Simon Hunt is City editor for CityAM.
The government’s hotly-anticipated industrial strategy has at last arrived. In it are a handful of bold new announcements, and a lot of old recycled ones. There are some big shiny spending commitments – a couple of billion pledged here, a few hundred million spent there. But perhaps the most consequential element, especially for the tech
Donald Trump has his eyes on Britain’s Digital Services Tax (DST). The tariff-touting US President insists that the tech firm tax must be scrapped if the UK is to have the ‘deep’ trade deal on technology it desires. So far the government has demurred, but, with Keir Starmer disclosing last week that there are ‘ongoing
I recently reported on a major partnership signed by a German tech startup. Or so I thought. Not long after publication, I got a message from the company: ‘You have wrongly said we were founded in Germany. In fact, we were founded in California. Please correct this.’ That’s strange, I thought. Everyone I spoke to
The government has unveiled its new ‘AI Opportunities Action Plan’ – a ten-syllable, fifty-point proposal to grow the UK’s AI industry. Among the only memorable points of the fifty unveiled last month was the creation of ‘AI growth zones’, clusters of AI expertise dotted around the country. The only growth zone named in the plan
You’d be forgiven for thinking the government’s new AI Opportunities Action Plan lacks ambition. While frontier AI businesses in the US and China are developing dazzlingly powerful AI tools to cure diseases and solve mind-bending equations in physics, Sir Keir Starmer today promised that artificial intelligence would ‘spot potholes more quickly’. Leaving this Starmerism aside,
AI has an energy problem: it consumes an awful lot of it. Firms like ChatGPT creator OpenAI demand eye-watering levels of energy to develop their models. Training Chat GPT-3 used as much as 120 American homes over the course of a year, according to one study, while the training of GPT-4 used many multiples more. The
Until this week, OpenAI seemed like an unstoppable force. In the space of little more than a year, the San Francisco-based organisation was transformed from a research unit on the fringes of the tech industry to the world’s number one dominant AI business. Every newspaper on the planet seems to have covered the rapid rise
The world’s biggest tech firms have lined up to lambast the latest incarnation of the Online Safety Bill and Investigatory Powers Act. Many, including Apple and Meta, are threatening to withdraw products and services from the UK if the proposed rules become law. The Home Office could become the ‘de facto global arbiter of what level of
When Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta released Threads earlier this month, it looked to be the biggest threat to Twitter in the app’s 17-year history. Over 100 million people signed up within days, a lightning-fast adoption rate that made ChatGPT’s four-week timescale to hit the same milestone seem sluggish. But that threat now appears to be rapidly
Less than two years ago, Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg bet the house on the metaverse. Zuckerberg believed that his virtual reality world was the future. Now, with the rapid progress of Artificial Intelligence (AI), he appears to have made a calamitous mistake. The metaverse isn’t yet dead – but it’s future looks far from rosy.
When he bought Twitter in October last year, Elon Musk set out a bold vision for the bird app. The billionaire said his acquisition was ‘an accelerant’ towards building ‘X, the everything app,’ emulating the functionality of China’s WeChat, with which users can transfer money, play video games, shop online and more. But so far, beyond
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has surged in popularity in recent months. ChatGPT alone has swelled to more than 100 million users in a matter of weeks, capturing the imagination of the world for whom the technology had previously been consigned to the realm of science fiction. Scores of companies, from software businesses to manufacturers, are racing
