Treating model degradation as a time-to-failure problem The post Survival Analysis for Data Drift and ML Reliability appeared first on Towards Data Science.

Pony.ai and ComfortDelGro opened public Zig app booking for an autonomous mobility service in Singapore’s Punggol district, giving APAC transport and enterprise technology leaders a closer look at regulated robotaxi deployment. The post Pony.ai Opens Singapore Robotaxi Service to Zig App Booking appeared first on TechRepublic.

Benoit Berthelot / Bloomberg: Paris-based UMA, founded by ex-Tesla Optimus scientist Rémi Cadene and ex-Google DeepMind researcher Pierre Sermanet, demos its Northstar AI humanoid robot  —  A former Tesla Inc. scientist who worked on Elon Musk's Optimus robot unveiled plans to produce a lightweight humanoid robot …

Amazon says it has enough satellites in orbit to begin initial broadband service at mid-latitudes later this year.

With the rapid progress of AI capabilities and the move to agentic systems, organizations are expanding their use cases as the technology continues to grow. That constant evolution also introduces risk, leaving IT leaders to wonder which investments will prove valuable even six months into the future. Returning to the foundational elements of AI architecture—the…

Fanny Potkin / Reuters: Sources: Beijing recently held meetings with Alibaba, ByteDance, Z.ai, and others to discuss restricting overseas access to advanced open and closed AI models  —  Chinese authorities have held meetings with top tech firms over the past month about potentially restricting overseas access …

Overall, investment in U.S. and Canadian startups totaled a staggering $392 billion for the first half of 2026, per Crunchbase data, dwarfing anything we’ve seen before.

Gao Yuan / Bloomberg: Survey: Chinese companies plan to allocate 46% of their AI accelerator budget to domestic products in the next 12 months, up from 30% today, a shift from Nvidia  —  Chinese companies are ditching Nvidia Corp.'s advanced accelerators in favor of domestic silicon, underscoring how tensions …

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Tim Fernholz / TechCrunch: US autonomous military vehicle startup Forterra says it deployed 100+ Lancer UGVs, based on Polaris ATVs, in Ukraine since 2025, completing 1,100+ missions  —  Forterra, a US builder of autonomous vehicles, revealed today that more than 100 of its self-driving ATVs have been deployed …

i_am_zews/Shutterstock Young people in low- and middle-income countries appear generally more optimistic about how AI can enhance their work prospects and social lives than their western peers, according to our new survey of people in ten countries in Africa and South Asia. While debates in higher-income countries often focus on job losses, misinformation and mental health risks, many of the 1,864 young adults we surveyed (all aged 18-35) placed more emphasis on the opportunities artificial intelligence tools present for them. In particular, nearly 80% of our participants expect AI to deliver improved education and learning for them. Until now, there has been little evidence of how young people in middle- and low-income countries use AI, and how they feel about this technology – for good and bad. The 2026 youth AI survey – run by global charity Restless Development and academics from the universities of Makerere in Uganda and Cambridge in the UK – seeks to correct this imbalance. It comes immediately after the UN Independent International Scientific Panel released its preliminary report on AI. Commenting on the need for more science about AI’s use around the world, the UN’s secretary general, António Guterres, admitted: “The world cannot govern what it cannot understand.” Our responses were collected in Angola, Kenya, India, Nepal, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe – with the UK included for comparison. Two-thirds of respondents said they use AI every day, with Meta AI the most common tool, followed by Claude. The extent of AI use is striking given the obstacles many young people encounter. In every African country surveyed except Nigeria, more than half said high data costs limit their access. Weak internet connections and a lack of digital skills were also raised, with many relying on basic-feature phones. By contrast, UK participants said ethical concerns played a stronger role in limiting their AI usage. AI work opportunities While few respondents (14%) said they earn income directly from AI tools yet, half expected AI to improve their employment and economic opportunities within the next five years. Currently, AI’s main work-related uses among our respondents are learning new skills and job searches. In almost every lower-income country, young people held broadly positive attitudes about AI’s future role in their working lives – although many (32%-50% per country) expressed concerned about its impact on their future income. How will your income be affected by AI? Sonal Gupta/Youth AI Survey 2026, CC BY-SA Among those from lower-income countries, more than seven in ten thought AI would bring them better education and learning opportunities in the near future. A 28-year-old self-employed man in Nepal commented: “AI has the potential to empower young people in developing countries like Nepal by improving access to knowledge, digital skills, and economic opportunities.” Our sentiment analysis found respondents to be most positive in Tanzania and Zambia, with young women there even more upbeat than young men. In the UK, young men diverged from their international peers in feeling more negative towards AI and work. Biggest AI concerns Some respondents described AI tools as “Americanised”, built around western norms and unable to grasp local nuance. They worried this could lead to their languages being further marginalised. “These AI tools are fed major languages that are spoken worldwide, unlike Shona,” said a 25-year-old student in urban Zimbabwe. Shona is spoken by around 14 million people mainly in southern Africa, but is severely underserved by AI and other technology tools. A Ugandan respondent was similarly critical about provision for her native language, Luganda – the country’s most widely spoken Indigenous language. “AI barely knows the spellings, grammar and how to interpret sentences. It’s not even familiar with our culture at all, which increases mistakes when we get to things concerning our own world.” What most concerns you about AI? Dark blue to light green reflects large to small proportions of respondents expressing ‘high levels of concern’ about the issues listed on x-axis. Sonal Gupta/Youth AI Survey 2026, CC BY-SA Despite the widespread belief that AI would improve education and training, some held strong reservations. A 21-year-old female student in rural Uganda said: “Slowly by slowly, AI is making us dumb. We can no longer think for ourselves.” The more often these young people use AI, the more worried they appear to be about it. The biggest concerns highlighted by daily users were around who owns their data and the power of AI companies. Concern about AI’s environmental impact and the welfare of AI workers followed a similar pattern of higher usage co-existing with higher concern. Mental health is the only domain where non-users worry slightly more than daily users. Gender differences Significantly more young men (38%) than women (23%) reported having “a lot” of AI knowledge. This probably reflects a combination of diverging gender self-confidence, which tends to emerge from school age, and different levels of AI use. “AI is scary but helpful too,” said one female homemaker in urban Nepal. Almost twice as many men than women use AI to search for work (33% vs. 17%). This difference is probably rooted in gendered access to data and technology, as well as differing social roles – such as the tendency for women to do more care work. What have you used AI for in the past month? Note: the bars sum to more than 100% because many respondents have multiple uses for Al. Sonal Gupta/Youth AI Survey 2026, CC BY-SA In most of the ten lower-income countries surveyed, young women expressed greater concern about AI than men – with their biggest concern being over who owns their data. In the UK, 68% of young women were strongly concerned about data ownership, compared with 29% of men. What young people want from AI Many of our participants stressed the need for cheaper data and internet connections that work well. But they also want AI tools that fit their lives and culture – and speak their language. Until then, most recognise that talk of AI “leapfrogging” traditional stages of economic and social development is just that – talk. Some efforts to make AI more inclusive and relevant for lower-income countries are underway. These include initiatives for “frugal AI”, as well as regional collaborations such as Masakhane for African languages and QuechuaBase in Peru. How can AI be made safer? Note: the bars do not sum to 100% because survey participants selected multiple responses. Sonal Gupta, CC BY-SA Most of our participants framed AI safety as much more of a governance problem than a technical one. Many countries are establishing new AI policies, shaped in part by global forums such as the UN-led AI for Good summits. Overwhelmingly, our respondents agreed that governments, not tech companies, should be setting the rules when it comes to AI regulation and privacy protection. Anna Barford receives funding from UKRI. She has previously been funded by the British Academy, Leverhulme Trust, ESRC, the Asian Development Bank, the Mastercard Foundation, and a philanthropic gift to the University from Unilever. She is a co-director of the Business Fights Poverty Institute and does consultancy work for the International Labour Organization. Anthony Mugeere works as a Research Fellow for the Advocates Coalition for Development, Uganda's leading thinktank specialising in advocacy and analysis on climate change. He has received funding from the British Academy and the Mastercard Foundation to conduct research on climate change and young people. Giulia Occhini does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Tejas Chopra built Headroom, an open-source context compression layer for Claude and Codex, to stop burning through his own token budget. Six months on, he's left Netflix to build Headroom Labs full time. In this Q&A, he walks through the agent-to-agent context problem he's building toward next...

L’Oreal is using AI to shorten product development timelines and identify new uses for ingredients already present in its portfolio. The French cosmetics group has applied AI in its laboratories for the past four years, with Fabrice Megarbane, president of L’Oreal’s consumer products division, telling Reuters that the technology helps the company predict how molecules […] The post L’Oreal, Mondelez, and Nestle use AI to speed product development appeared first on AI News.

Norwegian striker Erling Haaland isn’t just a footballer anymore. He’s become an internet character perpetuated by fans and AI.

Anthony Agueda, a third-generation California dairy farmer, pulls a rake through a bed of dark, wet wood chips on his family’s land in Hickman, a tiny town in the state’s agricultural heartland. He reaches down with both hands and pulls up a clump of muck, turning it over to reveal a half-dozen squirming red earthworms.…

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The lab will beam back data to train AI models to predict how proteins behind age-related diseases like Alzheimer’s and certain cancers behave.

A painting of Miranda, one of the characters in The Tempest, by Frederick Goodall (1888). Folger Shakespeare Library In the 400 years since his death, William Shakespeare’s work has been used as a lens through which to interpret countless developments he could never have anticipated – from modern psychology and political theory to colonialism and climate change. His writing possesses an uncanny ability to illuminate nearly every facet of the human condition. Yet, as a decolonial scholar and an AI researcher, we believe that Shakespeare’s plays are now beginning to illuminate something beyond that as well – the emergent forms of artificial intelligence that increasingly shape and challenge our understanding of what it means to think, act and be. AI tools have rapidly become part of many people’s everyday lives. Yet relatively few probably consider the physical infrastructure that makes these systems possible. Each prompt we send is processed in distant data centres: vast facilities that generate responses by predicting the most likely sequence of words based on patterns learned from enormous datasets. This dynamic of distant, unseen control recalls Shakespeare’s The Tempest, a play that offers a useful means of understanding how power operates through hidden infrastructures. This article is part of Rethinking the Classics. The stories in this series offer insightful new ways to think about and interpret classic books and artworks. This is the canon – with a twist. AI data centres are energy and resource intensive, often located far from the users they serve. In some cases, they are built in rural or marginalised regions where land and resources are more easily secured. For example, in the United States, a proposed bill, NCA 25-077, would establish the Mvskoke Technology and Innovation Park in eastern Oklahoma. This proposal sparked debate within the Mvskoke Nation, particularly around water usage and long-term trade-offs, which ultimately led to it being voted down. Mvskoke Nation citizen Jordan Harmon and her friend Mackenzie Roberts, two prominent voices in the debate, pointed to these data centres’ “ravenous consumption of data and physical resources” and AI being used to “surveil and police people”. They consider this as “part of the legacy of colonialism and imperialism”. AI data centres are extractive endeavours, they argued, impinging on other aspects of a community’s life, such as water supply and land sovereignty. The Tempest offers a stark warning of what happens if such endeavours are not reined in. Prospero’s island and the politics of AI infrastructure The play tells the story of Prospero, the exiled duke of Milan. He seizes control of a remote island and its inhabitants, including a creature named Caliban and the spirit Ariel. While the play ends with reconciliation and Prospero’s return to Milan, it has long been read by postcolonial scholars as an allegory of colonisation. Caliban’s prior claim to the island, “which thou tak’st from me”, resonates with contemporary struggles over land and resources. Yet the parallels go further when considering how Prospero exercises power. His authority depends not only on physical domination but on his command of sorcery and manipulation. Both Ariel and Caliban are compelled to serve him – Ariel through enchantment, Caliban through coercion and emotional abuse. Hervé Goffings performs Caliban’s monologue. In this sense, Prospero’s magic mirrors the logic of modern AI systems, which extracts labour to transform human knowledge and creativity into outputs that appear detached from the people and environments that make them possible. Prospero’s conjuring of a storm at the start of the play is equally revealing. The tempest is a spectacle of control, designed to disorient and reorder the world to Prospero’s advantage. Today’s AI expansion produces its own kind of storm: not only in the environmental strain of data centres, but also in the disruption of labour markets, as automation threatens certain forms of work while concentrating power in the hands of a few corporations. Like Prospero’s magic, these transformations obscure the decisions and interests that drive them. In the final act of The Tempest, Prospero relinquishes his magical power only after it has enabled him to recover his dukedom, orchestrate reconciliation, and secure dynastic stability, implying that his renunciation is prompted less by ethical transformation than by the completion of his political objectives. The play largely centres on Prospero’s authority, in which power was his to give, instead of offering recognition of the native inhabitants as agents capable of self-governance. A similar dynamic is echoed in the discourse surrounding AI, where corporations are unlikely to surrender control unless it becomes advantageous to do so. The Mvskoke Nation has demonstrated that it is not futile for Indigenous citizens to assert their sovereignty and maintain stewardship of their lands by exerting pressure that makes the continued development of data centres more costly. This comparison highlights that, unlike the idealised resolution of the play, real-world change is rarely driven by the goodwill of those in power. Instead, it often depends on the efforts of communities to make continued control less advantageous and to demand accountability From Caliban to contemporary struggles Postcolonial scholars have often compared the relationship between Caliban and Prospero to that between colonised and coloniser. This can be seen in novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen’s writing, where the colonised are called the “descendants of Caliban”. Jamaican-born poet Safiya Sinclair’s literary manifesto articulates similar sentiments where she compares herself to Caliban. Nguyen and Sinclair are among the thinkers and authors concerned with the impact of colonisation and the role of language in shaping colonial power. Colonisation can take many forms – the rise of data centres on lands that do not belong to multinational corporations is just one of them. Rather than treating AI infrastructure as inevitable, the debate within the Mvskoke Nation is a reminder that its development is a matter of choice. If data centres are to exist on Indigenous lands, they must not replicate extractive models that prioritise corporate gain over community wellbeing. Caliban’s experience of loss and coercion under Prospero’s control need not be the template of the historical or future trajectories of Indigenous nations such as the Mvskoke Nation. As communities assert control over their digital futures, they challenge us to rethink who AI is for and who it benefits. Beyond the canon As part of the Rethinking the Classics series, we’re asking our experts to recommend a book or artwork that tackles similar themes to the canonical work in question, but isn’t (yet) considered a classic itself. Here is Xin Ying Lim and Xin Chen Cai’s suggestion: A highly engaging contemporary play that explores themes of power, justice, identity and resistance is Off the Rails by Randy Reinholz. Set in 1880s Nebraska, the play follows Indigenous American characters navigating a world shaped by colonial control and cultural suppression. Trailer for a production of Off the Rails. Reinholz examines how institutions and authority figures can restrict individual freedom while also highlighting the resilience of communities facing oppression. The play combines humour, romance, music and social commentary to create an accessible yet thought-provoking exploration of cultural survival and self-determination. Rather than presenting history as a distant subject, Off the Rails brings the experiences of Indigenous people to life through vivid characters and dramatic storytelling. Its focus on challenging injustice and preserving identity makes it a powerful and relevant work for modern audiences, offering fresh perspectives on social inequality and the lasting effects of colonialism. This article features references to books that have been included for editorial reasons, and may contain links to bookshop.org. If you click on one of the links and go on to buy something, The Conversation UK may earn a commission. Xin Ying Lim receives funding from Leverhulme Center for Water Cultures. Xin Chen Cai does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Midjourney founder David Holz described the feeling amongst his friends about AI coding. Bobby Longoria/Getty Images for SXSW Midjourney founder David Holz said that AI coding models made his friends more productive — and "extremely drained." "This makes me feel like something is wrong," he said. Commenters gave solutions like getting away from AI and staring at a tree. Your programmer friend is thrilled — and tired. Midjourney founder David Holz summarized the feeling among many programmers in an X post. His friends are "all feeling extremely productive and also extremely drained with the latest coding models," Holz wrote. "This makes me feel like something is wrong, and also that there might be a big opportunity," he wrote. Holz concluded the post by asking: "Does anyone have any strategies they use to make it feel better day-to-day?" my friends are all feeling extremely productive and also extremely drained with the latest coding models. this makes me feel like something is wrong, and also that there might be a big opportunity. does anyone have any strategies they use to make it feel better day-to-day? — David (@DavidSHolz) July 6, 2026 Commenters replied with their own solutions — and greater diagnoses of the problem. Ex-Meta engineer Shuming Hu wrote that "vibe coding doesn't get you into a flow state." Catherine Wu, Anthropic's head of product for Claude Code, replied that she liked "focused work on a hard task with a single agent." "Usually I run 10s of agents, but it's nice to get into the zone and in the weeds of one task to get it done well," Wu wrote. Former X and Cash App designer Brandon Kainoa Jacoby said the problem was "probably going to get worse before it gets better." He recommended getting away from AI for just a bit: "I've noticed doing some sort of deep cognitive task, entirely away from any model, helps a tad." Others suggested similarly analog solutions to the drain, like staring at a tree or playing with their kids. As AI coding tools transform their daily workflows, engineers are ringing the alarm on AI fatigue. In February, programmer Siddhant Khare argued the fatigue was real and that "nobody talks about it" in a viral essay. Other coders told Business Insider that they struggled to keep up with the tech's rapid advancements, leading to a sense of workplace paralysis. There's a frenzy to the AI era, one that keeps coders up late and grinding longer. Ben South, a serial founder and former Postmates VP, shared his drive in Holz's comments. "Even an hour of rest feels like a ton of productivity lost," South wrote. Read the original article on Business Insider

Luffy AI, a UK-based startup developing AI for real-timeadaptive control in industrial systems, has raised £8.1 million in a Series Afunding round. The investment was led by BGF, with participation fr...