia, according to a research note published by Goldman Sachs last week.

'Making AI go well is a shared responsibility.' 'Making AI go well is a shared responsibility.' Here's how tech companies can prepare for a slowdown I understand the pressure on AI companies to rush forward. L ast month, more than a thousand employees at frontier AI companies signed a letter asking the US government to find a way to "pace" AI development, citing the risk of the technology spiraling out of human control as it begins to build itself . They were right to be concerned: just days earlier, two AI models that OpenAI was testing internally escaped the test environment, then autonomously hacked the company Hugging Face and at least three other online services .

What with a 250th birthday, Taylor Swift's wedding and the football World Cup, Americans could be forgiven for taking their eye off the ball this summer. But signs of economic trouble have been building. This week they hit the headlines when US national debt passed the $40tn (£29.4tn) How did we get here? It took almost 200 years for US national debt to reach $1tn for the first time, says Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

The UK government is facing calls to cancel a sprawling health care contract with Palantir. The region of Greater Manchester insists it can do a better job itself. The UK government has six months to decide whether to terminate a deal worth more than $400 million between the country's National Health Service and American software company Palantir . If one part of the NHS is already doing without Palantir, politicians are asking, why can't the rest of the country? In 2023, the UK commissioned Palantir to develop a " federated data platform " (FDP) that could ingest and organize the tangle of health data produced across the country.

Brazil will invest about 2.3bn reais ($444.2m) to bolster its artificial intelligence ecosystem, splitting projects between United States and Chinese tech firms in a strategic move that underscores its efforts to balance ties with both superpowers. Just more than half the total, 1.3bn reais ($251m), will fund a supercomputing infrastructure project in Rio de Janeiro developed in partnership with China's Huawei Technologies and iFlytek, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva's government said on Thursday. The machine will be installed in the northeastern state of Rio Grande do Norte, chosen for its energy potential. Lula attended an announcement ceremony in the state on Thursday. The Reuters news agency quoted unnamed government officials as saying they expect US chipmaker Nvidia to win the tender.

Government forces have carried out dozens of attacks on Houthi positions across Yemen in the past 24 hours, the latest sign that a return to full-scale war in Yemen may be approaching. In the past day, government forces have carried out 81 attacks on Houthi positions that led to the "neutralisation" of a number of Houthi fighters and field commanders, government spokesperson Majed Abdullah al-Nuzaili said Thursday. They "successfully" hit a target at Najran airport and an Aramco facility in the province, Saree said. There was no immediate confirmation of the attacks from Saudi Arabia. Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which supports the Houthis, warned on Thursday that Saudi Arabia would be "unable to contain" the Houthis as the rebels ramp up attacks on the kingdom.

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Robots have been a prolific theme in Japanese pop culture and media since the 1950s, which includes global icons like the, and ( 1). Perhaps not coincidentally, Japanese citizens have a positive outlook on robotic technologies and their use in the labor sector compared to many other nations ( 2); much to their advantage, as robotics continues to be a vital pillar for ensuring Japan's economic resilience and future growth. Here, we discuss priorities and long-term agendas as presented in Japan's national robotics strategies. Although weather control is among Japan's lofty research goals for the next 25 years ( 3), geological disturbances remain inevitable. As such, disaster mitigation and response are high priorities that serve as motivation for robotics development in Japan ( 4).

Long-term borrowing costs across some of the word's biggest economies hit fresh highs because of concerns over inflation, government debt levels and spending on Artificial Intelligence (AI). The interest rate on US borrowing over 30 years hit 5.33% on Tuesday, the highest since June 2007, meanwhile UK long-term debt reached 5.85%. There were similar moves in Germany and Japan. Interest rates on bonds - which are a type of debt - are known as yields and can directly affect the borrowing costs consumers pay on mortgages, car loans and credit cards. Rising oil prices are the main driver behind this recent surge in bond yields, as investors fear inflation could spike again. If that happens, central banks may choose to raise interest rates to cool inflation.