News that Alphabet Inc’s Google sidelined an engineer who claimed its artificial intelligence system had become sentient after he’d had several months of conversations with it prompted plenty of skepticism from AI scientists. Many have said, via postings on Twitter, that senior software engineer Blake Lemoine projected his own humanity onto Google’s chatbot generator LaMDA. Whether they’re right, or ...

  In July 2008, with the global financial crisis trashing the world’s economy, then US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson asked legislators for the power to grant unlimited credit to his country’s mortgage agencies: “If you have a squirt gun in your pocket you may have to take it out; if you have a bazooka in your pocket, and people know ...

  Bloomberg Air France-KLM vowed to expand low-cost and transatlantic flights after raising 2.26 billion euros ($2.4 billion) to repay a chunk of the state aid that helped the carrier survive the Covid-19 crisis. The proceeds of the rights issue launched last month will be used to reimburse about 1.7 billion euros of bonds issued last year and held by ...