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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said AI adoption is "non-negotiable" for countries, comparing rejecting it to refusing electricity a century ago and predicting it will unleash an unprecedented boom in entrepreneurship. "The economic growth and benefit to people that can come from this, the value to a country, is too high to ignore," he said. His comments were made during a fireside chat with U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick at the G20 Innovation Ministerial in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. CNBC reports: Altman thinks the public won't be talking as much about AI a decade from now -- it'll be expected everywhere. "A kid growing up today will never be smarter than AI, but he or she will also never have understood a world where every product and service that they interact with is not really smart and really capable and really helpful," he said. Altman referenced the adoption of electricity multiple times in his comments and drew a line between that and AI. "I think it would be approximately as bad of an idea to say we're not going to have AI in our country as it was to say we're not going to have electricity in our country, you know, back 100 plus years ago," he said. Altman called cybersecurity one of the biggest challenges to navigate in the age of AI and one that leaders shouldn't sidestep. "I think some things are going to go very wrong with cybersecurity unless people act quite urgently," he said. Altman said that falling short in cyber defense and other areas "could set this technology back a great deal." You can watch a recording of the chat on YouTube.

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AI model scores well, runs fast, and doesn't cost too much (yet)

As the 83rd Venice Film Festival gets underway, the Italian city is set to come alive as a plethora of star-studded guests hit the red carpet in all of their finery.

New figures from the US Department of Transportation show that airlines mishandled 1,052,493 bags between January and June 2026.

Alexander Harris (pictured) trekked up the 13,000ft (4,000m) Musa Ka Musalla mountain in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province on Saturday with his friend Alun David Cooper Cledwyn.

North, whose father is Kardashian's third ex-husband Kanye West , posted a clip this week to the TikTok account she shares with her mother.

A pedestrian in his 60s was injured in a hit-and-run crash.

A pedestrian in his 60s was injured in a hit-and-run crash.

June 24th is a date of morbid significance in the timeline of baby killer Lucy Letby's crimes. It was on that day, in 2016, that the former nurse murdered the last of her victims.

New York City Public Schools is banning generative AI for students from pre-K through eighth grade for the 2026-27 school year, affecting more than half a million students in the nation's largest school district. ABC News reports: In a statement to ABC News, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani said that the city is implementing a moratorium on generative AI for students in pre-school or 2-K through eighth grade and will spend the next year "studying the impacts of this technology." Mamdani wrote in part, "the tech industry wants us to believe that A.I.-powered early education is not only inevitable, but necessary." "We do not see it that way," he added. [...] The district said it is implementing the most expansive AI moratorium in the nation, eliminating software that uses student-facing AI and banning companion chatbots. The city's AI moratorium does not apply to high school students. The district said it will offer twice-yearly AI literacy classes designed to help high school students "think critically" about the technology before they start to "rely" on it.

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The boy is said to remain in hospital after the tragedy, which unfolded at the family-friendly Alfagar Alto Da Colina aparthotel resort in Albufeira, Portugal, just before 7pm on Tuesday.

The plot reportedly targeted 26 celebrities, including footballers, rappers and wealthy businessmen, with French star Kylian Mbappe among them.

Adding insult to injury

Olympic medallist Jack Beaumont has described his terror as a motorboat captain appeared to 'lose his mind' and nearly ram him on the River Thames close to Maidenhead Rowing Club.

The sudden urge to splurge on a designer handbag might not be as random as it seems.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Alphabet's Google escaped a breakup of its advertising technology business on Wednesday, when a judge in Virginia rejected U.S. antitrust enforcers' bid to force a sale of Google's online advertising exchange. While the ad exchange is a small part of Google's business, the ruling is the second powerful symbolic victory against the U.S. Department of Justice in its efforts to force Google to sell assets to address illegal monopolies. U.S. Judge Leonie Brinkema in Alexandria, Virginia, declined to make Google sell AdX, where publishers pay Google a 20% fee to sell ads in auctions that happen instantly when users load websites. She accepted most of the parties' proposed behavioral remedies. The DOJ and a broad coalition of states sued Google in 2023 over its dominance in markets for advertising technology used by online publishers and websites. In April 2025, Brinkema ruled that Google holds illegal monopolies on servers that host publisher ads and ad exchanges which sit between buyers and sellers. Google unlawfully locked publishers on its ad server into using its AdX, the judge found. The tech giant's anticompetitive conduct "substantially harmed Google's publisher customers, the competitive process, and, ultimately, consumers of information on the open web," Brinkema said at the time. At a trial last year on remedies in the case, the DOJ argued that Google cannot be trusted to run AdX, given its past behavior. Google argued that a forced sale would be technically difficult and result in a long and painful transition that would hurt customers. During the remedies trial, Google's lawyers warned that forcing it to sell parts of its ad-tech business would cause disruption and damage. [...] The ruling is the third time in a row that a judge has rejected a bid by U.S. antitrust enforcers to break up Big Tech in a crackdown that started during President Donald Trump's first term. In another major Google antitrust case, a judge similarly rejected the DOJ's push to force Google to sell Chrome. It is likely to fuel questions about whether courts are up to the task of checking the industry's unprecedented power over the U.S. economy.

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Nearly two-thirds of US national security pros surveyed believe AI risks, and government posture toward them, are unacceptable

The 65-year-old A-lister stood up for free speech and the embattled 58-year-old Avengers star who was also recently defended by 170 Jewish entertainment figures in an open letter.

The Bridgerton star stunned fans on Tuesday by sharing that he would no longer appear in the musical, in a show of 'unwavering support' for his 'dearest friend' Ariana Grande .