Large language models will be able to unspin financial numbers and open up a different way of understanding accounts

Second, how frequent is the task? The higher the frequency, the more likely it is to be automated. Machines have a clear advantage in maintaining speed over prolonged periods. Frequently repeated interactions with clients strengthen the economic case for AI replacement of customer service representatives.

Chinese artificial intelligence phenomenon DeepSeek revealed some financial numbers on Saturday, saying its “theoretical” profit margin could be more than five times costs, peeling back a layer of the secrecy that shrouds business models in the AI industry.

But as of the end of last week, analysts were expecting index-wide earnings growth of 11.4 per cent for 2025, according to LSEG. That’s decent, but lower than the 14 per cent they were forecasting at the start of January. Predictions for first-quarter growth have come down particularly sharply.

Artists including Kate Bush, Damon Albarn and Annie Lennox are contesting the UK government’s copyright proposals with ‘Is This What We Want?’

Madhumita Murgia talks to Vahap Can of Capital City College, Anton Korinek of University of Virginia, researcher Alex Chalmers and Cristina Criddle

OpenAI, Perplexity and German drugmaker BioNTech and its London-based AI subsidiary InstaDeep have recently launched their own AI research tools, while Google DeepMind’s AlphaFold has shown how the fast-developing technology can accelerate scientific research.

The Chinese AI developer DeepSeek kick-started worldwide debates around open-source AI and spending on AI infrastructure. The company’s low-cost model has been quickly adopted across China’s public and private sectors, and perhaps just as quickly been labelled a “national security risk” and shunned in the west.

There's a steep cost to reasoning AI, or AI that can provide a step-by-step breakdown of its thought process along with a response. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told CNBC on Wednesday that next-generation AI models capable of reasoning through problems before arriving at an answer,