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Apple, which spent years as TSMC's undisputed top customer and helped the Taiwanese foundry become the semiconductor industry's most important manufacturer, is now fighting for production capacity as Nvidia's AI chip orders consume an ever-larger share of the company's leading-edge wafer supply. TSMC CEO CC Wei visited Cupertino last August to deliver unwelcome news: Apple would face the largest price increase in years and the iPhone maker would no longer have guaranteed access to production capacity across TSMC's nearly two dozen fabs. According to Culpium analysis and its supply chain sources, Nvidia likely overtook Apple as TSMC's largest customer in at least one or two quarters of 2025. TSMC's revenue climbed 36% last year to $122 billion, the company reported Thursday.

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The chatbot's challenges no longer just Elon Musk’s problem, as campaigners call on tech giants to step in

The ongoing Grok fiasco has claimed two more unwilling participants, as campaigners demand Apple and Google boot X and its AI sidekick out of their app stores, because of the Elon Musk-owned AI's tendency to produce illicit images of real people.…

Wikipedia turns 25 today, and the online encyclopedia is celebrating that with an announcement that it has signed new licensing deals with a slate of major AI companies -- Amazon, Microsoft, Meta Platforms, Perplexity and Mistral AI. The deals allow these companies to access Wikipedia content "at a volume and speed designed specifically for their needs." The Wikimedia Foundation did not disclose financial terms. Google had already signed on as one of the first enterprise customers back in 2022. The agreements follow the Wikimedia Foundation's push last year for AI developers to pay for access through its enterprise platform. The foundation said human traffic had fallen 8% while bot visits -- sometimes disguised to evade detection -- were heavily taxing its servers. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said he welcomes AI training on the site's human-curated content but that companies "should probably chip in and pay for your fair share of the cost that you're putting on us." The site remains the ninth most visited on the internet, hosting more than 65 million articles in 300 languages maintained by some 250,000 volunteer editors.

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And it's 'not unique to AWS,' researcher tells The Reg

A critical misconfiguration in AWS's CodeBuild service allowed complete takeover of the cloud provider's own GitHub repositories and put every AWS environment in the world at risk, according to Wiz security researchers.…

Anthropic's fourth installment of its Economic Index, drawing on an anonymized sample of two million Claude conversations from November 2025, finds that AI is changing how people work rather than whether they work at all. The study tracked usage across the company's consumer-facing Claude.ai platform and its API, categorizing interactions as either automation (where AI completes tasks entirely) or augmentation (where humans and AI collaborate). The split came out to 52% augmentation and 45% automation on Claude.ai, a slight shift from January 2025 when augmentation led 55% to 41%. The share of jobs using AI for at least a quarter of their tasks has risen from 36% in January to 49% across pooled data from multiple reports. Anthropic's researchers also found that AI delivers its largest productivity gains on complex work requiring college-level education, speeding up those tasks by a factor of 12 compared to 9 for high-school-level work. Claude completes college-degree tasks successfully 66% of the time versus 70% for simpler work. Computer and mathematical tasks continue to dominate usage, accounting for roughly a third of Claude.ai conversations and nearly half of API traffic.

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When margins are this tight, mergers might follow

The memory shortage is forecast to push smartphone prices higher in 2026, triggering a market decline and forcing budget phone makers to merge or disappear.…

January patch trips up Azure Virtual Desktop and Windows 365 authentication

Microsoft has kicked off 2026 with another faulty Windows update. This time, it is connection and authentication failures in Azure Virtual Desktop and Windows 365 related to the Windows App.…

White-collar workers stuck in a cycle of layoffs and stagnant wages might want to look past the traditional tech, finance and media job postings to an unexpected source of opportunity: the blue-collar sector, which faces a labor shortage and is seeing rapid transformation through private-equity investment. These jobs are generally less vulnerable to AI, and the earning trajectory can be steep, the WSJ writes. At Crash Champions, a car-repair chain that has grown from 13 locations in 2019 to about 650 shops across 38 states, service advisers start at roughly $60,000 after a six-month apprenticeship and can double that within 18 months, according to CEO Matt Ebert. Directors overseeing multiple locations earn more than $200,000. Power Home Remodeling, a PE-backed construction company, says tech sales professionals earning $85,000 to $100,000 could make lateral moves after a 10-week training program. The share of workers in their early 20s employed in blue-collar roles rose from 16.3% in 2019 to 18.4% in 2024, according to ADP -- five times the increase among 35- to 39-year-olds.

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Research shows erroneous training in one domain affects performance in another, with concerning implications

Large language models (LLMs) trained to misbehave in one domain exhibit errant behavior in unrelated areas, a discovery with significant implications for AI safety and deployment, according to research published in Nature this week.…

Smart Driver pitched as safety app, but feds claim it's a data-harvesting scheme that jacked up premiums

The Federal Trade Commission has banned General Motors and subsidiary OnStar from sharing drivers' precise location and behavior data with consumer reporting agencies for five years under a 20-year consent order finalized January 14.…

Suspect assisting West Midlands Police over alleged theft at Walsall GP practice

The UK's West Midlands Police has released a woman on bail as part of an investigation into a data breach at a Walsall general practitioner's (GP) surgery.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Over the weekend, Neel Somani, who is a software engineer, former quant researcher, and a startup founder, was testing the math skills of OpenAI's new model when he made an unexpected discovery. After pasting the problem into ChatGPT and letting it think for 15 minutes, he came back to a full solution. He evaluated the proof and formalized it with a tool called Harmonic -- but it all checked out. "I was curious to establish a baseline for when LLMs are effectively able to solve open math problems compared to where they struggle," Somani said. The surprise was that, using the latest model, the frontier started to push forward a bit. ChatGPT's chain of thought is even more impressive, rattling off mathematical axioms like Legendre's formula, Bertrand's postulate, and the Star of David theorum. Eventually, the model found a Math Overflow post from 2013, where Harvard mathematician Noam Elkies had given an elegant solution to a similar problem. But ChatGPT's final proof differed from Elkies' work in important ways, and gave a more complete solution to a version of the problem posed by legendary mathematician Paul Erdos, whose vast collection of unsolved problems has become a proving ground for AI. For anyone skeptical of machine intelligence, it's a surprising result -- and it's not the only one. AI tools have become ubiquitous in mathematics, from formalization-oriented LLMs like Harmonic's Aristotle to literature review tools like OpenAI's deep research. But since the release of GPT 5.2 -- which Somani describes as "anecdotally more skilled at mathematical reasoning than previous iterations" -- the sheer volume of solved problems has become difficult to ignore, raising new questions about large language models' ability to push the frontiers of human knowledge. Somani examined the online archive of more than 1,000 Erdos conjectures. Since Christmas, 15 Erdos problems have shifted from "open" to "solved," with 11 solutions explicitly crediting AI involvement. On GitHub, mathematician Terence Tao identifies eight Erdos problems where AI made meaningful autonomous progress and six more where it advanced work by finding and extending prior research, noting on Mastodon that AI's scalability makes it well suited to tackling the long tail of obscure, often straightforward Erdos problems. Progress is also being accelerated by a push toward formalization, supported by tools like the open-source "proof assistant" Lean and newer AI systems such as Harmonic's Aristotle.

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Transparently runs 16, 32, and 64-bit Windows apps, but still doesn't use the Microsoft store.

The latest version of the Wine Windows app runner arrives a year after version 10. Given its annual release cycle, its magic is starting to seem almost boring and routine, but it's far from it.…

40 TOPS of inference grunt, 8 GB onboard memory, and the nagging question: who exactly needs this?

Raspberry Pi has launched the AI HAT+ 2 with 8 GB of onboard RAM and the Hailo-10H neural network accelerator aimed at local AI computing.…

Redmond says cheap virtual desktops powered a global wave of phishing and fraud

Microsoft has taken its cybercrime fight to the UK in its first major civil action outside the US, moving to shut down RedVDS, a virtual desktop service used to power phishing and fraud at global scale.…

Cold milk poured over 'spicy mode,' but it might not be enough to escape a huge fine

Ofcom is continuing with its investigation into X, despite the social media platform saying it will block Grok from digitally undressing people.…

ValueLicensing case rumbles on as Windows giant appeals against copyright judgment

Microsoft's From Software Assurance (SA) program is the subject of a disclosure application as the long-running spat between Microsoft and ValueLicensing over the resale of software licenses rumbles on.…

Games Workshop, the owner and operator of a number of hugely popular tabletop war games, including Warhammer 40,000 and Age of Sigmar, has banned the use of generative AI in its content and design processes. IGN reports: Delivering the UK company's impressive financial results, CEO Kevin Rountree addressed the issue of AI and how Games Workshop is handling it. He said GW staff are barred from using it to actually produce anything, but admitted a "few" senior managers are experimenting with it. Rountree said AI was "a very broad topic and to be honest I'm not an expert on it," then went on to lay down the company line: "We do have a few senior managers that are [experts on AI]: none are that excited about it yet. We have agreed an internal policy to guide us all, which is currently very cautious e.g. we do not allow AI generated content or AI to be used in our design processes or its unauthorized use outside of GW including in any of our competitions. We also have to monitor and protect ourselves from a data compliance, security and governance perspective, the AI or machine learning engines seem to be automatically included on our phones or laptops whether we like it or not. We are allowing those few senior managers to continue to be inquisitive about the technology. We have also agreed we will be maintaining a strong commitment to protect our intellectual property and respect our human creators. In the period reported, we continued to invest in our Warhammer Studio -- hiring more creatives in multiple disciplines from concepting and art to writing and sculpting. Talented and passionate individuals that make Warhammer the rich, evocative IP that our hobbyists and we all love."

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EU-only ops, German subsidiaries, and a pinky promise your data won't end up in Uncle Sam's hands

Amid continued trade and geopolitical volatility between Europe and the US, Amazon Web Services is making its European Sovereign Cloud generally available today and plans to expand so-called Dedicated Local Zones.…

The UK government has awarded guaranteed electricity prices to offshore wind projects totaling 8.4 GW in a bid to revive wind development, attract nearly $30 billion in private investment, and stabilize energy costs. The New York Times reports: On Wednesday, the British government said that it would provide guaranteed electricity prices for a group of wind farms off England, Scotland and Wales that would, once built, provide power for 12 million homes. The 8.4 gigawatts, a power capacity measure, that won support is the largest amount that has been achieved in an auction in Britain. The government said that these wind farms could lead to 22 billion pounds, or almost $30 billion, in private investment. The government holds regular auctions, roughly on an annual basis. Results have been improving after a failed auction in 2023 that produced no bids from developers. The government almost doubled its original budget for the recent auction to about 1.8 billion pounds per year. To encourage renewable energy sources like offshore wind, Britain offers a price floor to provide certainty for investors. The average floor, or strike price, from the auction on Wednesday was about 91 pounds, or $122 per megawatt-hour, in 2024 prices, up about 11 percent from the last auction. Over the past year the wholesale price for electricity in Britain was on average about 79 pounds, according to Drax Electric Insights, a market analysis website. The bulk of the planned wind farms that won price supports will be off eastern England. Support will also go to wind farms off Scotland and Wales. The British government wants at least 95 percent of the country's electricity generation to come from clean sources by 2030. Political consensus for ambitious climate goals is eroding in Britain, but the government of Prime Minister Keir Starmer believes that an enormous bet on clean energy, especially offshore wind, is necessary to protect consumers from volatile fossil fuel prices.

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