The board of US AI chip giant Nvidia has announced an independent investigation as chief executive Jensen Huang said in a memo to employees that he had been unfaithful to his wife. Huang admitted to an extramarital affair and apologised to his family and colleagues in the memo, which the company published on its website on Sunday. “I was unfaithful to my wife. My actions hurt her and our children. There is no excuse for what I did. I am deeply sorry,” Huang wrote. He apologised and pledged to...

Artificial intelligence models will soon be powerful enough to master biology, presenting both benefits and serious risks, Tencent Holdings’ chief AI scientist and former OpenAI star researcher Vinces Yao Shunyu said during a rare public appearance on Saturday. The assessment comes as frontier AI systems are increasingly being applied to medicine and biology, which could accelerate discovery of new drugs and other treatments. However, experts also warn that malicious actors could use AI to...

The driver’s seat was empty and the steering wheel was turning on its own. Sitting in the back of a Pony.ai robotaxi in Shenzhen, I felt a flicker of nervousness. But as the car glided into traffic, the initial unease gave way to an appreciation of something far less futuristic: the blissful absence of small talk with the driver. My test rides in two of China’s major tech hubs – with Pony.ai in Shenzhen and Baidu’s Apollo Go in Beijing – offered a first-hand experience of how autonomous vehicles...

China’s pure-play artificial intelligence chipmakers crossed an important milestone in the third quarter as several firms swung into profit, but severe supply chain hurdles and soaring memory costs cloud their long-term growth prospects. Domestic graphics processing unit (GPU) developers including Moore Threads, MetaX and Iluvatar CoreX are racing to fill the market void left by Nvidia, whose high-end processors face strict US export controls. These home-grown firms are competing fiercely to win...