Rest of World

Kylian Mbappé of France entered the World Cup semifinals with Argentina’s Lionel Messi in the race for the Golden Boot. Pundits, punters, and chatbots are divided on who finishes as the football tournament’s top scorer. The sharpest predictor of them all, though, is a goldfish. Swimbappé lives in a Toronto storefront tank fitted out as a miniature pitch, and calls matches by swimming toward one of two flags at either end.

Meta recently unveiled Muse Image, an artificial intelligence image generator that allows anyone to manipulate pictures of any Instagram user with a public profile. Just as its Meta glasses — the facial recognition-equipped accessory that lets wearers record anyone without their consent — it is an extremely problematic feature because image-based abuse is one of the fastest-growing forms of technology-facilitated gender-based violence.

After twin earthquakes struck northern Venezuela last month, thousands of people took to social media, pleading for help locating friends and family. The interim government was slow to act, but help came quickly from an unexpected source: developers and programmers. “Who knew when the government was going to respond?” Jorge Bastidas, a 31-year-old Venezuelan programmer who lives in Buenos Aires, told Rest of World.

The Gulf’s oil-rich states, betting billions on reinventing themselves as centers of artificial intelligence, are discovering that money can buy almost everything, except a way out of Nvidia. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have committed tens of billions of dollars to becoming AI powers before the oil money fades. For the past year, they have tried to buy chips from as many companies as they can, so that no single supplier controls how much they pay and how fast they can build.

The Indian government’s latest tussle with WhatsApp has raised concerns about the censorship of app features globally. On June 29, WhatsApp began rolling out usernames globally, allowing users to chat without sharing their phone numbers. The Indian government has objected to the feature, arguing that pseudonymous accounts could make it easier for bad actors to impersonate others and carry out scams and financial fraud.

Young people can’t seem to stop watching AI slop videos of cats talking and fruits cheating on each other. Older people are enjoying a different kind of AI-generated content, which provides them with much-needed comfort and companionship. Take Uncle Chang, a 67-year-old family friend who recently visited New York from Taiwan. As we chatted, the retired businessman showed me some YouTube videos that made him cry.

In his job as a nurse and healthcare administrator, Chris decided on appropriate treatments for patients, and checked their vital signs. Sometimes, he monitored up to 10 patients in intensive care — and he did it all from Manila, thousands of miles away from the U.S. hospital he worked for. Chris, who asked to go by a pseudonym because he is bound by nondisclosure agreements, moved through a dozen remote nursing jobs in U.S. hospitalsbetween 2020 and 2023.

One of the most significant developments today is the rapid growth of data centers and other artificial intelligence-related infrastructure. This is true of Africa, too, where demand for digital services is accelerating. South Africa, in particular, has emerged as one of the continent’s leading destinations for data center investment because of its connectivity, market size, and strategic position within the regional economy.

Involution — neijuan (内卷) in Mandarin, literally “inward curling” — entered everyday Chinese speech around 2020. The concept was borrowed from the American anthropologist Clifford Geertz, who described a pattern in colonial Java in the 1960s:  farming systems that grew more elaborate and complex without becoming more productive, absorbing ever more labor for diminishing returns.

Gordon Sheng, a 32-year-old civil engineer in China, spent two decades reading web novels before using AI to write his own. He used DeepSeek to outline a dramatic divorce plot, then generated the story in five minutes using an AI writing tool. Published on Tomato Novel, the short story drew over 5,500 reads in 10 days.