Jack Loughran

1 week ago | eandt.theiet.org | Jack Loughran

TikTok has been given another 90 days by the Trump administration to operate in the US after a law was passed last year that would force parent company ByteDance to sell the video-sharing platform. The ban was originally signed into law in April 2024, but TikTok owner ByteDance appealed to the US Supreme Court.

1 week ago | eandt.theiet.org | Jack Loughran

The government has unveiled plans to invest £725bn over the next decade in improvements to the UK’s infrastructure, including energy, transport, water and digital connectivity. Chief treasury secretary Darren Jones said the plan was needed to counteract “years of erratic decisions” from the previous government that has left the UK’s productivity falling behind countries such as France, Germany and the US.

1 week ago | eandt.theiet.org | Jack Loughran

Generative AI services such as ChatGPT are major carbon (CO ) emitters due to their intensive energy usage, but a new study has found that some AI prompts could cause 50 times more emissions than others depending on what is asked. To answer user queries, these services use tokens. These are words or parts of words that are converted into a string of numbers that can be processed by the large language model (LLM). This conversion, as well as other computing processes, produces CO emissions.

1 week ago | eandt.theiet.org | Jack Loughran

Amazon’s driverless taxi subsidiary Zoox has opened its first production facility for purpose-built robotaxis in the US and hopes to build more than 10,000 a year. Amazon bought the start-up in 2020 for $1.2bn (£890m) with the intention of eventually launching a service akin to Google’s Waymo. Waymo began taking rides for its first commercial service in San Francisco in 2021, while Zoox is gearing up to start public rides in Las Vegas later this year, with San Francisco to follow.

1 week ago | eandt.theiet.org | Jack Loughran

The HS2 railway project will face further delays beyond its expected 2033 completion date because of a “litany of failure”, transport secretary Heidi Alexander has told the Commons. HS2 has been beset by a string of failures and budget overruns over the last decade, including the cancellation of routes ending in Leeds and Manchester by the previous Conservative government.