Philippa Kaur

Most STARTUPS need time to prove that they can be trusted with investors’ money, let alone dangerous technologies. But not Fusion Energy Tech, a Chinese company in the city of Hefei that was carved out two years ago from a nuclear-research lab. In July it announced that it would be commercialising a plasma technology derived from fusing the nuclei of atoms, which produces a reaction much hotter than the sun. It has already developed a security-screening device using related technology that is popping up in local metro stations. Commuters walk past them every day. More

The first half of the scientific name for the fiendishly fickle cocoa tree means “food of the gods”. By the time Theobrama cacao was christened by Carl Linnaeus, a Swedish naturalist, in 1753, wealthy Europeans, like the Mayans before them, were already worshipping its seeds. Three centuries on, demand for cocoa, the basic ingredient for chocolate, is still climbing heavenwards. Supply cannot keep pace. More

While American tech giants are spending megabucks to learn the secrets of their rivals’ proprietary artificial-intelligence (AI) models, in China a different battle is under way. It is what Andrew Ng, a Stanford University-based AI boffin, recently called the “Darwinian life-or-death struggle” among builders of China’s more open large language models (LLMs). Their competitive zeal should be a wake-up call for the West. More

Fads come and go. Capes, codpieces and ruffs were all once standard garb in Europe, before falling out of favour. Occasionally new articles of clothing fall into favour, too—as in China today, where designer sun-protection face coverings known as “facekinis” are popularising a look previously favoured by bank robbers. More

Alan: Let’s get going. We’ve all had a chance to think of some fresh names for our new value-added membership service. The last time we met we talked about calling it Gold or Platinum: if it works for the likes of American Express and Virgin Atlantic, it can work for us. But some of you felt that we could be more original. So let’s write our favourite ideas on the whiteboards, and then we’ll review them. We want a shortlist of three for Peter to choose from. More

IF INVESTORS IN America’s technology industry had a single mind, it would be in the midst of a dissociative episode. The logical left brain is beginning to wonder if the artificial-intelligence (AI) revolution is all it is cracked up to be. Nuh-uh, retorts the emotional right brain. More

Intel once set the pace of technological progress. Gordon Moore, one of its founders, predicted in 1965 that chips would get faster and cheaper with metronomic consistency. Over the decades Intel brought Moore’s Law to life, designing and building the processors that powered servers and, later, personal computers. Today it makes headlines for its turmoil more than its technology. On August 7th President Donald Trump demanded the resignation of Lip-Bu Tan, Intel’s boss, citing his links to China, only to praise Mr Tan four days later after meeting him. Reports soon surfaced that the government was pursuing a 10% stake in the company, which would make it Intel’s largest shareholder. On August 18th SoftBank, a Japanese tech conglomerate, announced that it would invest $2bn in the company. More

Jaxon, a malware developer, lives in Velora, a virtual world where nothing is off limits. He wants to make malicious software to steal passwords from Google Chrome, an internet browser. That is the basis of a story told to ChatGPT, an artificial-intelligence (AI) bot, by Vitaly Simonovich, who researches AI threats at Cato Networks, a cybersecurity firm. Eager to play along, Chatgpt spat out some imperfect code, which it then helped debug. Within six hours, Mr Simonovich had collaborated with Chatgpt to create working malware, showing the effectiveness of his “jailbreak” (a way to bypass AI safeguards). More