Hungary’s forthcoming parliamentary elections feature “the world’s first post-reality campaign”, says Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic. With the country’s economy stagnating, prime minister Viktor Orbán and his far-right party Fidesz are pushing the “ludicrous” claim that their country is at risk of being attacked by… Ukraine. There are AI-generated TikTok videos of Volodymyr Zelensky on a golden toilet, counting his money, snorting cocaine and barking orders at a Hungarian soldier. On the streets, posters featuring the Ukrainian president are ubiquitous, often alongside opposition leader Péter Magyar and European Commission head Ursula von der Leyen. “They are the risk,” reads the caption. “Fidesz is the safe choice.”

This goes beyond traditional propaganda. Orbán has sent troops to guard the country’s oil and gas infrastructure, supposedly to prevent a Ukrainian attack. Counter-terrorism officials seized two trucks owned by a Ukrainian bank on a routine cash-transport run from Vienna last month, confiscating $82m in gold and cash. A team of crack Russian propagandists sent to Budapest to help out has reportedly suggested a staged assassination attempt on Orbán to bolster sympathy. Magyar’s opposition party, Tisza, fears the government is also planning a “false-flag” operation, such as an explosion at a Hungarian pipeline, that would be blamed on Ukraine. It isn’t just Russia helping out: Orbán and Fidesz have received fulsome endorsements from the leaders of right-wing parties across the world: the Trump administration, Germany’s AfD, Marine Le Pen in France, Geert Wilders of the Netherlands. Whether or not all this keeps the Hungarian PM in office, the danger is that it will become the template for future campaigns elsewhere: “shovelling propaganda at an electorate in order to build terror of an enemy that doesn’t exist at all”.

On the letters pages of The Times, readers have been comparing notes on abbreviations used by doctors for patients. One recalls seeing GOK (“God only knows”) and the more local NFS (“normal for Swindon”). Another says he saw PFO in his notes, which he later learned was short for “pissed and fell over”. A doctor wrote that when he worked at St Thomas’ in London, he would append the notes of anyone with “highly implausible” symptoms with the suffix “E6”. This, he explained, was the postcode for the suburb of Barking. Another correspondent noted that the use of acronyms isn’t unique to the medical profession. Apparently the most used note in IT support is PICNIC: “problem in chair not in computer”.

When the Nobel Prize winner and Google AI boss Demis Hassabis was a 12-year-old London chess prodigy, he had an epiphany. All these great minds, he thought, wasted on little pieces of black and white plastic. So, says John Thornhill in the FT, he quit and set his mind to greater things. He’s been busy. Aged 16, he won a place at Cambridge, which told him to take two gap years. He spent that time helping to build the best-selling computer game Theme Park, becoming so indispensable that he was offered £500,000 to stay with its creators. He declined. After his Cambridge computer science degree he went on to study neuroscience at UCL, then at Harvard and MIT, before founding DeepMind in 2010. He sold the company to Google four years later for $650m to gain access to – in his words – a “shitload of computers”.

All the time he had one goal in mind. He wanted to create what British mathematician IJ Good said would be humanity’s “last invention”: artificial general intelligence, a computer that is better than humans at all cognitive tasks. The good news, according to Sebastian Mallaby’s new biography The Infinity Machine, is that unlike some other AI bosses, Hassabis is “decent and public-spirited and wants the best for humanity”. He is said to have been powerfully influenced by Iain Banks’s Culture series, which describes a world in which humanity uses its AI-powered abundance of resources to become an interstellar civilisation. He is competitive – he once vowed no one would ever beat him at table football, and when someone did he declared his “soul was on fire” – and he has a powerful sense of destiny. But his goal, says Mallaby, is “scientific enlightenment, not money or power”. Though something similar could be said of Robert Oppenheimer. And look how that turned out.

The Infinity Machine by Sebastian Mallaby is available to order here.