All civil servants in England and Wales to get AI training | Artificial intelligence (AI) | The Guardian – “More than 400,000 civil servants will be informed of the training on Monday afternoon, which is part of a drive by the chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster, Pat McFadden, to overhaul the civil service and improve its productivity”.
All civil servants to get AI training – “For the latest One Big Thing project, officials will be trained on AI and tasked with assessing how they can use the tech to streamline their own work”.
Which tasks do public servants spend too long on? And how can AI help? – “The government is placing high hopes on the potential for AI to improve productivity in public services. But where can it be most of use?”
UK tackles AI skills gap through NVIDIA partnership – “Research unveiled during the recent London Tech Week showed something many tech observers have long suspected: regions blessed with robust AI and data centre infrastructure tend to enjoy stronger economic growth across the board”.
What is in the UK-NVIDIA deal? - UKTN – “At London Tech Week, Jensen Huang committed to supporting British AI”.
Northern Ireland gets Office for AI and Digital | UKAuthority – “The Office has been set up as a key element of the Programme for Government 2024-2027, which includes a commitment to investing in digital capabilities”.
Local government AI trial nets £7.5m in savings - UKTN – “A successful AI integration programme in Derby County Council could lead to more widespread adoption”.
UK ICO publishes AI and biometrics strategy | Computer Weekly – “The UK data regulator has outlined how it will approach the regulation of artificial intelligence and biometric technologies”.
MoJ team develops AI and Data Science Ethics Framework | UKAuthority – “It has been developed in collaboration with The Alan Turing Institute’s Public Policy Programme, building on the guidance from the Government Digital Service and the Office for Artificial Intelligence on how to build and use AI in the public sector”.
‘A major step forward’: Keir Starmer’s £187 million tech skills drive welcomed by UK industry | IT Pro – “The ‘TechFirst’ program aims to shore up the UK’s digital skills to meet future AI needs“.
UK banks to test AI in 'supercharged sandbox' – “The FCA has given banks the okay to test artificial intelligence, as part of a push to encourage more risk-taking in the UK financial sector”.
UK sees Sam Altman’s eye-scan orbs hit streets to outsmart AI fakes – “The project faces privacy concerns but says it keeps data safe and works with UK regulators".
This Week’s Top 5 Stories in AI | AI Magazine - "announcements from Nvidia GTC, Kier Starmer’s £2bn pledge for AI growth, ChatGPT’s outage and AI CEO’s plans and concerns".
'The illusion of thinking': Apple research finds AI models collapse and give up with hard puzzles | Mashable - New artificial intelligence research from Apple shows AI reasoning models may not be "thinking" so well after all”.
With the launch of o3-pro, let’s talk about what AI “reasoning” actually does - Ars Technica – “New studies reveal pattern-matching reality behind the AI industry's reasoning claims”.
The best AI for coding in 2025 (including a new winner - and what not to use) | ZDNET – Latest version of this LLM comparison, with Copilot Chat much improved.
Devs mostly welcome AI coding tools but don't trust them • The Register – “A survey from AI biz Qodo finds robo-coding productivity gains are unevenly distributed”.
Wikipedia pauses AI summaries after editors skewer the idea – “Editor comments in the WMF's announcement (via 404 Media) ranged from "Yuck" to "Grinning with horror."
Wikipedia Tries to Calm Fury Over New AI-Generated Summaries Proposal – “The denizens of the open web don't want anything to do with AI”.
China Takes on Student Cheating by Shutting Off AI Nationwide During Exams – “Centralized intelligence meets centralized government”.
The Meta AI app is a privacy disaster | TechCrunch - "It sounds like the start of a 21st-century horror film: Your browser history has been public all along, and you had no idea".
What the AI coding assistants get right, and where they go wrong | InfoWorld – “ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Windsurf, RooCode, and Claude Code all have their strengths, but no single assistant ticks all the boxes”.
AI’s metrics question — Benedict Evans – “With every platform shift, we want to measure the growth but we’re confused about what to measure”.
Microsoft-backed Mistral launches European AI cloud to compete with AWS and Azure | VentureBeat –“Mistral AI, the French artificial intelligence startup, announced Wednesday a sweeping expansion into AI infrastructure that positions the company as Europe’s answer to American cloud computing giants”.
Physicists use AI to hunt for UAPs and UFOs | Popular Science – “Their new interdisciplinary method is inspired by the search for dark matter”.
Google develops AI model for forecasting tropical cyclones - SiliconANGLE – “During internal tests, Google successfully used the algorithm to predict the paths of four recent cyclones. For two of the storms, the model generated accurate forecasts nearly a week ahead of time”.
And finally…Chap claims Atari 2600 beat ChatGPT at chess • The Register – “1.19MHz eight-bit CPU trounced modern GPUs – can you do better with your retro-tech?”