Much is new about this month’s FIFA World Cup tournament. It hosts more teams than ever before. It’s the first to occur in three different host countries. Like every World Cup for over half a century, it will employ a football with a brand-new design. Wind-tunnel experiments found that long-distance kicks with Adidas’s new Trionda ball might not travel as far as they did in the past, while offering a more predictable flight path that players have not always had from World Cup balls. The findings point to how grooves and seams can alter performance on the field.
OpenAI plans to turn ChatGPT into a “super app” before its IPO, combining coding tools and Artificial Intelligence agents as the company shifts beyond conventional chatbots. OpenAI is also building a fully automated researcher. A senior OpenAI employee told the Financial Times, “Chat is dead,” underscoring the company’s focus on agent-based systems. Trump wants the US government to take a stake in Artificial Intelligence companies and plans to meet Artificial Intelligence leaders to discuss the proposal, framing it as a partnership with the American public.
Artificial Intelligence infrastructure remains a major theme across the sector. Google has agreed to buy Artificial Intelligence computing power from SpaceX. The contract runs through June 2029. Google will use about 110,000 Nvidia GPUs owned by SpaceX. The deal follows a SpaceX data center agreement involving Anthropic. Artificial Intelligence is also expected to make everyday life more expensive because its demand for resources is likely to push up inflation, while Europe is accelerating its withdrawal from US Big Tech through moves toward alternative providers and a “made in Europe” drive.
Other developments show the breadth of technology’s impact. ICE plans to give local police a new facial recognition app that would let them verify a person’s immigration status. Silicon Valley’s pull is weakening for India’s tech talent because of Trump’s immigration policies and Artificial Intelligence-driven layoffs. Concerns over “recursive self-improvement” are raising questions about whether Artificial Intelligence could escape control. Gene-edited embryos are getting closer, though current techniques still fail to edit every cell. NASA astronauts will wear high-tech Prada underwear on moon trips, with ventilation tubes knitted into the garments. Artificial Intelligence is also helping historians analyze digitized records, though machine learning could introduce bias or falsifications into interpretations of the past.
