A survey found that young people admitted finding democracy dull against the toxic glamour of strongman politics

‘DYOR.” That’s what they say. That’s Do Your Own Research, for those of us not quite meeting the 13- to 28-year-old gen Z age bracket. It’s a common refrain when one of them finds their truth challenged.

So I set out on some DYOR regarding the report last week that most gen Zers were in favour of the UK becoming a dictatorship. The study, commissioned by Channel 4, has been described broadly as “shocking”, “worrying” and “bleak”. Yet for anyone with daily interaction with that generation, it would probably be better described as – “fairly predictable”.

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© Photograph: Romain Doucelin/SOPA Images/REX/Shutterstock

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© Photograph: Romain Doucelin/SOPA Images/REX/Shutterstock

While privacy fears are justified, the main beef Silicon Valley has is that China’s chatbot is democratising the technology

No, it was not a “Sputnik moment”. The launch last month of DeepSeek R1, the Chinese generative AI or chatbot, created mayhem in the tech world, with stocks plummeting and much chatter about the US losing its supremacy in AI technology. Yet, for all the disruption, the Sputnik analogy reveals less about DeepSeek than about American neuroses.

The original Sputnik moment came on 4 October 1957 when the Soviet Union shocked the world by launching Sputnik 1, the first time humanity had sent a satellite into orbit. It was, to anachronistically borrow a phrase from a later and even more momentous landmark, “one giant leap for mankind”, in Neil Armstrong’s historic words as he took a “small step” on to the surface of the moon.

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© Photograph: Andy Wong/AP

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© Photograph: Andy Wong/AP

The first volume of the tech baron turned philanthropist’s memoirs focuses on his parent’s struggles to control him – and a painful early loss

The enduring mystery about William Henry Gates III is this: how did a precocious and sometimes obnoxious kid evolve into a billionaire tech lord and then into an elder statesman and philanthropist? This book gives us only the first part of the story, tracing Gates’s evolution from birth in 1955 to the founding of Microsoft in 1975. For the next part of the story, we will just have to wait for the sequel.

In a way, the volume’s title describes it well. In the era before machine learning and AI, when computer programs were exclusively written by humans, the term “source code” meant something. It described computer programs that could be read – and understood, if you knew the programming language – enabling you to explain why the machine did what it did.

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© Photograph: Lakeside School

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© Photograph: Lakeside School

Technology has changed how predators operate. Now a raft of new offences will stop those who create heinous content escaping punishment

Technology moves fast. Legislation can be slow. For decades, that has felt like a fundamental fact of public life. But the gap between our laws and the world they are supposed to govern feels wider than ever. While the internet has transformed every element of our society, the state has not kept up.

Most of the laws that prohibit the creation and distribution of child sexual abuse imagery have been in place since the 1990s. Back then, Photoshop was in its infancy. The physical photographs that paedophiles shared were no less vile, but they were easier for the police to seize and destroy.

Peter Kyle is secretary of state for science, innovation and technology

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 250 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at observer.letters@observer.co.uk

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© Photograph: Dado Ruvić/Reuters

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© Photograph: Dado Ruvić/Reuters

UK will be first country to bring in tough new laws to tackle the technology behind the creation of abusive material

Britain is to become the first country to introduce laws tackling the use of AI tools to produce child sexual abuse images, amid warnings from law enforcement agencies of an ­alarming proliferation in such use of the technology.

In an attempt to close a legal ­loophole that has been a major ­concern for police and online safety campaigners, it will become illegal to possess, create or distribute AI tools designed to generate child sexual abuse material.

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© Photograph: Jacob King/PA

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© Photograph: Jacob King/PA

Sam found himself getting sucked deeper and deeper in to betting, sometimes risking £11,000 in a day. Now a judge has ruled he was unlawfully targeted

At 1.17pm on 15 August 2018, Sam* logged in to his online betting account and gambled five days’ worth of wages. Already deep in debt – having taken out 13 loans over three years, and with his marriage under strain – he had been desperate to quit.

But Sky Betting & Gaming, operator of Sky Bet, Casino, and Vegas, had other ideas. Having labelled him a “high value” customer, and not realising he was at risk, it had sent him an email promising a £100 bonus if he spent £400 on a casino game. “Well done on making it past level 2. Can you make it even further this week?” it said. Soon after receiving it, Sam deposited £400.

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© Illustration: Getty Images/Observer Design

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© Illustration: Getty Images/Observer Design

Judge condemns firm for use of customer’s data after problem gambler was sent 1,300 emails over two years

• ‘I lost 10 years of my life’: how UK betting giant’s unlawful marketing kept suicidal gambler hooked

Gambling companies in Britain could be forced to overhaul their advertising practices after a betting firm was ruled to have unlawfully targeted a problem gambler who was bombarded with more than 1,300 marketing emails.

In a ruling at the high court, a judge found that Sky Betting & Gaming sent the man personalised marketing without proper consent after gathering hundreds of thousands of pieces of data about him and his gambling habits.

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© Illustration: Jason Alden/Bloomberg/Getty Images

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© Illustration: Jason Alden/Bloomberg/Getty Images

The cheap Chinese chatbot has stunned tech giants – and opened up the possibility that other countries, not just China, could now afford to enter the AI race

At 2.16pm California time last Sunday, the US billionaire tech investor Marc Andreessen called it. “DeepSeek R1 is AI’s Sputnik moment,” he posted on X.

A Chinese startup, operating since 2023 and helmed by a millennial mathematician, had unveiled a new chatbot that seemed to equal the performance of America’s leading models at a fraction of the cost.

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© Photograph: Dado Ruvić/Reuters

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© Photograph: Dado Ruvić/Reuters

The AI startup has upended the industry by developing a model that costs much less to produce – and is available free to a universe of tinkerers

Nothing cheers up a tech columnist more than the sight of $600bn being wiped off the market cap of an overvalued tech giant in a single day. And yet last Monday that’s what happened to Nvidia, the leading maker of electronic picks and shovels for the AI gold rush. It was the biggest one-day slump for any company in history, and it was not alone – shares of companies in semiconductor, power and infrastructure industries exposed to AI collectively shed more than $1tn in value on the same day.

The proximate cause of this chaos was the news that a Chinese tech startup of whom few had hitherto heard had released DeepSeek R1, a powerful AI assistant that was much cheaper to train and operate than the dominant models of the US tech giants – and yet was comparable in competence to OpenAI’s o1 “reasoning” model. Just to illustrate the difference: R1 was said to have cost only $5.58m to build, which is small change compared with the billions that OpenAI and co have spent on their models; and R1 is about 15 times more efficient (in terms of resource use) than anything comparable made by Meta.

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© Photograph: GK Images/Alamy

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© Photograph: GK Images/Alamy

Why is the US technology industry worried about Chinese company DeepSeek? Robert Booth reports

DeepSeek, the Chinese company behind the new AI chatbot R1, uses less computing power and fewer chips than its rivals, and claims the model is far cheaper.

“It’s sort of the biggest news in this space of AI chatbots since November 2022 when ChatGPT came out,” Robert Booth, the Guardian’s UK technology editor, tells Helen Pidd.

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© Photograph: Faisal Bashir/SOPA Images/REX/Shutterstock

While the tool may require less chips to operate and demand smaller fees to run, it may also carry security risks.

Over centuries, musical complexity has evolved alongside culture and technology. Network science is now revealing how

We’d like to hear from people in the US about their experiences of TikTok following the president pausing the ban of the app

TikTok users in the US prepared themselves for a ban that was due to take effect on 19 January. However, following an executive order granting TikTok a 75-day extension signed by Donald Trump, users now find themselves in new territory.

For those in the US wanting to download the app on their phones, the social media platform is unavailable in app stores, however those who already have it on their phones can continue to use it, for now.

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© Photograph: Matt Cardy/Getty Images

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© Photograph: Matt Cardy/Getty Images