AI news, explained

Understand what just happened in AI — in five minutes.

Independent reporting and plain-language explainers on models, chips, agents, funding and policy. Published in six languages.

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Policy & regulation

The EU AI Act: which obligations are already in force, and which are still ahead

The EU AI Act entered into force on 1 August 2024 and applies in stages. The bans on prohibited practices and the AI-literacy duty applied from February 2025; obligations for general-purpose AI models from August 2025; and the main high-risk regime from August 2026, with product-embedded high-risk systems following in 2027.

The Act is staged: prohibitions first, general-purpose model duties second, the high-risk regime last.
Obligations attach to roles — provider, deployer, importer, distributor — not to companies, and one organisation can hold several roles at once.

Aug 20, 2026Updated Aug 22, 20264 min read

Agents & automation

Analysis: what actually changed when AI agents moved from demo to production

Demos run a short happy path once with a human watching. Production runs thousands of variations unattended, where per-step error rates compound and an unbounded permission scope turns a wrong decision into an incident. The deployments that work narrow the scope, verify each step cheaply, and gate every irreversible action.

Aug 19, 2026Updated Aug 22, 20264 min read

Business & funding

Analysis: the price of AI keeps falling, so why are the bills going up?

Price per token has fallen sharply through better hardware, smaller distilled models and serving optimisations. Consumption has grown faster: longer contexts, reasoning models that generate far more tokens per answer, and agents that turn one user action into dozens of model calls. Falling unit prices with rising unit counts produce larger bills.

Aug 17, 2026Updated Aug 22, 20263 min read

Tools & products

Analysis: answer engines are rewriting how people find information — and how publishers get paid

Answer engines synthesise a response from several sources and show it above or instead of the traditional link list, so a query that once produced a visit can now be resolved without one. Publishers see impressions and citations rise while click-through falls, which breaks the advertising model that assumed every answer required a page view.

Aug 15, 2026Updated Aug 22, 20264 min read

Open source AI

Analysis: how far behind are open-weight models, really?

On common benchmarks the best open-weight models now sit close to frontier commercial models, and for many routine tasks the difference is not noticeable. The remaining gaps show up in long-horizon reliability, tool use, very long contexts and safety tuning — and in the operational work of running them yourself.

Aug 13, 2026Updated Aug 22, 20263 min read

Start here: explainers

Evergreen answers to the questions people actually ask.

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Agents & automation

What is an AI agent, and how is it different from a chatbot?

An AI agent is a language model that has been given tools it can call, a goal to pursue, and permission to take several steps without asking a human between each one. A chatbot answers a question and stops; an agent keeps acting until it decides the goal is met or it runs out of budget.

Aug 18, 2026Updated Aug 22, 20264 min read

Models & research

What is a context window, and why does it run out?

A context window is the maximum amount of text, measured in tokens, that a model can consider in a single request. It holds the system instructions, the conversation so far, any documents you paste in, and the answer being generated. When the total exceeds the limit, something has to be dropped or summarised.

Aug 16, 2026Updated Aug 22, 20264 min read

Models & research

What is RAG (retrieval-augmented generation), and when do you need it?

Retrieval-augmented generation is a pattern where the system searches your own documents for passages relevant to a question, puts those passages into the model's prompt, and asks the model to answer using them. The model's weights never change; the knowledge arrives as context at request time.

Aug 14, 2026Updated Aug 22, 20263 min read

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Models & researchNew frontier models, benchmarks, training methods and the research behind them.Agents & automationTool-using AI systems, autonomous workflows and what they actually automate.Chips & infrastructureAccelerators, data centres, memory supply and the power bill behind AI.Business & fundingRounds, revenue, pricing and the economics of shipping AI products.Policy & regulationLaws, enforcement, copyright and the rules AI has to live inside.Safety & ethicsEvaluations, misuse, bias, alignment research and incident reporting.Open source AIOpen-weight models, permissive licences and the community stack around them.Tools & productsApplications people can use today, with honest notes on limits and cost.

AI glossary

Short, precise definitions of the terms you keep seeing in headlines.

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Model directory

A side-by-side reference of the frontier models people are actually deploying.

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