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The Dodgers of esports: How L.A.'s Liquid Guild won the attention of over 100,000 people

Los Angeles Times

Things to Do in L.A. Tap to enable a layout that focuses on the article. The Dodgers of esports: How L.A.'s Liquid Guild won the attention of over 100,000 people The top "WoW" guilds around the world, including Team Liquid, race to be the first to defeat highest-difficulty bosses. This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here . Los Angeles-based Team Liquid won the "World of Warcraft" world championship for the fourth consecutive time, defeating Germany's Echo guild in a monthlong competition watched by more than 100,000 viewers.



L.A.'s defense industry is booming. Federal funding crunch could change that

Los Angeles Times

Things to Do in L.A. Tap to enable a layout that focuses on the article. L.A.'s defense industry is booming. This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here . L.A. defense-tech startups like Gambit face funding shortfalls as the Small Business Innovation Research program expired in September amid a Capitol Hill dispute.


Valar Atomics Says It's the First Nuclear Startup to Achieve Criticality

WIRED

Valar Atomics Says It's the First Nuclear Startup to Achieve Criticality A Trump administration pilot program aims for three nuclear startups to reach a key milestone by July 4, 2026. Valar Atomics says it's the first to do so--but it had some help. The El Segundo, California-based startup, which last week announced it had secured a $130 million funding round with backing from Palmer Luckey and Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar, claims that it is the first nuclear startup to create a critical fission reaction. It's also, more specifically, the first company in a special Department of Energy pilot program aiming to get at least three startups to criticality by July 4 of next year to announce it had achieved this reaction. The pilot program, which was formed following an executive order president Donald Trump signed in May, has upended US regulation of nuclear startups, allowing companies to reach new milestones like criticality at a rapid pace.



Newsom signs AI transparency bill prioritizing safety

Los Angeles Times

Things to Do in L.A. Tap to enable a layout that focuses on the article. Gov. Gavin Newsom holds a news conference at the Google office in San Francisco in August to announce new AI partnerships. This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here . Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation Monday requiring AI companies to publicly disclose security protocols and report critical safety incidents.


DoorDash's latest addition? Thousands of Kroger grocers

Los Angeles Times

Things to Do in L.A. Tap to enable a layout that focuses on the article. Starting Oct. 1, over 2,700 Kroger locations will be available on DoorDash. Customers will be able to shop the store's entire selection. Above, bagged purchases from a Kroger grocery store sit in a shopping cart in Flowood, Miss. This is read by an automated voice.


Signal Use and Emergent Cooperation

Williams, Michael

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

In this work, we investigate how autonomous agents, organized into tribes, learn to use communication signals to coordinate their activities and enhance their collective efficiency. Using the NEC-DAC (Neurally Encoded Culture - Distributed Autonomous Communicators) system, where each agent is equipped with its own neural network for decision-making, we demonstrate how these agents develop a shared behavioral system -- akin to a culture -- through learning and signalling. Our research focuses on the self-organization of culture within these tribes of agents and how varying communication strategies impact their fitness and cooperation. By analyzing different social structures, such as authority hierarchies, we show that the culture of cooperation significantly influences the tribe's performance. Furthermore, we explore how signals not only facilitate the emergence of culture but also enable its transmission across generations of agents. Additionally, we examine the benefits of coordinating behavior and signaling within individual agents' neural networks.


Cross-Lingual Generalization and Compression: From Language-Specific to Shared Neurons

Riemenschneider, Frederick, Frank, Anette

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Multilingual language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable abilities to transfer knowledge across languages, despite being trained without explicit cross-lingual supervision. We analyze the parameter spaces of three MLLMs to study how their representations evolve during pre-training, observing patterns consistent with compression: models initially form language-specific representations, which gradually converge into cross-lingual abstractions as training progresses. Through probing experiments, we observe a clear transition from uniform language identification capabilities across layers to more specialized layer functions. For deeper analysis, we focus on neurons that encode distinct semantic concepts. By tracing their development during pre-training, we show how they gradually align across languages. Notably, we identify specific neurons that emerge as increasingly reliable predictors for the same concepts across languages.


It's the same but not the same: Do LLMs distinguish Spanish varieties?

Mayor-Rocher, Marina, Pozo, Cristina, Melero, Nina, Martínez, Gonzalo, Grandury, María, Reviriego, Pedro

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

It's the same but not the same: Do LLMs distinguish Spanish varieties? Abstract: In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated a high capacity for understanding and generating text in Spanish. However, with five hundred million native speakers, Spanish is not a homogeneous language but rather one rich in diatopic vari ations spanning both sides of the Atlantic. For this reason, in this study, we evaluate the ability of nine language models to identify and distinguish the morphosyntactic and lexical peculiarities of seven varieties of Spanish (Andean, Antillean, Continen tal Caribbean, Chilean, Peninsular, Mexican and Central American and Rioplatense) through a multiple - choice test. The results indicate that the Peninsular Spanish variety is the best identified by all models and that, among them, GPT - 4o is the only model c apable of recognizing the variability of the Spanish language.