A slew of tech earnings predict an expensive future for everyday electronics buyers, and big developments in the UK tech world
Hello, and welcome to TechScape. I’m your host, Blake Montgomery, US tech editor at the Guardian. Today, we examine how a slew of tech earnings predict an expensive future for everyday electronics buyers and two big developments in the UK tech world: Workers at Google DeepMind, headquartered in London, petitioned to unionize to stop their employer’s military work. And UK police are increasingly adopting live facial recognition, with considerable consequences.
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Emissions understated by factor of five in Essex plans for tech giant, while Greystoke’s Lincolnshire plans show similar error
Developers working for Google have significantly misstated how much carbon two proposed AI datacentres will contribute to the UK’s total emissions in planning documents reviewed by the Guardian.
The tech company wants to build two huge datacentres – one 52-hectare (130 acre) project in Thurrock and another at an airfield in North Weald, both in Essex. To do so, developers are required to submit planning documents calculating how much carbon these projects will emit as a proportion of the UK’s total carbon footprint.
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The company’s UK and Europe boss has become a lightning rod for the British public’s fear of a US tech takeover
The hall was packed with rightwing radicals when Louis Mosley heralded a coming revolution. Just as Oliver Cromwell – that “crusader for Christ and liberty” – routed King Charles I’s royalists, “a similar revolution is brewing today”, said the UK and Europe boss of Palantir. Globalism’s “twilight” was upon us, he said in a speech dotted with admiring mentions of the podcaster Joe Rogan and “Elon’s Doge”.
It was not a typical peroration for a big UK government contractor with more than £600m in deals with the NHS, the Ministry of Defence and police. But Palantir, the world’s most controversial tech company, is no typical contractor. In recent years it has gained firm footholds across Britain’s public sector while appalling critics with its leadership’s rightwing rhetoric and its work for the US and Israeli militaries and Donald Trump’s ICE immigration crackdown.
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The words “pressure” and “NHS” go hand in hand in the UK and unfortunately there is no sign of a reduction in the strain the institution suffers any time soon. As NHS England continues the struggle to reduce its 7.25 million waiting list, new policies are being introduced to move care away from hospitals and […]
The post AI helping ease the UK’s NHS burden appeared first on AI News.
The Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI), a division of the US Department of Commerce, has signed agreements with Google DeepMind, Microsoft, and xAI that would give the agency the ability to vet AI models from these organizations and others prior to their being made publicly available.
According to a release from CAISI, which is part of the department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), it will “conduct pre-deployment evaluations and targeted research to better assess frontier AI capabilities and advance the state of AI security.”
The three join Anthropic and OpenAI, which signed similar agreements almost two years ago during the Biden administration, when CAISI was known as the US Artificial Intelligence Safety Institute.
An August 2024 release about those agreements indicated that the institute planned to provide feedback to both companies on “potential safety improvements to their models, in close collaboration with its partners at the UK AI Safety In
While some are using AI to tailor programs better suited to their needs, others warn ‘it can be wrong, confidently so’
People have mixed feelings about AI. While many people regularly use it – 62% in the US and 69% in the UK – trust in the technology is low. In the US, only 26% of people have a positive view of AI, according to one NBC poll, and in the UK, 78% say they worry about negative outcomes from AI.
So it is perhaps no surprise that readers’ responses to our callout about AI and fitness were varied. Some said they rely on AI to shape their workouts and diets while others said they refuse to use it at all because of its impact on the economy and the environment. And many were somewhere in between – they found it a useful tool, but were less than thrilled about the technology’s impact overall.
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Microsoft, Google DeepMind and Elon Musk’s xAI have offered to let the U.S. government access new AI models ahead of their general release, which sets up a new phase in Silicon Valley’s often fractious relationship with the US government’s fear of AI threats, based on the latest report of AI companies offering models to U.S. officials in the name of security review, in the hopes that government analysts can vet frontier AI systems for security threats like cyberattacks and military use before it is exposed for public consumption by developers and users, and, inevitably, those who should have no business […]
Agreements with Microsoft, Google DeepMind and xAI focus largely on recognizing cybersecurity, biosecurity and chemical weapons risks
The US government has struck deals with Google DeepMind, Microsoft and xAI to review early versions of their new AI models before they are released to the public.
The Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI), part of the US Department of Commerce, announced the agreements on Tuesday, saying the review process would be key to understanding the capabilities of new and powerful AI models as well as to protecting US national security. These collaborations will help the federal government “scale (its) work in the public interest at a critical moment”, the agency said in a press release.
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