Policymakers who think AI can help rescue flagging UK economy should take heed | Heather Stewart

From helping consultants diagnose cancer, to aiding teachers in drawing up lesson plans – and flooding social media with derivative slop – generative artificial intelligence is being adopted across the economy at breakneck speed.Yet a growing number of voices are starting to question how much of an asset the technology can be to the UK’s sluggish economy. Not least because there is no escaping a persistent flaw: large language models (LLMs) remain prone to casually making things up.It’s a phenomenon known as “hallucination”. In a recent blogpost, the barrister Tahir Khan cited three cases in which lawyers had used large language models to formulate legal filings or arguments – only to find they slipped in fictitious supreme court cases, and made up regulations, or nonexistent laws

‘We’re being attacked all the time’: how UK banks stop hackers

It is every bank boss’s worst nightmare: a panicked phone call informs them a cyber-attack has crippled the IT system, rapidly unleashing chaos across the entire UK financial industry.As household names in other industries, including Marks & Spencer, grapple with the fallout from such hacks, banking executives will be acutely aware that, for them, the stakes are even higher.Within hours of a successful bank hack, millions of direct debits could fail, leaving rents, mortgages and wages unpaid. Online banking may be blocked, cash machine withdrawals denied, and commuters left in limbo as buses and petrol stations reject payments. News of the attack could spark panic, leading to a run on rival lenders, as customers pull money from their accounts amid fear the disruption could spread

UK government rollout of Humphrey AI tool raises fears about reliance on big tech

The government’s artificial intelligence (AI) tool known as Humphrey is based on models from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, it can be revealed, raising questions about Whitehall’s increasing reliance on big tech.Ministers have staked the future of civil service reform on rolling out AI across the public sector to improve efficiency, with all officials in England and Wales to receive training in the toolkit.However, it is understood the government does not have overarching commercial agreements with the big tech companies on AI and uses a pay-as-you-go model through its existing cloud contracts, allowing it to swap through tools as they improve and become competitive.Critics are concerned about the speed and scale of embedding AI from big tech into the heart of government, especially when there is huge public debate about the technology’s use of copyrighted material.Ministers have been locked in a battle with critics in the House of Lords over whether AI is unfairly being trained on creative material without credit of compensation

Hey AI! Can ChatGPT help you to manage your money?

Artificial intelligence seems to have touched every part of our lives. But can it help us manage our money? We put some common personal finance questions to the free version of ChatGPT, one of the most well-known AI chatbots, and asked for its help.Then we gave the answers to some – human – experts and asked them what they thought.We asked: I am 35 years old and want to ensure I have a comfortable retirement. I earn about £35,000 a year and have a workplace pension, in which I have saved £20,000

Bath’s treble win blends yesteryear charm with the recently unthinkable | Michael Aylwin

At the 29th time of asking, Bath are champions of England once more. At five to five on a sunny afternoon here, Ben Spencer passed to Finn Russell – the married couple, as their coach, Johann van Graan, likes to call them – and Russell kicked it somewhere, anywhere but on the pitch to put an end to decades of pain out west.In 1996, when titles were won the old-fashioned way, the notion it would take so long for Bath, who had just won their sixth in eight years – their 10th cup in 13, and their fourth double – to become champions of England again would have seemed absurd. Only a little more absurd than the notion they would win it might have seemed three years ago, when they finished bottom of the table, spared the indignity of relegation only by the very different way English rugby is organised these days.The most telling difference, though, is that thing about paying players

Bavuma’s brave team make giant leap for South African Test cricket | Andy Bull

South Africa lost their shot at winning this World Test Championship in 2022, when their board announced the team were going to play 28 games in the next four years. They lost it for a second time during the spring of last year, when they packed their reserve team off to play a series against New Zealand because their centrally contracted players had to stay back and play in a franchise tournament.They lost it a third time when the team were bowled out for 138 on Thursday morning and they lost it a fourth when they let Australia’s tail put on 134 runs for the last four wickets, leaving them needing 282 to win. Finally, after they had just about run out of ways to lose, they won.The last runs came hard and the winning ones seemed to be the most difficult of all