Author: Art Ryan

Surging artificial intelligence (AI) use will drive up demand for fossil fuels to power data centres, but widespread adoption of AI applications could reduce greenhouse gas emissions overall, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said in a new report. Power-hungry data centres will consume as much electricity by 2030 as Japan uses today – more than double their current demand – largely as a result of the global AI rush, the Paris-based watchdog forecasted. While renewable energy sources – combined with batteries – are expected to supply half of the additional electricity, increased demand from data centres will be a “significant” driver…

Google has announced deeper integration of Gemini AI into Docs. With this, the Google Workspace app gets two new features, including one that lets users create podcast-style audio versions of their documents. There is also a new “Help me refine” tool in Docs, that Google said acts like a writing coach. Google Docs with Gemini AI: New features Audio This upcoming feature will help bring audio generation capabilities directly into Google Docs. Google said that soon, users will be able to create full audio versions of their documents. Additionally, it will also give users the option to choose podcast-style overviews for…

Dubai, UAE – April 2025 – Eshara, an innovative tech company dedicated to creating AI-powered Arabic Sign Language solutions, will proudly exhibit at the Dubai AI Festival 2025, scheduled for April 23–24 at Madinat Jumeirah, Dubai. Designed with a mission to support People of Determination, Eshara’s groundbreaking platform is a step toward making the UAE more accessible, inclusive, and disability-friendly through technology. Bridging Communication Gaps with Artificial Intelligence Eshara’s solution harnesses the power of AI and computer vision to interpret and translate Arabic Sign Language in real time, enabling seamless communication between individuals with hearing impairments and the wider community.…

Dubai, UAE – April 2025 – AI Guru, a world-class AI education platform founded by Ritesh Vajariya, one of Silicon Valley’s most respected AI visionaries, will be an official exhibitor at the Dubai AI Festival 2025, taking place April 23–24 at Madinat Jumeirah, Dubai. AI Guru is on a mission to democratize access to high-impact AI knowledge—bridging the global skills gap and empowering a new generation of AI leaders. A Visionary Behind the Movement Founded by Ritesh Vajariya, the current Head of Generative AI Strategy at Cerebras Systems, AI Guru brings decades of deep industry expertise and a passion for…

Dubai, UAE – April 2025 – Skyloop Cloud, a leading provider of cloud consulting, DevOps, and AI solutions across AWS, Azure, and Huawei Cloud, is proud to announce its participation as an exhibitor at the Dubai AI Festival 2025, taking place on April 23–24 at Madinat Jumeirah, Dubai. With a mission to enable businesses to scale smarter and faster, Skyloop Cloud is empowering the next wave of enterprise innovation through its robust, multi-cloud expertise. Elevating Cloud Transformation with AI and DevOps Skyloop Cloud stands at the intersection of cloud engineering, automation, and artificial intelligence. By combining cloud-native architecture with intelligent…

Dubai, UAE – April 2025 – Nyukt.AI, a trailblazing platform at the forefront of Agentic AI development, is set to exhibit at the highly anticipated Dubai AI Festival 2025, taking place on April 23–24 at Madinat Jumeirah, Dubai. Nyukt.AI is redefining what’s possible with autonomous systems, offering cutting-edge tools to build next-generation AI agents that can reason, act, and evolve—revolutionizing automation, decision-making, and enterprise AI deployments. Powering the Future of Autonomous Intelligence Nyukt.AI specializes in enabling organizations to develop agentic systems—AI agents capable of independent goal execution, real-time learning, and adaptive responses to dynamic environments. These agents are the next…

Dubai, UAE – April 2025 – Understand Tech, a rising force in secure AI innovation, is set to exhibit at the Dubai AI Festival 2025, happening on April 23–24 at Madinat Jumeirah, Dubai. With a mission to make AI accessible, secure, and scalable for every business—regardless of size or technical expertise—Understand Tech is empowering the future of enterprise intelligence with its groundbreaking no-code AI Assistant platform. AI That’s Secure, Scalable, and Shockingly Simple At the intersection of artificial intelligence and cybersecurity, Understand Tech is redefining how businesses deploy and manage AI. With deep-rooted expertise in secure architecture, the company has…

Africa’s Technological Leap Forward From April 14 to 16, 2025, GITEX Africa returns to the vibrant city of Marrakech, Morocco, uniting the most influential voices in technology, innovation, and policy. As the largest tech and startup event on the continent, it marks a pivotal moment in Africa’s digital evolution—spotlighting its booming tech economy and an ambitious, youth-driven innovation force. Once seen as an emerging player, Africa is now a leading force in global tech. Countries like Nigeria, Kenya, and Egypt are driving powerful startup ecosystems, with surging venture capital investments positioning the continent as a global innovation hub. GITEX Africa…

Just a few weeks after OpenAI said it would adopt rival Anthropic’s standard for connecting AI models to the systems where data resides, Google is following suit. In a post on X on Wednesday, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis announced that Google will add support for Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol, or MCP, to its Gemini models and SDK. He gave no timeline. “MCP is a good protocol and it’s rapidly becoming an open standard for the AI agentic era,” wrote Hassabis. “Look forward to developing it further with the MCP team and others in the industry.” MCP lets models draw data from…

The dramatic suit between OpenAI and its estranged co-founder, billionaire Elon Musk, shows no sign of letting up. In a filing Wednesday, attorneys for OpenAI and the other defendants in the case, including CEO Sam Altman, called for Musk to be enjoined from “further unlawful and unfair action” and “held responsible for the damage he has already caused” to the defendants. “OpenAI is resilient,” reads the filing for a counter-suit. “But Musk’s actions have taken a toll. Should his campaign persist, greater harm is threatened — to OpenAI’s ability to govern in service of its mission, to the relationships that…

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang appears to have struck a deal with the Trump administration to avoid export restrictions on the company’s H20 AI chips. The H20, the most advanced Nvidia-produced AI chip that can still be exported from the U.S. to China, was reportedly spared thanks to a promise from Huang to invest in new AI data centers in the U.S. According to NPR, Huang made the proposal during a dinner at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort sometime last week. Nvidia declined to comment. Many in the semiconductor industry feared H20s, which are modified to have lower performance than other Nvidia chips, were headed for…

OpenAI co-founder and former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever’s new AI startup, Safe Superintelligence (SSI), is using Google Cloud’s TPU chips to power its AI research, part of a new partnership the companies announced on Wednesday in a press release. Google Cloud says SSI is using TPUs to “accelerate its research and development efforts toward building a safe, superintelligent AI.” Cloud providers are chasing a handful of unicorn AI startups that spend hundreds of millions of dollars on computing power every year to train AI foundation models. SSI’s deal with Google Cloud suggests the former will spend a large chunk of its…

OpenAI thinks AI benchmarks are broken. Now the company is launching a program to fix how AI models are scored. The new OpenAI Pioneers Program will focus on creating evaluations for AI models that “set the bar for what good looks like,” as OpenAI phrased it in a blog post. “As the pace of AI adoption accelerates across industries, there is a need to understand and improve its impact in the world,” the company continued in its post. “Creating domain-specific evals are one way to better reflect real-world use cases, helping teams assess model performance in practical, high-stakes environments.” As the recent controversy with…

Anthropic announced on Wednesday that it’s launching a new, very expensive subscription plan for its AI chatbot Claude: Max. An answer to OpenAI’s $200-a-month ChatGPT Pro tier, Max comes with higher usage limits than Anthropic’s $20-per-month Claude Pro subscription, as well as priority access to the company’s newest AI models and features. A bit confusingly, Max comes in two flavors with different price points and usage limits. There’s a $100-per-month Max tier with 5x higher rate limits than Claude Pro and a $200-per-month Max option with 20x higher rate limits. Frontier AI model developers are looking for new ways to increase revenue…

A study went viral several months ago for implying that, as AI becomes increasingly sophisticated, it develops “value systems” — systems that lead it to, for example, prioritize its own well-being over humans. A more recent paper out of MIT pours cold water on that hyperbolic notion, drawing the conclusion that AI doesn’t, in fact, hold any coherent values to speak of. The co-authors of the MIT study say their work suggests that “aligning” AI systems — that is, ensuring models behave in desirable, dependable ways — could be more challenging than is often assumed. AI as we know it today hallucinates and imitates,…

YouTube on Wednesday announced an expansion of its pilot program designed to identify and manage AI-generated content that features the “likeness,” including the face, of creators, artists, and other famous or influential figures. The company is also publicly declaring its support for the legislation known as the NO FAKES ACT, which aims to tackle the problem of AI-generated replicas that simulate someone’s image or voice to mislead others and create harmful content. The company says it collaborated on the bill with its sponsors, Sens. Chris Coons (D-DE) and Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), and other industry players, including the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA)…

Hosting platform WordPress.com on Wednesday launched a new AI website builder that allows anyone to create a functioning website using an AI chat-style interface. The feature, which is being made available to WordPress users for free, is targeted at entrepreneurs, freelancers, bloggers, and others who need a professional online presence, the company says. At this time, the AI builder is not capable of creating more advanced websites like those needed for e-commerce stores or others with complex integrations. While AI-powered website builders are no longer new, the addition is designed to help WordPress better compete with companies like Squarespace and Wix, which offer…

Google is upgrading Workspace, its suite of cloud-based productivity tools, with new AI capabilities. The suite is gaining Workspace Flows, a tool designed to automate multistep processes such as updating spreadsheets and digging through documents for information. Flows can tap Gems, Google’s brand of custom AI-powered chatbots, to handle specialized tasks, and it can also integrate with apps like Google Drive to retrieve data. “Simply describe what you need in plain language, and Workspace Flows will design and build sophisticated, logic-driven flows,” Yulie Kwon Kim, VP of product for Google Workspace, wrote in a blog post provided to TechCrunch. “We’re also…

Google is releasing a new AI model designed to deliver strong performance with a focus on efficiency. The model, Gemini 2.5 Flash, will soon launch in Vertex AI, Google’s AI development platform. The company says it offers “dynamic and controllable” computing, allowing developers to adjust processing time based on the complexity of queries. “[You can tune] the speed, accuracy, and cost balance for your specific needs,” Google wrote in a blog post provided to TechCrunch. “This flexibility is key to optimizing Flash performance in high-volume, cost-sensitive applications.” Gemini 2.5 Flash arrives as the cost of flagship AI models continues trending upward.…

Gemini Code Assist, Google’s AI coding assistant, is gaining new “agentic” capabilities in preview. During its Cloud Next conference on Wednesday, Google said Code Assist can now deploy new AI “agents” that can take multiple steps to accomplish complex programming tasks. These agents can create applications from product specifications in Google Docs, for example, or perform code transformations from one language to another. Code Assist is now available in Android Studio in addition to other coding environments. Code Assist’s upgrades are likely in response to competitive pressure from rivals such as GitHub Copilot, Cursor, and Cognition Labs, the creator of…