Sign in Subscribe

Topic

AI

Artificial intelligence news and analysis: what's real, what's marketing, and what it means for you.

China's open AI models are cheap. Read the small print

DeepSeek, Z.ai, Alibaba and Moonshot have released a burst of new AI models, several with downloadable weights. They're cheap and you can run them yourself, but licences and trust come with strings.

Grok 4.7 and the week every AI model came top

xAI's Grok 4.7 landed the same week as OpenAI's GPT-6 Sol and Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5, each with charts showing it winning. Independent leaderboards tell a messier story, and for UK buyers price and data matter more.

Gemini 3.8 Flash is cheap. Until 1 January

Google's Gemini 3.8 Flash is fast, capable and cheap, which is why small models are the ones most people actually use. But its introductory price doubles on 1 January, and the Cyber version is invite-only.

Claude Opus 5.5: cheaper, top-ranked, and still US-gated

Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 beats its pricier Fable 5.1 on many tests at under half the price. The savings are real, but so are the rerouted requests, the US-only Mythos and the lack of UK data options.

GPT-6 Astra is brilliant. Its benchmarks need a footnote

OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra is fast becoming the model everyone wants, so much so that ChatGPT Pro sign-ups are paused. It's genuinely strong, but its headline benchmark shrinks under an independent test.

Amazon shut out Meta's AI shopper. Shopify let it in

Amazon has blocked Meta's Muse AI agent from buying on its site, while Shopify has plugged it straight into checkout. The fight over who lets AI shoppers in is coming, and UK rules are already waiting.

ElevenLabs says AI should admit it's AI. For now

ElevenLabs, the London-headquartered voice AI firm, is reportedly worth $22 billion. Its boss thinks AI callers should say they're AI today, but not in five years. That second part deserves a closer look.

The cheap AI era is ending, and DeepSeek just proved it

DeepSeek, the Chinese lab famous for cheap AI, has raised prices by up to four and a half times, and customers haven't blinked. It's reportedly now on a $1 billion revenue run rate.

The AI boom just hit a very old problem: electricity

Oracle has warned that energy delays at its giant Stargate data centre may be out of its hands. AI's biggest bottleneck isn't chips any more. It's power, and the UK has the same problem.

Your AI is about to phone their AI. Who's listening?

Google is testing an AI that makes phone calls for you. A day later, Ofcom revealed how Brits really feel about AI customer service. Put the two together and you get a call with nobody on either end.