Hub AI and society

Artificial Intelligence is a key technology that can help us solve major societal challenges such as climate change, energy supply, healthcare, education or logistics. AI can solve specific problems more effectively by supporting us in decision-making, automating solutions and thus scaling them, or discovering completely new solutions. But the use of AI also poses new risks, for example when it comes to surveillance or questions of social justice.

What is our society doing with AI – and what is AI doing to our society? We shed light on this question in our AI and Society Content Hub.

AI and society

OpenAI restructures under new foundation, Microsoft takes 27 percent stake

AI and society

The long-predicted deepfake dystopia has arrived with Sora 2

AI and society

Google downplays AI's environmental impact in new study

Ad
AI and society
Short

Venture capitalists have already invested $192.7 billion in AI startups in 2025 - a new record. For the first time, more than half of all global VC funding is flowing into AI, according to an analysis by PitchBook.

Major players like Anthropic and xAI have secured multi-billion dollar rounds, while smaller startups outside the AI sector are finding it harder to raise money. Kyle Sanford at PitchBook describes the result as a split market - it's either AI or not.

In the US, 62.7 percent of VC funding went to AI companies, compared to 53.2 percent worldwide. In total, global VC investment for 2025 stands at $366.8 billion, with $250.2 billion coming from the US.

Ad
Ad
Ad
Ad
AI and society
Short

Cognitive scientist Melanie Mitchell is pushing back against recent New York Times columns by writer Thomas Friedman, criticizing his framing of advanced AI.

In his pieces, Friedman calls for close U.S.-China collaboration on AI regulation and warns of an approaching "superintelligence." Much of his argument leans on comments from his friend Craig Mundie, the former Microsoft executive, as well as media reports. Mitchell says these claims lack scientific evidence. According to her, examples Friedman cites - like AI "teaching itself" new languages or chatbots pursuing their own hidden agendas - can be explained by training data and have been debunked.

Mitchell describes Friedman’s outlook as "magical thinking." In her view, he ascribes AI with mysterious powers that actually stem from human data and relatively simple mechanisms. She warns that because of Friedman’s broad reach, these myths risk shaping public understanding of AI. Instead of speculative scenarios, Mitchell argues for fact-based realism and human-led regulation.

Ad
Ad
AI and society
Short

Huawei introduced its new AI supercomputer, the Atlas 950 SuperCluster, at the Connect 2025 conference. The system uses more than 524,000 Ascend-950DT chips and, according to Huawei, can deliver up to 524 FP8 exaFLOPS for training and 1 FP4 zettaFLOP for inference. That makes it capable of handling models with trillions of parameters, according to Huawei.

In contrast to Nvidia's Rubin systems, Huawei continues to focus on scale over individual chip performance. As reported by Tom's Hardware, the setup requires about 64,000 square meters of floor space. Huawei is already planning a follow-up: the Atlas 960, slated for 2027, will include more than one million chips.

Google News

Bank details

IBAN: DE88 2507 0070 0053 0014 00
BIC: DEUTDE2HXXX
Account holder: Deep Content GmbH
Purpose: Support THE DECODER
AI and society
Comment

OpenAI and Microsoft call AGI pointless, then make it the linchpin of billion-dollar deals

AI in practice

Google leans on token metrics, not revenue, adding to bubble talk about AI growth

AI and society

OpenAI restructures under new foundation, Microsoft takes 27 percent stake

Google News