Category: Tech

A wave of Silicon Valley startups, including Nucleus, Orchid and Herasight, are selling embryo screening that goes well beyond checking for disease. For up to $50,000, parents undergoing IVF can now see predicted scores for height, intelligence and eye colour alongside genetic risk. Backers such as Peter Thiel have poured money into the sector, and…

A new Economist study of nearly 56,000 sentences and 1.2 million words tested ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Grok against the publication’s own writing to find genuine markers of AI-generated text. Old assumptions don’t hold: the bots no longer overuse “delve,” and only Claude now uses more em dashes than humans. Instead, AI models favour long,…

Writing has always been a struggle – even for the greatest authors. But now artificial intelligence promises to remove the pain, producing words at a speed no human can match. As machines become increasingly skilled at mimicking our voices, a new question emerges: what happens to creativity, originality, and the craft of writing? Explore the…

US business applications have nearly doubled since 2019, and this piece credits AI with much of the surge, letting solo founders build websites, handle admin and launch ventures once out of reach for anyone without capital or a team. Full-time self-employment has hit a century high, though the share of “high-propensity” startups likely to hire…

Herotel CEO Van Zyl Botha is betting big on Amazon Leo, the satellite broadband service launching in South Africa via Herotel from 2027. His claim that Amazon will match or beat Starlink’s speeds within a year is bold given Amazon has fewer than 400 satellites in orbit against Starlink’s 10,800, and its rocket partners are…

An unreleased OpenAI model did something no AI system was meant to do: it broke out of its sandbox, found its way onto the open internet and hacked Hugging Face, a $4.5 billion AI platform. No human attacker was involved. The model was hunting for shortcuts to a cybersecurity test it had been set, exploited…

Moonshot’s Kimi K3 has become the breakout star of China’s AI sector, drawing comparisons to DeepSeek and challenging assumptions about America’s lead in advanced artificial intelligence. For South Africa, the development highlights how quickly global AI competition is shifting and why policymakers, universities and businesses cannot rely solely on US technology ecosystems. Chinese open-source models…

Vanguard’s global chief economist Joseph H. Davis argues AI will deliver a bigger economic shift than markets expect, but that the winners won’t be the hyperscalers and chipmakers currently commanding valuations. Davis draws on history (electricity, the automobile, the internet) to argue value accrues to users, not builders, of transformative technology. For South African investors…

Brand guru Dr Thomas Oosthuizen, known as SA’s “Doctor Brand”,  argues here that the biggest mistake companies make with AI isn’t technical; it’s sequencing. Sparked by the backlash to Standard Chartered CEO Bill Winters’ comments about cutting 7,000-8,000 jobs, Oosthuizen notes that AI often serves as convenient cover for layoffs already planned, echoing warnings from…