Oceania
China flashes new tech swagger to world markets convulsed by war
Attendees at the Canton Fair in Guangzhou, China, take pictures of various service robots on display. At the world's largest trade show, it's not just the clientele that had a different look this year. Despite the near absence of buyers wearing a traditional Arab headdress and robe at the Canton Fair, a vast showcase that started last week in China's southern metropolis of Guangzhou, a brash new generation of tech companies stood out just as much. Few wanted to dwell on the war. Even as the conflict in the Middle East once more fractures global commerce, interviews with more than a dozen exporters at the fair found many were already eager to look beyond the hostilities blamed for the worst energy disruption in generations.
Amazon to invest an additional 5 billion in Anthropic
Anthropic was founded in 2021 by several former employees of OpenAI. Amazon is investing an additional $5 billion in Anthropic, and may inject $20 billion more over time, a deal that deepens the companies' ties in an increasingly competitive artificial intelligence industry. Anthropic, which makes the Claude chatbot and coding tool, plans to spend more than $100 billion over the next 10 years on Amazon's cloud technologies and chips, the companies said in a statement on Monday. Amazon shares gained about 3% on the news in extended trading. Amazon was already one of Anthropic's biggest backers, with prior investments totaling $8 billion.
Outrage in China after streaming site debuts AI actor 'database'
A TV screen shows the artist database on Nadou Pro, iQIYI's artificial intelligence product for professional film and television production, during the iQIYI World Conference in Beijing on Monday. Beijing - China's equivalent of Netflix, iQIYI, faced backlash on Monday over a new initiative that facilitates the use of actors' likenesses in artificially generated dramas and films. More than 100 celebrities have joined a platform to connect with makers of AI-generated content interested in using their image, a senior executive told a conference in Beijing. China's entertainment industry has rapidly embraced the use of artificial intelligence, with AI-generated films and shows a common feature on video platforms. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever.
Fifteen years after Steve Jobs, Tim Cook leaves a dramatically different Apple
After 15 years, Tim Cook is stepping down as Apple's top executive. At age 65, he leaves behind a hardware juggernaut that, under his leadership, brought about a global smartphone revolution and transformed Apple into one of the most profitable publicly traded companies in history. With a reputation for logistical management, Cook first joined Apple in 1998, overseeing its worldwide sales and operations. In 2009, he temporarily began running day-to-day operations when the company's legendary co-founder, Steve Jobs, took medical leave due to complications from pancreatic cancer. In 2011, just a few months before Jobs's death, Cook took over as CEO.
Revisiting Active Sequential Prediction-Powered Mean Estimation
Sfyraki, Maria-Eleni, Wang, Jun-Kun
In this work, we revisit the problem of active sequential prediction-powered mean estimation, where at each round one must decide the query probability of the ground-truth label upon observing the covariates of a sample. Furthermore, if the label is not queried, the prediction from a machine learning model is used instead. Prior work proposed an elegant scheme that determines the query probability by combining an uncertainty-based suggestion with a constant probability that encodes a soft constraint on the query probability. We explored different values of the mixing parameter and observed an intriguing empirical pattern: the smallest confidence width tends to occur when the weight on the constant probability is close to one, thereby reducing the influence of the uncertainty-based component. Motivated by this observation, we develop a non-asymptotic analysis of the estimator and establish a data-dependent bound on its confidence interval. Our analysis further suggests that when a no-regret learning approach is used to determine the query probability and control this bound, the query probability converges to the constraint of the max value of the query probability when it is chosen obliviously to the current covariates. We also conduct simulations that corroborate these theoretical findings.
How to Approximate Inference with Subtractive Mixture Models
Zellinger, Lena, Branchini, Nicola, De Smet, Lennert, Elvira, Víctor, Malkin, Nikolay, Vergari, Antonio
Classical mixture models (MMs) are widely used tractable proposals for approximate inference settings such as variational inference (VI) and importance sampling (IS). Recently, mixture models with negative coefficients, called subtractive mixture models (SMMs), have been proposed as a potentially more expressive alternative. However, how to effectively use SMMs for VI and IS is still an open question as they do not provide latent variable semantics and therefore cannot use sampling schemes for classical MMs. In this work, we study how to circumvent this issue by designing several expectation estimators for IS and learning schemes for VI with SMMs, and we empirically evaluate them for distribution approximation. Finally, we discuss the additional challenges in estimation stability and learning efficiency that they carry and propose ways to overcome them. Code is available at: https://github.com/april-tools/delta-vi.
Google brings Gemini in Chrome to users in Asia and the Pacific
Outside of Japan, Google's chatbot is accessible on both desktop and iOS. Google has added a new sidebar to Chrome that allows users to access Gemini from any of their tabs. After debuting in the US, Gemini in Chrome is making its way to more markets. Starting today, Google is rolling out Chrome's built-in chatbot to users in Asia and the Pacific, including Australia, Indonesia, Japan, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea and Vietnam. The expansion comes after Google earlier this year made Gemini in Chrome available to people in Canada, India and New Zealand .
Chilling warning from Nobel physicist as date is set for humanity's final destruction
Nancy Guthrie sheriff's appalling past revealed: Beat handcuffed suspect so badly he needed intensive care, used VILE language about woman and lied in sworn statement Vance grounded at White House as Iran peace talks in turmoil and Trump declares: 'I expect to be bombing' New'Hollywood dose' pill: A-listers hooked on'youth elixir' that dermatologists say is anti-ageing, shrinks pores, smooths wrinkles... and even banishes rosacea Days after we got engaged, the love of my life told me he'd killed a man and buried him in a bog. I reported him to police... but then I made this irreversible mistake Ark of the Covenant's final resting place pinpointed by archaeologists as fresh search begins Ritzy Bay Area town torn apart after teacher's daughter, 16, crashed car while speeding and killed four friends... then posted a TikTok video that poured fuel on the flames Jordon Hudson extends her control over Bill Belichick's empire with secret move that is set to leave his family and friends furious Two CIA officers killed in Mexico when their car skidded off ravine and exploded after meeting about bust of'largest ever drug lab' Life-threatening cantaloupe recall in four states upgraded to FDA's highest risk level... 'reasonable probability of death' AMANDA PLATELL: Why Sarah Ferguson - with the ghost of Princess Diana at her side - is ready to sensationally blow up the Royal Family. She knows ALL their secrets... Trump confronts Xi as US forces seize Chinese ship carrying mysterious'gift' to Iran Team USA Olympics star Noah Lyles slammed for'horrible' reaction to his wife's wedding dress reveal In honour of the Queen's (purple!) reign: Kate mirrors late monarch's colourful wardrobe and wears her pearl earrings and necklace How to lose weight when perimenopause sabotages your metabolism: I'm a trainer but when I hit 46, I piled on the pounds overnight. The new'posh' drug that's easier to order than Uber Eats - and why all my middle-class friends have ditched booze and cocaine for it: JANA HOCKING Fury as murderer marries pen pal behind bars... as teenage victim's mom says: 'I'm serving a life sentence without my son' Autistic woman, 24, worked hard to build independent life for herself... now she's PARALYZED thanks to selfishness of stranger Chilling warning from Nobel physicist as date is set for humanity's final destruction The winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics has issued a stark warning to humanity, saying it could face an existential catastrophe within roughly 35 years. David Gross, who shared the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics, warned that'due to the danger of nuclear war,' humankind may have just a little more than three decades left.
Elon Musk snubs Paris legal summons over alleged child abuse images on X
Elon Musk was summoned by the French authorities for a voluntary interview that had been planned to take place on Monday. Elon Musk was summoned by the French authorities for a voluntary interview that had been planned to take place on Monday. Elon Musk did not appear on Monday for a voluntary interview with lawyers in Paris, who had summoned the American tech billionaire over an investigation into his social media platform X and AI chatbot Grok. The prosecutors told AFP that they had "taken note of the absence of the first people summoned", without mentioning Musk's name. The billionaire called the French authorities involved "retards" weeks earlier in a French-language post on X .
Bruce is missing his upper beak, but it has not stopped him from dominance
Inside the bird eat bird world of'beak jousting.' More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Even without an upper beak, one bird in New Zealand is defying odds at the top of the pecking order. Bruce is a rescued kea () parrot that is the alpha male among his species living at the Willowbank Wildlife Reserve in Christchurch, New Zealand.