Meet the UK's very own LeBron James... but not as you know it Look out LeBron James and Michael Jordan, there's a new basketball champ around. But it was made in Lisburn rather than Los Angeles or Chicago. The name 25416 may not appear on many replica vests, but it can shoot hoops like no-one else. And the basketball-playing robot won a school in Lisburn first prize at the UK-wide First Tech Challenge robotics competition. The team of sixth-formers from Friends' School came top of 48 schools from across the UK at the competition held in London's Copper Box Arena. Going down and working on it with my friends is honestly one of the highlights of my last year in school, he said.

A French woman and her partner will remain in custody after allegedly abandoning her two young boys on a roadside in the south of Portugal, a court has ruled. The boys were found on Tuesday evening crying beside a road near Alcacer do Sal, about 100km (60 miles) south of Lisbon. The woman and her partner, identified by authorities as Marine R and Marc B, were arrested in Fatima on Thursday. As they were being led into court on Saturday morning, the man shouted I love you in French and the boys' mother sang. A judge subsequently ordered the pair be placed in pre-trial detention, French and Portuguese media report.

An Engineer's Post Protesting Laptop Surveillance Is Going Viral Inside Meta Meta employees in the US and UK are organizing against corporate software that tracks workers' keystrokes and mouse activity. Meta's decision to track employee keystrokes and mouse data is causing an uproar within the company. "Selfishly, I don't want my screen scraped because it feels like an invasion of my privacy," wrote an engineer in an internal post seen by nearly 20,000 coworkers this week. "But zooming out, I don't want to live in a world where humans--employees or otherwise--are exploited for their training data." The message aimed to rally support for a petition circulating inside the company since last Thursday that demands an end to what Meta calls the Model Capability Initiative.

Computer says no. Are AI interviews making it harder to get a job? It's brutal, says Bhuvana Chilukuri - a third-year business student who has applied for more than 100 jobs and has been rejected for every one. There are moments where I applied and I got a rejection less than two minutes later, which is really horrible, says the 20-year-old. She is convinced that very few, if any, of her applications are ever seen by a human as firms are increasingly using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to hire new staff. The first step is AI screening your CV.

Hollywood studios take aim at'ultra-realistic' AI video tool The MPA represents the major US studios - Netflix, Paramount Pictures, Prime Video & Amazon MGM Studios, Sony Pictures, Universal Studios, The Walt Disney Studios and Warner Bros Discovery. The content referenced was created as part of a limited pre-launch testing phase, it said. The AI tool can quickly make highly realistic clips from a short, simple text prompt, such as a fist fight between Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt, Will Smith battling a red-eyed spaghetti monster or even Friends characters reimagined as otters. ByteDance should immediately cease its infringing activity. According to ByteDance, steps are being taken to further address risks, and it will implement robust policies, monitoring mechanisms and processes to ensure compliance with local regulations.

AI is asbestos in the walls of our tech society, stuffed there by monopolists run amok. What I do not do is predict the future. No one can predict the future, which is a good thing, since if the future were predictable, that would mean we couldn't change it. Now, not everyone understands the distinction. They think science-fiction writers are oracles. Even some of my colleagues labor under the delusion that we can "see the future". Then there are science-fiction fans who believe that they are the future. A depressing number of those people appear to have become AI bros. These guys can't shut up about the day that their spicy autocomplete machine will wake up and turn us all into paperclips has led many confused journalists and conference organizers to try to get me to comment on the future of AI. That's something I used to strenuously resist doing, because I wasted two years of my life explaining patiently and repeatedly why I thought crypto was stupid, and getting relentlessly bollocked by cryptocurrency cultists who at first insisted that I just didn't understand crypto.

Apple's Siri AI will be powered by Gemini Netflix's expanded Sony deal includes streaming rights to the Legend of Zelda movie It will also be the first streaming service to get Sony's films worldwide. As part of a new agreement, films from Sony Pictures Entertainment will stream on Netflix first, the companies announced via a joint statement . The new deal expands on the exclusive rights Netflix had to Sony films in the US, and means the service will be the first place people will be able to stream upcoming projects like the live-action adaptation of The Legend of Zelda, and a quartet of biopics about The Beatles . Sony's films will stream worldwide on Netflix in what's called Pay-1, the first window of availability after a movie's theatrical and VOD releases. As part of the deal, Netflix is also licensing an undisclosed number of films and television shows from the Sony Pictures back catalog to help fill out its library.

Campaigners have accused the government of dragging its heels on implementing a law which would make it illegal to create non-consensual sexualised deepfakes. It comes amid a backlash against images created using Elon Musk's AI Grok to digitally remove clothing - with one woman telling the BBC more than 100 sexualised images have been created of her. It is currently illegal to share deepfakes of adults in the UK, but new legislation that would make it a criminal offence to create or request them is still not in force despite passing in June 2025 . But it is unclear whether all of the unclothing images created by Grok would fall foul of this law. The BBC has contacted the government for comment.

Fifty years after her death in New York, Hannah Arendt has become the most popular philosopher of our time. For good reason: Her views are just as timely as ever. It must be so nice to play Hannah Arendt. No fewer than five actresses are on stage this evening at the Deutsches Theater Berlin to portray the philosopher. The piece is an adaptation of the graphic novel by American illustrator Ken Krimstein about the philosopher's life, called The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt," combined with scenes from the famous interview that journalist Günter Gaus conducted with Arendt in 1964 for German public broadcaster ZDF. The article you are reading originally appeared in German in issue 49/2025 (November 28th, 2025) of DER SPIEGEL. They play Arendt and a few of her contemporaries, the philosopher Martin Heidegger, the writer Walter Benjamin, her husband Heinrich Blücher. There is a great deal of speech in the play, especially from Arendt herself. The places of her life are ticked off, her ...

Yoshua Bengio, a Canadian professor of computing, says the idea that chatbots are becoming conscious is'going to drive bad decisions'. Yoshua Bengio, a Canadian professor of computing, says the idea that chatbots are becoming conscious is'going to drive bad decisions'. A pioneer of AI has criticised calls to grant the technology rights, warning that it was showing signs of self-preservation and humans should be prepared to pull the plug if needed. Yoshua Bengio said giving legal status to cutting-edge AIs would be akin to giving citizenship to hostile extraterrestrials, amid fears that advances in the technology were far outpacing the ability to constrain them. Bengio, chair of a leading international AI safety study, said the growing perception that chatbots were becoming conscious was "going to drive bad decisions".