Noughties nostalgia trends on TikTok as fans revisit music and TV favourites

It is the social media platform that likes to see itself as being on the cutting edge of the latest youth culture and setting the latest trends for others to follow. But across music, television and observations on British daily life, something more familiar is trending on TikTok – a new generation of nostalgia.Music and TV from the 2000s are being rediscovered by gen X and ageing millennials, as well as being discovered for the first time by gen Z. Use of the #noughties nostalgia hashtag is up 36% on last year across entertainment content – while the era is also enjoying a revival in fashion.Sex and the City, which initially ran from 1999 to 2004, has been the subject of 108,000 videos on the site, with a doubling in videos over the past year

Meta signs deal with nuclear plant to power AI and datacenters for 20 years

Meta on Tuesday said it had struck an agreement to keep one nuclear reactor of a US utility company in Illinois operating for 20 years.Meta’s deal with Constellation Energy is the social networking company’s first with a nuclear power plant. Other large tech companies are looking to secure electricity as US power demand rises significantly in part due to the needs of artificial intelligence and datacenters. Google has reached agreements to supply its datacenters with nuclear power via a half-dozen small reactors built by a California utility company. Microsoft’s similar contract will restart the Three Mile Island nuclear plant, the site of the most serious nuclear accident and radiation leak in US history

Will AI wipe out the first rung of the career ladder?

Hello, and welcome to TechScape. This week, I’m wondering what my first jobs in journalism would have been like had generative AI been around. In other news: Elon Musk leaves a trail of chaos, and influencers are selling the text they fed to AI to make art.Generative artificial intelligence may eliminate the job you got with your diploma still in hand, say executives who offered grim assessments of the entry-level job market last week in multiple forums.Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, which makes the multifunctional AI model Claude, told Axios last week that he believes that AI could cut half of all entry-level white-collar jobs and send overall unemployment rocketing to 20% within the next five years

Google working on AI email tool that can ‘answer in your style’

The march of artificial intelligence is predicted to bring monumental changes on a par with the advent of the internet or even the Industrial Revolution. But before all that, one of the technology’s leading figures wants it to solve a more urgent problem – the tyranny of the email inbox.Demis Hassabis, the head of Google DeepMind, has revealed he and his team are working on “next-generation email” that will deal with the daily grind of sorting through emails, replying to the most mundane ones and avoiding the need to apologise profusely for missing an important message.Hassabis was speaking at the SXSW London festival about the extraordinary growth and potential of AI. He said its impact was “overhyped in the short term”, but would lead to profound longer-term changes to society

AI pioneer announces non-profit to develop ‘honest’ artificial intelligence

An artificial intelligence pioneer has launched a non-profit dedicated to developing an “honest” AI that will spot rogue systems attempting to deceive humans.Yoshua Bengio, a renowned computer scientist described as one of the “godfathers” of AI, will be president of LawZero, an organisation committed to the safe design of the cutting-edge technology that has sparked a $1tn (£740bn) arms race.Starting with funding of approximately $30m and more than a dozen researchers, Bengio is developing a system called Scientist AI that will act as a guardrail against AI agents – which carry out tasks without human intervention – showing deceptive or self-preserving behaviour, such as trying to avoid being turned off.Describing the current suite of AI agents as “actors” seeking to imitate humans and please users, he said the Scientist AI system would be more like a “psychologist” that can understand and predict bad behaviour.“We want to build AIs that will be honest and not deceptive,” Bengio said

‘Nobody wants a robot to read them a story!’ The creatives and academics rejecting AI – at work and at home

Is artificial intelligence coming for everyone’s jobs? Not if this lot have anything to do with itThe novelist Ewan Morrison was alarmed, though amused, to discover he had written a book called Nine Inches Pleases a Lady. Intrigued by the limits of generative artificial intelligence (AI), he had asked ChatGPT to give him the names of the 12 novels he had written. “I’ve only written nine,” he says. “Always eager to please, it decided to invent three.” The “nine inches” from the fake title it hallucinated was stolen from a filthy Robert Burns poem