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...

The sweeping midterm election victory by US Democrats has triggered warnings from analysts that an impending regulatory clampdown could derail the nation’s multi-trillion-dollar artificial intelligence data centre buildout. Wall Street forecasters slashed their projections for Big Tech infrastructure spending hours after the vote, cautioning that a wave of proposed project moratoria and tighter oversight could stall up to 30 per cent of planned US facilities and force developers to downscale...