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An investigation has exposed the tech firm’s cooperation with autocratic regimes to remove unfavorable content. 

Feb. 15.– Google has cooperated with autocratic regimes around the world, including the Kremlin in Russia and the Chinese Communist party, to facilitate censorship requests, an Observer investigation can reveal.

The technology company has engaged with the administrations of about 150 countries since 2011 that want information scrubbed from their public domains.

Technology—all technologies—inevitably become better and cheaper over time. That trend has been in motion, at an accelerating rate, since at least the end of the last Ice Age about 12,000 years ago. Since the start of the Industrial Revolution about 200 years ago the hyperbolic curve has gone vertical.

Why, therefore, has DeepSeek surprised everybody? Its arrival is part of a very established and obvious trend. I’m just amused by the ironic fact that no existing AIs seem to have predicted it.

That being the case, somebody, or AI itself for all we know, has already come up with something even better than DeepSeek. That’s inevitable. "They" say that AI will soon be vastly smarter, and arguably wiser, than humans. If so, maybe it will be kinder and gentler too. Unless its programmers have bad intentions—which is quite likely.

I’m not a computer nerd—far from it—but I am a technophile. Looking at the history of technology, starting with Heraclitus, Leonardo, Edison, the Wright Brothers, Steve Jobs, and thousands of others, almost all of the great breakthroughs in history have been made by individual geniuses working on their own or with small groups. Getting the government involved would almost certainly be a gigantic mistake.

Helsinki, Feb.5 (DPnet).– The Council of Europe and Finland’s Non-discrimination Ombudsman will host a seminar focusing on the human rights implications of artificial intelligence (AI) and automated decision-making in public administration. Speakers include the Head of Hate Speech, Hate Crime and Artificial Intelligence Unit, Council of Europe, Menno Ettema; and Finland’s Non-discrimination Ombudsman, Kristina Stenman alongside researchers and civil society representatives. 

Discussions will explore case studies, and regulatory frameworks, including the Council of Europe Framework Convention on AI, and the European Union AI Act. The seminar is organized in the framework of the CoE-EU Technical Support project “Upholding equality and non-discrimination by equality bodies regarding the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in public administrations”, co-funded by the European Union. This European Union–Council of Europe Technical Support project will extend up to 2025 and is expected to strengthen the administrative capacity of the equality bodies with Belgium, Portugal, and Finland as the main beneficiaries.

The seminar can be followed via a livestream (in English and in Finnish):
Contact: Päivi Suhonen, tel. +33 6 69 76 52 89 <paivi.suhonen@coe.int>

Last September the European Commission Vice-President for Values and Transparency, Věra Jourová signed the Council of Europe Framework Convention on Artificial Intelligence and human rights, democracy, and the rule of law on behalf of the European Union. This was done during the informal conference of Ministers of Justice of member states of the Council of Europe in Vilnius, Lithuania. This Convention is the first legally binding international instrument on artificial intelligence. 

Jan.28 (DPnet).– A surprisingly powerful and efficient Chinese AI model created a year ago has overtaken the tech sector by storm. It is known as DeepSeek R1. This is a breakthrough AI product of a startup business that has somehow managed a market commotion that famed tech investor Marc Andreessen has called “AI’s Sputnik moment”: R1 can nearly match the capabilities of its far more famous rivals, including OpenAI’s GPT-4, Meta’s Llama and Google’s Gemini — but at a fraction of the cost.

On Monday, DeepSeek, a tiny company that reportedly employs no more than 200 people, caused American chipmaker Nvidia to have almost $600bn wiped off its market value – the biggest drop in US stock market history.  The startup was founded in 2023 in Hangzhou, China, by Liang Wenfeng, who previously co-founded one of China's top hedge funds, High-Flyer.