Since the emergence of chatbots like ChatGPT, China has made building its own advanced AI a priority. But to build AI it needs the most advanced computer chips, and the US has banned companies from selling them to China. The FT’s James Kynge visits China to find out how the country is turning to smuggling to get its hands on high-end chips for AI r…

In China, you can find robots serving food in restaurants, delivering room service in hotels, and cleaning floors in office buildings. But it’s in factories where China wants robots to make the biggest difference. China’s population is starting to shrink. With the number of workers set to plummet, will robots be able to fill the gap? The FT’s James…

Introducing Power for Sale, a new season of Untold from the Financial Times. In Untold: Power for Sale, host Valentina Pop and a team of FT correspondents from all over Europe investigate what happened in the Qatargate scandal, where EU lawmakers were accused of accepting payments from Qatar to whitewash its image. Subscribe and listen on: Apple Po…

In this episode, long-time FT China correspondent James Kynge travels to Lagos to hear about the success of Chinese-backed companies in Nigeria – and some of the looming concerns. We hear about Transsion, a massive Chinese mobile phone company that perfected its business model in the street markets of Nigeria, and the Chinese-owned online lending a…

China’s BYD has become one of the world’s largest electric vehicle manufacturers, thanks to its low production costs. The US has slapped a 100% tariff on Chinese EV imports to protect its own sector but BYD has its sights set on Europe. The FT’s James Kynge reports from Germany to find out what established European carmakers make of this burgeoning…

How did China go from tech imitator to innovator? The FT’s James Kynge reports from Shenzhen, known as China’s Silicon Valley, where he explores the city’s vast electronics markets with inventor Noah Zerkin, an American who’s based himself in China, visits robot start-up Youibot and hears from DJI about how it became the world’s biggest drone manuf…

In a new season of Tech Tonic, longtime FT China reporter James Kynge travels around the world to see how China is pushing towards tech supremacy. Will China be able to get an edge in crucial technological areas? What does China’s attempt to leapfrog the west look like on the ground? A six-part series looking at China’s tech industry. Presented by …

If you have questions about this year's US presidential election, we have answers. Swamp Notes is a new podcast from the FT News Briefing. Listen every Saturday morning as our journalists analyse and discuss the latest happenings in US politics. We’ll go beyond the horse race for the White House and offer a global perspective on the election. You c…

Introducing Untold, a new podcast from the special investigations team at the Financial Times. In its first series, The Retreat, host Madison Marriage examines the world of the Goenka network, which promotes a type of intensive meditation known as Vipassana. Thousands of people go on Goenka retreats every year. People rave about them. But some peop…

As the race to human-level AI accelerates, researchers are increasingly confronted with the question of what it would mean to develop conscious AI. Will sentience emerge naturally from powerfully intelligent artificial systems? Or is consciousness incompatible with disembodied AI? As some human users become more attached to romantic chatbots, will …

What are the ideas driving the pursuit of human-level AI? In the penultimate episode of this Tech Tonic series, hosts Madhumita Murgia and John Thornhill look at some of the futuristic objectives that are at the centre of the AI industry’s quest for superintelligence and hear about the Extropians, a surprisingly influential group of futurists from …

Are generative AI systems such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT really intelligent? Large language models such as GPT 4 appear to use human-level cognitive abilities when they engage in legal reasoning, write essays or solve complex problems. Hosts John Thornhill and Madhumita Murgia speak to Emily Bender, professor of computational linguistics at the Universit…

If even AI companies are fretting about the existential threat that human-level AI poses, why are they building these machines in the first place? And as they press ahead, a debate is raging about how we regulate this emergent sector to keep it under control. In the second episode of a new, five-part series of Tech Tonic, FT journalists Madhumita M…

In the first episode of a new, five-part series of Tech Tonic, FT journalists Madhumita Murgia and John Thornhill ask how close we are to building human-level artificial intelligence and whether ‘superintelligent’ AI poses an existential risk to humanity. John and Madhu speak to Yoshua Bengio, a pioneer of generative AI, who is concerned, and to hi…

In a new series of Tech Tonic, FT journalists Madhumita Murgia and John Thornhill look at the concerns around the rise of artificial intelligence. Will superintelligent AI bring existential risk, or a new renaissance? Would it be ethical to build conscious AI? How intelligent are these machines anyway? The new season of Tech Tonic from the Financia…

A hardware revolution in recording devices and a software revolution in artificial intelligence has convinced some scientists that humans will eventually be able to ‘translate’ animal and even plant sounds into human language. But what would be the consequences of humans learning to ‘speak whale’, chat with bats or converse with elephants? The FT’s…

A hardware revolution in recording devices and a software revolution in artificial intelligence is enabling researchers to listen in to all kinds of conversations outside the human hearing range, a field known as bioacoustics. Some scientists now believe these developments will also allow us to ‘translate’ animal sounds into human language. In a ne…