Top AI engineers at defence technology companies defended the need for autonomous weapons on Thursday, amid a push for a ban on so-called "killer robots". More than 115 countries and 250 non-governmental organisations are calling for an international treaty to ban weapons that use artificial intelligence to identify and engage human targets, technology which United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has called "morally repugnant."

A slew of announcements from OpenAI and Google this week brought us to the brink of human-like AI assistants. Generative artificial intelligence is getting faster, and being applied to an increasing number of tasks. But without a major breakthrough to the models underpinning such projects, it has led some to emerge from the parapets and ask whether the technology will continue getting smarter given its exponential hunger for data. One of them is Dr. Michael Pound, Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Nottingham.

OpenAI will announce plans for a search engine powered by artificial intelligence on Monday May 13, Reuters reports. It's the latest challenge to search king Google and comes just one day before the tech giant's annual developer conference. On this week's Tech 24, Peter O'Brien looks at what might get Google sweating, amid changing search habits, a federal antitrust trial and smart new AI "answer engines". One of these is Perplexity AI. Speaking to FRANCE 24, CEO Aravind Srinivas says its results "cut through the noise" that comes up on a traditional Google search.

On Sunday, Chinese President Xi Jinping will come to Europe for the first time in five years, staying in France until Tuesday. Aside from the Ukraine war, technology – computer chips and green tech in particular – could be the most important talking point on the agenda. FRANCE 24's Peter O'Brien tells us more in this week's edition of Tech 24.

US President Joe Biden signed a law this week giving TikTok's Chinese owner ByteDance nine to 12 months to sell the popular video-sharing app or face a ban. The company has vowed to fight this in the courts. How might the showdown play out, and what does it mean for TikTok users globally? FRANCE 24's Tech Editor Peter O'Brien tells us more.

Legal proceedings began in the Nigerian capital Abuja on Thursday, targeting the cryptocurrency exchange Binance and two of its executives on charges of money laundering and tax evasion. Tigran Gambaryan, a US citizen and Binance's head of financial crimes compliance, appeared alone in court after Nadeem Anjarwalla, a British-Kenyan and the company’s regional manager for Africa, escaped custody and fled. Gambaryan's family is asking for the US to do more to secure his release. Find out why Nigeria is cracking down on crypto in this week's edition of Tech 24.

The United Nations has unanimously approved its first resolution on artificial intelligence, with all member states agreeing to make sure the technology respects human rights. The UN also hopes that AI will help it achieve its development goals for 2030, which are well behind schedule.

French daily and website Le Monde has become the latest publisher to strike a deal with OpenAI, allowing the San Francisco company to use its journalists' work to train artificial intelligence systems. To deal with claims that AI firms have plagiarised content scraped from the internet in order to build tools like ChatGPT, publishers have taken different approaches.

As people continue to turn to artificial intelligence for romance, new research suggests that almost every romantic AI companion disregards your privacy, and could be selling your data. We take a closer look in this edition of Tech 24.

After a week in the wild, the consensus is in: Apple's new "spacial computing" headset, the Vision Pro, is impressive, expensive, and ludicrous to wear in public.