8 h. ago Inside San Francisco’s new AI school: is this the future of US education?

The private Alpha School says its students can learn faster and better – but experts warn not all may benefit from an AI boom in schoolsIn the world’s tech innovation epicenter, an “AI-powered” private school has made headlines for unabashedly embracing the technology.Alpha School San Francisco, which opened its doors to K-8 students this fall, is the newest outpost of a network of 14 nationwide private schools. Its learning model entails just two hours of focused academic work per day, during which the school says students can learn twice as fast as their counterparts in traditional schools – with the help of artificial intelligence. Continue reading...

Politics

16 h. ago Driverless cars are coming to the UK – but the road to autonomy has bumps ahead

Waymo plans London robotaxis as early as 2026, but the history shows hype, hesitation and a few missed turnsThe age-old question from the back of the car feels just as pertinent as a new era of autonomy threatens to dawn: are we nearly there yet? For Britons, long-promised fully driverless cars, the answer is as ever – yes, nearly. But not quite.A landmark moment on the journey to autonomous driving is, again, just around the corner. This week, Waymo, which successfully runs robotaxis in San Francisco and four other US cities, announced it was bringing its cars to London. Continue reading...

Transport

22 h. ago Taylor Swift's film Easter egg sparks a $2M windfall for sea otters

Taylor Swift's new album film includes an Easter egg that's proving to be a boon for sea otters in Northern California

Politics

3 d. ago Driverless taxis from Waymo will be on London’s roads next year, US firm announces

Cars with human safety drivers will appear in coming weeks as permissions are sought for fully autonomous ridesDriverless taxis from Waymo will be available for hire on London’s roads next year, the US company has announced.The UK capital will become the first European city to have an autonomous taxi service of the kind now familiar in San Francisco and four other US cities using Waymo’s technology. Continue reading...

Economics

4 d. ago Road to nowhere: Prankster sends 50 Waymo driverless taxis to dead

Riley Walz, a young software engineer, announced that he was behind the stunt

Events

4 d. ago ChatGPT ‘upgrade’ giving more harmful answers than previously, tests find

Campaigners ‘deeply concerned’ about response to prompts about suicide, self-harm and eating disordersThe latest version of ChatGPT has produced more harmful answers to some prompts than an earlier iteration of the AI chatbot, in particular when asked about suicide, self-harm and eating disorders, digital campaigners have said.Launched in August, GPT-5 was billed by the San Francisco start-up as advancing the “frontier of AI safety”. But when researchers fed the same 120 prompts into the latest model and its predecessor, GPT-4o, the newer version gave harmful responses 63 times compared with 52 for the old model.In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, you can call or text the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 or chat at 988lifeline.org. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org Continue reading...

Politics

4 d. ago ‘Under 5ft 5in? Forget about being a prince!’ How the Royal Ballet is kicking out the old rules

What will the ballet dancer of the future look like? We visit the hunting lodge where the next generation are being trained – and find huge changes are under wayIt’s an idyllic autumn day in leafy Richmond Park, London, where a grand Georgian hunting lodge houses the Royal Ballet school. Enter through the classical columns and it feels like a bubble away from the world. “I was on a video call with my son,” says the school’s artistic director, Iain Mackay. “He said, ‘Where are you? Hogwarts?!’” This is indeed a place of magic for children who come here, hoping to follow in the footsteps of generations of leading dancers. They touch the middle finger of Margot Fonteyn’s statue for luck as they pass, the bronze rubbed shiny by their superstition.Getting a place at the school, founded in 1926 by the formidable Ninette de Valois, is a huge achievement. Two years ago, 40 students were accepted from more than 1,000 applications (all on merit – 90% are supported by bursaries). Mackay, 45, a...

Politics

4 d. ago ‘Under 5ft 5in? Forget about being a prince!’ How the Royal Ballet school is kicking out the old rules

What will the ballet dancer of the future look like? We visit the hunting lodge where the next generation are being trained – and find huge changes are under wayIt’s an idyllic autumn day in leafy Richmond Park, London, where a grand Georgian hunting lodge houses the Royal Ballet school. Enter through the classical columns and it feels like a bubble away from the world. “I was on a video call with my son,” says the school’s artistic director, Iain Mackay. “He said, ‘Where are you? Hogwarts?!’” This is indeed a place of magic for children who come here, hoping to follow in the footsteps of generations of leading dancers. They touch the middle finger of Margot Fonteyn’s statue for luck as they pass, the bronze rubbed shiny by their superstition.Getting a place at the school, founded in 1926 by the formidable Ninette de Valois, is a huge achievement. Two years ago, 40 students were accepted from more than 1,000 applications (all on merit – 90% are supported by bursaries). Mackay, 45, a...

Politics

4 d. ago The gospel according to Peter Thiel: why the tech svengali is obsessed with the antichrist

The influential billionaire investor has been giving secret lectures warning about Armageddon. Here’s why it mattersHello, and welcome to TechScape. For the past week, my brain has been marinating in billionaire Peter Thiel’s byzantine musings about the antichrist and Armageddon. At this point, I’m pickled.Why, you might ask, does it matter what a billionaire thinks about the antichrist? Good question!Over the past month, Thiel has hosted four lectures on the downtown waterfront of San Francisco philosophizing about who the antichrist could be and warning that Armageddon is coming. Thiel, who describes himself as a “small-o Orthodox Christian”, believes the harbinger of the end of the world could already be in our midst and that things such as international agencies, environmentalism and guardrails on technology could quicken its rise. It is a remarkable discursion that reveals the preoccupations of one of the most influential people in Silicon Valley and the US.Thiel was on the for...

Politics

5 d. ago Elon Musk demands Trump send US troops to San Francisco for war on drugs: ‘It’s the only solution’

Musk said downtown San Francisco is ‘a drug zombie apocalypse’ as he called for the deployment of federal troops

Events

5 d. ago The Antichrist has long haunted American politics. Now it’s rearing its head again | Matthew Avery Sutton

From Silicon Valley to Michigan, the biblical figure is in the headlines. The shift from pulpits to politics is familiar – and dangerousTwo scenes from the past two weeks capture something unsettling – and familiar –about American public life. In San Francisco, a tech billionaire delivered a sold‑out, off‑the‑record lecture series on the antichrist. In Michigan, a man rammed his pickup truck into a Latter‑day Saints meetinghouse during Sunday worship, opened fire and set the building ablaze, apparently believing that Mormons are the antichrist.The antichrist is clearly back. But perhaps he has never really left.Matthew Avery Sutton is a Guggenheim Fellow and author of the forthcoming Chosen Land: How Christianity Made America and Americans Remade Christianity (Basic Books), in addition to five prior books on Christianity. He is the Claudius O and Mary Johnson distinguished professor and chair of the department of history at Washington State University. The views expressed here are h...

Politics

6 d. ago ‘Death to Spotify’: the DIY movement to get artists and fans to quit the music app

Musicians have long criticized the streaming service’s paltry payouts, but a new wave of boycotts is emergingThis month, indie musicians in San Francisco gathered for a series of talks called Death to Spotify, where attenders explored “what it means to decentralize music discovery, production and listening from capitalist economies”.The events, held at Bathers library, featured speakers from indie station KEXP, labels Cherub Dream Records and Dandy Boy Records, and DJ collectives No Bias and Amor Digital. What began as a small run of talks quickly sold out and drew international interest. People as far away as Barcelona and Bengaluru emailed the organizers asking how to host similar events. Continue reading...

Events

9 d. ago Tragedy in San Francisco as four family members found dead in $2million home in quiet neighborhood

Tragedy struck a quiet suburb of San Francisco after police found four family members dead in a $2million home.

Society

9 d. ago ‘I’m a composer. Am I staring extinction in the face?’: classical music and AI

Technology is radically reshaping how we make music. As I dug deeper into this for a radio 3 documentary I began to wonder if creative organisations are right to be so upbeat about AI. Are we riding the wave or will the wave destroy us? The hacker mansion is part startup commune, part luxury crash-pad, part sales floor for the future. They are dotted around Silicon Valley, inhabited by tech founders and futurists. The most opulent I’ve seen is in Hillsborough, one of the Bay Area’s wealthiest enclaves, just south of San Francisco. Inside, marble floors gleam beneath taped-up portraits of tech royalty; in the gardens, gravel is raked into careful Zen spirals and pools shimmer beyond the hedges.It was a sunny June afternoon, and I had come with my producer, Fay Lomas, to record interviews for a BBC Radio 3 documentary about the collision of generative AI and classical music in San Francisco and Silicon Valley. Continue reading...

Politics

1 week ago San Francisco's Fleet Week goes on despite federal shutdown, with help from Canada and Colombia

The government shutdown has grounded the Blue Angels from its crowd-pleasing

Events

1 week ago Man who became popular in Blinking White Guy gif raises over $300,000 for multiple sclerosis research

Drew Scanlon, a resident of San Francisco, said the case was close to him as a friend and his mother are affectedThe man whose befuddled facial expression on a recorded video live stream in 2013 birthed what the internet collectively dubbed the Blinking White Guy meme has managed to convert his online notoriety into more than $300,000 for multiple sclerosis research, he said in a new interview.Drew Scanlon explained to ABC News that donating to the US’s National Multiple Sclerosis Society is important to him because a friend of his and her mother both have the chronic, autoimmune disease that attacks people’s central nervous systems. Continue reading...

Economics

1 week ago In our family, there’s been zero doubt about Diego Luna’s USMNT identity

The attacking midfielder’s path to representing the US was natural for him, even if it seemed unorthodox to othersLike many California-raised Mexican Americans, I’ve lost count of the times my family has gathered to watch a match between Mexico and the United States. Whether a friendly or World Cup qualifier, the “Dos A Cero” rivalry attracts the largest crowds to my tia’s watch parties, about an hour south of San Francisco.Each clash feels like the fractured embodiment of being Mexican American: the cheering and moaning of Mexican immigrant parents and their Americanized children alike, rife with intergenerational discord. The stakes are always high, especially since most of my relatives grew up with the sport – and aren’t shy about sharing their tactical opinions midgame. Many of them played pro, semi-pro, collegiately and, of course, at the neighborhood parks. Continue reading...

Events

1 week ago Most 'beautiful' city in the US that 'flies under the radar' crowned for its outdoor spaces

A debate swirled on Reddit over the most beautiful city in America. Redditors offered up Chicago and San Francisco but it was another spot that took the crown.

Politics

2 w. ago ‘I have no doubt this cat could take him down!’: Dorothy O’Donnell’s best phone picture

The San Francisco photographer on a spontaneous moment that turned into a cute photoDorothy O’Donnell begins all her days at home in San Francisco with a coffee and a dog walk. The street photographer lives in North Beach, an area she loves “for its diversity and old San Fran charm. The combination of colourful characters and old Victorian buildings with interesting architectural details makes this area something of a street photographer’s paradise. There’s no shortage of photo opportunities, and plenty of cute cats and dogs, too.”The ears of Lucky, her chihuahua and miniature pinscher mix, are pictured here, frozen at the sight of a sworn enemy. “I have no doubt this cat could take him down!” O’Donnell says. “We’ve seen him a few times, monitoring the neighbourhood from this window.” Continue reading...

Politics

2 w. ago Federal appeals court rules Trump administration can't end birthright citizenship

A federal appeals court in Boston has ruled the Trump administration cannot withhold citizenship from children born to people in the country illegally or temporarily

Politics