Artificial intelligence isn’t always so smart. It has amplified outrage on social media and struggled to flag hate speech. It has designated engineers as male and nurses as female when translating language. It has failed to recognise people with darker skin tones when matching faces. Systems powered by machine learning are amassing greater influence on human life, and while they ...

For years, Facebook and other large technology companies grew into vast digital conglomerates by making so-called killer acquisitions, small deals for companies that could one day pose a competitive threat. Internal emails between executives at Facebook show CEO  Mark Zuckerberg and his executive team were quaking at their keyboards in 2012 as they watched WhatsApp grow to dominate the market ...

A prominent hedge fund manager has a provocative idea to fix the UK stock market’s addiction to dividends — abolish income funds. Paul Marshall, co-founder of Marshall Wace, blames them for starving the biggest London-listed companies of the investment needed to fuel growth. It’s a novel solution to a longstanding problem. Shares in the FTSE 250 index of mid-sized companies ...