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Sam Cooper-Gray, The IndependentWhat do you think about when you picture a British female entrepreneur? Is it Trinny Woodall launching Trinny London after a long TV career or Deborah Meaden from Dragons' Den? Maybe it's
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Pope Leo XIV has produced his first encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas,” 42,300 words of it in the English version.He speaks of the need to value humans and protect their roles in society. AI can do much
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James Rosen, Tribune News ServiceI’m not a knee-jerk anti-tax fellow. While no one enjoys paying taxes, I recognise that federal, state and local levies fund a broad range of critical needs, from schools, parks, libraries
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All roads lead to Beijing these days. Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Sheikh Khaled Bin Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan visited China in April, meeting with President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Qiang. During this trip
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There’s a new formula for achieving global success in the world of pop as traditional routes have become somewhat outdated. This week we are taking a look at some of the biggest names dominating the
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In the IPL 26, a most delightful surprise has been the excitement and ebullience of children attending the matches. Many of the children are aged around eight to twelve. Yet, they wear the uniforms of
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When AMD CEO Lisa Su arrived in China last week just days after Nvidia’s CEO left, she kept a much lower profile than Jensen Huang, who drew crowds in the centre of the capital as he posed for photos and ate local delicacies like Beijing-style soybean paste noodles. Their contrasting approaches show two very different forms of corporate diplomacy around the world’s most politically sensitive artificial intelligence chip market, where their fortunes have also been diverging. Just a year ago at the annual Computex trade show in Taipei, Huang said Nvidia’s market share in China had dropped to 50% from 95% due to US export controls. Since then, that has effectively fallen to zero, he said this year, amid Beijing’s push for self-reliance in advanced AI chips. Huang has previously estimated that China’s AI chip market would be worth $50bn this year. By contrast, AMD commands 4% of China’s AI chip market, according to IDC, a research firm, and it has more routes into the country than AI accelerators, which are Nvidia’s mainstay. AMD can serve Chinese customers with central processing units (CPUs), consumer graphics processing units (GPUs), AI chipsets and programmable integrated circuits called FPGAs, said Lian Jye Su, chief analyst at Omdia, a tech research firm. That gives AMD access to more types of system architecture as AI workloads spread beyond training large models into broader enterprise use, he said. With the two US tech CEOs showing up in Taipei before the Computex event, their diverging China playbooks appear more pronounced, as both over the past week unveiled big investment plans in Taiwan, home to the world’s largest contract chip manufacturing firm, TSMC. Their contrasting approach to China also carries an unusual personal dimension: both hail from Taiwan and have said publicly that they are distant relatives. AMD’s announcement on its Taiwan investment followed a flurry of meetings that Su had in China last week, where she spoke at an AMD developer event and met customers and partners. She also had a publicly announced meeting with Chinese Vice-Premier He Lifeng, who said Beijing welcomes companies including AMD to “seize the opportunities presented by China’s development and deepen mutually beneficial co-operation.” Beijing, however, did not have a comparable senior-level meeting for Huang, who was in Beijing around the summit between China’s Xi Jinping and U.S. President Donald Trump on May 14 and 15. That silence stood out because Huang has been the more vocal of the two executives in arguing that US chip curbs risk handing China’s AI market to domestic rivals like Huawei. An adviser to multinational CEOs with business in China, who declined to be identified so they could discuss specific executives, said Su’s lower-profile approach was better suited to the current geopolitical environment. The adviser added that the politicization of US-China commercial ties and volatility in public sentiment had raised reputational risks for global chip CEOs. Su said last week that China accounts for about 20% of AMD’s revenue and remains important across PCs, gaming and some data-centre segments. “Frankly, you look at the size of the market and the size of our portfolio, and we’ll continue to partner very closely with our Chinese customers,” she said. While Huawei and other domestic chipmakers jump into the void left by Nvidia, AMD’s Shanghai developer event on May 19 suggests the Santa Clara, California-based company is also looking to fill the gap. During the event, Su promoted ROCm, AMD’s open-source software stack, to Chinese developers at a time when many AI firms are seeking alternatives to Nvidia’s CUDA ecosystem because the most advanced Nvidia hardware is hard to obtain. However, there are signs that the opening remains limited for now. AMD’s software ecosystem is far less mature than Nvidia’s and US export controls also restrict the US firm from selling its most advanced AI chips to China.
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Anthropic logo seen in file photo. Reuters Early fears that Anthropic’s new AI model, Mythos, could dramatically turbocharge hacking are looking overstated a month after its release. The company warned at launch in April that Mythos had uncovered thousands of software vulnerabilities -- including flaws across every major operating system and browser -- and said the fallout from its spread could be severe. Governments took notice. Officials in multiple countries huddled with banks to assess risks, and by early May the White House was weighing rules to control how new models are released after safety testing. But inside the cybersecurity world, the reaction has been more measured -- with some saying the broader response has been overblown, and that access to a Mythos-level large language model will not immediately enable hacking operations previously out of reach for bad actors. “I think there’s a really big communication gap between practitioners and policymakers,” said Isaac Evans, founder and CEO of software security firm Semgrep. The model represents “a real technical advance,” he said, but the response “is not substantiated by what we actually know about how those capabilities will translate in the field.” To be sure, experts who have used the model in controlled environments have reported substantial improvement in vulnerability discovery, and banking industry IT staffs are working to fix scores of system weaknesses in large and small bank technology stacks, Reuters reported on May 12. The worry has been heightened further by continued revelations of criminal and state-linked hacking cases involving AI, including Google’s announcement on May 11 that it had detected the first-ever case of a major cybercrime group using AI to discover a previously unknown software flaw and planning a mass exploitation event. The gap between the extent of the threat seen by security professionals and that seen by policymakers has fueled a narrative that puts Mythos at the centre of a looming security crisis - even as comparable capabilities have been available for some time. “We’ve been able to use AI to find more bugs than we know what to do with for months if not years,” said one person with extensive vulnerability research experience with early access to Mythos. The challenge is not finding vulnerabilities, they said, but validating, prioritizing and fixing them without breaking systems. Organisations’ ability to process and validate a flood of newly discovered vulnerabilities is generally not where it needs to be, the person said, and that is the bigger challenge introduced by Mythos-level models, even as they acknowledged that the model is an improvement. “It is capable of finding more with a weaker prompt than the models that came before it,” the person said, referring to the instructions a user provides the model to attempt to achieve a goal. Existing models required more detailed and complicated instructions, the person said, meaning the barrier to entry has been lowered. Anthony Grieco, senior vice-president and chief security and trust officer at Cisco, said one new and helpful aspect of Mythos is its ability not only to identify vulnerabilities, but to scan much faster vast amounts of code for those vulnerabilities and help experienced practitioners lower the rate of false positives. This, he said, allows defenders to focus on the most pressing cyber risks in their contexts. The model also has fewer guardrails than previous models, allowing users to craft more specific instructions that enable activities that previous models would not. Grieco said to fully maximize the power of Mythos, organizations need both proper computing power as well as a rigorous harness, a term used to describe the computer environment within an organization where a large language model runs with specific instructions and limitations. “If you have a Formula One car but you’ve only ever driven a bike, you might be able to get it to go straight,” Grieco said. “But you’re not going to maximize the track time out of the gate.” Even so, Anthropic’s framing - and its decision to invite select firms to test defenses under a program dubbed Project Glasswing - helped push the conversation about the model well beyond typical security circles. The result: an all-hands-on-deck response that amplified both the perceived threat and the company’s stature, even as the Pentagon labeled Anthropic a supply-chain risk while other parts of the government clamored for access. The White House is discussing with AI labs more widespread use of their technology, a White House official told Reuters. An Anthropic spokesperson said the company is working “closely with the US government to quickly advance shared priorities,” and working with the government to give more parties access to Mythos. Mythos - and to some extent OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 - has dominated national security discussions about AI. But those debates often gloss over a simpler point: vulnerability-hunting AI is not new. The real problem is what comes next.
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One of the reasons why Sir Tony Blair was Labour’s longest-serving and, certainly in domestic matters, most successful prime minister is that, both while preparing for power and then while in it, he possessed an
