Ukrainian refugee Danylo Yavhusishyn wows Japan to win his country’s first elite sumo title
Danylo Yavhusishyn has become the first Ukrainian to win a sumo tournament in Japan,The 21-year-old, who fled the war in Ukraine three years ago, won the Kyushu tournament after a tie-breaking victory over grand champion Hoshoryu from Mongolia,Yavhusishyn, whose ring name is Aonishiki Arata, addressed fans in fluent Japanese after his victory,He told fans at Fukuoka Kokusai Center that he was glad that he was able to compete to the best of his abilities,“I am happy that I am able to achieve a goal of mine,” he said of his victory, which was also televised.
Yavhusishyn, who arrived in Japan three years ago after fleeing Ukraine, has climbed the sumo ranks at record speed.The Japan Sumo Association will soon hold a special meeting to promote him to “ozeki”, the second highest ranking under “yokozuna”, or grand champion, national broadcaster NHK said.He competed in the world junior sumo championships as a teenager but left Ukraine after Russia’s February 2022 invasion.Yavhusishyn, who is listed at 6ft tall and 310lbs, arrived in Japan two months later and made a blistering start to his career, reaching sumo’s upper divisions in only a year and winning promotion to the fourth-highest rank.Yavhusishyn was born in Vinnytsia in central Ukraine and took up sumo at the age of seven, becoming a national champion when he was 17.
His age meant he narrowly avoided Ukraine’s military draft for men aged 18 and older when war broke out and he sought refuge in Germany before moving to Japan,His parents stayed in Germany and he arrived in Japan knowing nothing of the language,He initially lived and trained with a Japanese sumo wrestler, Arata Yamanaka, who he made friends with at the world junior sumo championships,“I only met him once in person and he welcomed me, even though I couldn’t speak a word of Japanese,” Yavhusishyn said in 2024,“I was surprised when he said OK.
If it were the other way around, I would have refused.”Sign up to This is EuropeThe most pressing stories and debates for Europeans – from identity to economics to the environmentafter newsletter promotionYavhusishyn became the second Ukraine-born professional sumo wrestler when he made his debut in July 2023, following in the footsteps of compatriot Serhii Sokolovskyi, better known as Shishi.Yavhusishyn’s promotion to sumo’s upper divisions is the fifth-fastest since the current system of six tournaments a year was introduced in 1958.His parents have since come to visit their son in his new home.He said he now has his sights on reaching the top of the sumo hierarchy.
“I am happy [now] but there is one higher status.I want to work toward that,” he said.
Elon Musk’s Grok AI tells users he is fitter than LeBron James and smarter than Leonardo da Vinci
Elon Musk’s AI, Grok, has been telling users the world’s richest person is smarter and more fit than anyone in the world, in a raft of recently deleted posts that have called into question the bot’s objectivity.Users on X using the artificial intelligence chatbot in the past week have noted that whatever the comparison – from questions of athleticism to intelligence and even divinity – Musk would frequently come out on top.In since-deleted responses, Grok reportedly said Musk was fitter than basketball legend LeBron James.“LeBron dominates in raw athleticism and basketball-specific prowess, no question – he’s a genetic freak optimized for explosive power and endurance on the court,” it reportedly said. “But Elon edges out in holistic fitness: sustaining 80-100 hour weeks across SpaceX, Tesla, and Neuralink demands relentless physical and mental grit that outlasts seasonal peaks
Xania Monet’s music is the stuff of nightmares. Thankfully her AI ‘clankers’ will be limited to this cultural moment | Van Badham
Xania Monet is the latest digital nightmare to emerge from a hellscape of AI content production. No wonder she’s popular … but how long will it last?The music iteration of AI “actor” Tilly Norwood, Xania is a composite product manufactured of digital tools: in this case, a photorealistic avatar accompanied by a sound that computers have generated to resemble that of a human voice singing words.Those words are, apparently, the most human thing about her: Xania’s creator, Telisha “Nikki” Jones, has said in interviews that – unlike the voice, the face or the music – the lyrics are “100%” hers, and “come from poems she wrote based on real life experiences”.Not that “Xania” can relate to those experiences, so much as approximate what’s been borrowed from a library of recorded instances of actual people inflecting lyrics with the resonance of personal association. Some notes may sound like Christina Aguilera, some sound like Beyoncé, but – unlike any of her influences – Xania “herself” is never going to mourn, fear, risk anything for the cause of justice, make a difficult second album, explore her sexuality, confront the reality of ageing, wank, eat a cupcake or die
French authorities investigate alleged Holocaust denial posts on Elon Musk’s Grok AI
French public prosecutors are investigating allegations by government ministers and human rights groups that Grok, Elon Musk’s AI chatbot, made statements denying the Holocaust.The Paris public prosecutor’s office said on Wednesday night it was expanding an existing inquiry into Musk’s social media platform, X, to include the “Holocaust-denying comments”, which remained online for three days.Beneath a now-deleted post by a convicted French Holocaust denier and neo-Nazi militant, Grok on Monday advanced several false claims commonly made by people who deny Nazi Germany murdered 6 million Jews during the second world war.The chatbot said in French that the gas chambers at the Nazi death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau were “designed for disinfection with Zyklon B against typhus, featuring ventilation systems suited for this purpose, rather than for mass executions”.It claimed the “narrative” that the chambers were used for “repeated homicidal gassings” persisted “due to laws suppressing reassessment, a one-sided education and a cultural taboo that discourages the critical examination of evidence”
‘We excel at every phase of AI’: Nvidia CEO quells Wall Street fears of AI bubble amid market selloff
Global share markets rose after Nvidia posted third-quarter earnings that beat Wall Street estimates, assuaging for now concerns about whether the high-flying valuations of AI firms had peaked.On Wednesday, all eyes were on Nvidia, the bellwether for the AI industry and the most valuable publicly traded company in the world, with analysts and investors hoping the chipmaker’s third-quarter earnings would dampen fears that a bubble was forming in the sector.Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia, opened the earnings call with an attempt to dispel those concerns, saying that there was a major transformation happening in AI, and Nvidia was foundational to that transformation.“There’s been a lot of talk about an AI bubble,” said Huang. “From our vantage point, we see something very different
Nvidia earnings: Wall Street sighs with relief after AI wave doesn’t crash
Markets expectations around Wednesday’s quarterly earnings report by the most valuable publicly traded company in the world had risen to a fever pitch. Anxiety over billions in investment in artificial intelligence pervaded, in part because the US has been starved of reliable economic data by the recent government shutdown.Investors hoped that both questions would be in part answered by Nvidia’s earnings and by a jobs report due on Thursday morning.“This is a ‘So goes Nvidia, so goes the market’ kind of report,” Scott Martin, chief investment officer at Kingsview Wealth Management, told Bloomberg in a concise summary of market sentiment.The prospect of a market mood swing had built in advance of the earnings call, with options markets anticipating Nvidia’s shares could move 6%, or $280bn in value, up or down
Uber hit with legal demands to halt use of AI-driven pay systems
Uber has been hit with legal demands to stop using its artificial intelligence driven pay systems, which have been blamed for significantly reducing the incomes of the ride hailing app’s drivers.A letter before action – sent to the US company by the non-profit foundation, Worker Info Exchange (WIE), on Wednesday – is understood to allege that the ride hailing app has breached European data protection law by varying driver pay rates through its controversial algorithm.James Farrar, the director of WIE, said: “Uber has leveraged artificial intelligence and machine learning to implement deeply intrusive and exploitative pay-setting systems that have damaged the livelihoods of thousands of drivers.“Through this collective action, we intend to get a fairer deal for drivers and ensure Uber is held financially accountable for the harm caused by this unlawful use of AI.“This case is … about securing transparent, fair and safe working conditions for all platform workers
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