(Image credit: Getty Images) in Features A cyberthreat environment that was already only getting more complex has been made even more dangerous with the proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI). According to feedback from more than 3,500 cybersecurity and business leaders for IBM's Cost of a Data Breach Report 2024, the average cost of a data breach is now $4.88 million. That's up 10% over the past year. So it seems like cybersecurity costs will continue to increase. "Threat actors are...

(Image credit: Getty Images) By Tom Taulli published 3 February 2025 in Features Training a foundation model like those advanced artificial intelligence systems from OpenAI and Anthropic requires enormous amounts of data, the use of expensive GPUs and sophisticated fine tuning. It's a process that can take months and hundreds of millions of dollars – or so it was thought until a tech startup from China upended this conventional approach. In late January, DeepSeek claimed that it built its own...

in Features Lithium is a chemical element used in rechargeable lithium-ion batteries that power smartphones, laptops and electric vehicles (EVs). So it's fair to say lithium–a soft, silvery-white alkali metal–is ubiquitous. That's to say nothing of lithium's large-scale use in electricity networks and wind turbines. It's also fair to say the price of lithium has been extremely volatile, rising as high as $80,000 per ton in December 2022 but plunging to $13,000 by January 2024. Supply from new...

(Image credit: Getty Images) By Tom Taulli published 22 January 2025 in Features In early December, Google introduced a quantum computing chip, Willow, that engineers used to solve the hardest benchmark in the field. A post on the Alphabet (GOOGL) subsidiary's blog explains the significance of the achievement: "Willow's performance on this benchmark is astonishing: It performed a computation in under five minutes that would take one of today's fastest supercomputers ... 10 septillion years....