A.I. Lowdown

Which Country Is Actually Leading the AI Race? For years, the answer seemed straightforward: if you wanted to know which country was leading the artificial-intelligence revolution, the answer was the United States. Silicon Valley produced many of the world's most influential AI companies. American technology companies built the largest foundation models, attracted leading researchers and invested enormous amounts of capital into computing infrastructure. But by 2026, that simple answer has become considerably harder to defend. China has closed much of the gap in frontier AI performance, while leading the world in several important measures of AI research and patents. Other countries—including the United Kingdom, Singapore, South Korea, France and Canada—have developed significant strengths of their own. So which country is actually leading? The answer depends on what you mean by "leading." The United States still has enormous advantages According to Stanford University...

Will AI Kill Everyone? The Question That Silicon Valley Can’t Ignore Few questions surrounding artificial intelligence are more dramatic—or more difficult to answer—than this one: Could AI eventually kill everyone? It sounds like the premise of a science-fiction movie. Yet the possibility of extremely advanced AI systems causing catastrophic harm has become a serious subject of discussion among scientists, technology executives and governments. That does not mean an AI apocalypse is inevitable. It doesn't even mean experts agree on how likely such an event might be. What it does mean is that humanity is developing increasingly capable technology while simultaneously trying to understand where the limits of that technology might eventually lie. And that creates an uncomfortable question: What happens if we build something substantially more capable than ourselves, but fail to keep it under control? The concern isn't today's AI Today's AI systems can write essays, generat...

Could HumNumber Become the Next Billion-Dollar Freemium Marketplace? In an increasingly digital world, people have identifiers for almost everything: usernames, account numbers, social-media handles, customer IDs and government-issued identification numbers. But what if there were a number designed to represent something much broader—the individual's place in the entire history of humanity? That is the idea behind HumNumber , a new identification and registration concept developed by HumNumber Registry Inc. in Canada. The premise is unconventional. HumNumber describes itself as a unique identifier that anchors an individual to humanity's collective timeline. Its numbering system incorporates an estimate of the cumulative number of human lives born before a person's birth year, combined with a distinguishing identifier and a tier designation. At first glance, it might look like another novelty internet registration service. But there is a potentially much larger business mod...