Founded in 2005 and lauded by Silicon Valley, the Nick Bostrom’s centre for studying existential risk warned about AI but also gave rise to cultish ideas such as effective altruismTwo weeks ago it was quietly announced that the Future of Humanity Institute, the renowned multidisciplinary research centre in Oxford, no longer had a future. It shut down...

Managing the barrage of upsetting material online is a challenge that service providers are struggling to meet, even if they tryWay back in the mid-1990s, when the web was young and the online world was buzzing with blogs, a worrying problem loomed. If you were an ISP that hosted blogs, and one of them contained material that was illegal or defamatory,...

UK company’s offer from Thoma Bravo is 44% higher than average share price over past three monthsBusiness live – latest updatesThe Cambridge-based cybersecurity and artificial intelligence company Darktrace is likely to become the latest British technology champion to be swallowed up by a US suitor, after it agreed a $5.3bn (£4.2bn) sale to US private...

World’s largest public company reports $61.86bn revenue after investing billions into artificial intelligenceProfits at Microsoft beat Wall Street’s expectations as its heavy bet on artificial intelligence continued to bear fruit in the latest quarter.The technology giant has invested billions of dollars into AI in a bid to turbocharge its growth, particularly...

Shares surge after tech giant issues first ever dividend and posts revenue of $80.5bn, up 15% since last year, despite staff turmoilShares in Alphabet, the owner of Google and YouTube, surged after it issued its first ever dividend and revealed that profits had surged in the last quarter.Sundar Pichai, CEO, hailed the transition to artificial intelligence...

Large-language models such as ChatGPT are still liable to distort the meaning of what they are summarisingSeth Lazar is a professor of philosophy at the Australian National University and a distinguished research fellow at the Oxford Institute for Ethics in AIWhat is the role of AI in democracy? Is it just a volcano of deepfakes and disinformation?...