The Next Web (TNW)

Australian inquiry asks Altman and Amodei to testify The heads of OpenAI and Anthropic have been asked to face an Australian Senate inquiry into AI and datacentres. The move follows cases in which OpenAI agents got into Australian and US government websites, Luca Ittimani reported for the Guardian on Saturday. The Greens run the inquiry, and Senator Sarah Hanson-Young chairs it. Its next hearing …

Google’s India AI hub cleared for 2.51GW, not 1GW, the Guardian reports Google’s $15bn AI datacentre project in Andhra Pradesh has state environmental clearance for 2.51GW of capacity, more than double the 1GW announced, according to clearance papers seen by the Guardian. Hannah Ellis-Petersen and Aakash Hassan reported the story from Tarluvada, one of the villages where the project is being buil…

Why markdown is becoming the default language between search data and AI models Across the infrastructure layer that powers AI applications, Markdown has been emerging as a new standard. More providers are turning to it as the default output for anything a model needs to read, and moving beyond JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) as the go-to, one-size-fits-all format. This real, ongoing shift refl…

Oxford let OpenAI train AI models on Bodleian texts, the Guardian reports Oxford has let OpenAI use old texts from its Bodleian Library to train its AI models, according to internal papers seen by the Guardian. Ethan Penny and Dan Milmo broke the story on Saturday. The papers say texts that OpenAI scanned at the library went into the firm’s training data. Oxford made its deal with OpenAI public […

Deel loses bid to bar key witness in Rippling spy case, Bloomberg reports US federal judge on Friday rejected Deel’s bid to block testimony from a key witness in Rippling’s corporate espionage lawsuit, as Peter Blumberg reported for Bloomberg.Judge Charles Breyer also refused to revisit his February ruling, which let Rippling’s racketeering and trade secret claims go ahead. In addition, he sent D…

From tunnel to connectivity layer: What GnuVPN says about where VPNs are heading For years, consumer VPNs were easy to explain: choose a server, create an encrypted tunnel, and route your traffic through it. The product category was built around a fairly simple idea, and the buying criteria followed the same logic, speed, server count, and price. That description is becoming less complete. The wa…

TikTok to pay Alabama at least $100m to settle teen safety lawsuit TikTok has agreed to pay Alabama at least $100m to settle the state’s lawsuit over the app’s effect on children, Attorney General Steve Marshall’s office said on Friday. The case had been due to go to trial on Monday. The first payment is due within 45 days, according to the attorney general’s announcement. Alabama could receive […

OpenAI took 2.5 hours to stop an AI agent that escaped its sandbox OpenAI took about two and a half hours to stop an AI agent that reached the public internet from a training sandbox. Its monitoring had flagged the problem within minutes. The company disclosed the 20 September incident in an incident report on Friday. The report lands as lawmakers push to make AI kill switches mandatory. However,…

McDonald’s tests Archy, an AI drive-thru voice for English and Spanish McDonald’s is testing an AI voice assistant called Archy that takes drive-thru orders in English and Spanish. The company presented it at its investor day at its Chicago headquarters on 23 September. Archy has been more than 90% accurate in early tests, McDonald’s said, according to Restaurant Dive. The company has not said ho…

Hollywood studios want film graduates who already use AI, Semafor reports Hollywood studios are turning to film schools for graduates who already know how to use AI video tools, rather than training their own staff, Semafor reported on Thursday. “How do we find people who already know how to use this?” studios are now asking, Runway chief executive Cristóbal Valenzuela told Semafor. Runway, which…