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The former ballet dancer said Chalamet’s comments were ‘reckless’ in an interview with the New York Times in which she also discussed her violent childhoodActor and former ballet dancer Charlize Theron has joined the chorus of disapproval aimed at Timothée Chalamet over his remarks that appeared to disrespect performers of ballet and opera.In an interview with the New York Times, Theron said: “Oh, boy, I hope I run into him one day,” adding: “That was a very reckless comment on two art forms that we need to lift up constantly because, yes, they do have a hard time. But in 10 years, AI is going to be able to do Timothée’s job, but it will not be able to replace a person on a stage dancing live.” Continue reading...

• Scale AI raised $2.5 billion in fresh funding on April 19, 2026, at a $15 billion valuation, backed by Meta and Tiger Global. • Capital expands US data annotation workforce to 50,000, focusing on synthetic data for autonomous vehicles and LLMs. • Funding counters labor-intensive bottlenecks in AI training, vital for US competitiveness.

• Meta released Llama 4 on April 20, 2026, a 2 trillion parameter multimodal AI model trained on 15 petabytes of US-centric data. • The model outperforms GPT-4o on benchmarks like MMLU (92% score) and supports vision-language tasks for enterprise apps. • Open-sourcing aims to spur US AI innovation, with downloads exceeding 500,000 in first hours via Hugging Face.

First recorded in 687BC, the meteoroids were once part of the tail of a comet discovered in 1861This week, the annual Lyrid meteor shower returns to the spring skies. Although active since 16 April, the shower peaks during the late evening of Wednesday 22 April and early the next morning.The chart shows the view looking east from London at 00.01 (BST) on Thursday 23 April. The origin point of the meteors, known as the radiant, is labelled Lyrids. It sits in the constellation of Lyra, the Lyre, close to the bright star of Vega. Continue reading...

Social media corporation terminated Sama contract after allegations its staff viewed private scenes filmed by Meta’s smartglassesMore than 1,000 low-paid workers in Kenya have been abruptly sacked by an outsourcing company for the US social media corporation Meta, in what activists said was a “shocking” move exposing the precariousness of global south tech workers.Sama, a company based in Nairobi to which Meta outsourced content moderation and AI training work, announced on Thursday that the workers were being laid off after Meta terminated a contract. That came in the after reports some of the Kenyan workers involved in data annotation were asked to view content filmed by the company’s AI smart glasses showing wearers using the toilet or having sex. Continue reading...

• China's government investigation into Meta Platforms' acquisition of Manus has created uncertainty among Chinese AI startup founders seeking exit opportunities. • The probe has disrupted what was previously considered a popular exit pathway for Chinese AI startups, casting a shadow over international investment and acquisition strategies. • The regulatory scrutiny reflects China's heightened focus on controlling technology transfers and foreign acquisitions of strategic Chinese tech assets.

This year’s conference had plenty of newsworthy aspects, but it’s a mystery why the press fails to talk about itThe 72nd meeting of the Bilderberg group, the elite and secretive policy conference that is the longtime subject of endless conspiracy theories, was held at the weekend in Washington DC. A security cordon went up around the opulent Salamander hotel for the notoriously media-shy summit, which was packed as ever with prime ministers, military leaders, tech billionaires and the heads of giant investment companies.Bilderberg, which since the 1950s has been the intellectual engine room of Nato, took place this year at a time of immense crisis and uncertainty for the alliance. In recent weeks, with Trump threatening at every turn to withdraw from the “paper tiger” of Nato, the “Trans-Atlantic Defence-Industrial Relationship” (as it’s called on the agenda) has reached a strained breaking point. Continue reading...