Expenditure is growing fast and consumer take-up accelerating. But alarm bells are sounding

The race is very much on. Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which makes AI models as well as space rockets, announced last week it is seeking a $1.77tn (£1.31tn) valuation on the US stock market while Anthropic, the startup behind the Claude chatbot, said it had filed for an initial public offering. OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, is expected to follow.

This latest peak in the AI market comes amid a multitrillion-dollar spending spree on related infrastructure such as datacentres. Meanwhile, companies are attempting to deploy the technology in a way that makes investing in it worthwhile. Here’s a look at what stage the AI boom is at and six key charts that tell us how we got here.

Andrew Sparrow has been writing the Guardian’s daily political live blog for more 15 years. How does he cope with the relentless psychodrama of British politics?

On Monday at 14:12 BST, the Guardian’s Andrew Sparrow posted two sentences announcing one of the largest government document dumps in British political history:

The Cabinet Office has published the Mandelson files.
They are in three volumes.

Many people despair at the quality of governance in Britain at the moment, but in one respect we are living through a golden age; if you are interested in contemporary history, and learning about what actually happens at the heart of government, then you can now – sometimes – access the sort of information never available before …

Last month a minister compared [the documents being published today] to the evidence released as part of the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war. But the Chilcot inquiry took place in the era before WhatsApp, and it was publishing secret memos – intended for circulation within Whitehall. WhatsApp messages are a lot more personal; reading them is like being able to eavesdrop on a private conversation.”

An autism school in Wiltshire exemplifies what’s so different about education in a tailored environment, and the outcomes for children speak for themselves

In the old Wiltshire milltown of Calne, there is an autism specialist school called the Springfields Academy. About 250 children and young people between the age of four and 19 go there. Class sizes are no larger than 12. In each room, every child has their own dedicated table. There are no end of seating options, described by the headteacher, Nicola Whitcombe, as “wobble stools, wobble cushions, ball chairs, standing desks and booths”, with “pods” elsewhere for one-to-one teaching. And across a broad, multi-level curriculum based around personal development, every lesson follows the same basic structure. “From an autistic perspective,” she says, “that’s really important: ‘I know I’m going into the same thing, so therefore I feel safe.’”

Every year the school takes in a lot of primary school leavers who would find a mainstream secondary pretty much impossible. “If you’ve got five different lessons in a day, in five different classrooms with five different teachers, and this before we’ve talked about the corridors, and the smells, and where you have lunch – it’s overwhelming,” Whitcombe said. “So at our school, we have to get our environment right.” Over the past six years, no one who has been to Springfields has begun post-school life as a Neet (not in education, employment or training) – which is quite some achievement.

John Harris is a Guardian columnist

From franchise hits to historical epics, joyous musicals to autobiographical family sagas: Steven Spielberg has done it all. As his latest sci-fi film Disclosure Day is released, film-makers, authors and Guardian critics reveal which of his movies means the most to them

Steven Spielberg is often described as the inventor of the “event movie” – or as the creator of our new age of IP supremacy, in which the genre property is more important than any above-the-title film star. But that isn’t quite it. He came of age in the American new wave era but in spirit belonged neither to that nor fully to Hollywood’s golden age studio system that preceded it.

In fact, he synthesised both into a directing style that was audacious and fluent. He availed himself of the subversiveness of the new wave, and yet was classically oriented, drawing upon his love of – and alienation from – the all-American suburb, making him the Edward Hopper or the Andrew Wyeth of the movies. Tellingly, it was François Truffaut, the most emollient and Hollywood-friendly of France’s Nouvelle Vague masters, whom Spielberg cast in a cameo in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Attempt to turn a stretch of the English-Scottish border into a commercial forest exposes threat to habitats from wealthy investors

On the English-Scottish border a small species of butterfly, the northern brown argus, has fended off one of the biggest investors in the UK.

Todrig, with its heath moorlands and hundreds of species of flora and fauna, represents an investment that could save Britain’s wealthiest families millions of pounds in inheritance tax.

Visitors flock to Book Arsenal in Ukraine’s capital as wartime writing takes centre stage

It was a literary festival, all right, but if your reference for such things is Hay-on-Wye and Edinburgh, or Melbourne and Sydney, or New York and Washington DC, then at Kyiv Book Arsenal you might think you had slipped through a crack in the universe and landed in an alternative reality.

For a start, they were so young, the audience members. Dressed in their considerable best, they clutched their bags of books bought directly from publishers’ stalls and stopped to hug their friends – the festival providing the perfect opportunity for a people-watching passeggiata through its venue, the city’s vast 18th-century military arsenal.

Exclusive: Practice that includes women fleeing abuse is ‘ripping at social fabric’ of towns in poorest parts of England

Vulnerable families including women fleeing abuse are being illegally “dumped” hundreds of miles away by London councils in a practice “ripping at the social fabric” of deprived towns, a Guardian investigation has found.

Against the backdrop of a deepening housing crisis, the number of homeless people forced out of London has doubled in the past two years.

Attack was ‘extremely vile’ and deliberate, says Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy

A Russian Shahed drone has substantially damaged a building used to store spent nuclear fuel close to the disused Chornobyl nuclear power plant, in what Ukraine’s president described as a deliberate and “extremely vile” attack.

While the structure – the reception building of the spent fuel storage facility – was empty of containers at the time, the targeting of the sensitive site appeared to be direct messaging from Moscow amid an intensifying battle of long-range aerial strikes in which high-profile locations on both sides have been hit.

Deputy PM says he spoke to US vice-president about post that blamed ‘mass invasion of migrants’ for teenager’s death

• UK politics live – latest updates

David Lammy has said he told the US vice-president, JD Vance, he was wrong to blame the murder of the British teenager Henry Nowak on mass migration.

The deputy prime minister said he spoke to Vance by phone on Saturday to tell him “our democratic process is working well” and that he was wrong in his commentary about the murder.

Five hospitals in England and Wales have switched to urine test, rather than invasive hospital procedure

NHS hospitals are using a new way of diagnosing bladder cancer that is faster, more accurate and more convenient for patients than the existing test.

Doctors said the Galeas bladder test was a major breakthrough because it involved a urine test taken at home rather than an invasive procedure done at hospital which was uncomfortable for patients.