Control over artificial intelligence is at risk of being concentrated in the hands of a small group of big technology companies, which would leave the UK lagging in the race to dominate the growing market, peers have warned. The House of Lords communications and digital committee has found that regulators were not “striking the right…
Jeremiah Owyang broke a decades-old habit that he never thought he’d kick. No, not smoking or drinking, but something that is, for many, just as addictive: Google. “I don’t ‘Google it’ any more. It’s a back-up now,” said Owyang, an investor at Blitzscaling Ventures. “That’s 20 years of behaviour unlearnt in just a few months.”…
When Kevin Ellis was starting out as a trainee accountant in the early 1980s, photocopying skills were an important part of the job. “We used to say that in their first year, juniors had to wear sunglasses because they photocopied so much,” he said. Now, when Ellis tours schools as the UK head of PwC,…
Apple is one of the world’s highest-quality businesses. Its smartphones are the most popular on the market and in the past decade it has grown into a leader in wearable technology, from the Apple Watch to AirPods. This has rewarded shareholders handsomely, with returns of more than 200 per cent in the past five years….
Faced with the threat of an AI chatbot hijacking the written word this year, tens of millions of people sought solace in Wikipedia. The publicly edited online encyclopaedia had 84 billion views in 2023 and the most popular article was on OpenAI’s ChatGPT. More than 49 million readers accessed the ChatGPT Wikipedia page which details…
With each passing week, OpenAI looks a bit more like Napster. Oldsters will have vivid memories of the latter, a company that seemed to materialise out of nowhere in 1999 to revolutionise an industry. Suddenly the world’s music was instantly and freely available for download. It was a glorious time. It didn’t last. The company,…
Students have complained about having to memorise information after traditional exams were reintroduced on their university degree. Undergraduates at the University of Glasgow were expecting to sit “open-book” exams, which allow students to use notes and are often taken online at home. But the university said rapid developments in artificial intelligence (AI) had prompted a…
What has been the most remarkable civilisation-enhancing breakthrough in your own lifetime? Smallpox was eradicated a few years after I was born, so it’s tempting to name that, along with all the other incredible medical advancements that have ensured that child mortality rates have plummeted. The internet and the democratisation of information are fairly mind-blowing,…
Cuts to public spending on quantum computing research risk “squandering decades of investment” and could leave Britain relying on other countries to share the benefits of the breakthrough technology, the founders of a leading start-up in the field have claimed. Ashley Montanaro and Toby Cubitt, two of the three co-founders of Phasecraft, a company that…
Applicants are using artificial intelligence when applying for jobs and the government should issue advice to employers, industry leaders have warned. Hiring managers have observed potential recruits using generative AI such as ChatGPT to write cover letters, improve their CV, formulate interview answers and complete content writing tests. The warnings come as the European parliament…