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Hassabis, who runs the AI unit of Alphabet Inc.’s Google, told Bloomberg Television that DeepSeek “seems to have only reported the cost of the final training round, which is a fraction of the total cost.”

The executive also shot down the idea that DeepSeek’s emergence upends the economics of AI development. “We don’t see any new silver bullet technologies,” Hassabis said on Monday, in Paris, at the Artificial Intelligence Action Summit. “DeepSeek is not an outlier on the efficiency curve.”

Trump, meantime, has tasked Vice President JD Vance with overseeing negotiations, with the hope Vance’s background in venture capital and Silicon Valley ties can facilitate a deal.

“There is now a process to be followed that will ensure a resolution to any concerns, while maintaining the operability of the TikTok platform,” a TikTok spokesman said in a statement Saturday, adding that TikTok is committed to that effort.

The top official at the US AI Safety Institute is stepping down, raising new uncertainty about the future of a key government group focused on artificial intelligence under the Trump administration.

Elizabeth Kelly, the director of the safety institute and a face of US AI policy on the world stage, is set to leave her position by the end of the week, according to people familiar with the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private information.

Sonos will release a streaming player that sources tell me could cost between $200 and $400 — a truly staggering price for its category.

I’ve seen images of the upcoming product, which is deep into development, and it’s about as nondescript as streaming hardware gets. Viewed from the top, the device is a flattened black square and slightly thicker than a deck of trading cards.

But the Android-based streamer, codenamed Pinewood, is designed to be more than just another competitor to the Apple TV 4K, Nvidia Shield, or Roku Ultra. Don’t get me wrong: streaming is a huge focus for the product. Sources familiar with Pinewood tell me it has a “beautiful” interface, despite the software being developed in partnership with a digital ads firm.

The 31-year-old Chinese actor had flown to Bangkok for what he expected to be a movie casting call. Instead, he was picked up at the airport and driven to a scam center in Myanmar’s Myawaddy, a notorious cyber-fraud hub across the border from Thailand.

Wang is among hundreds of thousands of people who have been trafficked into scam compounds – many run by Chinese crime syndicates – that have proliferated in civil war-torn Myanmar and other parts of Southeast Asia in recent years. Often lured by the promise of well-paying jobs or other enticing opportunities, victims are held against their will and forced to carry out online fraud schemes in heavily guarded compounds, where former detainees say beatings and torture are common.

Popular Roblox life simulation game “Brookhaven” has been acquired by game developer Voldex in a deal funded by Raine Partners and Shamrock Capital.

Created by Roblox user Wolfpaq in 2020, “Brookhaven” is described as a place to “hang out, roleplay, interact, craft unique narratives, live in big houses, drive fun vehicles and explore the city.”

A consistent top-three title in terms of concurrent users on Roblox, “Brookhaven” boasts 60 billion visits and more than 120 million monthly active players, per Voldex data.

Black and Latino people have long been underrepresented in the tech industry. Google’s 2024 diversity report said 5.7% of its U.S. employees were Black and 7.5% were Latino. Four years earlier, those figures were 3.7% and 5.9%, respectively.

Google said it was evaluating whether to continue releasing annual diversity reports, which it has done since 2014. The evaluation is part of a broader review of DEI-related grants, training and initiatives, including those that the email said “raise risk, or that aren’t as impactful as we’d hoped.”

The Senate Commerce Committee approved legislation Wednesday to ban children under 13 from social media. By limiting access, the bill hopes to address youth anxiety and depression linked to social media.

The panel approved the Kids Off Social Media Act — sponsored by the panel’s chair, Texas Republican Ted Cruz, and a senior Democrat on the panel, Hawaii’s Brian Schatz — by voice vote, clearing the way for consideration by the full Senate. Only Ed Markey (D-Mass.) asked to be recorded as a no on the bill.

Employees at the Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, were initially excluded from broader government offers to take deferred resignation offers, in part due to their role in national security and defending critical infrastructure.

However, on Wednesday, some CISA staffers were given the offer and just hours to decide whether to accept it, according to three sources who spoke to NPR on condition of anonymity.

Lawmakers announced Thursday they planned to introduce a bill to ban DeepSeek’s chatbot application from government-owned devices, over new security concerns that the app could provide user information to the Chinese government.

The legislation written by Reps. Darin LaHood, an Illinois Republican, and Josh Gottheimer, a New Jersey Democrat, is echoing a strategy that Congress used to ban Chinese-controlled TikTok from government devices, which marked the beginning of the effort to block the company from operating in the U.S.

As previously spotted, Google Search is working on a new “AI Mode” that offers a “persistent place” to ask more “open-ended / exploratory questions” and get generated AI Overview-style responses. Powered by Gemini 2.0, Google has begun testing this experience with employees.

9to5Google today saw an internal email that invites Google employees to dogfood (test) this “AI Mode.” Google describes the new experience as “Search intelligently research[ing] for you – organizing information into easy-to-digest breakdowns with links to explore content across the web.”

On Thursday, President Trump asked Republican lawmakers to end tax breaks on carried interest.

The tax break allows private equity and venture fund managers to treat their earnings from investments at a lower capital gains rate, rather than as ordinary income.

Newly unsealed emails allegedly provide the "most damning evidence" yet against Meta in a copyright case raised by book authors alleging that Meta illegally trained its AI models on pirated books.

Last month, Meta admitted to torrenting a controversial large dataset known as LibGen, which includes tens of millions of pirated books. But details around the torrenting were murky until yesterday, when Meta's unredacted emails were made public for the first time. The new evidence showed that Meta torrented "at least 81.7 terabytes of data across multiple shadow libraries through the site Anna’s Archive, including at least 35.7 terabytes of data from Z-Library and LibGen," the authors' court filing said. And "Meta also previously torrented 80.6 terabytes of data from LibGen."