Jeff Bezos is “close” to securing a £7.4 billion fundraising deal from investors for his AI lab, codenamed Project Prometheus, according to the Financial Times. The massive cash injection would propel the Amazon founder into the ranks of the AI titans heading firms with multibillion-dollar valuations. Here are some of the industry elite figures.

Sam Altman
Launched in November 2022, OpenAI’s ChatGPT has “redefined the standards of artificial intelligence”, said Forbes. As the company nears a possible value of more than £740 billion, “one of the biggest so-called risk factors” is “Altman himself”, said Bloomberg. He was fired as CEO by the board in November 2023, only to be reinstated days later.

Dario Amodei
Amodei clearly “wants to position himself as one of the good guys in the AI debate”, said the FT. He founded Anthropic – the creators of Claude – in 2021 alongside six other former OpenAI employees, including his sister Daniela, who became the company’s president. Anthropic recently raised £22.2 billion in a funding round that valued it at £281.3 billion.

Jensen Huang
Although the head of Nvidia may not be driving the AI revolution directly, the world’s most valuable company is acting as the “hardware backbone” of the movement, said Business Insider. Huang’s “chip empire” is effectively “powering the generative AI boom”. He founded the company in 1993 and has served as CEO since its inception.

Alex Karp
Fewer people will have heard of the co-founder of Palantir but, to some, he is the “scariest CEO in the world”, said The Guardian. The company recently released a 22-point “manifesto” summarising a recent book by Karp in which he extols the need for “hard power” and argues the inevitability of “AI weapons”. Palantir has multibillion-dollar contracts with the US army and Ice, as well as partnerships with the Israeli military and the UK’s Ministry of Defence.

Elon Musk
The founder of xAI and Grok has high hopes of an automated future and believes AI will put “immortality within human reach”, said Forbes. But his Grok chatbot has faced backlash over generating deepfakes, and he is also locked in a legal feud with Altman, with whom he cofounded OpenAI. Musk accuses Altman of deceiving him into donating £28 million to launch OpenAI with the promise that it would remain a non-profit.

Former fighter pilot Rumen Radev led his party into Bulgaria’s parliamentary election promising to take on the “corrupt officials, conspirators and extremists” who he accused of running the country into the ground. Voters responded on Sunday by handing his newly formed Progressive Bulgaria coalition the “single biggest vote haul in a ‌generation”, which “paves the way for greater political stability after eight elections in five years”, said Reuters.

Corruption crusader
Radev (pictured above) rose through the ranks of the Bulgarian air force to become a major general and finally head of the service. A relative latecomer to politics, he was elected to the largely ceremonial role of president in 2016 and held the position until this January, when he resigned after massive anti-corruption protests brought down the government. He then formed Progressive Bulgaria to run in the election, which he won with just under 45% of the vote, giving Bulgaria its first parliamentary majority in nearly 30 years.

The “main factors” driving Radev’s victory were “deep frustration over years of futile anti-corruption efforts, concern over rising prices” and a “potent mix of pro-Russian sentiment”, said Atanas Rusev, from the Center for the Study of Democracy in Sofia. “Radev played astutely on all these anxieties.”

‘Symbolically valuable’
A Radev-led government is “bad news for Ukraine and would represent a significant win for Russia”, said Jan Surotchak at the Atlantic Council think tank. In the short term, his victory will “likely mean an end to Bulgarian ammunition supplies to Ukraine, forcing Nato to seek other sources”. The US-backed northern corridor for energy supplies to Eastern Europe could also “lose out in favour of Turk Stream, the last major energy pipeline bringing Russian gas to Europe”.

Radev’s winning message has been a “cocktail of anti-corruption pledges, Euroscepticism and pledges to rebuild ties with Moscow, spooking some EU and Nato diplomats”, said the Financial Times. But “while his outreach to Russia may be symbolically valuable to the Kremlin, it is likely to be far less consequential in practice” than the recent election defeat of Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, who “routinely vetoed EU decisions in order to benefit Moscow”.

Leading matador Morante de la Puebla suffers an eye-watering injury during a comeback performance at Spain’s Seville Fair. The “King of Bullfighters”, who announced his retirement last year, underwent two hours of surgery to repair a 10cm wound in his buttock.

Joaquin Corchero / Europa Press / Getty Images

Safaris often come with an “eye-rolling price tag”, said The Times, but there are “bargains” to be had if you know where to look. One way to save money is to “rent a car and drive yourself”, avoiding the hefty cost of a fully guided package. It’s also worth choosing one of the “gateway towns” with a “locally run park outside of the national park”, rather than “an internationally owned lodge within it”.

Everyone is keen to see the annual wildebeest migration, “but most people don’t realise that the migrating herds can be found year-round at various places in Africa”, said Condé Nast Traveller, “so you don’t necessarily have to be in the Masai Mara during July and August”. Consider travelling during the spring or autumn and “staying longer” in one safari destination instead of moving between lodges every few days, to cut down on travel costs and increase your chances of “finding a good deal”.

“Africa has become synonymous with safaris,” said The Independent, but if you’re willing to expand your search, “more affordable Brazil has flown under the radar”. Home to the “highest concentration of wildlife in South America”, the Pantanal region is “sometimes dubbed the Brazilian Serengeti”. It even has its “own Big Five: the capybara, giant river otter, maned wolf, jaguar, and – tick – the giant anteater”. And with all-inclusive lodges costing a fraction of the price of a luxury resort, the country “promises an affordable alternative to a traditional safari”. 

We are one crisis away from a nuclear point of no return
David Blair in The Telegraph
The UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency aims to “preserve humanity from nuclear destruction”, writes David Blair, but “the whole intricate system designed to prevent calamity is crumbling before our eyes”. US-Russia disarmament treaties have collapsed and China is “expanding its nuclear arsenal at breakneck speed”. As “risk-reduction measures have fallen away”, countries including Japan, South Korea and Poland are considering joining the nuclear club. “And the more countries that have nuclear weapons, the greater the risk of catastrophe.”

Even the job from hell teaches you something
Gabriella Bennett in The Times
“I’ve held short-term jobs since I was 12 years old” and “each one has taught me something”, writes Gabriella Bennett. “The thing about work” is that “you pick things up even when it’s hell”, from “how to fold a jumper perfectly even when hungover” to the lesson that with pub work, “you earn more tips in a crop top”. But most of all, work means “you meet people you’d never ordinarily encounter and they change your life”.

King Charles’ message of peace presents hidden meanings in a fractured world
Russell Myers in The Mirror
“King Charles’ remarks on how unsettled his mother may have been” if she were alive today hints that “he too has struggled to come to terms” with our “fractured world”, writes Russell Myers. The Queen didn’t “live to see her disgraced son Andrew arrested” or the full “disintegration” of Prince Harry’s relationship with the royal family. Charles “has endured a difficult start to his reign”, but recent polling suggests his own “stature has not diminished in the face of adversity”.