Author: Art Ryan

The Dubai AI Festival 2025 proudly welcomes Dr. Antoine Bordes, Vice President of AI at Helsing, as one of its distinguished speakers. A leading figure in global artificial intelligence research and application, Dr. Bordes brings deep expertise spanning frontier AI science, strategic defense technology, and ethical innovation. His unique career—combining academic rigor, industry-defining AI research, and cutting-edge applications in security—positions him at the intersection of some of today’s most urgent and high-impact AI conversations. From FAIR to Helsing: A Journey Through the Core of AI Advancement Before joining Helsing, a European defense AI company building software to protect democratic values,…

The Dubai AI Festival 2025 is honored to welcome Gary Kazantsev, Head of Quant Technology Strategy in the Office of the CTO at Bloomberg, as one of its distinguished speakers. A recognized leader in applied machine learning, computational linguistics, and financial technology, Kazantsev brings a rare blend of deep technical knowledge and real-world impact to the stage. With a career defined by pioneering innovation at the intersection of AI, language, and quantitative finance, his session promises to be one of the most anticipated of the event. Shaping the Future of AI in Global Finance In his current role at Bloomberg,…

The Dubai AI Festival 2025 is excited to welcome Ahshad Jussawala, a seasoned technology leader and entrepreneur, as one of its featured speakers. With over 20 years of techno-functional leadership, Jussawala has built a career at the intersection of conversational AI, digital transformation, and customer experience, helping organizations leverage the power of intelligent systems to engage, personalize, and scale. His keynote will provide compelling insights into how AI-powered interactions are reshaping digital engagement and what it takes to build conversational experiences that deliver both utility and delight. A Career Forged in Innovation and Impact Ahshad Jussawala’s journey spans leadership roles…

The Dubai AI Festival 2025 continues to position itself as a platform for transformational ideas and policy-driven innovation. Among this year’s key speakers is Kaustubh Dhavse, Joint Secretary in the Government of Maharashtra and Officer on Special Duty (OSD) to the Chief Minister—a pivotal figure in India’s governance ecosystem and a champion of data-driven infrastructure delivery. As the head of the Chief Minister’s War Room, Dhavse has become instrumental in shaping how India’s second-most populous state leverages intelligence, coordination, and monitoring frameworks to execute high-impact infrastructure and development projects. Architect of Maharashtra’s Execution Engine Kaustubh Dhavse leads the CM’s War…

As artificial intelligence moves from innovation to regulation, the Dubai AI Festival 2025 is set to feature a critical voice in the global policy arena: Kai Zenner, Head of Office and Digital Policy Adviser to MEP Axel Voss (European People’s Party Group) in the European Parliament. Recognized as one of the most engaged advocates for ethical, innovation-friendly, and future-proof digital policy in the EU, Zenner is at the heart of Europe’s most consequential tech legislation. Shaping Europe’s Digital Transition Describing himself as a “digital enthusiast,” Kai Zenner is deeply involved in the European Union’s digital transformation, where he focuses on…

Some ChatGPT users have noticed a strange phenomenon recently: Occasionally, the chatbot refers to them by name as it reasons through problems. That wasn’t the default behavior previously, and several users claim ChatGPT is mentioning their names despite never having been told what to call them. Reviews are mixed. One user, software developer and AI enthusiast Simon Willison, called the feature “creepy and unnecessary.” Another developer, Nick Dobos, said he “hated it.” A cursory search of X turns up scores of users confused by — and wary of — ChatGPT’s first-name basis behavior. “It’s like a teacher keeps calling my name, LOL,” wrote one user. “Yeah,…

OpenAI is upgrading ChatGPT’s “memory” again. In a changelog and support pages on OpenAI’s website Thursday, the company quietly announced “Memory with Search,” a feature that lets ChatGPT draw on memories — details from past conversations, such as your favorite foods — to inform queries when the bot searches the web. The update comes shortly after OpenAI beefed up ChatGPT’s long-in-the-tooth memory tool with the ability to reference a user’s entire chat history. It’s seemingly a part of OpenAI’s ongoing effort to differentiate ChatGPT from rival chatbots like Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Gemini, the latter of which also offers a memory feature. As OpenAI explains in its documentation, when Memory with Search is enabled…

When news broke that OpenAI was in talks to acquire AI coding company Windsurf for $3 billion, one of the first questions on the mind of anyone following the space was likely: “Why not buy Cursor creator Anysphere instead?” After all, OpenAI Startup Fund has been an investor in Anysphere, the maker of Cursor, since the quickly growing coding assistant’s seed round in late 2023. (Anysphere is often referred to by its product name, Cursor.) It turns out that OpenAI indeed approached Anysphere in 2024 and again earlier this year about a potential acquisition, according to a report from CNBC. The talks failed. Instead,…

Artificial intelligence (AI) security startup Pillar Security has raised $9 million in seed funding to expand its research and development (R&D) and go-to-market efforts. Pillar Security’s solution is designed to meet the needs of a new age in which “software has gained agency and data itself has become executable,” Pillar Security CEO and Co-founder Dor Sarig said in a Wednesday (April 16) press release. “Pillar’s technology, backed by real-world AI threat intelligence, is built with this understanding, delivering a new class of protection designed explicitly for AI-related security risks,” Sarig said. “We are redefining application security to match the agentic and autonomous software of the Intelligence Age.”…

The Transportation Security Administration is developing an internal artificial intelligence chatbot, while also relying on its innovation lab to do “hands-on” tests of different AI use cases. Kristin Ruiz, deputy chief information officer at TSA, said the agency’s IT office has focused on training and educating its existing personnel on artificial intelligence, while partnering with other Department of Homeland Security components and industry. “We’re looking at all the options available to us to see what we can do for the biggest bang of our buck,” Ruiz said during an April 17 breakfast hosted by AFCEA Bethesda in Tysons Corner, Va.…

As artificial intelligence continues to reshape global economies, governance, and societal norms, the Dubai AI Festival 2025 is honored to host Lord Clement-Jones, a prominent UK parliamentarian and globally respected voice on AI policy, ethics, and regulation. His contributions to AI discourse in the UK and beyond have helped frame the ongoing conversation on how nations can embrace intelligent technologies while safeguarding public trust and human values. A Parliamentarian Shaping the Future of AI Governance Lord Clement-Jones serves as the Liberal Democrat House of Lords spokesperson for Science, Innovation and Technology, where he plays a leading role in steering forward-thinking…

As governments around the world embrace artificial intelligence to drive digital transformation and inclusive growth, the Dubai AI Festival 2025 is pleased to announce Jayesh Ranjan, a prominent government official from the Indian state of Telangana, as a featured speaker. Renowned for his trailblazing work in public sector innovation and technology policy, Ranjan stands at the forefront of India’s AI evolution. A Leader in India’s Digital Governance Movement As a senior member of the Government of Telangana, based in the tech-forward city of Hyderabad, Jayesh Ranjan oversees the crucial portfolios of Information Technology and Industrial Development. Under his guidance, Telangana…

The Dubai AI Festival 2025 is proud to announce Abhinav Shashank, CEO and Co-founder of Innovaccer, as one of its distinguished speakers. A transformative figure in healthcare technology, Shashank is redefining how the world thinks about data, care delivery, and the power of artificial intelligence in revolutionizing the global healthcare ecosystem. Engineering the Future of Health Through Innovation Abhinav Shashank leads Innovaccer, a San Francisco-based healthcare technology company that has rapidly emerged as a national leader in population health management. With a mission to make healthcare 100% consumer-centric and value-driven, he is leveraging technology to solve some of the most…

As the world turns to artificial intelligence to solve complex challenges and fuel innovation, the Dubai AI Festival 2025 is honored to welcome Thomas Pramotedham, the CEO of Presight, as a keynote speaker. Recognized globally as a visionary in digital transformation, Pramotedham leads with purpose—driving technological innovation to reshape societies and strengthen national capabilities across diverse regions. The Visionary Behind Presight’s Global Impact At the helm of Presight, a pioneering data analytics and AI company, Thomas Pramotedham has emerged as a transformative leader dedicated to harnessing technology for societal good. Under his guidance, Presight has become a key player in…

In a bid to more aggressively compete with rival AI companies like Google, OpenAI is launching Flex processing, an API option that provides lower AI model usage prices in exchange for slower response times and “occasional resource unavailability.” Flex processing, which is available in beta for OpenAI’s recently released o3 and o4-mini reasoning models, is aimed at lower-priority and “non-production” tasks such as model evaluations, data enrichment, and asynchronous workloads, OpenAI says. It reduces API costs by exactly half. For o3, Flex processing is $5/M input tokens (~750,000 words) and $20/M output tokens versus the standard $10/M input tokens and $40/M output tokens.…

On Thursday, weeks after launching its most powerful AI model yet, Gemini 2.5 Pro, Google published a technical report showing the results of its internal safety evaluations. However, the report is light on the details, experts say, making it difficult to determine which risks the model might pose. Technical reports provide useful — and unflattering, at times — info that companies don’t always widely advertise about their AI. By and large, the AI community sees these reports as good-faith efforts to support independent research and safety evaluations. Google takes a different safety reporting approach than some of its AI rivals, publishing technical reports only…

Stargate, a $500 billion project headed up by OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank to build AI data centers and other AI infrastructure in the U.S., is considering investments in the U.K. and elsewhere overseas, according to a Financial Times report. While Stargate was initially launched as a way to boost U.S. AI infrastructure, the project is allegedly weighing international expansion. In addition to the U.K., Germany and France are on the table, per the Financial Times’ reporting. Stargate remains focused on the U.S. at the moment, to be clear, as originally pitched — and it’s still in the process of raising its…

There’s a somewhat concerning new trend going viral: People are using ChatGPT to figure out the location shown in pictures. This week, OpenAI released its newest AI models, o3 and o4-mini, both of which can uniquely “reason” through uploaded images. In practice, the models can crop, rotate, and zoom in on photos — even blurry and distorted ones — to thoroughly analyze them. These image-analyzing capabilities, paired with the models’ ability to search the web, make for a potent location-finding tool. Users on X quickly discovered that o3, in particular, is quite good at deducing cities, landmarks, and even restaurants and bars from…

Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, is slowly bringing its Grok chatbot to parity with top rivals like ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini. On Wednesday night, xAI announced a “memory” feature for Grok that enables the bot to remember details from past conversations with a user. Now if you ask Grok for recommendations, it’ll give more personalized responses, assuming you’ve used it enough to allow it to “learn” your preferences. ChatGPT has long had a similar memory feature, which was recently upgraded to reference a user’s entire chat history. Gemini, too, has persistent memory to tailor its replies to individual people. “Memories are transparent,” reads a post from the official Grok account…

The Trump administration is considering new restrictions on the Chinese AI lab DeepSeek that would limit it from buying Nvidia’s AI chips and potentially bar Americans from accessing its AI services, The New York Times reported on Wednesday. The restrictions are part of the Trump administration’s effort to compete with China on AI. Months after DeepSeek jolted both Silicon Valley and Wall Street, U.S. officials seem to be weighing several options to limit China’s access to American technologies and consumers. On Tuesday, the White House moved to restrict more of Nvidia’s AI chip sales to China, strengthening rules created by the Biden administration. DeepSeek’s…