Microsoft will invest $290 million over the next two years in South Africa on AI and cloud infrastructure, vice chair and president Brad Smith announced.
At an event with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in Johannesburg Thursday, Smith said the investment will help the country’s “ambition to become a globally competitive AI economy.”
It has built massive datacenters in the past three years in Johannesburg and Cape Town, a $1.1 billion investment.
In today’s AI news, believe it or not AI is alive and well, and it’s clearly going to change a lot of things forever. My personal epiphany happened just the other day, while I was “vibe coding” a personal software project. Those of us who have never written a line of code in our lives, but create software programs and applications using AI tools like Bolt or Lovable are called vibe coders.
S how these tools improve automation, multi-agent collaboration, and workflow orchestration for developers. Before we dig into what Then, Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei is worried that spies, likely from China, are getting their hands on costly “algorithmic secrets” from the U.S.’s top AI companies — and he wants the U.S. government to step in. Speaking at a Council on Foreign Relations event on Monday, Amodei said that China is known for its “large-scale industrial espionage” and that AI companies like Anthropic are almost certainly being targeted.
Meanwhile, despite all the hype, very few people have had a chance to use Manus. Currently, under 1% of the users on the wait list have received an invite code. It’s unclear how many people are on this list, but for a sense of how much interest there is, Manus’s Discord channel has more than 186,000 members. MIT Technology Review was able to obtain access to Manus, and they gave it a test-drive.
In videos, join Palantir CEO Alexander Karp with New York Times DealBook creator Andrew Ross Sorkin on the promises and peril of Silicon Valley, tech’s changing relationship with Washington, and what it means for our future — and his new book, The Technological Republic. Named “Best CEO of 2024” by The Economist, Alexander Karp is a vital player in Silicon Valley as the CEO of Palantir.
Then, Piers Linney, Co-founder of Implement AI, discusses how artificial intelligence and automation can be maximized across businesses on CNBC International Live. Linney says AI poses a threat to the highest income knowledge workers around the world.
Meanwhile, Nate B. Jones is back with some commentary on how OpenAI has launched a new API aimed at helping developers build AI agents, but its strategic impact remains unclear. While enterprises with strong LLM expertise are already using tools like LangChain effectively, smaller teams struggle with agent complexity. Nate says, despite being a high-quality API, it lacks a distinct differentiator beyond OpenAI’s own ecosystem.
We close out with, Celestial AI CEO Dave Lazovsky outlines how their “Photonic Fabric” technology helps to scale AI as the company raises $250 million in their latest funding round, valuing the company at $2.5 billion. Thats all for today, but AI is moving fast — subscribe.
Quantum systems don’t just transition between phases—they do so in ways that defy classical intuition.
A new experiment has directly observed these “dissipative phase transitions” (DPTs), revealing how quantum states shift under carefully controlled conditions. This breakthrough could unlock powerful new techniques for stabilizing quantum computers and sensors, making them more resilient and precise than ever before.
Quantum phase transitions: a new frontier.
Factors like your income and how much sleep you get are more predictive of how long you’ll live than genes, an Oxford study found.
Hugging Face co-founder and chief science officer Thomas Wolf thinks that AI today isn’t capable of figuring out novel solutions like a human.
Superconductivity, which entails an electrical resistance of zero at very low temperatures, is a highly desirable and thus widely studied quantum phenomenon. Typically, this state is known to arise following the formation of bound electron pairs known as Cooper pairs, yet identifying the factors contributing to its emergence in quantum materials has so far proved more challenging.
Researchers at Princeton University, the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory, Beijing Institute of Technology and the University of Zurich recently carried out a study aimed at better understanding the superconductivity observed in CsV₃Sb₅, a superconductor with a Kagome lattice (i.e., in which atoms form a hexagonal pattern that resembles that of Kagome woven baskets).
Their paper, published in Nature Physics, identifies two distinct superconducting regimes in this material, which were found to be linked to different transport and thermodynamic properties.
The X-37B is a reusable robotic space plane operated by the US Space Force. It resembles a miniature space shuttle at just under 9 metres long with a 4.5 metre wingspan and is an uncrewed vehicle designed for long-duration missions in low Earth orbit.
The craft launches vertically atop a rocket, lands horizontally like a conventional aircraft and serves as a testbed for new technologies and experiments that can be returned to Earth for analysis.
It’s development was a collaborative effort between NASA, Boeing, and the US Department of Defence. It was originally conceived by NASA in the late 1990s to explore reusable spaceplane technologies but transitioned to the US Air Force in 2004 for military purposes.
Shanghai Jiao Tong University along with multiple collaborating institutions including the University of Copenhagen and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, have conducted an extensive investigation into microbial ecosystems in the deep ocean hadal zone.
Findings reveal an unprecedented level of taxonomic novelty, with 89.4% of identified microbial species previously unreported. The study demonstrated that selection pressures, favoring either streamlined or versatile adaptation strategies, dominate over neutral drift in shaping these extreme microbial ecosystems.
Hadal environments, located at depths exceeding 6,000 meters below sea level, remain among the least explored ecosystems on Earth. Manned submersibles capable of reaching full-ocean depth have been rare, with less than a dozen individuals visiting the deepest point of the Mariana Trench before 2019.
Sulfate-reducing bacteria break down a large proportion of the organic carbon in the oxygen-free zones of Earth, and in the seabed in particular. Among these important microbes, the Desulfobacteraceae family of bacteria stands out because its members are able to break down a wide variety of compounds—including some that are poorly degradable—to their end product, carbon dioxide (CO2).
A team of researchers led by Dr. Lars Wöhlbrand and Prof. Dr. Ralf Rabus from the University of Oldenburg, Germany, has investigated the role of these microbes in detail and published the findings of their comprehensive study in the journal Science Advances.
The team reports that the bacteria are distributed across the globe and possess a complex metabolism that displays modular features. All the studied strains possess the same central metabolic architecture for harvesting energy, for example.
Yale University, Dartmouth College, and the University of Cambridge researchers have developed MindLLM, a subject-agnostic model for decoding functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) signals into text.
Integrating a neuroscience-informed attention mechanism with a large language model (LLM), the model outperforms existing approaches with a 12.0% improvement in downstream tasks, a 16.4% increase in unseen subject generalization, and a 25.0% boost in novel task adaptation compared to prior models like UMBRAE, BrainChat, and UniBrain.
Decoding brain activity into natural language has significant implications for neuroscience and brain-computer interface applications. Previous attempts have faced challenges in predictive performance, limited task variety, and poor generalization across subjects. Existing approaches often require subject-specific parameters, limiting their ability to generalize across individuals.