Technology

➚ MOVE FAST: Humain. Saudi Arabia’s new AI company is planning a $10 billion venture fund to invest in startups outside the kingdom, in a sign of its global ambitions. Humain CEO Tareq Amin also told the FT that it hopes to process 7% of the world’s AI training and inference by 2030.

➘ BREAK THINGS: Meta. Mark Zuckerberg’s firm is once again overhauling its AI team by splitting them in two as it faces increasing competition from China’s DeepSeek and others. Meanwhile, it may spend months waiting for a US judge to decide its future after the conclusion of an antitrust trial targeting its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp.

Sounds familiar. When Scottish voice actress Gayanne Potter discovered that ScotRail was using what she believed to be her voice for its new AI-generated train announcement system, she burst into tears. To add insult to her two-year saga to limit its use, some passengers have complained that the voice sounded robotic and unnatural, the BBC reported. “Why continue to choose a dreadful AI version of me when I’m right here…” she wrote on Facebook.

The conflict began when text-to-speech provider ReadSpeaker launched an AI character named Iona in 2023, which Potter believes the company created using recordings she made two years prior for its accessibility tools. Iona now speaks for the train system.

“ReadSpeaker is aware of Ms Potter’s concerns, and has comprehensively addressed these with Ms Potter’s legal representative several times in the past,” ReadSpeaker told the BBC.

Potter also protested the “minimal fee” she earned for the initial recording and the two years she says ReadSpeaker has profited from her voice. But there is little legal recourse available for the artist. Unlike in the US, the UK lacks specific legal protections for individuals’ likeness and voices, which makes it difficult for artists and creators to prevent AI companies from making digital replicas without their consent. Still, the issue is striking a chord with artists who want more protections for their craft.

The show that predicted AI

Americans in the years 2011 to 2016 — not the coastal media types watching Girls or Silicon Valley on HBO, but the 10 million-plus watching CBS Thursday nights — were exposed to a tutorial on the emerging field of artificial intelligence.

Consider some Person of Interest plot points in what its creator called a “cyberpunk procedural”:

• The AI, called The Machine, deciphers written and spoken speech and predicts our actions.
• Its acolytes engage in a gunfight to seize gaming consoles for their GPUs.
• Its malignant AI rival, thirsty for energy, launches a daring large-scale theft of generators.

With the AI boom, the show is having a moment despite the other big hits of creator Jonathan Nolan. For starters, he wrote the screenplay for four of his older brother’s, Christopher Nolan, era-defining films: Memento, The Dark Knight, The Dark Knight Rises, and Interstellar. He also created the dark robot western Westworld for HBO with his wife, Lisa Joy.

But these days, “more than almost anything I’ve done, people talk to me about Person of Interest,” Nolan said in a recent video interview from his home in Manhattan. “I wouldn’t credit us with any particular gift for prophecy. The pieces of it were right there if you cared to look at them.”

Robots and forms of artificial intelligence date back into the mists of time in history, literature, and film — back to HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey, to the invention of the term “robot” by the Czech playwright Karel Čapek in 1920, and before that to Frankenstein, the Golem, and so on.

Perhaps no contemporary artist has approached artificial intelligence on such a large canvas — big American films and television — as Nolan.

“For a very long time, AI has felt like the story of our time,” Nolan said. “This is the moment we get to live through: We live before the emergence of another sentient species on our planet, and it’s happening right now.”

The government subsidies (equivalent to about $21 million) that Japanese AI chip startup EdgeCortix will receive to develop energy-efficient products. The venture is addressing local labor shortages through chiplets that will help robots make faster decisions. It’s also part of Japan’s defense buildup and embrace of dual-use technology, Bloomberg reported, with ¥4 billion ($28 million) in subsidies to make chips for communications systems.

Elon Musk’s Neuralink raised $600 million in a deal that values the brain-mapping company at $9 billion before the new cash infusion, Semafor’s Liz Hoffman scooped.

The startup was last valued at $3.5 billion in late 2023, according to PitchBook, but has since implanted three chips into the brains of patients paralyzed or unable to speak. The most recent, a non-verbal Arizona man with ALS, posted a video on Musk’s X last month in which he speaks using the chip.

Bloomberg reported in April that Neuralink was looking to raise $500 million at a valuation of $8.5 billion. Jared Birchall, Neuralink’s CEO and the head of Musk’s investment office, didn’t respond to a request for comment.

The value of Musk’s companies has soared over the last four years, though Neuralink remains one of the smaller parts of his empire. Meanwhile, Tesla is the subject of a new book by investigative journalists on its questionable safety practices, underpinned by 23,000 leaked documents. The exposé is the first updated look at Musk since Walter Isaacson’s biography published in 2023, and includes the billionaire’s shift to far-right politics.

As electricity demand soars — driven by the rapid expansion of data centers and AI — pressure is mounting to scale secure and reliable energy resources.

Join Semafor for a timely conversation with Rep. Brett Guthrie, R-Ky., and Aamir Paul, President of North American Operations at Schneider Electric, as they discuss how the new Administration plans to accelerate domestic energy production — and whether current infrastructure is up to the task. The discussion will also explore the innovative policies and technologies that could help close the growing supply-demand gap.

June 11, 2025 | Washington, DC | RSVP

A Syrian-born cybersecurity expert and entrepreneur has emerged as a major drone maker in Ukraine and plans to expand production to meet demand from Western and Gulf militaries, Semafor’s Mohammed Sergie reports. Khaled Alfaiomi — a pseudonym he uses out of concern for his security — is the CEO of a Kyiv-based firm building surveillance and suicide aircraft. The company plans to build a €1 billion ($1.1 billion) factory in Europe, he said in an interview in Abu Dhabi.

Drone warfare is reshaping the battlefield: This month in Qatar, former CIA Director David Petraeus called Ukraine’s progress “breathtaking,” and President Trump questioned why American contractors can’t build drones as cheaply as other countries. Alfaiomi sells a €350,000 fixed-wing reconnaissance kit with three planes that he said costs less than half the price of comparable systems.

The precision and low cost of drones are forcing a rethink in Gulf defense doctrine, writes Semafor columnist Omar Al-Ubaydli. “In short, they can deter through offense, not defense ... Countermeasures are still possible, but many are expensive compared to the low cost of offensive drones.”

A string of crypto kidnappings across Europe and the US have put executives and investors on edge. A brutal scene unfolded in New York City over the holiday weekend, when a Kentucky man was arrested and accused of torturing an Italian tourist to obtain access to his crypto wallet, Semafor’s Rohan Goswami writes.

Concerns have grown after hackers stole the names, addresses, and account balances of some Coinbase customers. “This hack will lead to people dying,” TechCrunch founder and crypto investor Michael Arrington wrote on X.