Spades are in the ground to build Britain’s first “vertiport” at a former RAF base on the outskirts of the Oxfordshire town as the reality of a new way of flying inches closer.

Tests of the first electric vertical take-off and landing (eVtol) aircraft from the site are set to begin by the end of the year with flights planned to Bristol, Heathrow and Farnborough.

Skyports, the company building the vertiport, has partnered with Vertical Aerospace, a Bristol-based advanced mobility company, as it moves closer to its ambition of the first eVtol launches in Britain.

“We looked at a few sites,” Duncan Walker, the founder of Skyports, said. “We wanted to do it at an existing airfield because it’s easier from a regulation perspective but also Bicester is a real tech hub with loads of automotive companies and is right in the heart of the country.”

Exactly what the first eVtol journeys will look like is still a little unclear but most in the industry agree that they will probably regional connectivity from hub airports, such as Heathrow, for premium-class passengers.

Under the government’s plans, the first commercial flights are expected to take off in 2026, although that still leaves Britain lagging behind some rivals.

In Dubai, work on Skyports’ vertiport on the Palm Islands and at the emirate’s international airport is soon to get underway. It also expects to be operational by 2026 in the Middle East, ferrying passengers from airports into city centres.

“The UK will be a couple of years after that,” Walker said. “And look, our first route is not going to be landing in Mayfair. It will be a less demanding route infrastructure-wise, but slowly over time the network will grow.”

Plans are also afoot for eVtols to play a large role at the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles with the craft used to ferry athletes from the village to stadiums. Plans for such aircraft to feature at the Paris Olympics this year are understood to have been quietly shelved.

Around the world more than 400 start-ups are vying to be at the forefront of the nascent industry, although experts predict that very few will become a commercial success.

“It’s a real mixed bag of operators from drones to one-person aircraft right up to some of the bigger players,” Will Nathan, the head of public affairs at Vertical Aerospace, said.

The Bristol-based start-up has already begun real-life tests of its craft, the VX4. It’s black, shiny, and very futuristic. The company is working with Skyports to prepare for the first full test flights by the end of the year.

“That will involve Nats [the national air traffic controller] and what we are trying to achieve is showing how the whole ecosystem will come together to demonstrate the first full eVtol flight in the UK,” Nathan added.

It will be a big moment for the company, which was founded in 2016, as it hopes to have its craft fully certified for passenger use by the end of 2026.

Aviation experts have said that flying taxis will be first adopted by existing airlines to offer first-class passengers transfers from airports into cities. Within 15 years it is expected that the cost of trips will fall dramatically, threatening conventional taxis — particularly for longer journeys.

“What we’re not trying to do is replicate helicopters, which are the playthings of oligarchs,” Walker said. “The airlines that will operate this sort of vehicle talk about pricing similar to an Uber X in the long run. But of course, to get there you need economies of scale. So yes, it will start expensive, but not to the extent that it is ridiculously out of reach.”

Vertical Aerospace anticipates a hop of 20–30 miles eventually costing about £40 per passenger.

Nats, meanwhile, is developing a new app-based platform allowing operators to file flight plans that would be processed, amended or approved automatically. It is designed to speed up the process to work in a world where eVtols are operating continuously.

Under the plans, pilots would only need to physically talk to air traffic controllers in exceptional circumstances, with the app ensuring the aircraft was “entirely deconflicted from other aircraft”. An “airspace manager” would monitor all activity from a central digital control room.

Anna Postma-Kurlanc, the project lead at Nats, said: “Our skies are already busy, so we are going to have to find new, innovative ways of managing and integrating this new generation of electric aircraft.”

Work is also under way at the Civil Aviation Authority on the regulatory side of the industry. It has been consulting on vertiport design at existing aerodromes ahead of the planned trials.

“We are starting to get to the pointy end,” Nathan said. “We’ve been doing this for eight years and are now ramping up our flight tests as we move closer to certification. The government has published its Future of Flight plans which spell out that it wants to see the first commercial flights in 2026. It’s very exciting.”

Oxford Endovascular’s folding concept is inspired by the way satellites unpack their solar arrays. It allows doctors to insert tubes inside the brain’s blood vessels to heal weak spots. Estimated to affect one in fifty people, these are known as aneurysms and can potentially leak or rupture.

Parkwalk Advisors led the company’s second big funding round, being called a Series A+, along with Norcliffe Capital, Oxford University, Oxford Science Enterprises and Vulpes Investment Management. The investment is designed to fund a test programme.

Spun out of Oxford University in 2015, the company has built a team of engineers to develop the product, which is a stent made of a nickel titanium alloy that can in effect reline the blood vessel to take the pressure off.

Mike Karim, chief executive, said: “We use an origami-inspired design, which allows this technology to be cut in one piece and fold down into a tiny space so that it can be inserted through a tiny little tube that goes up into the brain’s blood vessels. When a doctor releases it, because of the special folding technology within it, it opens up very accurately and very precisely, giving the doctor a huge degree of control.”

If all goes to plan the team will apply for human clinical studies next year to take place in 2026, followed by a larger clinical trial, which could mean the product is available to patients from the end of 2028.

Alun Williams, investment director of Parkwalk Advisors, which backs companies coming out of UK universities and research institutions, said the business “is demonstrative of the exceptional ideas currently spinning out of universities in the UK”.

Looking ahead, Karim said he would like to remain in the UK rather than go to the United States as so many others do because “there is more liquid capital around and investors are prepared to take more risk. We are a British company, British innovation from one of the world’s top universities, based in Britain. We have a great future and we’re going to take this technology forwards into the NHS and global healthcare systems and save hundreds of thousands of patients’ lives.”

Oxford Endovascular has also received financial backing in the form of grants from Horizon Europe, the EU’s research funding programme, and Innovate UK, the national innovation agency.

In a strongly worded warning, Margherita Della Valle told The Times that this means the UK will be less quick to adopt and take advantage of the technology than its rivals.

The FTSE 100 chief executive said the UK’s cellular networks could be “the next AI bottleneck” to restrict growth in the use of AI, adding to issues over chip shortages, limits on computing power and AI’s high energy demands.

Britain is at the bottom of the G7 when it comes to 5G connectivity, she said, citing recent research from OpenSignal, the network analytics company, and is also “falling behind the rest of the world”.

“5G standalone in the UK, which is the capability you need for this type of communication, is simply not available and will not be available even in three, four, five years time,” Della Valle said.

“The absence of high-speed, low latency connectivity means that certain use cases are not possible, either across the whole network or simply because you have locations where this high speed, low latency will not be available.”

At present, almost all 5G used in the UK is built on top of existing 4G infrastructure. To get the full benefits of 5G, a so-called “standalone” network architecture is required which operates independently. This can carry more data, at faster speeds and with shorter delays, or latency.

The government wants everyone to have access to standalone 5G by 2030, but Ofcom described its deployment in December as “at an early stage”. Frontier Economics has found an investment gap between what private industry can deliver and what is needed to meet the target, while the National Infrastructure Commission believes it can be funded commercially.

Della Valle argued that the need for capacity on the network would only increase as consumers started to see AI capabilities embedded in their smartphones, and AI finds commercial applications, such as in agriculture, healthcare and education.

“All of this will travel across our network”, she said. “AI needs computing capacity, it needs energy, and it needs networks”, without these, she said businesses and society cannot capitalise on the technology.

Her remarks echo those of some analysts who have warned that the increased adoption of AI could lead to a huge increase in data on wireless networks which will require network upgrades.

“When people think about the opportunities of AI, when people think about what it can deliver for society, the public sector savings, everyone is focused on the tech companies side of the equation, but in the infrastructure layer that is required for AI, success tends to be forgotten,” Della Valle said.

Vodafone is in the middle of an £18 billion merger with Three which would create the UK’s biggest mobile network operator, bringing 27 million customers together and reducing the number of operators from four to three.

The deal is being investigated by the competition watchdog over concerns that it may lead to mobile customers facing higher prices and reduced quality.

Della Valle made the case that, without the scale provided by the tie-up, the size of investment needed in the UK’s infrastructure was uneconomical. “In the current circumstances, companies like ours cannot invest more because there are no returns on investment”.

Vodafone has committed to investing £11 billion over the next decade if the takeover goes through.

Della Valle said it was imperative to consider the impact of AI on Britain’s digital infrastructure as soon as possible: “It will take time to fill these gaps. It’s not something that you wake up in the morning and decide, ‘I want to have the best 5G network in Europe’ and you get it. It takes time.”

The boss of National Grid has also warned about the pressures of AI on the energy network’s capacity, remarking that data centre power use would grow sixfold in the next decade.

According to the Department of Science and Technology, the UK’s AI sector employs more than 50,000 people, contributes £3.7 billion to the economy every year, and attracts £4.2 billion in investment.

The actor-turned-campaigner was successfully sued over a row on Twitter, now known as X, where he made derogatory remarks about Simon Blake and Colin Seymour, who performs under the name Crystal, in an exchange about a decision by Sainsbury’s to mark Black History Month in October 2020.

The Reclaim Party founder, who said at the time that he would boycott the supermarket, countersued the pair and the broadcaster Nicola Thorp over tweets accusing him of racism.

In a judgment in January, Mrs Justice Collins Rice ruled in favour of Blake and Seymour, dismissing Fox’s counter-claims.

In a ruling on Thursday, the judge said Fox must pay Blake and Seymour £90,000 each in damages. She said: “By calling Mr Blake and Mr Seymour paedophiles, Mr Fox subjected them to a wholly undeserved public ordeal. It was a gross, groundless and indefensible libel, with distressing and harmful real-world consequences for them.”

At a hearing in March, Lorna Skinner KC, for Blake and Seymour, had said the pair should receive “at least six-figure sums” from Fox, calling a suggestion the pair should only receive a “modest” award “nonsense”.

However, Patrick Green KC, for Fox, said the starting point of damages should be between £10,000 and £20,000, with the total being “substantially lowered” due to an apology from Fox and the absence of malice.

Before Thursday’s ruling, Fox described the original judgment as a “bullies charter” and said he disagreed “profoundly” with the result. He said in a post on Twitter/X: “I don’t know what the judge will award these people. But the costs of these proceedings are enormous. So a whopper of a cheque is getting written in the next few days.”

Fox added: “We are seeing the courts used maliciously across the west and that is a very concerning trend. So enjoy the victory guys and I hope it is short-lived!”

The judge declined to make an order requiring Fox to publish a summary of her decision on his Twitter/X account.

It was the only way to watch A Gentleman in Moscow, the new Ewan McGregor series based on the book of the same name.

This is typical of the way entertainment companies have been adding to their networks, luring us in with top-drawer, exclusive content and hoping to hook us into permanent monthly payments with their library of shows.

It has been an expensive strategy in a crowded field and after years of spending to buy customers’ affections, the media giants are having to rein back.

Paramount is no exception. Its latest quarterly results show it is stemming its losses. In its “direct to consumer” division, they narrowed in the first quarter of this year, to $286 million from $511 million, as the company cut costs, added subscribers and put up prices.

The losses are still there, however. It has around a quarter of Netflix’s 270 million subscribers and is playing catch-up.

So it is no surprise that the owner of CBS, Paramount Pictures, Nickelodeon and MTV is the subject of two takeover bids. Yet another example of consolidation in Hollywood as the industry faces structural change, increasing competition from Big Tech and the looming threat of artificial intelligence.

The potential sale could come straight out of an episode of Succession with the lead played by Shari Redstone, Paramount Global’s non-executive chairwoman and its glamorous controlling shareholder, through her family’s National Amusements empire.

The first deal on the table, which Redstone is said to favour, is from Skydance, the film producer known for franchises such as Star Trek and Terminator.

It is run by David Ellison, the son of Oracle founder Larry Ellison, backed by Tencent and KKR alongside RedBird — which British readers will recognise after it orchestrated a bid for the Telegraph.

This link to the tech world could count in Ellison’s favour as Hollywood and Silicon Valley become increasingly intertwined. Apple, Amazon and Google’s YouTube are all now key players in media.

Then there is a second $26 billion offer from Sony and the private equity business Apollo Global. To make things more complicated, Paramount is now ruled by a committee of three after Bob Bakish, the chief executive, resigned as tensions boiled over with Redstone.

The drama has reached this climax because despite the number of hits under Paramount’s belt, most recently Mean Girls, like its rivals the company has had a painful time.

Its share price is down more than 70 per cent in the past five years as it pivots into the world of digital and customers increasingly shake off their cable subscriptions, known as “cord-cutting” — a story as familiar in Hollywood as Cinderella.

Disney’s Bob Iger recently fended off an attack by the activist investor Nelson Peltz. Its streaming service has only just turned a profit, again by increasing prices and cost-cutting.

At the weekend, at Berkshire Hathaway’s annual meeting, Warren Buffett made his view of Paramount’s future clear when he announced that he had got rid of his entire stake in the business: “We lost quite a bit of money.”

A silver screen happy ending is up in the air. Marc Rowan, Apollo Global’s chief executive, says: “This market is wide open.”

But in a perfect example of why streaming is such a hard business, my relationship with Paramount ended once I had watched A Gentleman in Moscow. Like many fickle customers, I signed up for the free seven-day trial and then slipped away before I had to pay.

Time machine wanted

The field for tech conferences continues to get ever-more crowded. This year, Paris will again hold Vivatech towards the end of May. It builds on the success of Elon Musk’s appearance last year and has the boss of Mistral, Arthur Mensch, France’s home-grown AI guru, centre stage. However, it clashes with the UK government’s second AI safety summit in South Korea. Which way will tech executives decide to fly? Someone needs to invent a time machine.

Katie Prescott is Technology Business Editor of The Timeskatie.prescott@thetimes.co.uk

Of course, there is a reason for this phenomenon. Banks, large accountancy firms and City lawyers now often sign up as corporate customers to food delivery companies. Instead of offering staff a good-quality canteen, they give them a daily £30 Deliveroo or Uber Eats allowance.

I found the scene rather depressing: bankers working late and munching on Dishoom curries and over-priced Korean chicken wings at their desks. There is a generation of workers who not only do not really like working but also, for very understandable reasons, resent coming into the office when they can do the job just as well from home. Is handing them a generous takeaway voucher really the answer? Isn’t this just reinforcing the atomisation of office life?

There is an alternative. Eat together as a company. This is an idea favoured by Eccie Newton, who has co-founded a couple of companies that between them employ about 70 people. “Every day we stop and eat together,” she says. “Literally. A bell goes off at midday and we down tools. We all sit down together and we can talk about things, not necessarily work, but we’re talking about ideas and how we feel.”

This, to me, sounds as much fun as sawing off my left arm with a blunt bread knife. When I worked in an office, lunchtime was an opportunity to escape, to get some fresh air, not share a pilaf with my boss. If it was raining, I would hide myself in the furthest corner of the newspaper’s office, often on a spare desk behind the obituaries department, with the crossword and my homemade sarnie to avoid having to make polite chit chat with any of my superiors.

But Newton is not only charming, displaying none of the sociopathic tendencies that some of my former colleagues harboured, but also is quite persuasive about the benefits of communal eating. For starters, her main company, Karma Cans, is an office food delivery company. She supplies the London offices of Meta, Microsoft and Amazon with catering for meetings and these technology offices’ group lunches. So it is in her interest to promote the idea of office lunches. The food her company eats at midday is the same menu it has sent out to other companies around the capital. Having a high-quality kitchen on site helps, so does having a workforce whose mission is food, but her point is that it has a benefit beyond the touchy-feely sense of community. “Having a moment in the day when you can form connections with somebody in a different team leads to better-quality communications across the company.”

There was an era when many workplaces had strictly hierarchical eating arrangements. The Raleigh bicycle factory had fifteen different staff canteens, one for each rank of worker, from directors down to the most basic shopfloor workers. Newton believes her company lunch, which she insists is voluntary, breaks up these segregations.

There is some science to back this up. Commensality is the lovely, technical word for eating together and Robin Dunbar, an Oxford professor of evolutionary psychology, has suggested that eating together drives social connections rather than the other way around. It holds true for workplaces, too, according to some studies. Cornell University undertook an analysis of firehouses in America and found that firemen who ate together at work were more productive and displayed greater cohesion. Nesta, a British research and innovation group, ran a small-scale experiment encouraging workers to eat together at the same table once a week. The benefits of commensality were felt beyond the weekly activity and solo desk eaters on other days of the week fell from 37 per cent to 25 per cent.

Although Karma Cans’ formal bell-ringing is highly unusual, quite a few organisations try to eat together occasionally. Nebel Crowhurst is chief people officer at Reward Gateway, an employee benefits platform. Its own office has a large stand-up table where workers gather to eat and snack. Although it is not as civilised as sitting down for a chef-cooked meal, it is a chance to chat to people from other departments. “It makes a difference in wanting to show up to the office, in wanting to feel connected,” she says. “People want to feel part of something, which we lost for a few years because of the pandemic.”

My lunchtime misanthropy was rooted in an era when we had to turn up to the office religiously, five days a week. Lunchtime was a sliver of freedom, either for running errands or for tracking down a Pret without a queue. However, now that many office drones spend at least a day a week working from home, the necessity to carve out time for a haircut or a visit to the phone repair shop is less pressing.

For most companies, certainly those with more than 100 employees, sitting down together is not practical, but for the office to have meaning to a generation that started working life during or after Covid it needs to offer something beyond superficial face-to-face interactions and a few tax-deductible perks. Maybe the occasional shared meal, if not daily, is preferable to everyone swiping on the Deliveroo app for another meal to end up as crumbs on your keyboard.

Harry Wallop is a consumer journalist and broadcaster. Follow him on Twitter/X @hwallop

Captchas were developed in the early 2000s to try to identify a human from a bot (the acronym roughly stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart). Since then they have become ubiquitous as a way to deter fraudsters, scammers, abusers and cybercriminals from using bots to access online platforms.

At their heart is a simple equation: the Captcha has to be easier for a human to do than a machine. But as machines and AI have become better at tasks and identifying images, those developing the Captchas have had to up their game, quite literally.

A paper last year from researchers at the University of California, Irvine concluded that bots can outperform humans at solving Captchas.

The days of transcribing random distorted text are now gone and a more familiar experience is clicking on all the motorcycles and traffic lights in the grid.

But with advances in computer vision technology and AI models that can interpret images as well as text, even these puzzles are inadequate and now users are confronted with ever more sophisticated tests.

The comedian Jack Whitehall asked the question on everyone’s lips in his recent Netflix show: “Is it just me, or have those ‘I am not a robot’ tests started getting harder?”.

On Reddit, under a post tittled “This is the hardest and most confusing Captcha ever”, was a puzzle with an image of a fish skeleton with a “x4” that had to be matched with a rotating series of pictures next to it (there had to be four fish skeletons in the other picture).

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Kevin Gosschalk, the founder and CEO of Arkose Labs, which develops Captchas, gave this warning to the Wall Street Journal: “Things are going to get even stranger, to be honest, because now you have to do something that’s nonsensical. Otherwise, large multimodal models will be able to understand.”

They may be stranger, but are they more difficult? “Yes, I think so. And we’ve done a lot of research on this internally,” says Cyril Noel-Tagoe, principal security researcher at Netacea, a company that combats bots.

Others in the industry disagree. A spokesperson from hCaptcha, a cybersecurity company, which develops the systems, said: “hCaptcha challenges are not actually getting harder for people to solve, as measured by time needed and percentage of people passing on the first try. However, any change in a familiar system can create a temporary perception of difficulty. Several years of relatively slow progress in visual AI meant that people got used to seeing a small number of questions about bicycles or crosswalks, while today there is more diversity.”

Noel-Tagoe adds: “Part of the problem with Captcha is that they are being solved by people of different abilities and cultures. Something that might be easy for someone in one culture, or someone with one ability level, might not be easy for someone else. How do you create a challenge that is universally easy for humans but difficult for bots?” He adds that “Captcha farms” — thousands of people sitting and solving the puzzles for small amounts of money — have emerged to get round the barrier.

Despite the frustration felt by many at the tasks (“Is that wheel actually part of the motorbike?”), we may actually be enjoying the mental challenge, according to the UC Irvine paper.

“Our results also show that average solving time is not fully correlated with participants’ preferences,” it concluded.

So the next time you’re stumped by a Captcha, treat it like a Sudoku or Wordle and think of all the benefits it’s bringing to your brain.

Rich Caccappolo, the chief executive of DMG Media, said: “If you don’t have direct traffic, then you’re in real trouble. The sites that are dependent on search traffic are going to struggle. I don’t think they are going to get enough in licensing. Generative AI answering questions in search, that’s going to be devastating for some publishers who are very dependent on search.”

He told the Deloitte and Enders Media & Telecoms 2024 and Beyond conference in London that while Mail Online benefited from people visiting the site directly, generating traffic was now “probably more expensive than ever and probably harder than ever. It may be too late for some.”

The rising popularity of chatbots such as ChatGPT and Claude, which give users full answers rather than links to websites, has raised questions over the future of traditional search engines. Many businesses depend on search engines such as Google to direct users to their websites in order to make revenue from advertising. Recent research by Gartner suggested that generative AI would cut traditional search engine volumes by 25 per cent by 2026.

To counter this, speaking on the same panel as Caccappolo, Anna Jones, the chief executive of Telegraph Media Group, said there could be a return to more “old-fashioned brand campaigns” to attract readers.

Another concern for media companies is the use of their copyright within AI models. Technology companies require vast amounts of high-quality data to power their generative AI. The creative industries, including authors, musicians and artists, want to ensure that they are paid correctly if their work is being used to train AI.

Several leading news organisations have signed licensing deals for their content with OpenAI, the ChatGPT owner, in recent weeks, including NewsCorp, the owner of The Times. OpenAI also has partnerships with Axel Springer, the publisher, Associated Press, the news agency, and the Financial Times.

Jones said she was “hopeful” of striking a deal with generative AI businesses for her company’s content.

Anna Bateson, the chief executive of Guardian Media Group, said the newspaper business would consider a deal, but “only on the right terms and for the right value”.

She claimed technology companies “seem to believe that they’re exceptional in a way that they don’t necessarily have to pay for the things that everyone else respects, which is protected by copyright, which protects the considerable investment that has gone into the creation of that content over hundreds of years. They’re happy to pay for talent and they’re happy to pay for computing power, but they don’t want to pay for data.

“I’m sure we’d all love to reduce our cost to our businesses by not paying for the things that are fundamental to the way that we manage businesses. It would be lovely not to pay for electricity. It would be lovely not to pay for print and paper, but that’s not the way that markets work.”