Self-improving AI the key step towards AGI but safety is key: Z.ai founder

Organizers are calling for one of the biggest demonstrations yet, in a string of rallies that has racked India since the summer.

Malaysian Transport Minister Anthony Loke Siew Fook has dismissed a recent claim on social media that students were forced to serve alcohol at an old boys’ association reunion and centenary dinner, calling the allegations a politically motivated attack against him. The DAP secretary general, who is also a former student of St Paul’s Institution, claimed the individual who allegedly uploaded the post had been looking for every possible opportunity to attack him. “In the social media post, the...

Driving along the wide boulevards of Astana during a recent trip to the Kazakh capital, signs of China’s growing commercial footprint were everywhere. Chinese cars were becoming a common sight on the streets here, as brands from BYD to Changan made aggressive inroads in a market once dominated by South Korea’s Hyundai and Kia, said the driver who picked me up from the airport in a gleaming Changan electric vehicle. But it was not the rise of Chinese tech that had brought me to this energy-rich...

Long dubbed an “air-conditioned nation”, Singapore is experimenting with cooling alternatives from chilled beams to “passive displacement” to curb its thirst for energy-guzzling air conditioning. The city state has the highest per-capita air conditioner ownership rate in Southeast Asia, with about 99 per cent of private residences equipped with cooling units. Singapore’s local building sector accounts for one-fifth of its emissions, while cooling itself accounts for 40 to 60 per cent of a...

For Singaporean flight attendant Chloe Tan Zi Ling, 35, the problem with paper straws is their impracticality. “It softens before we can finish the drink, so we have to gulp it down without a straw,” she said, adding that reusable metal alternatives left an unpleasant taste in her mouth. Her frustration reflects a wider debate over Asia’s shift away from plastic straws, with a recently released South Korean study finding that conventional plastic straws performed better than paper and other...

Bangkok’s firefighters do more snake catching than firefighting, and Pinyo Pukpinyo trains them. But he refuses to kill the snakes, and he’s running out of containers.

Pinyo Pukpinyo, Thailand’s most famous snake catcher, has found the critters slithering in nooks and crannies all over Bangkok. He refuses to kill them.

The rise of Korean terms in Japanese is a striking reversal from colonial times and a sign of the global appeal of South Korean culture.

For over three decades, Dolores Balladares Pelaez has lived and worked in Hong Kong without once returning to the Philippines for Undas, the annual two-day observance honouring the dead. This year, she is arranging prayers from afar for her late father and four siblings, but will once again miss the gathering back home. On Thursday morning, the 56-year-old domestic helper called her mother and niece in Laguna province to discuss hiring a prayer leader to visit the family home. Her sisters-in-law...

A little-known South Korean music act has climbed the charts with a viral hit that has caught listeners off guard – not just for its sudden popularity, but because its vocals were generated entirely by artificial intelligence. Meomuru’s single, “Have You Become the Adult You Dreamed Of?”, climbed to No 2 on Melon’s Top 100 – South Korea’s flagship streaming chart – earlier this week. The track’s popularity has turned Meomuru into one of the country’s most-talked-about acts. The song was created...

Southeast Asia’s electric vehicle boom risks leaving the region’s smaller companies behind, as Chinese automotive giants bypass local part-makers in favour of imported components and locked-in supplier networks. Local manufacturers across Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia are facing a double squeeze: demand is weakening for parts used in petrol and diesel cars, collectively known as internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles, while steep barriers to entry also keep them out of EV supply...

The theft of billions of dollars from Binance within a matter of minutes, the biggest cryptocurrency heist in history, was orchestrated by North Korean hackers, the FBI said on Saturday. The Federal Bureau of Investigation said in a statement that this week’s attack was tied to “malicious cyber activity” by an entity known as TraderTraitor, the same actors behind a US$1.5 billion Bybit hack last year. The FBI asked cryptocurrency exchanges, blockchain analytics companies and others to block...