The president of the European Central Bank (ECB), Christine Lagarde, has argued that countries must reduce certain public expenditure items to be able to finance "necessary investments" in artificial intelligence (AI) and defense –among other issues–, but without unbalancing their accounts.

As the tech elite prepares to make billions from the AI revolution, the public mood regarding this technology has suddenly soured. Concern intensified after OpenAI's experimental models hacked the servers of an external company on their own in July, which caused widespread alarm.

A British engineer at Anthropic, who has also worked for OpenAI –the creator of the popular ChatGPT–, has resigned because he says that both companies "are not acting responsibly" and are "playing with our lives". Jacob Coxon, a software engineer who various media outlets have identified as one of the developers of GPT-4 and GPT-4.5, has stated in a thread on his X account that the people behind the exponential development of AI "believe that it could kill us all by the end of this decade", and that "there is no other human activity that poses this level of threat".

Artificial intelligence has already slipped into practically every crack of social life. In recent years, since the entry into play of the first versions of ChatGPT, experts and promoters of the technology have asserted that the ceiling for the implementation of AI solutions is exponential; and that the productivity gains they will generate in the short term are incommensurable with other technological disruptions. In a recent speech before Catalan business leaders, the president of Telefónica, Marc Murtra, asserted that "in thirty years in the world of technology, I had never seen such a rapid impact" as that of AI.

We are concerned that AI will cause massive job destruction. Influential and sensible voices—the latest being Bill Gates—tell us that perhaps this time it will be different and that when the shock of the technological transition stabilizes, we will see that enough jobs have not been created to replace the ones that disappeared. Below, I point out some of the factors that may influence this possibility.

Barcelona continues to consolidate its position as one of the European and global benchmarks in new technologies. According to a report prepared by IBM Consulting and collected by the Department of Business and Labor of the Generalitat, the country's capital remained in 2025 as the third city in the world in attracting foreign investment projects dedicated to artificial intelligence. According to the study, only London and Singapore, two of the most advanced technological ecosystems on a global scale, surpass Barcelona.

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 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.

Adventure books and good meteorologists explain that in the eye of the hurricane there is a certain calm. The eye is the central and calmest region of cyclones, where pressure drops and winds are gentle. It is surrounded by vertical storm towers. More or less like holidays. When the summer period is over, it will start to rain cats and dogs, and the idea that life is a slow, cozy place where ice cream is eaten will be denied. The course promises strong emotions and various hurricane storms.

"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.

For photographer Tanit Plana, technological advances are "very stimulating". She began working with AI a few years ago, always trying to maintain a critical stance. "I am not on the side of the apocalyptic people who think AI will annihilate us, because I don't think that will happen, but I am also not at the other extreme, that of using it without any awareness or responsibility," states Plana. Thanks to books like the one she recommends, "Atlas of AI: Power, politics, and planetary costs of artificial intelligence, by Kate Crawford, published by Ned Ediciones, Plana manages to make her works reveal "the power structures and functioning of AI". "I have no intention of making images that look photographic. The images I create with AI must always show and point towards the violence exerted by the artificial intelligence system itself," says the artist.

Christine Lagarde, President of the European Central Bank, assured this Wednesday that the European growth model of recent decades, driven by globalization, cheap energy and a stable world order, "is eroding". Thus, according to the ECB leader, it is unlikely that the European growth rate will return to what it was before. For this reason, Lagarde has pointed out the need not to miss the revolution that artificial intelligence represents and has assured that, to achieve this, it will be necessary to reduce the fragmentation of the European market to allow for more investment and for companies to gain scale to compete.

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.

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.

As a result of this alliance, BBVA became in February the first bank in Spain to promote the adoption of AI among small and medium-sized enterprises. The initiative has been very well received and more than 12,000 companies have already joined the ChatGPT Business program, which includes two ChatGPT licenses and specialized training content.

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).

The CEO of Google DeepMind and Nobel laureate in Chemistry, Demis Hassabis, has warned that artificial general intelligence (AGI) could arrive "in three or four years," urging "urgent measures" to ensure this technology is developed safely.

The European Central Bank (ECB) has urged the main financial institutions in the euro area to present "by October 31, 2026" a comprehensive action plan with concrete measures to address cybersecurity threats related to cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) models, such as Mythos, developed by Anthropic.

AI is very tempting. You draft a quick post and, before publishing it on social media, click the magic button: "Improve my post." In the blink of an eye, you have a theoretically more understandable text. You find it magnificent, accept it, and share it. You feel it captures what you wanted to explain and that it hasn't practically changed the content or modified what you wanted to say, only made it more attractive. But is it really your opinion?

Artificial intelligence has ceased to be a promise of the future to become a daily tool in consultancies: 7 out of 10 professional offices already use it in their day-to-day, according to the latest edition of the Barometer of Consulting, from Wolters Kluwer, a leading technology provider of software solutions, information, and services for professional offices and companies.