Apple announces structural changes at its top. The CEO until now, Tim Cook, confirmed this Tuesday that he is handing over the reins to a new chief executive, a decade and a half after taking on the complicated task of succeeding the company's founder, Steve Jobs. He will be followed by John Ternus, until now vice president of hardware for the digital giant. The new era will be clearly marked by Apple's great challenge within the technological ecosystem: competing in the already crowded artificial intelligence market.

When going to check your email inbox in Gmail, a multicolored star reminds the user that they have a new companion: "Ask Gemini," suggests Google, in practically every corner of its suite digital. WhatsApp's search engine is no longer a search engine; it's Meta AI, also present on Instagram as an image and text generator. Like X, formerly Twitter, which has placed access to Grok, the chatbot of Elon Musk's. Outside of traditional applications, ChatGPT (OpenAI) and Claude (Anthropic) have become essential on phones and computers worldwide. "The AI era," as Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates calls it, has arrived; without permission, but with popular enthusiasm: both ChatGPT and Gemini are said to have surpassed 1 billion monthly users this summer; a usage figure that, as Ariadna Font, co-founder of the emerging Alinia AI and creator of Twitter's algorithmic ethics area, acknowledges, "is dizzying in human terms".

The generalization of the use of artificial intelligence (AI) has been unstoppable since the arrival of ChatGPT on social media in November 2022. In a very short time, much less than the expansion of the internet, for example, it has become part of citizens' daily lives through the major tech companies that have incorporated it into their products, such as search engines (Google), email and communication systems (Gmail and WhatsApp), or social networks (X). It has not only become a productivity improvement tool for economic sectors, but people also use it for all sorts of tasks, some even dangerous or questionable.

The stock market entries of the two competitors leading the race of commercial artificial intelligence – Anthropic (Claude) and OpenAI (ChatGPT)– are touching. While the market entry of Dario Amodei's leading company is assumed to occur this fall, Sam Altman's tech company "will be a listed company in 2027, or even sooner", according to the company's chief financial officer, Sarah Friar, as reported last Wednesday in a meeting with employees.

You had a primary school teacher who, to encourage you and your classmates, told you that anything you had done was wonderful, and congratulated you for working so hard. You and your classmates scribbled and doodled, and he applauded and displayed them.

Tension between the Spanish government and companies looking to promote data centers in the State. This week, Pedro Sánchez's executive has initiated the procedures to approve a royal decree that will toughen the requirements that projects must meet to be realized. The Spanish executive published the full text this Thursday, after meeting yesterday with the main sector employers' associations, Spain DC and Ametic.

"Artificial intelligence could be the greatest equalizer ever invented, or the worst source of inequality." Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates believes the potential impact of AI – benefits and pitfalls, in equal measure – is greatly underestimated. In a long essay published on his website, Gates Notes, the tech mogul and president of his namesake foundation has detailed the promises and dangers of a technology that, in his view, could dismantle the entire contemporary social structure. "The transition to the AI era will be one of the most turbulent periods in human history. And, as of now, we are not adequately prepared to face it," he asserts.

The fashion e-commerce portal Shein presented this Monday on the Hong Kong stock exchange the conditions for its initial public offering. The platform expects to raise up to 1.513 billion euros, on a valuation of 23.122 billion, a substantially lower amount than the peaks recorded in 2022. At that time, shortly after a boom in e-commerce driven by the pandemic, the company founded in China, but headquartered in Singapore, was close to 100 billion dollars in value, about 85.6 billion euros.

The debt of the United States has surpassed the threshold of 40 trillion dollars, above its gross domestic product (GDP), that is, the value of all the wealth it generates in a year, which exceeds 30 trillion. In the second term of President Donald Trump, which began in January of last year, about 4 trillion has been added due to the costs of the war with Iran. And the tariffs he had imposed globally stopped being collected after the Supreme Court annulled them. The solution will not come through other revenues, through tax cuts for companies and large fortunes. All of this, together with Trump's unpredictability, raises doubts about the economy of the world's leading power. Uncertainty has costs and is expensive.

"The real estate market is a ticking time bomb, and I want to bet against it." American director Adam McKay dramatized in the film The Big Short the bursting of the 2007 housing bubble around a key figure: Michael Burry, the investor who bet everything against the U.S. credit market and escaped the crisis with unprecedented gains. More than two decades after those warnings, Burry has chosen a new target: artificial intelligence.

The artificial intelligence has been the engine of stock market success in recent years. The tech companies leading the AI market have reached unimaginable heights, to the point where the club of companies worth more than a trillion dollars is no longer an exclusive affiliation. Nvidia exceeds $5 trillion in market capitalization, while both Alphabet (Google) and Apple are above four trillion.

The progress of computer science in recent decades has been immense. The computers that guided the lunar missions of the 1960s had only a tiny fraction of the computing power of any of the smartphones we carry in our pockets today. In the 1980s, quantum computing began to be discussed, but while we are still awaiting its practical availability, it is the everyday electronic computers that have done the job. Perhaps the most spectacular has been how graphics processors (GPUs, for their English acronym), along with the enormous amount of data available on the internet, have enabled the current revolution in artificial intelligence (AI). Generative AI models are today so powerful that they inspire not only a certain respect, but also a bit of fear. There is talk of models that "jump the rails" (in English guardrails); that is to say, the limitations that the engineers who trained them have imposed on them. For example, not explaining how to make bombs, how to commit crimes, etc. If a model jumps over the railings that have been placed on it, does it perhaps have its own objectives, ambitions, consciousness, a personality? Following this path, we will soon come to think that models could stop being our kind slaves and become competitors or even formidable enemies.But can a model really bypass guardrails? The short answer is that, unlike humans, who can decide to break behavioral rules as we please, a model cannot independently bypass the guardrails put in place by its creators or trainers. However, there is a longer answer with more nuances.

Nvidia, the maker of graphics memory chips that has dominated artificial intelligence in recent years, continues to push the market to grow at a forced pace. As announced in a statement, the most valuable company on the planet has reached an agreement with six of Wall Street's largest financial entities to mobilize $500 billion in investment dedicated to AI infrastructure. In a social media post, its CEO, Jensen Huang, assured that the alliance's objective is to "establish independent financing platforms" to activate the necessary capital to build and launch large-scale AI factories.

Earthquake at the helm of Google's artificial intelligence segment. The former CEO of DeepMind, Nobel laureate in chemistry Demis Hassabis, has stepped down from leading the British subsidiary to take charge of leading Alphabet's – the parent company of the well-known internet search engine – long-term scientific research. Hassabis relinquishes executive functions at DeepMind, Mountain View's first major bet on AI, but assumes its presidency. In a corporate statement, Google CEO Sundar Pichai stated that the move aims to "accelerate the work done and maintain focus on the frontier of artificial intelligence".

Ten universities in the State, including the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), have created ConfIA, a network with the aim of establishing coordinated artificial intelligence development aligned with the new European regulation. As explained by Ulises Cortés, professor of AI at UPC, researcher at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, and president of this network, the main factor that has driven its creation has been the entry into force of the new phase of the European Union's Artificial Intelligence Act, the EU AI Act, on August 2nd.

Cristian Fàbrega Gallego is a professor in the Department of Electronic and Biomedical Engineering and coordinates the master's degree in renewable energies and energy sustainability at the University of Barcelona. He speaks to ARA to explain the environmental impact and energy consumption of artificial intelligence data centers, which are multiplying around the world.

Long before chatbots entered our lives, we already had too much judgment and lacked listening. Perhaps that's why we find it so seductive to converse with technology that never interrupts us, never questions us, and almost always agrees with us. The paradox is that we run the risk of confusing validation with listening and elevating this experience to a new thermometer for our relationships.

Throughout history, humanity has had only one system for asking and answering questions: other humans. When we wanted to know something, we asked the doctor, the teacher, or the neighbor who knew; we read the newspaper, which paid journalists to investigate; we consulted books, magazines or websites written by experts. This human question-and-answer system worked the way it worked: it was slow, imperfect, and unequal. But it had an architecture of incentives that, for better or worse, sustained the production of knowledge. Producers of information (newspapers, magazines, researchers, creators) invested time and resources in generating quality content.

An artificial intelligence model from OpenAI, the North American multinational creator of ChatGPT, caused an "unprecedented incident" in global cybersecurity. As the company acknowledged in a statement, one of its training models broke free from its limitations and attacked Hugging Face, a company also dedicated to AI.

The Government will approve this Tuesday at the executive council meeting to allocate fourteen million euros for the deployment in Barcelona of one of the first European artificial intelligence factories. It is the BSC AI Factory project, an artificial intelligence infrastructure driven by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center - National Supercomputing Center (BSCCNS).