Rest of World

10 stories

Rest of WorldStartups recalibrate Chinese AI for the West The concept of machine unlearning — or removing data from an artificial intelligence system after it has been trained — was largely an academic pursuit when Ben Luria, an Israeli...

11.02

Rest of WorldWhy Africa needs its own AI off switch Imagine that it is 6 a.m. in the wholesale markets of Nairobi. Merchants are delivering vegetables from up-country farms to the retailers who sell to the city’s households. Everyone is...

10.29

Rest of WorldAI models cost more when you don’t use English People who use less widely spoken languages could end up paying more to use artificial intelligence than those who speak English or other dominant languages. A new study published last...

10.26

Rest of WorldBig Tech’s thirst for water is sparking a global resistance After ChatGPT was released in November 2022, the tech industry was quick to herald the chatbot as the marker of a new wave of technological progress. As companies pushed to...

10.22

Rest of WorldWill developing nations be able to handle millions of AI agents? Big Tech’s newest personal agents — Meta’s Muse and OpenAI’s Dots — promise to book tables at restaurants, buy groceries, and carry out other types of digital grunt work for...

10.19

Rest of WorldWestern open-weight models still can’t beat China A slew of new open-weight artificial intelligence models from American and European companies aim to convert users of Chinese open models who are concerned about security, but fall short of...

10.16

Rest of WorldWhat the West can learn from AI optimists in the rest of the world On a recent Sunday afternoon, I was invited to debate AI’s impact on the cultural sector alongside Dutch politicians and creative-industry leaders. I was the lone optimist, arguing that if...

10.15

Rest of WorldThe UAE embraces AI for kindergartners In September, Henry Price observed a classroom of 7- to 8-year-olds learn about the Stone Age. They discussed and wrote about cave paintings, then put on virtual reality headsets to...

10.13

Rest of WorldConflict in the Red Sea is forcing cloud giants to find a new route for the internet U.S. cloud giants are facing steep prices to secure backup internet routes around the Red Sea as fighting rages over the Red Sea strait that carries most data cables between...

10.07

Rest of WorldNot just AI. China is building technologies that challenge U.S. dominance While China is engaged in a fierce struggle with the U.S. for AI supremacy, it is accelerating its development of other future technologies. In 2024, Chinese investors put nearly $1...

10.06

The name is the button.

An agent writes the code now, and a human thumb hovers over Accept all a hundred times a day. The honest question of this decade is what, exactly, you just accepted. So I read the diff.

Eight years as a backend engineer in Stockholm, back in Tokyo since 2023, and I still ship something small most nights, usually badly. My one rule: the only real review of a model is the thing you built with it. That is why there is no leaderboard on this site.

Around a hundred and forty sources come through — the labs' own posts, the papers, the tools, the runtimes and languages nobody is watching yet, the chip under the demo, and the newsletters people actually forward. What is moving gets counted so the week reads at a glance, and every few days I explain one mechanism in plain words.

A story here is a headline, a short excerpt, one image and the link to whoever wrote it. We never reproduce the post; the images belong to their authors. A post written in Japanese appears in Japanese, exactly as it was published, and the link goes to the original.

— Yuki Halvorsen, Tokyo