Big retail will cope – but Reeves’ NICs raid is too much, too soon for part-timers | Nils Pratley

If one looked solely at this week’s trading reports from the world of big retail – the likes of Marks & Spencer, Next and Tesco – you might wonder why Rachel Reeves’ increase in employers’ national insurance contributions (NICs) has caused such a fuss. It is obvious from the trio’s outlook statements that they will cope with the extra costs.At Tesco, which faces a £250m extra from NICs and other budget changes, the chief executive, Ken Murphy, did not rule out price rises but said the group would do its “very best” to mitigate them; and, given Tesco’s expertise in grinding out efficiency gains, you would bet on it to succeed. In similar style, Stuart Machin at M&S noted the cost headwinds but said “there is much within our control”.At Next, Simon Wolfson gave thanks for zero inflation in the cost of goods it buys, mainly from Asia, and reckoned the clothing group could off-set the wage pressures with price rises of only 1%, or half the Bank of England’s target rate of inflation

What the bond market turmoil means for your mortgage, pension and savings

The bond market sell-off has revived fears about rising borrowing costs after the crisis that followed Liz Truss’s disastrous mini budget in 2022. However, experts are suggesting there is no need to panic. Here is what it may mean for mortgages, pensions and savings.Rates on new fixed-rate mortgages could start to creep up as a result of the bond market turbulence as lenders get funding for loans from the money markets.Simon Gammon, the managing partner at Knight Frank Finance, says that so far only a few specialist and niche lenders have raised mortgage rates

Collaborative research on AI safety is vital | Letters

Re Geoffrey Hinton’s concerns about the perils of artificial intelligence (‘Godfather of AI’ shortens odds of the technology wiping out humanity over next 30 years, 27 December), I believe these concerns can best be mitigated through collaborative research on AI safety, with a role for regulators at the table.Currently, frontier AI is tested post-development using “red teams” who try their best to elicit a negative outcome. This approach will never be enough; AI needs to be designed for safety and evaluation – something that can be done by drawing on expertise and experience in well-established safety-related industries.Hinton does not seem to think that the existential threat from AI is one which is deliberately being encoded – so why not enforce the deliberate avoidance of this scenario? While I don’t subscribe to his perspective about the level of risk facing humanity, the precautionary principle suggests that we must act now.In traditional safety-critical domains, the need to build physical systems, eg aircraft, limits the rate at which safety can be impacted

Elon Musk says all human data for AI training ‘exhausted’

Artificial intelligence companies have run out of data for training their models and have “exhausted” the sum of human knowledge, Elon Musk has said.The world’s richest person suggested technology firms would have to turn to “synthetic” data – or material created by AI models – to build and fine-tune new systems, a process already taking place with the fast-developing technology.“The cumulative sum of human knowledge has been exhausted in AI training. That happened basically last year,” said Musk, who launched his own AI business, xAI, in 2023.AI models such as the GPT-4o model powering the ChatGPT chatbot are “trained” on a vast array of data taken from the internet, where they in effect learn to spot patterns in that information – allowing them to predict, for instance, the next word in a sentence

Money or the starter’s gun? AFL and NRL riches remain a lure for Olympic hopefuls | Nicole Jeffery

Teenage sprint prodigy Gout Gout has taken the headlines but Australia had an equally promising and even younger prospect at the World Athletics U20 Championships in Lima last year. A Sydney schoolboy was the youngest medallist at the event, just 15 when he leaped a personal best of 7.80m to win the bronze medal in the long jump, beating boys up to three years older than him.But there is no guarantee Mason McGroder will still be competing in athletics when Brisbane 2032 rolls around. The talented youngster is also in the Sydney Swans Academy and could pursue a career in the AFL

The wrong trousers: how sporting dress codes can create an image problem | Emma John

Wallace and Gromit is a festive TV staple in many a household – but it wasn’t their wrong trousers that scooped the post-Christmas headlines. That honour belonged to Magnus Carlsen, disqualified from a chess tournament in New York for wearing jeans.The world No 1 – who also happens to be the only current chess player most people can name – had balked when he was told to change his attire before his ninth-round match at the World Rapid and Blitz Championships. Walking out of the event, Carlsen shrugged that he would “probably head off to somewhere where the weather is a bit nicer”. Instead, he returned three days later after the governing body, Fide, had agreed a more “flexible approach” to its dress code