Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence

On Monday, Elon Musk announced that he was merging two of his companies, SpaceX and xAI, in a deal said to be worth $1.25 trillion. The reason, Musk said in an announcement, was that in order for AI to grow, it needed to go to space. AI relies on "large terrestrial data centers" that run on "immense amounts of power and cooling," he said, which comes at great expense to the environment and community opposition.

Annual revenue will gain 61% to about $7.19 billion, the Denver-based company said Monday in a statement. Analysts, on average, estimated $6.27 billion. Palantir forecast sales in the current quarter of about $1.53 billion, which also beat expectations. The shares increased 4.8% at 10:01 a.m. in New York on Tuesday. The stock had dropped 29% from its November peak, reached right before Palantir last reported results, and was down 17% to start 2026 through the close.

Artificial intelligence (AI) machine learning is making a difference in assistive technology to help restore movement for the paralyzed. A new study in the American Institute of Physics journal APL Bioengineering shows how AI has the potential to restore lower-limb functions in those with severe spinal cord injuries (SCIs) by identifying patterns in brain signals captured noninvasively via electroencephalography (EEG).

Airrived, a startup promoting the 'agentic OS', is emerging from stealth following a successful funding round. Airrived's platform aims to combine SecOps, governance, identity management, IT, and business processes into a single AI-driven system. That's a laundry list of disciplines, but that comprehensiveness is precisely Airrived's goal. It hopes to create an operating layer on top of all kinds of IT components,

STL Partners predicts one AI-related growth area among telcos but warns of a slower adoption or pullbacks in three others. First, the AI optimism: Telcos will increasingly adopt voice-based AI, analysts believe. Already, some of the biggest global telcos are using embedded voice assistance in AI channels for enterprise customers. In 2026, telcos are likely to adopt voice technologies for customer calls as well. Immediate benefits could include live translation and integration of digital assistance services.

Musk has talked repeatedly about the need to speed development of technology that will allow data centers to operate in space to solve the problem of overcoming the huge costs in electricity and other resources in building and running AI systems on Earth. It's a goal that Musk said in his announcement of the deal could become much easier to reach with a combined company.

Recently, AI has infiltrated every corner of software delivery. It is writing code, tuning tests, fixing bugs, correlating logs and - most provocatively - making decisions inside CI/CD pipelines that used to be purely human territory. This isn't marketing hype - it is the inevitable result of handing models not just data, but influence. Influence without accountability is the sort of blind spot that turns innovation into chaos.

In September, the consulting firm Accenture made headlines when it acknowledged it had "exited" 11,000 employees who couldn't be retrained to adapt to AI. On a recent earnings call, CEO Julie Sweet explained the decision bluntly, saying that "the workforce needs new skills to use AI, and new talent strategies and related competencies must be developed." It's a tough-but-true reality that thanks to AI, tomorrow's jobs will look radically different than they do today.

The browser maker this week announced a new set of AI controls for Firefox, headlined by a global kill switch that lets users disable every current and future AI feature in one go. The change, rolling out with Firefox 148 later this month, is Mozilla's most direct admission that not everyone is thrilled about having generative AI stapled onto their everyday tools.

If you love using Firefly, Adobe's AI-first content creation suite, the company is opening up access for the next six weeks to give you even more generations. Through March 16, users can create unlimited images and videos up to 2K resolution via Firefly's website, Firefly Boards, and the free Firefly app for iOS and Android (more on each below). Firefly lets users generate royalty-free music, sound effects, and try features like the viral Generative Fill.

OpenAI has begun asking a small group of advertisers to commit a minimum spend of USD$200,000 (£148,000) as it tests advertising on ChatGPT, the company has confirmed. The initiative is being run as a tightly managed beta, with participation limited to a select number of brands. According to an OpenAI spokesperson, the restricted rollout is intentional and designed to assess which types of advertising deliver meaningful value to users within the ChatGPT experience.

My friend recently attended a funeral, and midway through the eulogy, he became convinced that it had been written by AI. There was the telltale proliferation of abstract nouns, a surfeit of assertions that the deceased was "not just X-he was Y" coupled with a lack of concrete anecdotes, and more appearances of the word collaborate than you would expect from a rec-league hockey teammate.

The pushback came after reports on a deal Nvidia disclosed in September, when it said it planned to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI. "We love working with NVIDIA and they make the best AI chips in the world," wrote Altman in a post on X on Tuesday. "We hope to be a gigantic customer for a very long time. I don't get where all this insanity is coming from," he added.

Meta has been using AI to improve its recommendation algorithm to keep users on its sites longer, which is leading to more opportunities to serve ads. At the same time, the company has developed a generative ads recommendation model (GEM) that can bring together a user's engagement across Meta's platforms to deliver more personalized ads. Meanwhile, it has started using sequence learning, which takes into account the order of users' interactions to help recognize a high intent to purchase.

In the age of AI, self-driving is one of the fastest-moving vehicle technologies. But to move fastand to do it safelycompanies need to throw gobs of cash at the problem. That's why it's so important for companies like Waymo to stuff their pockets. To be clear, Waymo doesn't need cash because it's failing. But a huge cash infusion will help it do one of the hardest things that any growing company, regardless of industry, needs to do: scale.

Paris prosecutors have raided the French offices of Elon Musk's social media platform X as part of a widening criminal investigation into how content is recommended on the platform and the role played by its AI systems. Police specialising in cybercrime, assisted by Europol, carried out the raid, according to the Paris prosecutor's office. Investigators said the operation was linked to an inquiry into X's recommendation algorithm, which has now been expanded to include scrutiny of the company's AI chatbot, Grok.