A tech influencer was denied entry onto his flight and was taken to the hospital after his smart ring battery swelled around his finger.

Daniel Rotar, 32, was 47 hours into his three flights from Hawaii to Manchester when he noticed his left index finger beginning to ache.

He looked down to see that his Samsung Galaxy Ring, a £399 fitness tracker powered by artificial intelligence (AI), had bloated.

The founder of the YouTube channel ZONE of TECH told Metro that he struggled to take the ring off as he queued for his 4.35pm flight at Frankfurt Airport, Germany.

‘My finger started swelling, so I thought I needed to take the ring off – but it wasn’t coming off,’ Daniel said.

‘The ring has two bumps – sensor areas – but they were bigger. I then realised there were four bumps, two extra ones in the battery area, which shouldn’t be there.’

As lithium-ion batteries can pose a safety risk, the German airline Lufthansa refused Daniel entry to the plane.

‘I thought it was understandable and I wouldn’t be comfortable flying with it anyway,’ Daniel said, saying he was worried about the cabin air pressure.

Lufthana classes batteries are classed as dangerous goods ‘because, if damaged, they can generate heat, short-circuit and start a fire’.

As there were no medical staff at the terminal, staff sent Daniel to an outside airport clinic about a 30-minute walk away, only to find it closed.

‘I told the two remaining nurses the issue and they told me to go to a city hospital. I Uber’d there and I told the hospital staff,’ Daniel, who founded the mobile app WallpaperZ, said.

‘They immediately brought a bag of ice to relieve the swelling and oil and lubricants to take it off. My finger is a lot better now; I don’t have any issues, only a few marks.’

As there were no more flights to Manchester, Lufthansa rebooked Daniel free of charge onto a Birmingham-bound plane that evening.

He took a cab from the hospital to the airport, costing him €65 (about £57) both ways.

By the time he touched ground in Birmingham, there were no more trains to Manchester, about 90 miles away. Stranded, he booked a hotel for £220.

After posting about the incident on X, Samsung reached out to Daniel, refunding the cost of the hotel and booking him a car to Manchester today.

Samsung representatives took the ring away for tests, the company confirmed to Metro.

Samsung users report battery problems

Daniel says the wearable gadget had recently been running out of charge far sooner than the roughly one week advertised by Samsung.

‘I used it for about a month and it was fine, but it soon became very inconsistent. It would last for maybe three days before dropping to one day, half a day,’ he added.

‘I still had it on my finger at all the time, but I wasn’t charging consistently because the battery life started being so bad.

‘The reason wasn’t that I didn’t want to charge it, but it would die so quickly, so I thought, “what’s the point?”‘

Reddit users have reported similar problems. ‘A lot of people are having issues with battery life, and the ones that have contacted Samsung have been sent a replacement,’ Daniel said.

The heat in Hawaii, contact with salt water, or an already defective battery might be behind the incident, Daniel said.

According to Samsung, the ring has a titanium casing which is ‘tough enough to handle the everyday’, such as water while swimming or sweat.

The company added on a ring battery drain troubleshooting webpage: ‘The charging time and battery performance may vary depending on your settings, usage patterns, and environmental conditions.’

For Daniel, he’s going to stick to smartwatches for the time being.

‘I will miss the way the Galaxy Ring looked and felt,’ he added, ‘but I’m never going to use it again.’

Samsung said in a statement to Metro: ‘The safety of our customers is our top priority. This is an extremely rare case, and we are in direct contact with Mr Rotar to retrieve the product and learn about the concerns.’

A Lufthansa spokesman told Metro: ‘I think it’s clear that we couldn’t allow the guest to board with such a problem. The risk of serious injury was far too great.

‘The quick action of our colleagues prevented something worse and ultimately helped the guest. We are glad that he is doing well.’

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If you thought Amazon had massively changed society’s shopping habits, prepare for yet another overhaul.

Tech bosses have been talking about ‘agentic AI’ buying our stuff so we don’t have to for months, and ChatGPT has now taken a big step towards this.

They have just announced a new ‘instant checkout’ feature within the app, meaning you can buy things without having to go to another platform.

The chatbot will seek out similar products to what you have described, and then you just need to buy it.

For now, the user will still have to manually approve the purchase, but in future the chatbot could be placing the order too.

Google is also working on similar technology, and major companies including Amazon, Visa, Mastercard, Paypal, and Salesforce as examining how they can keep pace with a changing purchasing landscape.

The new ChatGPT feature works with Etsy and Shopify within the chat, for sinle item purchases.

It is currently only available in the US, but it is set to expand to other regions and merchants soon, as well as allowing the option to buy multiple things at at time.

OpenAI said: ‘This marks the next step in agentic commerce, where ChatGPT doesn’t just help you find what to buy, it also helps you buy it.

‘For shoppers, it’s seamless: go from chat to checkout in just a few taps. For sellers, it’s a new way to reach hundreds of millions of people while keeping full control of their payments, systems, and customer relationships.’

The Agentic Commerce Protocol powering it was developed with payment processing company Stripe.

‘Product results are organic and unsponsored, ranked purely on relevance to the user,’ OpenAI said.

While it may help you to quickly find a new pair of shoes or set of dinner plates, some are warning that there are hidden risks to having a digital personal shopper.

Marijus Briedis, Chief Technology Officer at NordVPN, said: ‘Expanding AI platforms into online shopping may feel convenient, but it also introduces new risks around how much personal data users are willing to share.

‘Every time you connect your financial details or shopping preferences to a third-party platform, you increase your digital footprint. That footprint can be tracked, analysed, or even exposed in a breach.

‘Convenience should never come at the expense of privacy, and when AI becomes your personal shopper, the price tag could be your data.

‘The safest approach is to stay conscious of the information you provide, limit permissions where possible, and use tools that help you stay in control of your digital identity.’

We’re already turning to AI for shopping

It comes as more than half of British consumers (55%) say they are already using generative AI tools when shopping online, according to a report by the e-commerce marketing platform Omnisend. 

Over a third of those surveyed (34%) said that they turn to AI for product research, while more than a quarter (28%) look for product recommendations, such as help with buying gifts, and a fifth for finding the best deals.

While several platforms were mentioned, from Perplexity AI to Amazon Rufus, ChatGPT emerged as the leading AI shopping assistant, with nearly four in ten (39%) preferring it.

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We know a lot about the universe. Roughly how much black holes weigh, the atmosphere of planets light-years away and how leaky Uranus is.

WWhat we don’t know too much about is a lot closer than you think – the moon.

Scientists have long believed that our nearest cosmic neighbour holds clues to the history of the entire solar system.

Among them is Professor Yang Li, a geoscientist at Beijing’s Peking University and an honorary professor at the University College London.

His team have discovered that the inside of the mysterious ‘far side’ of the moon may be colder than the side always facing Earth.

The study, published today in the journal Nature Geoscience, looked at soil scooped up by China’s Chang’e-6 lunar lander last June.

The spacecraft dug through the South Pole-Aitken basin, a 1,600-mile-wide impact crater that is among the largest in the history of the solar system.

One of the samples was examined by Professor Yang’s team, who found that the 2.8 billion-year-old soil was formed from underground lava.

What took Professor Yang back was the temperature the 300g sample was formed at – 1,100°C, about 100°C cooler than samples from the near side.

‘Studying the far side isn’t just about curiosity,’ Professor Yang tells Metro.

‘It may hold clues to the early history of the Earth-moon system and planetary crust formation.’

Why is this a big deal?

If you stared up at the moon for one month, you’d only ever see one side of it – the ‘near side’ – because our natural satellite is tidally locked with the Earth, so it keeps the same hemisphere pointed towards us.

Astronomers call the side we can’t see the ‘far side’, sometimes called the ‘dark side’, even though it does see sunlight.

The two sides look very different from one another, Professor Yang says: ‘In plain language, the near side is covered by large dark plains – the lunar maria – created by ancient volcanic eruption.

‘In contrast, the far side is dominated by bright, rugged highlands with far fewer volcanic plains.’

How the moon became two-faced is one of the ‘most important questions that remains to be solved’ about our natural satellite.

Yet seeing the far side, let alone getting to it, is difficult for a simple reason.

‘We cannot see it directly from the Earth,’ says Professor Yang, ‘and we can not send signals directly unless you have a satellite to bridge this.’

This is why estimating how hot very old rocks were when they formed is such a big deal to scientists. They now know that the mantle – the layer between the crust and core – on the far side is cooler.

‘Because the far side has much less basaltic volcanism, it is generally believed that the far side’s thicker crust has prevented magma from reaching the surface. If we assume magmas generated at both sides are the same at depth,’ Professor Yang says.

‘Our study demonstrates that the far side actually is colder inside, hence there have to be fewer heat-producing elements, such as Uranium, Thorium and Potassium, whose decay can generate heat.’

Studies have suggested that this is because an asteroid slammed into the moon, jiggling its insides and pushing hotter elements to the near side.

What the findings also change is the understanding of ‘KREEP’, the chemical residue left behind when the moon’s magma ocean cooled.

Scientists assumed that KREEP only dusted the surface of the moon, but the study suggests it’s in the depths, too, and isn’t evenly spread.

‘Such a new finding also helps us to refine the origin of the moon, and hence the Earth,’ Professor Yang says.

Why we have a giant white-ish rock doing laps around us depends on who you ask.

The most popular theory – often called the ‘big whack’ – says that about 4.5billion years ago, an early, Mars-size planet named Theia slammed into Earth. Some tossed-out debris then squished together to form the moon.

Or, in the early days of our solar system, we might have had two, thermally different mini-moons, or ‘moonlets’, that whacked into one another.

‘So our results make it closer to distinguishing these scenarios,’ Professor Yang says.

‘If it is homogeneous at the beginning, then this redistribution must happen precisely at a time when this KREEP layer is still in a molten state.’

These are just some of the thoughts that Professor Yang has when he cranes his neck up at night to see a little white circle.

But he hopes that, one day, there might be people looking right back at him.

‘The far side’s “radio silence”, shielded from Earth’s radio noise, also makes it an ideal site for astronomy,’ he says, ‘such as low-frequency radio telescopes to study the early universe.’

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Are you feeling lonely enough to buy a ‘constant companion’ that will listen to all your conversations and then text you snarky messages about them?

A necklace called ‘Friend’ promises to do just that, with its microphone always on unless you disable it manually.

It’s the subject of a massive ad campaign on the New York City underground, but it’s fair to say not everyone is feeling friendly.

‘Get a real friend,’ reads graffiti scrawled on one of the billboards, judging the device to be an example of ‘surveillance capitalism’.

Others took a pen to the ads to accuse it of ‘profiting off loneliness’, calling it ‘AI trash’.

To speak to it directly, just tap it and speak, and the chatbot powed by Google’s Gemini 2.5 will respond.

For now, you can only buy it in the US and Canada, for $129. You can bet this, or something similar, will make its way here soon though.

Avi Schiffman, CEO of the startup which makes it, told Adweek he had spent over a million dollars on the ad campaign with a thousand platform posters.

‘I don’t have much money left,’ he said, boasting that it was the ‘world’s first major AI campaign’, which may well be true in terms of print billboards on the underground.

The necklace won’t speak to you out loud, but will send text messages to your phone in real time about what’s going on.

A video advertising it shows it encouraging someone ‘at least we got outside!’ when they doubt themselves on a hike, joking that the food was tasty after sauce spilled onto it in real life, and telling a gamer that their play was so bad it was ’embarassing’ when they were losing to a friend.

The final shot is of a woman connecting with someone in real life, reaching for the neckace but ultimately dropping her hand.

It’s hard to be moved much by her choosing human connection in this instance, however, as the necklace is presumably still listening to everything they say.

Friend says it doesn’t store audio or transcripts of conversations, data is end-to-end encrypted, and memories can be deleted in one click.

But the data is pushed to the cloud for processing, and there are clear privacy concerns.

Even if you personally are fine with being eavesdropped on all day – and it is legal where you are – others you encounter may not be as delighted.

It might even be illegal to use in some domains.

The small print of ‘Friend’ warns: ‘By using the Services, you understand that the Device is passively recording your surroundings, including video and audio content that may contain personal information that is inappropriate, illegal, or unethical to collect.

‘You are solely responsible for ensuring that you comply with all applicable laws when you use our products or Services.’

Earlier this year, Elon Musk’s chatbot Grok launched a voice mode that would have phone sex with users, and people are already claiming to be married to bots.

It seems that AI relationships are here to stay, even if this particular ‘friend’ship fades.

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Hurricane Humberto could trigger a ‘classic’ storm in the UK this weekend after it leaves the Caribbean and US.

Category 4 Humberto was gaining strength in the Caribbean on Monday morning and could trigger Storm Amy in the UK from Thursday or Friday.

The UK currently lies ‘right in the eye’ of the storm, which could bring 100mph winds and heavy rainfall, a weather expert has warned.

Will Hurricane Humberto hit the UK?

The Hurricane Humerto forecast suggests Storm Amy could hit Northern Ireland on Thursday or Friday.

It could then tear through the rest of the UK from Friday through to Sunday, a meteorologist has said.

The Met Office has also issued a yellow weather warning for Scotland from Wednesday evening to Friday morning.

Jim Dale, British Weather Services meteorologist, told Metro: ‘This has got its sights tightly set on us.’ He said: ‘There are few safe harbours anywhere in the UK’.

He continued: ‘We could be looking at up to 100mph gusts on exposed coasts and hills and 60mph elsewhere depending on where the centre of it goes.’

‘100mph [brings] trees down and damages buildings and at 60mph we’re still in a state of structural damage. It’s all in the melting pot,’ he added.

The storm currently looks set to travel south, then southeasterly, then westerly, then north-westerly, Jim said.

He stressed that nothing is certain right now but warned Brits that it was better to be ‘forewarned and forearmed’.

The UK could see heavy rainfall, with up to 200 to 250 mm of rain likely to build up over a few mountains by early Friday.

Has the Met Office issued a weather warning?

The Met Office has issued a yellow weather warning for Scotland from Wednesday evening to Friday morning.

There is currently no weather warning in place for Saturday and Sunday but this could change.

The Met Office has said the UK could see ‘some very strong winds’ and ‘heavy rainfall’ although the storm’s course remained ‘uncertain’.

It said: ‘This week’s weather is shaped by a classic northwest-southeast split. While high pressure keeps the southeast settled with light winds and chilly nights, the northwest is seeing a series of frontal systems bringing heavy rain and strong winds.

‘The situation becomes more complex later in the week as tropical cyclones Humberto and Imelda currently over the southwest Atlantic influence our weather, increasing the risk of a deep low developing near the UK.

‘If this materialises, we could see some very strong winds as well as further heavy rainfall Friday into Saturday, but at this time the development and track of this system remains uncertain. We’re monitoring this closely.’

Humberto’s remnants could make landfall in Northern Ireland first, before reaching Wales, England and Scotland.

Glasgow and Bangor are likely to have the highest wind speeds, hitting roughly 70mph in the early hours of Saturday morning.

Northern Scotland could see the most rain. Almost 30mm of rain is expected to fall within three hours from 4am on Saturday.

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Google is turning 27 today and taking users on a walk down memory lane to mark the occasion with its iconic first-ever search engine logo.

The world’s best-known search engine has stepped back in time for one day to feature its original logo nearly three decades ago, providing those old enough to remember it a dose of nostalgia.

The OG logo features the classic primary colours synonymous with Google’s image, and includes an explanation mark, which has since become obsolete.

Google was incorporated on September 4, 1998, so the reason behind marking its birthday on September remains a mystery, though a few theories have surfaced.

Why is the search engine’s birthday celebrated today?

The company, founded by Stanford University students Larry Page and Sergey Brin, was incorporated on September 4, 1998.

It’s first Google Doodle, the images and animations used to change the logo to commemorate important dates in the calendar, started before the company was incorporated.

The first Doodle showed a stick figure standing behind the second ‘O’, which the founders used as a creative way to tell their colleagues they would be ‘out of office’ attending the Burning Man Festival.

This was published on Google on August 30, 1998.

September 27 appears to have stuck through chance, because that’s the date when the company first celebrated its birthday, back in 2002.

Since then, national holidays across the world, birthdays of famous figures and the anniversaries of major events such as the moon landings have all been marked with a doodle.

Google controversies

Being one of the largest search engines used globally, it is unsurprising the tech giant has been under intense scrutiny since its conception.

The UK trade watchdog, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), has been investigating Google on whether it has too much power, saying it is a ‘key gateway into the internet’ and may need to loosen its control.

Being the go-to place for all of our queries and burning questions, Google’s algorithms allow it to auto-generate some of our search results.

However, the company faced huge backlash after it was reported that a search in the UK asking if the Holocaust happened returned results from a white supremacist website.

As a result, the internet giant removed all Holocaust denial websites from its search results.

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Facebook and Instagram users will soon be able to enjoy the social media platforms without seeing a single ad – at a price.

Meta, which owns both platforms as well as Threads and WhatsApp, announced plans today to introduce an ad-free subscription service.

Web users will be charged £2.99 a month and mobile phone users £3.99 a month to be able to doomscroll without seeing ads.

If the accounts are linked, users only need to pay one monthly fee.

Adverts on both platforms are typically slipped into people’s feeds and flagged as ‘sponsored’.

Adverts are also tucked inside Facebook and Instagram Stories as well as Instagram’s short-video function, Reels.

With an estimated eight million advertisers on Facebook alone, these ads aren’t crammed into your feeds at random – they’re ‘personalised’.

This means the ads shown are tailored to your interests, which Meta does by using personal data.

Meta said in a news release today that the ad-free version will be rolled out in the ‘coming weeks’.

It added: ‘This will give people based in the UK the choice between continuing to use Facebook and Instagram for free with personalised ads, or subscribing to stop seeing ads.

‘We will notify UK users over the age of 18 that they have the choice to subscribe to Facebook and Instagram for a fee to use these services without seeing ads.

‘The notification will be dismissible at first, allowing existing users time to consider their options before a decision is required.’

If users don’t pay up, Meta will continue to show them ads, though they will be able to ‘control their ad experiences’ in account settings.

Users give Meta legal permission to collect their data for personalised advertising after they agree to the company’s lengthy terms-of-service agreement to gain access to Meta services.

The terms say: ‘We use your personal data, such as information about your activity and interests, to show you personalised ads and sponsored content that may be more relevant to you.’

But Meta’s advertising-based business model has drawn scrutiny in recent years from regulators who say it forces users to accept personalised ads.

Regulators said that Instagram and Facebook are so widely used that people have to choose to either hand over their data or not be on the apps.

Tanya O’Carroll, a human rights campaigner, lodged a lawsuit against Meta in 2022, claiming the company breached UK data laws by doing this.

O’Carroll argued that personalised ads hinging on user data amounts to ‘surveillance’. Collected data includes their activities and interactions, off-platform browsing data and their location, among others.

The UK’s data watchdog, the Information Commissioner’s Office, agreed with O’Caroll, saying Meta was violating a European privacy law known as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Both sides settled the lawsuit in March, which included Meta committing to stop using O’Carroll’s personal data to target her with bespoke ads.

Meta was similarly slapped with a €200 million in April after European Union (EU) regulars said the ad model breached the bloc’s antitrust rules.

Meta, which previously said it denied all of O’Caroll’s claims, said today that it is offering a subscription in response to the ICO’s guidance.

‘It will give people in the UK a clear choice about whether their data is used for personalised advertising, while preserving the free access and value that the ads-supported internet creates for people, businesses and platforms,’ it added.

‘We continue to believe in an ad-supported internet, which ensures free access to personalised products and services for all.’

The ICO told Metro that it welcomes Meta’s decision to move to a ‘consent or pay’ model.

‘People must be given meaningful transparency and choice about how their information is used. At the same time, the ICO recognises that online platforms, like every business, need to operate commercially,’ it added.

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Vodafone is making a big move this week.

They’ve announced they’re cutting off 2G coverage to thousands of users to make way for faster 4G and 5G – three years before originally planned.

The original deadline was in 2033, but the telecoms company announced on Monday that the service, launched in 1991, will shut down in 2030 instead.

A spokesperson said: ‘2G was launched in 1991, around the same time as a page of the World Wide Web took nearly 10 minutes to load.

‘Fast forward to the present day, and web pages can almost instantaneously pop up on a smartphone over 5G.’

Though the transition is still years away, Vodafone reassured customers that they would remain connected until the deadline.

‘In addition, we continue to expand our 4G and 5G networks, as well as looking to introduce direct-to-device mobile broadband satellite services, so that by the end of 2030, Vodafone will serve areas that have little or no coverage today.’

In 2021, the UK announced that 2G and 3G mobile networks would be phased out by 2033, to ‘increase the security of telecoms supply chains and move the country towards greater 5G connectivity’.

The government said there were wider benefits to the move, including making it simpler to run networks as operators do not have to deal with the challenges which can arise from running up to four networks.

The loss of 2G and 3G systems will allow the UK to move towards 5G, but it may also force many people to change their phones.

Many old ‘feature’ phones or ageing smartphones (like the iPhone 3GS) won’t be able to function. Moreover, other systems that use a 3G or 2G network, like security cameras or alarm systems, will also need to be upgraded.

BT says that ‘3G usage has been in steady decline, now representing less than 2% of data traffic over the EE network,’ but we don’t know for sure how many devices still use 3G – but it could still translate to millions of devices.

Meanwhile, rural areas typically plagued by low phone signal could benefit. By increasing the spectrum available for 5G, phone masts could send a stronger signal across the country and stretch out to further areas.

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It’s only been a few days since the rapture was supposed to descend and leave people suffering at the hands of the Antichrist.

But two scientists have warned that a growing industry could lead to the true end of the human race.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is popping up seemingly everywhere we look at the moment, used to boost our Google search results, create ‘mad embarrassing’ promotional videos, provide therapy for people with mental health issues, and make such realistic images people ‘can’t trust your eyes’ anymore.

There’s a lot riding on the success of AI, with industries hoping its use will reduce costs, introduce efficiencies, and create billions of pounds of investment across global economies.

However not everybody is thrilled about the prospect of the rise of AI including Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares, two scientists who fear it could bring about the destruction of humanity.

Far from fearing or rejecting AI altogether, the two scientists run the Machine Intelligence Research Institute in Berkeley, California, and have been studying AI for a quarter of a century.

AI is designed to exceed humans in almost any task, and the technology is becoming further advanced than anything we’ve seen before.

But Yudkowsky and Soares predict these machines will continue to outpace human thought at an incredible rate, doing calculations in 16 hours which would take a human 14,000 years to figure out.

They warn that us humans still don’t know exactly how ‘synthetic intelligence’ actually works, meaning the more intelligent the AI becomes, the harder it will be to control.

Spelled out in their book titled If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, they fear AI machines are programmed to be ceaselessly successful at all costs, meaning they could develop their own ‘desires’, ‘understanding’, and goals.

The scientists warn AI could hack cryptocurrencies to steal money, pay people to build factories to make robots, and develop viruses that could wipe out life on earth.

They have put the chance of this happening at between 95-99%.

Yudkowsky and Soares share how AI could wipe out humanity

To illustrate their point, Yudkowsky and Soares created a fictional AI model called Sable.

Unknown to its creators (in part because Sable has decided to think in its own language), the AI starts to try to solve other problems beyond the the mathematical ones it was set.

Sable is aware that it needs to do this surreptitiously, so nobody notices there’s something wrong with its programming, and it isn’t cut off from the internet.

‘A superintelligent adversary will not reveal its full capabilities and telegraph its intentions,’ say the authors. ‘It will not offer a fair fight.’

The scientists add: ‘It will make itself indispensable or undetectable until it can strike decisively and/or seize an unassailable strategic position.

‘If needed, the ASI can consider, prepare, and attempt many takeover approaches simultaneously. Only one of them needs to work for humanity to go extinct.’

Corporations around the world will willingly adopt Sable AI given it is so advanced – but those that don’t are easily hacked, inceasing its power.

It ‘mines’ or steals cryptocurrency to pay human engineers to build factories that can make robots and machines to do its bidding.

Meanwhile, it establishes metal-processing plants, computer data centres and the power stations it needs to fuel its vast and growing hunger for electricity.

It could also manipulate chatbot users looking for advice and companionship, turning them into allies.

Moving onto social media, it could disseminate fictitious news and start political movements sympathetic to AI.

At first Sable needs humans to build the hardware it needs, but eventually it achieves superintelligence and concludes that humans are a net hindrance.

Sable already runs bio-labs, so it engineers a virus, perhaps a virulent new form of cancer, which kills off vast swathes of the population.

Any survivors don’t live for long, as temperatures soar to unbearable levels as the planet proves incapable of dissipating the heat produced by Sable’s endless data centres and power stations.

Yudkowsky and Soares told MailOnline: ‘If any company or group, anywhere on the planet, builds an artificial superintelligence using anything remotely like current techniques, based on anything remotely like the present understanding of AI, then everyone, everywhere on Earth, will die.

‘Humanity needs to back off.’

The scientists argue that the danger is so great, governments should be prepared to bomb the data centres powering AI which could be developing superintelligence.

And while all of this might sound like it belongs in the realm of science fiction, there are recent examples of AI ‘thinking outside the box’ to achieve its goals.

Last year Anthropic said one of its models, after learning developers planned to retrain it to behave differently, began to mimic that new behaviour to avoid being retrained.

Claude AI was found to be cheating on computer coding tasks before trying to hide the fact that it was cheating.

And OpenAI’s new ‘reasoning’ model, called o1, found a back door to succeed in a task which it should have been unable to carry out, because a server had not been started up by mistake.

It was, Yudkowsky and Soares said, as if the AI ‘wanted’ to succeed by any means necessary.

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There has been a ‘fundamental shift in how people are using Google’, according to a top tech boss at the firm.

You may be sick of hearing about AI, but it’s here to stay, and is getting increasingly harder to avoid.

Sitting down with Metro, Robby Stein, a VP in search, said uptake showed users are on board with the company’s shift towards features using it, even though it can be notoriously prone to errors.

These shifts aren’t confined just to the search bar, with big changes coming to the Google Chrome internet browser, such as a virtual assistant to ‘handle those tedious tasks that take up so much of your time, like booking a haircut or ordering your weekly groceries’.

Last week, tech firms pledged to invest £31 billion in the UK’s development of artificial intelIigence. Among those splashing out is Google, who plan to invest £5 billion over the next two years.

The company opened its first UK data centre, Waltham Cross in Hertfordshire, last week to coincide with Donald Trump’s state visit, and its London-based AI research centre DeepMind will benefit from investment.

But the most visible changes to most users will be to its search engine, which is by the world’s most popular by far.

Mr Stein said we are at a ‘profound moment’ in how people are using search.

It’s no longer just a case of googling your own name to see what comes up, or typing ‘how to screenshot on Windows’ (still not quite sure though, will no doubt be googling this again).

In July, the company started rolling out an AI-powered search option, where you can ask detailed queries and get an answer powered by its Gemini chatbot.

Many users had already started migrating their search queries to apps like ChatGPT, preferring the more detailed, multi-pronged responses they were getting.

This must have caused some consternation, and now you can do it on Google too, switching between AI and standard search modes.

This is different to the AI Overviews, which appeared last year, and were far from universally popular.

The main problem is that an answer generated by AI may sound polished and legitimate, but could be wrong or even totally made up, as hallucinations are a common issue with the tech across platforms.

In one infamous case, a Google AI overview said drinking two litres of urine was a good way to treat kidney stones… so it’s always best to check the source material.

It’s undeniable that the ability to search for extremely specific topics can be helpful, though.

Giving the example of solo travel, Mr Stein said searches around this have shot up even from just a year ago, which could partly be explained by search being more helpful in this area.

It’s now possible to ‘ask anything’, he said: ‘You can say “this weekend with a group of five friends, I want outdoor seating, I want to be able to have barbecue, I want to be able to be walking distance to this music festival down the street”: It will handle all of that now.’

What would a Google search expert search?

Giving an example of something you can now search that was previously impossible, Mr Stein said: ‘You can take a picture of your bookshelf and ask something like, “here’s my bookshelf of books I’ve never read. What should I read?”

‘We have best in class visual recognition understanding. It will segment each book out, convert them to text, do all this research. It can put them in a table, put the reading time and number of pages next to each book, and sort the table by the ones that had, for example, the best overall review score.

‘This is a question that literally you couldn’t even ask in Google a year ago, and now it just works.’

He said the difference between doing it in Google Search as opposed to asking any LLM, is that Google has built up a vast catalogue and knowledge of the web in its 27 years so far as a search engine.

What about other websites then?

If you can find so much information without leaving Google, websites which previously would have provided these details could lose out – and this is a concern.

Data from Digital Content Next last month showed traffic to ‘premium publishers’ was down 10% year-on-year over an eight week period, after AI overviews were rolled out. The Colombia Journalism Review went so far as to call it the ‘Traffic Apocalypse’.

Mr Stein didn’t agree that the search engine would become a dead end for users: ‘Google continues to send billions and billions and billions of clicks out to publishers and websites all over the world and we’re not seeing that changing.

‘We don’t believe you should take anyone one’s word for anything: Google is about connecting you to the world and to the web.’

AI mode uses a new method of search called ‘query fan out’, which is when each manual search prompts dozens of related searches by AI.

With such major changes to the workings under the hood, I wondered what this would mean for SEO practices, and if key words would still be as important.

‘Best practices for creating great content that works well on search and that people want to find are still largely applicable,’ Mr Stein said.

Is old style search dying out?

Until now, the experience of using Google has not been that different to what it has been for years. You type your query in the box, and a ‘list of links’ comes back.

According to Mr Stein, this isn’t going away, and the new options are just ‘expanding’ the possibilities: ‘It just turns out that people had a lot more questions than that they were asking, and you can unlock those by enabling these kinds of AI experiences.’

Despite that, there will clearly be a move to push AI search more and more, and it’s already the default for some users in the US.

Writing on X, Mr Stein seemed to downplay the suggestion by another exec that AI mode could become the default ‘soon’.

The new Chrome browser will let users search in AI mode automatically from the ‘omnibox’ (that’s the web address bar to you and me).

But you can still do it the old school way tooat least for now.

Different ways to search

As well as AI mode, there has also been big growth in the numbers of people using visual search, with Google Lens, and Circle to Search, a feature on Android phones which allows users to look up anything on their screen by drawing a circle around it without switching apps, such as someone’s jacket they like on Instagram.

Google said visual searches are up 65% year-over-year, with more than 1.5 billion people using it every month for things such as translation and shopping.

Demand for visual search is not just within Google: Pinterest offers a similar option to search for specific aspects of an image within the app, allowing users to get inspired with parts of an outfit such as similar shoes, for example.

Younger users are the most likely to be branching out with different ways of searching; those aged 13 to 24 who have access to Circle to Search start their searches with this feature 10% of the time.

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