Tech 24

This week's massive power outage in Spain and Portugal has raised questions over whether Europe's power grid is ready for a surge in demand, given the rapid pace of data centre deployment amid the rise of artificial intelligence. We take a closer look in this edition of Tech 24.

Google is still making lots of money. Its parent company Alphabet reported $90.2 billion in revenue for the first quarter, up 12 percent from the same period last year, making $34.5 billion in profit. Chief Executive Sundar Pichai said Google's AI strategy was to thank. But the elephant in the room at Thursday's earnings call was the possibility that US federal judges might order the company to be broken up. We take a closer look in this edition of Tech 24.

"I'm not worried about Jensen [Huang] at all," said US President Donald Trump, commenting on the Nvidia CEO's visit to Beijing. The trip was the latest twist in a tumultuous week for the US firm, which is the world's third most valuable company and top supplier of AI computer chips. We take a closer look in this week's edition of Tech 24. 

One concern around artificial intelligence is its voracious appetite for energy. Electricity demand for data centres specialised in AI will quadruple in the next five years, according to a new report from the International Energy Agency. But as for claims that AI is accelerating climate change through carbon emissions, the report calls them "overstated".

France says a response from the EU to Trump's new 20 percent tariff will "probably" come at the end of the month. A government spokesperson told French media RTL that services will be targeted, not just goods, including digital products from Big Tech companies like Google and Apple.

Anti-American sentiment is surging amid the second term of US President Donald Trump. Ifop research found this week that two thirds of French people support a boycott of US products. One market where those products are especially hard to avoid is technology. Just how integrated into our lives is American tech? How are boycotters taking steps to disconnect? And what's the EU doing to tackle America's tech monopoly? We take a closer look in this edition of Tech 24.

US President Donald Trump's announced shuttering of the Department of Education comes amid a broader attack on knowledge and research. Since Trump returned to the presidency in January, US science has suffered budget cuts, layoffs and censorship, with global implications. In a column published by French media on Thursday, 2,000 academics from the Stand Up for Science movement called for investment to help set up safe places for American researchers to continue their work. We take a closer look.

Elon Musk is starting to see the fruits of his AI shopping spree with the release of Grok 3, one of the most capable AI models yet. But according to French startup PRISM Eval, the chatbot's safety filters can easily be bypassed to make requests about dangerous and illegal activities, such as building a bomb or hiding a body.

A French human rights NGO has filed a lawsuit in Paris against Apple, alleging massive collection and processing of voice recordings via the tech giant's Siri assistant, without user consent. It comes as a California court is set to rule on a similar case, where Apple has agreed to pay $95 million in settlements, without admitting wrongdoing. FRANCE 24's Tech Editor Peter O'Brien tells us more.

A draft declaration of the Paris AI Action Summit has raised concerns for The Future Society, a nonprofit tasked by organisers to provide recommendations for protecting civil society from the risks of artificial intelligence.

It's becoming less clear by the day who is supposed to be buying TikTok. One of Donald Trump's first acts on his return as US president was to delay a ban on the Chinese-owned app, in order to find an American company for it to be sold to. But near the end of his second week in office, we're still none the wiser.

“This is money that normally would have gone to China,” Trump proclaimed on Tuesday while unveiling Stargate, an artificial intelligence project that will cost $500 billion, according to its participants OpenAI, Softbank, Oracle and MGX. It was another indication that keeping ahead of Beijing on AI is a priority of the Trump administration. But in his bid to save TikTok, the video app that was briefly banned in the US under a law that came into effect the day before Trump entered office, the president appears much more relaxed about China. 

Are leading artificial intelligence companies doing enough to keep us safe from the potential harms of their products? According to the nonprofits SaferAI and the Future of Life Institute, based in Paris and Brussels respectively, the answer is "no". We tell you more in this edition of Tech 24.

Iran may look increasingly isolated on the international stage, but cybersecurity companies say its extensive network of hackers is working hard to pursue the government's strategic interests. One person who's being used as a pawn in a massive cyber campaign is FRANCE 24's technology editor Peter O'Brien.

What's in a name? When it comes to AI, a name can mean a huge data protection headache. This week, the internet was fascinated by a list of people that the AI chatbot ChatGPT refuses to talk about. And it's changing the debate around your “right to be forgotten” online.

The chips are down. In the biggest antitrust trial of this century, US federal prosecutors have filed their demands for Google, including for the tech giant to sell its ubiquitous Chrome browser. It comes after the judge Amit Mehta ruled in August that Google had maintained an illegal monopoly in online search. Why would selling Chrome be a big deal, what other demands is the Department of Justice making, and how might all this change the internet? Find out in this edition of Tech 24.

Tech giant Meta is feeling the heat, no matter how relaxed its leader Mark Zuckerberg might appear. Despite the waves of bad news buffeting his company, CEO Zuckerberg is surfing ahead with a new relaxed persona. We tell you more in this edition of Tech 24.

Tech executives have lined up to congratulate Donald Trump on his US presidential election win. But behind the scenes, they're frantically trying to work out what a second Trump term means for their business. We take a closer look in this week's Tech 24.

As we approach the US presidential election, the safety of the candidates, their families and their running mates is paramount, particularly as Republican candidate Donald Trump has already survived two assassination attempts during this election campaign. According to an investigation published by French daily Le Monde, that safety has been compromised, along with the safety of other world leaders. The culprit? The running app Strava, used by bodyguards and members of the Secret Service.

With the public demo of Anthropic's "computer use" feature for its Claude chatbot, this was the week that AI "agents" – which can carry out many tasks rather than just answer questions – became viable. FRANCE 24's Tech Editor Peter O'Brien tells us more. 

"Assassin's Creed" played a starring role in the Paris Olympics Opening Ceremony, with a masked figure dressed like the protagonist running across the rooftops of Paris with the Olympic flame. Now, the game's developer Ubisoft is rumoured to be in talks to be taken private, in a possible acquisition by Chinese gaming giant Tencent.

Two Harvard students, Caine Ardayfio and AnhPhu Nguyen, say they have hacked a pair of Meta Ray-Ban Smart Glasses and installed facial recognition software, so that merely looking at someone's face will bring up their name, address, age, biography and any other information available on online databases.

OpenAI, the world's most valuable AI startup, has just lost another executive. Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati is one of more than 20 key staff who have departed this year, leaving CEO Sam Altman with just one of his fellow co-founders.

This week's attacks on Hezbollah pagers and radios have spread anxiety among Lebanese people, and a sense that no electronic device is safe. Amid some confusion over how the explosions were triggered, you might be wondering whether you can trust the phone in your pocket, or the headphones on your ears. On this week's Tech 24, we break down how the attacks were done, how they compare to other massive hardware hacks like Stuxnet and An0m, and whether you should be worried about your own device. 

The most ambitious mission yet in the billionaire space race saw Jared Isaacman become the first non-professional astronaut to walk in space on Thursday, in partnership with Elon Musk's SpaceX. The Polaris Dawn mission has been welcomed by the aerospace community for pushing the boundaries of 21st-century spaceflight, but dismissed by some in the general public as just another vanity project for the rich. On this week's Tech 24, we discuss what the mission has achieved, and its lofty hopes for the future.

It's been another wobbly week for the global semiconductor industry. Nvidia suffered the biggest one-day loss in stock market history, while Intel kept making headlines for its plans to cut costs. 

It's one of the logistical questions hanging over the Paris Olympics, two weeks from the Opening Ceremony: will there be flying taxis? 

A French AI lab has released a demo of a voice chatbot with practically immediate response times. OpenAI, the world's third most valuable start-up, has been teasing a similar feature for its own voice bot since mid-May. 

At Euro 2024 in Germany, referees are souped up with data and artificial intelligence, players' bodies are scrutinised to within a square inch by a grid of cameras, and even the ball has been fitted with a special sensor. In this edition of Tech 24, Peter O'Brien explains why football tournaments are a playground for cutting-edge monitoring and surveillance technology.

In the UK's general election, Steve is running to be MP for Brighton. In Wyoming in the United States, Vic is running to be mayor. Both of them are not in fact human, but created by artificial intelligence. On this week's Tech 24, we interview AI Steve to find out what these robot candidates mean for democracy (and whether he's going to turn us all into paperclips). We also look at the election campaigns that have recently come to a close in India and the EU, where the deluge of AI-generated disinformation that some were predicting did not come to pass.

Top AI engineers at defence technology companies defended the need for autonomous weapons on Thursday, amid a push for a ban on so-called "killer robots". More than 115 countries and 250 non-governmental organisations are calling for an international treaty to ban weapons that use artificial intelligence to identify and engage human targets, technology which United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has called "morally repugnant."

A slew of announcements from OpenAI and Google this week brought us to the brink of human-like AI assistants. Generative artificial intelligence is getting faster, and being applied to an increasing number of tasks. But without a major breakthrough to the models underpinning such projects, it has led some to emerge from the parapets and ask whether the technology will continue getting smarter given its exponential hunger for data. One of them is Dr. Michael Pound, Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Nottingham.

OpenAI will announce plans for a search engine powered by artificial intelligence on Monday May 13, Reuters reports. It's the latest challenge to search king Google and comes just one day before the tech giant's annual developer conference. On this week's Tech 24, Peter O'Brien looks at what might get Google sweating, amid changing search habits, a federal antitrust trial and smart new AI "answer engines". One of these is Perplexity AI. Speaking to FRANCE 24, CEO Aravind Srinivas says its results "cut through the noise" that comes up on a traditional Google search.

On Sunday, Chinese President Xi Jinping will come to Europe for the first time in five years, staying in France until Tuesday. Aside from the Ukraine war, technology – computer chips and green tech in particular – could be the most important talking point on the agenda. FRANCE 24's Peter O'Brien tells us more in this week's edition of Tech 24.

US President Joe Biden signed a law this week giving TikTok's Chinese owner ByteDance nine to 12 months to sell the popular video-sharing app or face a ban. The company has vowed to fight this in the courts. How might the showdown play out, and what does it mean for TikTok users globally? FRANCE 24's Tech Editor Peter O'Brien tells us more.

Legal proceedings began in the Nigerian capital Abuja on Thursday, targeting the cryptocurrency exchange Binance and two of its executives on charges of money laundering and tax evasion. Tigran Gambaryan, a US citizen and Binance's head of financial crimes compliance, appeared alone in court after Nadeem Anjarwalla, a British-Kenyan and the company's regional manager for Africa, escaped custody and fled. Gambaryan's family is asking for the US to do more to secure his release. Find out why Nigeria is cracking down on crypto in this week's edition of Tech 24.

The United Nations has unanimously approved its first resolution on artificial intelligence, with all member states agreeing to make sure the technology respects human rights. The UN also hopes that AI will help it achieve its development goals for 2030, which are well behind schedule.

French daily and website Le Monde has become the latest publisher to strike a deal with OpenAI, allowing the San Francisco company to use its journalists' work to train artificial intelligence systems. To deal with claims that AI firms have plagiarised content scraped from the internet in order to build tools like ChatGPT, publishers have taken different approaches.

As people continue to turn to artificial intelligence for romance, new research suggests that almost every romantic AI companion disregards your privacy, and could be selling your data. We take a closer look in this edition of Tech 24.

After a week in the wild, the consensus is in: Apple's new "spacial computing" headset, the Vision Pro, is impressive, expensive, and ludicrous to wear in public.

The world's first major regulation on artificial intelligence should almost be done and dusted – but France is causing trouble. FRANCE 24's Tech Editor Peter O'Brien tells us more.

Fantasy role-playing video game "Baldur's Gate 3" has won Game of the Year at the Game Awards in Los Angeles – the Oscars of gaming – after three and a half hours of speeches, prizes, announcements and adverts. The awards themselves were mostly a hurried afterthought as almost five million viewers of the Game Awards' official stream were subjected to a bombardment of trailers.

Meredith Whittaker, president of the Signal Foundation, says a leaked French government memo risked undermining public trust in cybersecurity protocols, after it was revealed that Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne had ordered cabinet members and their staff to delete popular messaging apps like Signal and WhatsApp. 

The tech sector in Africa is expected to have another year of growth in 2023, despite a turndown in venture capital investment worldwide. There are big opportunities in connectivity – mobile internet, fibre, satellite, subsea cables – thanks in part to Africa's growing population. FRANCE 24's Technology Editor Peter O'Brien reports from the 2023 Africa Tech Festival in Cape town.  

You may not have heard of it, but the social movement called "effective altruism" continues to influence public discourse around artificial intelligence, despite the fall from grace of the movement's highest-profile figure and one of its biggest donors: disgraced "crypto king" Sam Bankman-Fried. We take a closer look in this edition of Tech 24.

Hamas's October 7 attack on Israel was a shocking breach of Israeli defence technology, which is among the world's most renowned. But things weren't exactly easy before the war. Investment in Israeli startups plunged amid a global tech sector turndown and domestic political turmoil. Many young tech industry workers have now been drafted. In this week's Tech 24, we take a look at how the Israeli tech sector is responding ahead of an anticipated ground invasion of Gaza.

The European Commission has opened an investigation into X, Elon Musk's social media platform formerly known as Twitter. The move comes after Brussels ordered X, as well as rivals Meta and TikTok, to act quickly to tackle the spread of disinformation, which has surged on each of these platforms since Hamas's deadly attack on Israel.

It's already proving a very busy September for artificial intelligence (AI) regulation, with tech billionaires meeting US lawmakers, the EU wrangling over a landmark law and the UK concerned that AI might end life as we know it.

Worldcoin, a cryptocurrency project co-founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, has made waves this summer, enjoying millions of signups and raising $115 million, while other crypto startups struggle. But it's come under intense regulatory scrutiny, not least in France and Germany, over privacy concerns. We take a closer look in this edition of Tech 24.

It's the starting gun for the busiest time of the year in tech: IFA Berlin. Europe's largest tech trade show has kicked off, with more folding phones and robot lawnmowers than anyone could possibly need. With the "smart home" facing privacy and interoperability concerns and the smartphone industry dogged by falling sales, can we still get excited by new gizmos? FRANCE 24's Technology Editor Peter O'Brien went to Berlin to find out.

The world's top neurotechnology companies can keep indefinite possession of the data generated by the brains of their trial subjects and customers, and even share it with third parties, according to upcoming research. FRANCE 24's Tech Editor Peter O'Brien tells us more.