Data centre backlash goes national as protests hit 42 US states

On Saturday, American opposition to data centres stopped being a scatter of zoning-board arguments and started behaving like a movement. More than 140 rallies across 42 states unfolded under a single [...]

UK finance chiefs are warming to AI, even as they keep spending in check

Nearly three-quarters of the finance chiefs at Britain’s largest companies now say they are optimistic that artificial intelligence will improve business performance, a striking figure from a group [...]

Alibaba says Qwen3.8 is the world’s No.2 AI model. It has shown no proof.

Days after a rival Chinese lab shook Silicon Valley, Alibaba has fired back. The company previewed Qwen3.8, its most powerful model yet, and made a bold claim: it trails only one model on Earth. Aliba [...]

Decart’s Lucy 2.5 unlocks new live video effects, but physical AI is the real winner

Artificial intelligence startup Decart continues to stretch the boundaries of what’s possible with the release of its latest live video model, Lucy 2.5, introducing real-time streaming visual effect [...]

Alibaba claims its new AI model is second best in the world

The 2.4 trillion-parameter model debuted at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai, with open weights promised soon [...]

China weighs export controls on its own AI models and chips, FT reports

China is considering tightening export controls on its home-grown artificial intelligence models and the chips that run them, according to the Financial Times, in a move that would push Beijing’s t [...]

Kanishka Narayan becomes the UK’s first cabinet-level AI minister

Kanishka Narayan has become the first UK minister for artificial intelligence to sit at the cabinet table, a promotion that arrives as new prime minister Andy Burnham reshapes Whitehall around the tec [...]

US and China reportedly plan a fresh round of AI talks in September

The United States and China are reportedly preparing to hold a fresh round of talks on artificial intelligence in September, according to people familiar with the planning, in what would be the cleare [...]

Evals are the new PRD, Expedia’s AI chief tells VB Transform 2026

“The new PRD are the evals,” Xavi Amatriain, Expedia Group’s first chief AI and data officer, told the VB Transform 2026 audience last week in Menlo Park. “So basically, you encode what you wa [...]