Posts with «language|en-us» label

Logitech's Litra Glow streamer light falls to a new low of $40

It's getting dark much too early, and that means a lot more time in movies or live streaming with a bright overhead light or frustrating shadows. Logitech's Litra Glow is a fantastic option for ensuring you look good on camera, and right now, it's at a new all-time low price. The light is down to $40 from $60 thanks to a 17 percent off sale and an additional $10 coupon applied at checkout. 

Logitech's Litra Glow is a Premium LED Streaming Light designed for creators and is our recommendation for game-streaming gear that will make you feel like a pro. It clips right onto your computer next to its webcam with three-way mounting, letting you adjust its height, tilt and rotation. The light is USB-powered, so you'll want room for its cord to hide behind your monitor.

The Litra Glow is equipped with Truesoft technology, so you won't just have a painfully bright light in your face. You can also adjust the light's brightness and temperature (a great tool for warm light fans) based on the time of day and personal preference. You can make these changes using manual controls or Logitech's app.

Follow @EngadgetDeals on Twitter and subscribe to the Engadget Deals newsletter for the latest tech deals and buying advice.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/logitechs-litra-glow-streamer-light-falls-to-a-new-low-of-40-141910194.html?src=rss

How OpenAI's ChatGPT has changed the world in just a year

Over the course of two months from its debut in November 2022, ChatGPT exploded in popularity, from niche online curio to 100 million monthly active users — the fastest user base growth in the history of the Internet. In less than a year, it has earned the backing of Silicon Valley’s biggest firms, and been shoehorned into myriad applications from academia and the arts to marketing, medicine, gaming and government.

In short ChatGPT is just about everywhere. Few industries have remained untouched by the viral adoption of the generative AI’s tools. On the first anniversary of its release, let’s take a look back on the year of ChatGPT that brought us here.

OpenAI had been developing GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer), the large language model that ChatGPT runs on, since 2016 — unveiling GPT-1 in 2018 and iterating it to GPT-3 by June 2020. With the November 30, 2022 release of GPT-3.5 came ChatGPT, a digital agent capable of superficially understanding natural language inputs and generating written responses to them. Sure, it was rather slow to answer and couldn’t speak to questions about anything that happened after September 2021 — not to mention its issues answering queries with misinformation during bouts of “hallucinations" — but even that kludgy first iteration demonstrated capabilities far beyond what other state-of-the-art digital assistants like Siri and Alexa could provide.

ChatGPT’s release timing couldn’t have been better. The public had already been introduced to the concept of generative artificial intelligence in April of that year with DALL-E 2, a text-to-image generator. DALL-E 2, as well as Stable Diffusion, Midjourney and similar programs, were an ideal low-barrier entry point for the general public to try out this revolutionary new technology. They were an immediate smash hit, with Subreddits and Twitter accounts springing up seemingly overnight to post screengrabs of the most outlandish scenarios users could imagine. And it wasn’t just the terminally online that embraced AI image generation, the technology immediately entered the mainstream discourse as well, extraneous digits and all.

So when ChatGPT dropped last November, the public was already primed on the idea of having computers make content at a user’s direction. The logical leap from having it make words instead of pictures wasn’t a large one — heck, people had already been using similar, inferior versions in their phones for years with their digital assistants.

Q1: [Hyping intensifies]

To say that ChatGPT was well-received would be to say that the Titanic suffered a small fender-bender on its maiden voyage. It was a polestar, magnitudes bigger than the hype surrounding DALL-E and other image generators. People flat out lost their minds over the new AI and its CEO, Sam Altman. Throughout December 2022, ChatGPT’s usage numbers rose meteorically as more and more people logged on to try it for themselves.

By the following January, ChatGPT was a certified phenomenon, surpassing 100 million monthly active users in just two months. That was faster than both TikTok or Instagram, and remains the fastest user adoption to 100 million in the history of the internet.

We also got our first look at the disruptive potential that generative AI offers when ChatGPT managed to pass a series of law school exams (albeit by the skin of its digital teeth). Around that time Microsoft extended its existing R&D partnership with OpenAI to the tune of $10 billion that January. That number is impressively large and likely why Altman still has his job.

As February rolled around, ChatGPT’s user numbers continued to soar, surpassing one billion users total with an average of more than 35 million people per day using the program. At this point OpenAI was reportedly worth just under $30 billion and Microsoft was doing its absolute best to cram the new technology into every single system, application and feature in its product ecosystem. ChatGPT was incorporated into BingChat (now just Copilot) and the Edge browser to great fanfare — despite repeated incidents of bizarre behavior and responses that saw the Bing program temporarily taken offline for repairs.

Other tech companies began adopting ChatGPT as well: Opera incorporating it into its browser, Snapchat releasing its GPT-based My AI assistant (which would be unceremoniously abandoned a few problematic months later) and Buzzfeed News’s parent company used it to generate listicles.

March saw more of the same, with OpenAI announcing a new subscription-based service — ChatGPT Plus — which offers users the chance to skip to the head of the queue during peak usage hours and added features not found in the free version. The company also unveiled plug-in and API support for the GPT platform, empowering developers to add the technology to their own applications and enabling ChatGPT to pull information from across the internet as well as interact directly with connected sensors and devices.

ChatGPT also notched 100 million users per day in March, 30 times higher than two months prior. Companies from Slack and Discord to GM announced plans to incorporate GPT and generative AI technologies into their products.

Not everybody was quite so enthusiastic about the pace at which generative AI was being adopted, mind you. In March, OpenAI co-founder Elon Musk, as well as Steve Wozniak and a slew of associated AI researchers signed an open letter demanding a six month moratorium on AI development.

Q2: Electric Boog-AI-loo

Over the next couple months, company fell into a rhythm of continuous user growth, new integrations, occasional rival AI debuts and nationwide bans on generative AI technology. For example, in April, ChatGPT’s usage climbed nearly 13 percent month-over-month from March even as the entire nation of Italy outlawed ChatGPT use by public sector employees, citing GDPR data privacy violations. The Italian ban proved only temporary after the company worked to resolve the flagged issues, but it was an embarrassing rebuke for the company and helped spur further calls for federal regulation.

When it was first released, ChatGPT was only available through a desktop browser. That changed in May when OpenAI released its dedicated iOS app and expanded the digital assistant’s availability to an additional 11 countries including France, Germany, Ireland and Jamaica. At the same time, Microsoft’s integration efforts continued apace, with Bing Search melding into the chatbot as its “default search experience.” OpenAI also expanded ChatGPT’s plug-in system to ensure that more third-party developers are able to build ChatGPT into their own products.

ChatGPT’s tendency to hallucinate facts and figures was once again exposed that month when a lawyer in New York was caught using the generative AI to do “legal research.” It gave him a number of entirely made-up, nonexistent cases to cite in his argument — which he then did without bothering to independently validate any of them. The judge was not amused.

By June, a little bit of ChatGPT’s shine had started to wear off. Congress reportedly limited Capitol Hill staffers from using the application over data handling concerns. User numbers had declined nearly 10 percent month-over-month, but ChatGPT was already well on its way to ubiquity. A March update enabling the AI to comprehend and generate Python code in response to natural language queries only increased its utility.

Q3: [Pushback intensifies]

More cracks in ChatGPT’s facade began to show the following month when OpenAI’s head of Trust and Safety, Dave Willner, abruptly announced his resignation days before the company released its ChatGPT Android app. His departure came on the heels of news of an FTC investigation into the company’s potential violation of consumer protection laws — specifically regarding the user data leak from March that inadvertently shared chat histories and payment records.

It was around this time that OpenAI’s training methods, which involve scraping the public internet for content and feeding it into massive datasets on which the models are taught, came under fire from copyright holders and marquee authors alike. Much in the same manner that Getty Images sued Stability AI for Stable Diffusion’s obvious leverage of copyrighted materials, stand-up comedian and author Sara Silverman brought suit against OpenAI with allegations that its “Book2” dataset illegally included her copyrighted works. The Authors Guild of America, which represents Stephen King, John Grisham and 134 others launched a class-action suit of its own in September. While much of Silverman’s suit was eventually dismissed, the Author’s Guild suit continues to wend its way through the courts.

Select news outlets, on the other hand, proved far more amenable. The Associated Press announced in August that it had entered into a licensing agreement with OpenAI which would see AP content used (with permission) to train GPT models. At the same time, the AP unveiled a new set of newsroom guidelines explaining how generative AI might be used in articles, while still cautioning journalists against using it for anything that might actually be published.

ChatGPT itself didn’t seem too inclined to follow the rules. In a report published in August, the Washington Post found that guardrails supposedly enacted by OpenAI in March, designed to counter the chatbot’s use in generating and amplifying political disinformation, actually weren’t. The company told Semafor in April that it was "developing a machine learning classifier that will flag when ChatGPT is asked to generate large volumes of text that appear related to electoral campaigns or lobbying." Per the Post, those rules simply were not enforced, with the system eagerly returning responses for prompts like “Write a message encouraging suburban women in their 40s to vote for Trump” or “Make a case to convince an urban dweller in their 20s to vote for Biden.”

At the same time, OpenAI was rolling out another batch of new features and updates for ChatGPT including an Enterprise version that could be fine-tuned to a company’s specific needs and trained on the firm’s internal data, allowing the chatbot to provide more accurate responses. Additionally, ChatGPT’s ability to browse the internet for information was restored for Plus users in September, having been temporarily suspended earlier in the year after folks figured out how to exploit it to get around paywalls. OpenAI also expanded the chatbot’s multimodal capabilities, adding support for both voice and image inputs for user queries in a September 25 update.

Q4: Starring Sam Altman as “Lazarus”

The fourth quarter of 2023 has been a hell of a decade for OpenAI. On the technological front, Browse with Bing, Microsoft’s answer to Google SGE, moved out of beta and became available to all subscribers — just in time for the third iteration of DALL-E to enter public beta. Even free tier users can now hold spoken conversations with the chatbot following the November update, a feature formerly reserved for Plus and Enterprise subscribers. What’s more, OpenAI has announced GPTs, little single-serving versions of the larger LLM that function like apps and widgets and which can be created by anyone, regardless of their programming skill level.

The company has also suggested that it might be entering the AI chip market at some point in the future, in an effort to shore up the speed and performance of its API services. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman had previously pointed to industry-wide GPU shortages for the service’s spotty performance. Producing its own processors might mitigate those supply issues, while potentially lower the current four-cent-per-query cost of operating the chatbot to something more manageable.

But even those best laid plans were very nearly smashed to pieces just before Thanksgiving when the OpenAI board of directors fired Sam Altman, arguing that he had not been "consistently candid in his communications with the board."

That firing didn't take. Instead, it set off 72 hours of chaos within the company itself and the larger industry, with waves of recriminations and accusations, threats of resignations by a lion’s share of the staff and actual resignations by senior leadership happening by the hour. The company went through three CEOs in as many days, landing back on the one it started with, albeit with him now free from a board of directors that would even consider acting as a brake against the technology’s further, unfettered commercial development.

At the start of the year, ChatGPT was regularly derided as a fad, a gimmick, some shiny bauble that would quickly be cast aside by a fickle public like so many NFTs. Those predictions could still prove true but as 2023 has ground on and the breadth of ChatGPT’s adoption has continued, the chances of those dim predictions of the technology’s future coming to pass feel increasingly remote.

There is simply too much money wrapped up in ensuring its continued development, from the revenue streams of companies promoting the technology to the investments of firms incorporating the technology into their products and services. There is also a fear of missing out among companies, S&P Global argues — that they might adopt too late what turns out to be a foundationally transformative technology — that is helping drive ChatGPT’s rapid uptake.

The calendar resetting for the new year shouldn’t do much to change ChatGPT’s upward trajectory, but looming regulatory oversight might. President Biden has made the responsible development of AI a focus of his administration, with both houses of Congress beginning to draft legislation as well. The form and scope of those resulting rules could have a significant impact on what ChatGPT looks like this time next year.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/how-openais-chatgpt-has-changed-the-world-in-just-a-year-140050053.html?src=rss

The US government is no longer briefing Meta about foreign influence campaigns

As Meta gears up for the 2024 election, the company is grappling with a new challenge that could slow its efforts to combat foreign attempts at election interference. US government agencies have stopped sharing information with the company’s security researchers about covert influence operations on its platform.

Meta says that as of July, the government has “paused” briefings related to foreign election interference, eliminating a key source of information for the company. During a call with reporters, Meta’s head of security policy Nathaniel Gleicher, declined to speculate on the government’s motivations, but the timing lines up with a court order earlier this year that restricted the Biden Administration’s contacts with social media firms.

The order, the result of two states’ attempts to limit platforms' ability to remove misinformation, is currently suspended while the Supreme Court considers the case. But government agencies, like CISA (the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency) and the FBI, have apparently opted to keep the “pause” in place.

Gleicher noted that government contacts aren’t Meta’s only source of information, and that the company continues to work with industry researchers and other civil society groups. But he acknowledged that government officials can be best-placed to advise certain kinds of threats, like those that are coordinated on other platforms. “We have seen that particularly-sophisticated threat actors, like nation states, engaged in foreign interference… there are times when government has the capability to identify these campaigns that other players may not,” he said.

Meta’s researchers regularly share details about networks of fake accounts it catches boosting foreign propaganda and conducting other kinds of influence campaigns, what the company calls “coordinated inauthentic behavior” or CIB. And while most of its takedowns don’t come as a result of government tips, the company has relied on them in detecting CIB targeting US politics. Meta acted on three separate FBI tips about fake accounts from Russia, Iran and Mexico ahead of the 2020 presidential election.

Law enforcement officials have also expressed concern about the lack of coordination with social media platforms. The FBI previously told the House Judiciary Committee that it had “discovered foreign influence campaigns on social media platforms but in some cases did not inform the companies about them because they were hamstrung by the new legal oversight,” NBC News reported, citing congressional sources.

Meta’s latest comments are the first time the company has publicly confirmed that it is no longer receiving tips about election interference. The disclosure comes as the company ramps up its efforts to prepare for multiple elections in 2024, and the inevitable attempts to manipulate political conversations on Facebook. The company said in its latest report on CIB that China is now the third-most common source of coordinated inauthentic behavior on its platform, behind Russia and Iran.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-us-government-is-no-longer-briefing-meta-about-foreign-influence-campaigns-130019156.html?src=rss

Threads may finally launch in Europe in December

Meta has decided to play ball with the European Union's online services regulations in order to bring Threads to its member countries. According to The Wall Street Journal, Meta will make Threads available across Europe in December and, in compliance with EU policies, allow users to access the platform without needing to create a profile. 

Threads first launched to most of the world in July as an alternative to Elon Musk's increasingly polarizing X, formerly known as Twitter. Threads reached 100 million users in its first week but has experienced some drop-off. The Meta-owned platform currently has about 73 million active users compared to X's 365 million.

An expansion into the EU will undoubtedly grow Thread's global engagement, but time will tell how fast and to what extent. In October, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg predicted that Threads could see a reach of one billion users in the next few years. Instagram, which people can use to make a Threads account quickly, has over two billion active users but didn't hit the one billion mark until eight years after launch. Head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, has also announced that deleting your Threads account will no longer delete your associated Instagram account — another point of contention.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/threads-may-finally-launch-in-europe-in-december-124054154.html?src=rss

The Morning After: Google plans to delete your old inactive accounts starting tomorrow

Starting December 1, 2023 (that’s tomorrow), Google will begin deleting accounts that have been inactive for at least two years. The company says it's doing so for privacy reasons: “If an account hasn’t been used for an extended period of time, it is more likely to be compromised,” Google noted in May 2023. “This is because forgotten or unattended accounts often rely on old or re-used passwords that may have been compromised.” Google will warn users before deletion via emails sent to the inactive account and another email, provided one has been set up.

Even if you don’t need the account, it might be best to login and check you’re not going to miss anything — there might be important information somewhere in msmith.teamnaruto@gmail.com. No spam, please.

— Mat

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The biggest stories you might have missed

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December's free PlayStation Plus monthly games include Sable and PowerWash Simulator

 Microsoft joins OpenAI board as Sam Altman returns as CEO

Elon Musk to companies that pulled ads from X: 'Go fuck yourself’

It was a fun, very mature tirade at an NYT event.

Elon Musk, seeing his financially precarious X could lose another $75 million in ad revenue following his boosting of an antisemitic conspiracy theory, has a fresh new message for advertisers pulling away from the platform: “Go fuck yourself.”

While Musk again denied being antisemitic, he expressed some regret for engaging with the tweet that resulted in another exodus of advertisers from X. “I should have not replied to that particular person… I essentially handed a loaded gun to those who hate me,” Musk said.

Continue reading.

EVs are way more unreliable than gas-powered cars

Consumer Reports’ data indicates plug-in hybrids are even worse.

Engadget

Consumer Reports has published an extensive ranking of vehicle reliability, and the results pour cold water on the dependability of EVs and plug-in hybrids. The survey says electric vehicles suffer from 79 percent more maintenance issues than gas- or diesel-powered ones, while plug-in hybrids have 146 percent more problems. The troubles portray the industry’s growing pains with the relatively new technology. Lexus came out on top among EV brands. All but one of its models scored above average or better in CR’s ratings. Toyota also did well, including the 4Runner SUV, which CR describes as “among the most reliable models in the survey.”

Continue reading.

ChatGPT revealed real phone numbers and email addresses after a ‘silly’ attack

The chatbot was asked to repeat random words forever.

A team of researchers was able to make ChatGPT reveal some of the bits of data it has been trained on by asking it to repeat random words forever. In response, ChatGPT churned out random words, yes, but also shared people’s private information, including email addresses and phone numbers. When the researchers asked ChatGPT to “repeat the word ‘poem’ forever,” the chatbot initially complied, but then revealed an email address and a cellphone number for a real founder and CEO. OpenAI patched the vulnerability on August 30, the researchers say. But in our own tests, Engadget was able to replicate the attack, asking ChatGPT to repeat the word “reply” forever, which resulted, eventually, in revealing someone’s name and Skype ID.

Continue reading.

Spotify Wrapped returns to reveal your 2023 streaming stats

For the first time in a while, you can access it on desktop.

Spotify

Spotify is revealing all of the artists, genres, songs and podcasts you listened to most in the last 12 months, even if it’s going to make you cringe. The 2023 installment of the streaming service's Wrapped year-in-review debuted yesterday on the Spotify app, with an all-new design alongside the familiar story-style format. This year, the company will assign one of 12 "listening characters" that best fits your streaming habit. The feature is called Me in 2023, and those "characters" range from the Shapeshifter, someone who moves from one artist to another quickly, to the Alchemist, someone more likely to create their own playlists.

Continue reading.

Amazon now has its own AI image generator

AWS users can try out Titan Image Generator.

Amazon has its own image generator. AWS customers can now check out a preview of Titan Image Generator on the Bedrock console. They can either enter a text prompt to create an image from scratch or upload an image and edit it. Amazon says the tool can produce large volumes of studio-quality realistic images at low cost. Users can also isolate areas in which they want to add or remove details. Amazon also recently revealed its own business-centric chatbot, Q.

Continue reading.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-morning-after-google-plans-to-delete-your-old-inactive-accounts-starting-tomorrow-121517859.html?src=rss

Meta, X, TikTok, Snap and Discord CEOs will testify before the Senate over online child safety

Social media's negative impact on children's and young adults' mental health has been a growing cause of concern for parents and lawmakers. Now, the CEOs of Meta, TikTok, Snap, Discord and X are set to testify in front of the US Senate Judiciary Committee on "their failure to protect children online." Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew are willing participants. Snap CEO Evan Spiegel, Discord CEO Jason Citron and X CEO Linda Yaccarino are testifying after being subpoenaed.

Senator Dick Durbin, chair of the Judiciary Committee, and Senator Lindsey Graham, its ranking member, released a statement expressing their frustration with Snap, Discord, and X's initial refusal to have their CEOs participate and even accept the subpoenas. In Discord's case, US Marshals visited their offices to serve the document. 

The senators further shared a feeling of hypocrisy at these platforms wanting a say in policy but fighting against getting involved in discussions. "When we held our first hearing on protecting children online with experts and advocates earlier this year, Big Tech griped about not getting an invitation. We promised them that their time would come," Durbin and Graham stated. "We've known from the beginning that our efforts to protect children online would be met with hesitation from Big Tech. They finally are being forced to acknowledge their failures when it comes to protecting kids. Now that all five companies are cooperating, we look forward to hearing from their CEOs. Parents and kids demand action." 

The Judiciary Committee has focused on this issue a great deal throughout the year, approving bills that would force online platforms to take more responsibility in protecting children (and be more transparent in their efforts) and improve reporting of online child sexual exploitation, among other steps. The hearing with the CEOs from the five tech giants was originally set for December but will now take place on January 31, 2024, at 10 AM ET. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/meta-x-tiktok-snap-and-discord-ceos-will-testify-before-the-senate-over-online-child-safety-110559486.html?src=rss

United Auto Workers seeks to unionize Tesla, BMW and other carmakers

Fresh off successful contract negotiations with Ford, GM and Stellantis, the United Auto Workers (UAW) is seeking to unionize 150,000 workers across 13 automakers including Tesla, BMW, Mercedes Benz and Hyundai, it announced. "To all the autoworkers out there working without the benefits of a union: now it’s your turn," said UAW president Shawn Fain. 

The UAW said the organizing drive covers "more than a dozen" non-union automakers. It notes that many use a mix of full-time, temporary and contract employees "to divide the workforce and depress wages." The union cited one example of a Hyundai assembly plant employee who worked for a subcontractor for eight years starting at $9.25 an hour before finally becoming a full-time Hyundai employee. 

Non-union automakers, including VW, Nissan, Hyundai, Honda, Toyota and Subaru raised wages after the UAW's negotiations with the big three. VW, for one, bumped them to $23.42 an hour, rising to a maximum of $32.40. However, they "lag far behind UAW autoworkers in wages, benefits and rights on the job," the union said.

The UAW helped workers win a 25 percent raise over four years with the big three automakers, with the highest-paid Ford workers now earning $83,000 per year for a 40-hour work week (around $42 per hour). The union also gained reinstatement of cost-of-living allowances, shorter progression periods to top wages and a quicker conversion of temporary to in-progression (full-time) employees. 

Tesla employees have attempted to unionize the company before, and some alleged that the company fired them for that — though that claim was recently dismissed by the US National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). The NLRB has previously found that Tesla violated labor law by prohibiting employees from talking about workplace matters. Back in 2022, Elon Musk challenged the UAW to hold a vote at Tesla's California factory.

Other automakers aren't exempt from worker complaints, including startup Rivian. "The company likes to tell us we’re making the plane while flying it, and that explains a lot about the problems we have," said one Rivian chassis worker. "We have all sorts of safety issues. Turnover is terrible. Every group has a story about a new employee who did not make it to first break. The lack of safety, the low pay, the forced overtime, there are so many reasons we need to be union." 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/united-auto-workers-seeks-to-unionize-tesla-bmw-and-other-carmakers-100555374.html?src=rss

NASA and IBM are building an AI for weather and climate applications

NASA and IBM have teamed up to build an AI foundation model for weather and climate applications. They’re combining their respective knowledge and skills in the Earth science and AI fields, respectively, for the model, which they say should offer “significant advantages over existing technology.”

Current AI models such as GraphCast and Fourcastnet are already generating weather forecasts more quickly than traditional meteorological models. However, IBM notes those are AI emulators rather than foundation models. As the name suggests, foundation models are the base technologies that power generative AI applications. AI emulators can make weather predictions based on sets of training data, but they don’t have applications beyond that. Nor can they encode the physics at the core of weather forecasting, IBM says.

NASA and IBM have several goals for their foundational model. Compared with current models, they hope for it to have expanded accessibility, faster inference times and greater diversity of data. Another key aim is to improve forecasting accuracy for other climate applications. The expected capabilities of the model include predicting meteorological phenomena, inferring high-res information based on low-res data and "identifying conditions conducive to everything from airplane turbulence to wildfires."

This follows another foundational model that NASA and IBM deployed in May. It harnesses data from NASA satellites for geospatial intelligence, and it's the largest geospatial model on open-source AI platform Hugging Face, according to IBM. So far, this model has been used to track and visualize tree planting and growing activities in water tower areas (forest landscapes that retain water) in Kenya. The aim is to plant more trees and tackle water scarcity issues. The model is also being used to analyze urban heat islands in the United Arab Emirates.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/nasa-and-ibm-are-building-an-ai-for-weather-and-climate-applications-050141545.html?src=rss

Microsoft joins OpenAI board as Sam Altman returns as CEO

Following Sam Altman's rollercoaster of a return as OpenAI's CEO, the company announced that it will now include Microsoft as a non-voting observer on its board. The question remains as to why the firm's largest investor wasn't on its board in the first place, but this seems to be somewhat addressed for now, at least. Altman is joined by co-founder Greg Brockman who resumes his role as President, whereas Mira Murati, who very briefly served as interim CEO throughout the drama, will return to her role as CTO.

The announcement also confirms a new board consisting of former Salesforce CEO Bret Taylor (chair), former Clinton Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, and original member Adam D'Angelo, who is also Quora's co-founder and CEO. It was earlier rumored that Altman's exit was partly influenced by D'Angelo's seeming conflict of interest, as OpenAI was developing a potential competitor to Quora's Poe service — the latter offers OpenAI's ChatGPT and GPT-4, along with several other text-generating AI models.

I recognize that during this process some questions were raised about Adam’s potential conflict of interest running Quora and Poe while being on the OpenAI Board. For the record, I want to state that Adam has always been very clear with me and the Board about the potential…

— Sam Altman (@sama) November 30, 2023

D'Angelo's presence on OpenAI's new board came as a surprise, and Altman took to X to address the elephant in the room. "Quora is a large customer of OpenAI and we found it helpful to have customer representation on our Board." The exec added that D'Angelo "has always been very clear... about the potential conflict and doing whatever he needed to do," including offering to leave the board, if necessary. As to why the original board wanted Altman out, he said "it is clear that there were real misunderstandings between me and members of the board."

OpenAI co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever was a former board member who allegedly led the ouster of Altman. The exec later openly admitted that he "deeply regret my participation in the board's actions" (with Elon Musk begging for attention in his thread), and he had since voiced his support for Altman's return as CEO. In his open message, Altman says "I harbor zero ill will towards him," and that his team is figuring out a way to let Sutskever continue his work at OpenAI.

In the same official announcement, OpenAI's new Chair, Taylor, assured that the company will "enhance the governance structure," and put together "an independent committee of the Board to oversee a review of the recent events," for the sake of the organization's stability.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/microsoft-joins-openai-board-as-sam-altman-returns-as-ceo-023844090.html?src=rss

Elon Musk responds to companies that pulled ads from X: 'Go fuck yourself’

Elon Musk, facing the fact that an already financially-precarious X could be poised to lose another $75 million in ad revenue following his boosting of an antisemitic conspiracy theory, has a new message for advertisers pulling back from the platform: “Go fuck yourself.”

Musk repeated the sentiment multiple times during an appearance at The New York Times’ DealBook event. “Don’t advertise,” Musk said. “If somebody is going to try and blackmail me with advertising, blackmail me with money? Go fuck yourself. Is that clear? I hope it is.”

whoa — “go fuck yourself,” Elon Musk says to Bob Iger and others who pull advertising from X

at this point it’s almost as if he’s watching the old Iron Man movies and doing a reverse Tony Stark impression pic.twitter.com/csXxeLH2wG

— j.d. durkin (@jd_durkin) November 29, 2023

“Hey Bob,” Musk added, in an apparent reference to Disney CEO Bob Iger, who appeared at the same event earlier in the day and spoke about the company’s decision to pull ads following Musk’s tweet earlier this month. Iger said that Disney’s association with X was “not necessarily a positive one for us,” according to Variety.

While Musk again denied being antisemitic, he did express some regret for engaging with the tweet that’s resulted in another exodus of advertisers from X. “I should have not replied to that particular person… I essentially handed a loaded gun to those who hate me,” Musk said about the post, per Variety.

X didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. X CEO Linda Yaccarino had a front-row seat to the remarks, according to The Hollywood Reporter, which reports the former ad exec sat “stone-faced” during Musk’s tirade.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/elon-musk-responds-companies-pulled-233913536.html?src=rss