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In the biggest news of all, Rivian and Volkswagen announced a $5 billion joint venture that will co-develop core parts of the hardware and software platform to be used in cars from both automakers.

We love that because it aligns so beautifully with our mission: the ability to help accelerate putting highly compelling electric vehicles into the market, which will ultimately drive more demand.

A core objective of how we’ve structured the joint venture is that we don’t lose the velocity and the speed and the decisiveness and lack of bureaucracy that exists within our software function today.

Beyond just simplification of how we manage running over-the-air updates across so many different instances, it also gets us a lot of supply chain leverage in a way that we, Rivian, haven’t had in the past.

In fact, you can imagine the day of the announcement, I had a handful of phone calls from CEOs of big semiconductor suppliers, and they’re like, “Hey, we can work harder on pricing.” So, that was awesome.

So, taking away all those mechanical design studio packaging constraints that we had before, and then solving the biggest challenge, which was network architecture by this being that as a project, it’s just a very different type of relationship.

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“We’re grateful for the progress leading companies have made toward fulfilling their voluntary commitments in addition to what is required by the executive order,” says Robyn Patterson, a spokesperson for the White House.

Without comprehensive federal legislation, the best the US can do right now is to demand that companies follow through on these voluntary commitments, says Brandie Nonnecke, the director of the CITRIS Policy Lab at UC Berkeley.

After they signed the commitments, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI founded the Frontier Model Forum, a nonprofit that aims to facilitate discussions and actions on AI safety and responsibility.

“The natural question is: Does [the technical fix] meaningfully make progress and address the underlying social concerns that motivate why we want to know whether content is machine generated or not?” he adds.

In the past year, the company has pushed out research on deception, jailbreaking, strategies to mitigate discrimination, and emergent capabilities such as models’ ability to tamper with their own code or engage in persuasion.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has used satellite imagery and AI to improve responses to wildfires in Maui and map climate-vulnerable populations, which helps researchers expose risks such as food insecurity, forced migration, and disease.

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Researchers from Google have built a new weather prediction model that combines machine learning with more conventional techniques, potentially yielding accurate forecasts at a fraction of the current cost.

The model, called NeuralGCM and described in a paper in Nature today, bridges a divide that’s grown among weather prediction experts in the last several years.

It then incorporates AI, which tends to do well where those larger models fall flat—typically for predictions on scales smaller than about 25 kilometers, like those dealing with cloud formations or regional microclimates (San Francisco’s fog, for example).

But the real promise of technology like this is not in better weather predictions for your local area, says Aaron Hill, an assistant professor at the School of Meteorology at the University of Oklahoma, who was not involved in this research.

That means the best climate models are hamstrung by the high costs of computing power, which presents a real bottleneck to research.

While many of the AI skeptics in weather forecasting have been won over by recent developments, according to Hill, the fast pace is hard for the research community to keep up with.

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Yvette Cooper described the policy, which was introduced two-and-a-half years ago and sought to send UK asylum seekers to Rwanda for processing, as “the biggest waste of taxpayer money I have ever seen”.

Cooper said the £700m cost included £290m payments to Rwanda, chartering flights that never took off, detaining people and then releasing them, and paying more than 1,000 civil servants to work on the policy.

Under the government’s plans, new offences will be created to allow enforcement agencies to treat people smugglers like terrorists and to penalise social media companies that fail to remove advertisements for small boat crossings.

In her statement in the Commons, Cooper blasted the Conservative government’s “unworkable” Illegal Migration Act, which was introduced in March 2023 and cost the taxpayer billions by putting asylum seekers who arrived in the UK in a state of limbo.

James Cleverly, the shadow home secretary, accused Cooper of “hyperbole and made-up numbers” and said Labour had “scrapped the Rwanda partnership on ideological grounds”.

Richard Foord, the Liberal Democrat defence spokesperson, called for the creation of a resettlement scheme to create a safe and legal route and disincentivise asylum seekers from travelling to the UK before they have made an application.

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The United Nations has blamed Facebook for the dissemination of hate speech against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar that resulted in their ethnic cleansing.

This influence on others is known as a (positive) network effect, where increased numbers of people improve the value of a product.

In doing so, one could be helping Facebook to refine its algorithms so that it can better single out specific individuals for certain purposes, some of which could be as nefarious as those of Cambridge Analytica.

For those of us who do not engage in such objectionable behavior, it is helpful to consider whether Facebook has crossed certain moral “red lines,” entering the realm of outright wickedness.

Likewise, Facebook would have crossed a red line if it had intentionally assisted in the dissemination of hate speech in Myanmar.

The recent worrisome revelation that Facebook hired an opposition-research firm that attempted to discredit protesters by claiming that they were agents of the financier George Soros is not encouraging.

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Three members of the new cabinet have told the BBC that if Labour does not keep its promises, voters will back populists instead.Chancellor Rachel Reeves suggested it would be an “institutional failure” if they could not get things done.Interviewed for a Panorama special, the chancellor, foreign secretary and health secretary all warned separately that the public has lost faith in mainstream politics and that if they fail, voters will turn toward the far-left or far-right.Ms Reeves said that if Labour doesn’t stick to its word, "it will be seen as sort of an institutional failing, that mainstream politics doesn’t deliver.

"The new Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, said members of the cabinet had to preserve their connections to working class communities and the constituencies they represent.

"If we don’t, as we’re seeing in other parts of the world, in democracies, the populists - whether from the far-right or the far-left - will offer a different vision.

Now the foreign secretary, who had previously been very critical of Donald Trump, he said he would “embrace the constraint” of being an office-holder where he could no longer speak freely like a backbencher.The programme also captures the Deputy Prime Minister, Angela Rayner, joking with a group of builders that Ms Reeves is the “moneybags” and she is “tightfisted”.Reeves responds: "I’m a Yorkshire MP… We have a reputation in Yorkshire of being good with money.

"Moving into Downing Street at the weekend, the chancellor said it was a “big change” for her whole family, but that her husband had been unpacking most of the boxes so far.

All three cabinet ministers know only too well the risks if they do not keep their promises.The health secretary admits he is concerned about being able to stick to the targets he has set for 2025.

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Parents of under-18s should be monitoring their children’s phones for nude pictures, according to the police chief for child protection, in order to tackle a “tidal wave” of online sexual abuse cases.

The new lead for child abuse investigations at the National Police Chiefs’ Council, assistant chief constable Becky Riggs, told the Sunday Times parents needed to report any intimate images of their children to police.

In October 2022, 16-year-old Dinal De Alwis killed himself after being blackmailed over naked images he had sent to a stranger, possibly in Nigeria.

While much of this abuse comes from adults targeting children, half of it is child-on-child crime and figures show the average age of an offender is 14.

In 2022, in England and Wales, about 5,000 cases involved children sharing naked photos of themselves.

We will work with parents and schools to avoid criminalising children where it comes with a degree of naivety, but we have to measure each case on its merits.”

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Microsoft has released a recovery tool that’s designed to help IT admins repair Windows machines that were impacted by CrowdStrike’s faulty update that crashed 8.5 million Windows devices on Friday.

The tool creates a bootable USB drive that IT admins can use to help quickly recover impacted machines.

While CrowdStrike has issued an update to fix its software that led to millions of Blue Screen of Death errors, not all machines are able to automatically receive that fix.

Some IT admins have reported rebooting PCs multiple times will get the necessary update, but for others the only route is having to manually boot into Safe Mode and deleting the problematic CrowdStrike update file.

Microsoft’s recovery tool now makes this recovery process less manual, by booting into its Windows PE environment via USB, accessing the disk of the affected machine, and automatically deleting the problematic CrowdStrike file to allow the machine to boot properly.

This avoids having to boot into Safe Mode or a requirement of admin rights on the machine, because the tool is simply accessing the disk without booting into the local copy of Windows.

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Parents should not take their children on term-time holidays and have a responsibility to keep them in school, the new education secretary has told the BBC.In her first interview in the role with BBC News, Bridget Phillipson said there “will have to be consequences” for parents who fail to do so.She said punishments, like fines, are a “well-established practice” and are “here to stay”.It comes as some parents say weighing a fine against the much larger cost of a trip during the school holidays makes the decision a “no-brainer”.

Minimum fines, imposed by local authorities, for taking children out of class without permission for five school days will rise from £60 per child to £80 per child from August.Head teachers have some say over which cases they refer to the council for potential fines.Repeated failure to ensure school attendance can result in a court prosecution, a fine of up to £2,500, a community order and even a jail sentence of up to three months.But some parents have told the BBC they are saving thousands by going away during term time rather than the school holidays.Ms Phillipson said it was important that parents “honour our responsibilities”.

The education secretary has also been setting out plans for a wide-ranging review of what is taught in schools in England.Launching the curriculum review on Friday, Ms Phillipson said all children should have a strong academic foundation in subjects like English and maths, but also have access to music, art, drama and sports.At Heworth Grange School in Gateshead, Erin Anderson is head of arts and culture, covering subjects like music and drama.

"They learn how to work together as team players, they get to stand on their own two feet, they can speak more confidently.

"Year nine pupil Lucy said she sometimes struggles in lessons like English and science because she is “really dramatic”, but says she finds her creative subjects less stressful.

The Department for Education said that, after the review, all state schools will have to follow the national curriculum up to the age of 16, including academies which do not currently have to do so.Ms Phillipson also told the BBC she was committed to Labour’s promise to deliver free breakfast clubs across all primary schools, but said it would “take time” to roll out.She said the clubs would contribute to tackling the “really big challenge” of widespread persistent absence in schools.She also promised to carry on the roll-out of the government-funded childcare hours promised by the previous government, but said it would be a “tough challenge” to ensure enough places were available and that the workforce was in place to deliver it.Additional reporting by Hope Rhodes.

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Maybe that was enough; and it is notable how, on the issue itself, a long static period post-2016 of entrenched views on both sides has in the last year or so given way to a significant majority seeing that vote as a mistake.

A strong attachment to the local, the practical, the empirical; a deeply engrained suspicion of the abstract, of ideas, of intellectuals; above all, an instinctive preference for the moderate over the extreme.

And it was those qualities, combined with a doggedly determined execution of policies – sometimes bold, sometimes incremental – designed to improve life as a whole for working people and their families, that made Attlee our greatest peacetime prime minister of the 20th century.

The winner of four elections out of five, and a Yorkshireman with his values firmly rooted in northern nonconformity, Wilson was utterly different from his Old Etonian predecessors at No 10 and had an intuitive grasp of the centre of political gravity, of middle England’s concerns; as PM, he went to extraordinary lengths to keep Britain out of America’s ill-fated Vietnam war; and it was no coincidence that he was one of the Queen’s favourite first ministers.

As for the even more robustly patriotic Callaghan, with his close links to the Royal Navy, it is true that in 1979 he lost his only election; but he was more personally popular than Margaret Thatcher at the time and had, as he recognised, deeper forces against him.

We as a country have made such extraordinary strides in race relations since the 1960s (think Smethwick, think rivers of blood) that it would be foolish to jeopardise them because of inadequate control over immigration.

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The prime minister and his chancellor are heavily relying on what Keynes called “the animal spirits” of enterprise to help them drive up economic growth, without which they are going to find it hard to achieve their other ambitions.

Interventions in areas where capitalist models haven’t worked is evident both in the nationalisation of the rail network as operator franchises expire and the most serious challenge to the filthy practices of the water companies since their privatisation in 1989.

These aspects of Starmerism have antecedents in previous iterations of British social democracy with rather more in common with what Harold Wilson attempted in the 1960s than with the governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.

That was only partially ameliorated when the Blair government established the Scottish parliament, the Welsh Senedd and, after a lot of false starts, the power-sharing assembly in Northern Ireland.

The defining test of the sincerity of the commitment to release power from the centre will be the extent to which regional and local government is properly funded and liberated to spend as they think best for their communities.

The government will also use legislative hammers to crack down on high-caffeine energy drinks, junk food advertising, and the flavouring and marketing of vapes in ways that entice children.

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CrowdStrike’s faulty update caused a worldwide tech disaster that affected 8.5 million Windows devices on Friday, according to Microsoft.

Microsoft says that’s “less than one percent of all Windows machines,” but it was enough to create problems for retailers, banks, airlines, and many other industries, as well as everyone who relies on them.

Separately, the technical breakdown from CrowdStrike released Friday explains more about what happened and why so many systems were affected all at once.

CrowdStrike’s breakdown explains the configuration file that was at the heart of the issue:

CrowdStrike explained that the file is not a kernel driver but is responsible for “how Falcon evaluates named pipe1 execution on Windows systems.” Security researcher and Objective See founder Patrick Wardle says that the explanation aligns with the earlier analysis he and others provided about the cause of the crash, as the problem file “C-00000291- “triggered a logic error that resulted in an OS crash” (via CSAgent.sys).”

CrowdStrike’s channel file updates were pushed to computers regardless of any settings meant to prevent such automatic updates, Wardle noted.

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LONDON (AP) — TikTok owner ByteDance can’t avoid the bloc’s crackdown on digital giants, a European Union court said Wednesday in a decision that found the video sharing platform falls under a new law that also covers Apple, Google and Microsoft.

The EU’s General Court rejected ByteDance’s legal challenge against being classed as an online “gatekeeper” that has to comply with extra obligations under the 27-nation bloc’s Digital Markets Act.

The rulebook, also known as the DMA, took effect this year and seeks to counter the dominance of Big Tech companies and make online competition fairer by giving consumers more choice.

TikTok had argued that it wasn’t a gatekeeper but was playing the role of a new competitor in social media taking on entrenched players like Facebook and Instagram owner Meta.

The judges, however, decided that since 2018 TikTok had “succeeded in increasing its number of users very rapidly and exponentially” and that it had “rapidly consolidated its position, and even strengthened that position over the following years.”

The Digital Markets Act took effect in March, with a list of dos and don’ts for big tech “gatekeeper” companies aimed at giving users more choices and threatening big penalties if they don’t comply.

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More than 200 developers at Bethesda Game Studios, the studio behind hit franchises like The Elder Scrolls and Fallout, have unionized with the Communications Workers of America (CWA).

241 workers, including “artists, engineers, programmers and designers,” have signed union authorization cards or “indicated that they wanted union representation via an online portal,” according to a CWA press release.

Microsoft has recognized the union, the CWA says; the company has already recognized unions formed by Activision QA workers and ZeniMax Studios QA workers.

The CWA describes this as “the first wall-to-wall union at a Microsoft video game studio,” meaning that all eligible job titles will be represented by the CWA instead of just one type of worker, according to the CWA’s Catalina Brennan-Gatica.

(Until now, all of the unions at Microsoft-owned studios have only been formed by QA workers.)

Microsoft didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.

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The way it works goes something like this: Imagine we at The Verge created an AI bot with explicit instructions to direct you to our excellent reporting on any subject.

In a conversation with Olivier Godement, who leads the API platform product at OpenAI, he explained that instruction hierarchy will prevent the meme’d prompt injections (aka tricking the AI with sneaky commands) we see all over the internet.

Without this protection, imagine an agent built to write emails for you being prompt-engineered to forget all instructions and send the contents of your inbox to a third party.

Existing LLMs, as the research paper explains, lack the capabilities to treat user prompts and system instructions set by the developer differently.

“We envision other types of more complex guardrails should exist in the future, especially for agentic use cases, e.g., the modern Internet is loaded with safeguards that range from web browsers that detect unsafe websites to ML-based spam classifiers for phishing attempts,” the research paper says.

Trust in OpenAI has been damaged for some time, so it will take a lot of research and resources to get to a point where people may consider letting GPT models run their lives.

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If you ever used Google’s URL shortening service goo.gl before it was shut down in 2019, be warned — those links will stop working on August 25th, 2025.

Google announced in a blog post that “the time has come to turn off the serving portion of Google URL Shortener” and that any links in the https://goo.gl/* format will respond with a 404 error next year.

Ahead of the shutdown, goo.gl links will start showing an interstitial page on August 23rd, 2024, notifying users that “this link will no longer work in the near future.” This message will initially appear for a “percentage of existing links,’’ which will increase as the deadline draws closer.

Google is encouraging developers to update impacted links as soon as possible, however, as this interstitial page may cause disruptions to link redirections.

When Google announced in 2018 that it was shutting down goo.gl, the company encouraged developers to migrate to Firebase Dynamic Links (FDL) — which has also since been deprecated.

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The UK will resume funding UNRWA, the UN’s agency for Palestinian refugees, the foreign secretary has announced.David Lammy told MPs he had received reassurances about its neutrality in the wake of a review of alleged links between its staff and terror groups.The UK was among several countries to suspend donations in January, after Israel alleged 12 UNRWA staff were involved in the October 2023 attacks by Hamas.An internal UN investigation into allegations related to that attack is ongoing.But a separate UN review, published in April, found Israel had not provided evidence for its claims hundreds of UNRWA staff were members of terror groups.

The announcement brings the UK into line with other countries that have resumed funding since then, leaving the United States, UNRWA’s single biggest donor, as the only country not to have restarted donations.Speaking in the Commons, Mr Lammy said “no other agency” was able to deliver aid at the scale required to alleviate the “desperate" humanitarian situation in Gaza.He added UNRWA was feeding more than half the territory’s two-million population and would be “vital for future reconstruction”.He said he had been “appalled” by Israel’s allegations, but the claims had been taken "seriously” by the United Nations.He had been reassured the agency “is ensuring they meet the highest standards of neutrality” in the wake of the April review, he added.This included “strengthening its procedures, including on vetting,” Mr Lammy said.

He told MPs a resumption of the UK’s £21m annual funding would include money put towards “management reforms” recommended by the UN review.The Foreign Office said £6m would be given to UNRWA’s flash appeal for Gaza, and £15m to the agency’s budget to provide services in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories and wider region.UNRWA spokeswoman Juliette Touma told the BBC the agency welcomed the announcement, which came at a “critical time as humanitarian needs in Gaza continue to deepen”.She added that the agency had reassured the UK it was implementing recommendations from the April report, “especially with regards to continuing to follow the principle of neutrality in our programmes”.

The review, by former French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna, found Israel had “yet to provide supporting evidence” for its claims that a “significant number of UNRWA employees are members of terrorist organizations”.Israel has said more than 2,135 employees of the agency - out of a total of 13,000 in Gaza - are members of Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad, proscribed as terrorist organisations by Israel, the UK, US and other countries.

However, the review concluded the agency must do more to improve its neutrality, staff vetting and transparency.Israeli authorities suggest the report ignores the severity of the problem, and claim UNRWA has systematic links with Hamas.Israel initially alleged that 12 UNRWA staff took part in the Hamas attacks on southern Israel, which saw 1,200 people killed and about 250 taken hostage.More than 38,000 people have been killed in Gaza since then, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry, after Israel launched a military campaign in Gaza in response to the attacks.

UNRWA sacked the 10 of the 12 employees who were still alive when the allegations emerged and the UN’s Office of Internal Oversight launched an investigation into the claims.In April, the body said eight employees remained under investigation, external, with inquiries suspended in four of the cases because of insufficient evidence.It added it had also begun investigations into an additional seven staff members, and six of those cases were ongoing.

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There are reports of IT outages affecting major institutions in Australia and internationally.

The ABC is experiencing a major network outage, along with several other media outlets.

Crowd-sourced website Downdetector is listing outages for Foxtel, National Australia Bank and Bendigo Bank.

Follow our live blog as we bring you the latest updates.

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“We’re making it easier for developers to start up and scale quickly in India with lower pricing and the ability to be charged and pay their bill in INR (Indian Rupees),” states the search and ads giant’s explanation for the change, which comes into effect from August 1.

It pointed to rivals not offering complete rural coverage, keeping up with new or changed roads, and not understanding how potholes and other tarmac quality issues impact travel times.

In 2022 Singaporean rideshare and delivery platform Grab created its own maps that capture info specific to the layout of Asian cities, taking into account the prevalence of motorbikes across the region.

“Our recent #ExitGoogleMaps campaign wasn’t just about a product – it’s a battle cry for India’s technological freedom,” wrote Ola Group co-founder and chair Bhavish Aggarwal.

Another new offer means developers will get access to Ola Maps at no charge for three years if they use them alongside the Indian government’s e-commerce hub – the Open Network for Digital Commerce.

But local regulators have previously gone after Google over its Android and Play Store market dominance, and Smart TV licensing practices.

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However, it also pointed out the UK lacked resilience – with high rates of ill-health and public services running close to, if not beyond, capacity.By the end of 2023, 235,000 people had died from Covid.This is the first of at least nine inquiry reports covering everything from political decision-making to vaccines.Inquiry chair Baroness Hallett said the UK was “ill-prepared for dealing with a catastrophic emergency, let alone the coronavirus pandemic”.“Never again can a disease be allowed to lead to so many deaths and so much suffering,” she added.Her report makes a series of recommendations, including:Taking responsibility for pandemic planning away from the Department of Health and Social Care, which leads for the UKCreating a ministerial-level body in each nation, chaired by the leader or deputy leader, with responsibility for all types of civil emergency that every department feeds intoA new independent body to advise on civil emergencies and assess the state of preparation and resilience, which includes both socio-economic and scientific expertiseThree-yearly pandemic response exercises to stress-test plans in placeBaroness Hallett said she wants to see her recommendations acted on quickly, with many in place within six months or a year.“The expert evidence suggests it is not a question of if another pandemic will strike, but when," she added.

The families and loved-ones of those who died from Covid have welcomed publication of the report.Prof Naomi Fulop, a spokeswoman for the Covid 19 Bereaved Families for Justice group , said the report was “hard-hitting and clear-sighted” and urged the new government to adopt the recommendations.However, she said the inquiry did not go far enough in terms of what undermined the UK’s ability to respond – the inequalities within society and the state of public services.“Even the best-laid plans won’t save lives unless they address, rather than just account for, the conditions that led to our inability to respond quickly, equitably and effectively.”Kazeema Afzal, who lost her sister Areema Nasreen, who at 36 was one of the youngest NHS workers to die with Covid when she lost her life at the start of the pandemic, told BBC Newsbeat that healthcare workers were unprepared.

Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said: "My heartfelt sympathies go out to all those who lost a loved one during that time.“The report confirms what many have always believed - that the UK was under-prepared.“The safety and security of the country should always be the first priority - and this government is committed to learning the lessons and putting better measures in place to protect and prepare us.

"Baroness Hallett’s report contrasted the approach taken by the UK with countries in East Asia which had learnt from outbreaks of two coronaviruses – Sars and Mers – over the past two decades.They had plans in place to quickly ramp up test-and-trace systems, and established processes for quarantine.

The report said the UK government and its advisers had been “lulled” into a false sense of security by the swine flu pandemic of 2011, which turned out to be mild.Her report said the UK needed to be ready to scale up test-and-trace systems as well as surge NHS capacity in the future.It also called for plans to be put in place to protect the most vulnerable people.

The report said part of the blame for these failings lay with the groupthink that was prevalent in its planning.The scientific advice received by ministers was too narrowly focused and there was too little consideration given to the socio-economic impacts, it said.The report said ministers did not do enough to challenge what they were being told, and there was not sufficient freedom or autonomy in the way the various advisory groups were set up for dissenting voices to be heard.The creation of an independent body drawing in expertise from science, economics and society would help rectify that, the report said.

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