Alex Gibney’s Musk documentary premieres in Venice with an AI-simulated interview
Alex Gibney’s Musk documentary premieres in Venice with an AI-simulated interview

Alex Gibney’s documentary about Elon Musk premiered at the Venice Film Festival on Tuesday. As its subject declined to sit for an interview, the film built one. In a fine irony, a CGI avatar of Musk, driven by AI voice syncing, delivers statements he m…

Most large organisations think full digital sovereignty is unrealistic, Capgemini finds
Most large organisations think full digital sovereignty is unrealistic, Capgemini finds

Digital sovereignty has arrived in the boardroom and has immediately been downgraded. Some 93% of large organisations have now discussed it at the board level, and 59% say full digital sovereignty is not a realistic goal, according to a Capgemini Resea…

UN rights chief calls for international red lines on AI, warning of existential risk
UN rights chief calls for international red lines on AI, warning of existential risk

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights told the Human Rights Council in Geneva that advanced artificial intelligence could pose an existential risk to humanity. He also called on the countries that host AI development and sit in its supply chains to…

Texas has 474GW of data centre requests and no idea how many are real
Texas has 474GW of data centre requests and no idea how many are real

Texas has 474 gigawatts of requests from data centre developers waiting to connect to its power grid, more than five times the state’s record peak demand. In 2023, the figure was just 48 gigawatts, and the difference clearly does not represent hundreds…

London surgeons remove brain tumour in first AI-assisted operation of its kind
London surgeons remove brain tumour in first AI-assisted operation of its kind

Surgeons at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery in London have removed a brain tumour in what University College London Hospitals says is the world’s first successful AI-assisted operation of its kind. The system analysed live camera f…

Bill Gates proposes ‘Human Reserved’ jobs and a tax on AI tokens
Bill Gates proposes ‘Human Reserved’ jobs and a tax on AI tokens

Bill Gates has proposed what he calls Human Reserved jobs, occupations society would deliberately keep for people even where AI could do them, and the analogy he reaches for is a nature reserve, a place where development is restricted because something…

Microsoft employees built their own pay spreadsheet, and it shows two companies
Microsoft employees built their own pay spreadsheet, and it shows two companies

Around 600 Microsoft employees have entered their pay into a crowdsourced spreadsheet circulating internally, and the resulting picture is of a company that now compensates two quite different populations. Base salaries run from $111,000 at level 59 to…

Apple gave Tim Cook a farewell party a week before Ternus takes over
Apple gave Tim Cook a farewell party a week before Ternus takes over

Apple gave Tim Cook a leaving party on Sunday, a week before he stops being its chief executive. About 200 people attended, almost all of them Apple employees, at the Caffè Macs cafeteria on the company’s Cupertino campus. OneRepublic played. Aaron Til…

A robot that takes blood could be the best AI health story of 2026
A robot that takes blood could be the best AI health story of 2026

One minute and 49 seconds, that was the median time a machine needed to read a patient’s arm, choose a vein, insert a needle, fill the tubes, and withdraw, across the Dutch clinical trial that carried it towards regulators. A phlebotomist working caref…

A Berkeley professor wrote about students cutting corners, but a detector flagged her op-ed
A Berkeley professor wrote about students cutting corners, but a detector flagged her op-ed

Zvezdelina Stankova published an op-ed on 15 August arguing that Berkeley admits students who cannot do middle school mathematics. Within days, the argument had been overtaken by a question about how the op-ed itself was written. Zvezdelina Stankova, a…