Microsoft is planning an AI hub in the “heart of Lonson“.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

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Microsoft announces AI hub

Microsoft is planning an AI hub in the “heart of London” where it will work on language models while collaborating with other Microsoft teams, as well as partners such as OpenAI. The new AI hub will be headed by scientist and engineer Jordon Hoffman, who previously worked at Infection and DeepMind.

The announcement came even as the United Kingdom is working on positioning itself as the prime location for AI innovation and research, but with a focus on reasonable regulations. Earlier last year the country held the world’s first global AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park, where 25 countries came together to discuss the risks of AI.

Tesla settles autopilot lawsuit

Tesla has reached a settlement in a lawsuit stemming from a 2018 car crash that resulted in the death of Walter Huang, a 38-year-old Apple engineer. The vehicle operating on Tesla’s Autopilot system, veered off a highway and collided with a barrier, leading to questions about the safety and functionality of the semi-autonomous driving technology.

While the terms of the settlement are yet to be disclosed, the accident that led to the death of Huang is one of many in the U.S. where Autopilot was suspected to be a factor. The U.S. National Traffic Safety Administration has investigated numerous crashes involving Tesla’s automated driving systems, some of which resulted in fatalities.

Physicist faked supercondutory discovery data

A team from Nature, through court documents, has found that Ranga Dias, a professor at the University of Rochester who had touted the discovery of room-temperature supercondutor in March last year, committed data fabrication, falsification and plagiarism.

The 10-month long investigation was carried out by a group of scientists, recruited by the University of Rochester to look into allegations against Mr Dias, who had made a sensational claim of having discovered a superconductor capable of working at room temperature – a scientific feat which hadn’t been achieved before. However, investigations revealed that Dias who has been researching room-temperature superconductivity since 2020, had earlier an earlier paper also retracted due to plagiarism.