Estonia’s AI embarrassment began with a single wrong phrase. In December, the Riigikogu, Estonia’s parliament, passed changes to the country’s Gambling Tax Act meant to lower the tax rate on remote gambling. But the wording of the law referred only to “skill games” for that year, not games of chance or remote gambling. Estonia’s entire … Read more
Earlier this month I attended Vivatecha huge tech conference in Paris. One fear dominated the discussions: the prospect of ending up stuck using American AI, trained on American values. While the US and China are locked in an AI arms race, France and Germany, which consider their engineering talent second to none, feel boxed out. … Read more
A local court in Germany has issued a ruling that could reshape the operation of search engines and artificial-intelligence-based chatbots worldwide. The Munich Regional Court preliminarily ruled that Google is liable for a series of false statements generated by its AI Overviews feature, requiring the company to prevent the dissemination of erroneous or inaccurate claims … Read more
The UK government has laid out a $1.47 billion plan to shake its dependence on foreign-made artificial intelligence hardware. Under the measures, announced Monday, the UK will spend more than $1 billion on a national AI supercomputer. It will be stocked with $530 million worth of hardware, including $200 million that will go toward specialist … Read more
Hundreds of workers in Ireland tasked with refining Meta’s AI models have been told that their jobs are at risk as the company embarks on a sweeping new round of layoffsaccording to documents obtained by WIRED. The affected workers are employed by the Dublin-based firm Covalen, which handles various content moderation and labeling services for … Read more
Planning a big night out at Madison Square Garden? Have fun—but don’t say we didn’t warn you. A WIRED investigation this week revealed new details about the private surveillance state instituted by MSG owner Jim Dolan and his head of security, John Eversole. According to court records and WIRED sources, visitors to the Garden and … Read more
Standing inside HumanX conference in San Francisco’s Moscone Center, it’s hard not to feel like you’re at the center of the AI universe. Technology leaders swarm the building, and the headquarters of OpenAI and Anthropic are just down the block. But a 70-person startup headquartered 5,000 miles away in Germany’s Black Forest—a region famous for … Read more
European countries are racing to bring new data centers online as AI labs across the globe continue to demand more compute. The primary limiting factor is energy—and specifically, the ability to move it. Though Europe is on track to generate enough energy, utilities experts say, grid operators widely lack the infrastructure needed to transport it … Read more
I think its product has a profound democratizing effect. In theory, a kid sitting in a provincial town in rural Brazil should be able to receive the same responsive interaction with the Efekta AI teacher as someone living in Mayfair. Is anything lost by the introduction of AI to the classroom? Will we end up … Read more
On the bank of the river that runs through the Swedish town of Borlänge, construction is underway on a sprawling new data center. The site previously housed a paper mill. When the developer, EcoDataCenter, broke ground in September, its CEO Peter Michelson declared“The facility once produced paper, the raw material of the newspaper information age. … Read more