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Meet the OpenAI Engineer Leading ChatGPT's Biggest Transformation Yet
OpenAI is in the midst of overhauling ChatGPT . The goal is to transform the chatbot's simple interface into a personalized AI agent that can handle tasks in every facet of your personal and professional life. The company has taken to calling this new product, privately and publicly, a "super app." The all-in-one platform represents one of the biggest bets OpenAI has ever made, and one engineering leader now holds enormous sway over whether it pays off: Thibault Sottiaux. Last month, Sottiaux was appointed OpenAI's head of core products, overseeing both ChatGPT and Codex, as well as combining them into the future super app.
Elon Musk's SpaceX valued at nearly 1.8tn ahead of record share sale
Elon Musk's SpaceX valued at nearly $1.8tn ahead of record share sale SpaceX has raised $75bn (£56bn) from financial firms ahead of it becoming a publicly traded company on Friday, in what is expected to be the highest-value stock listing in history. In a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, the space exploration and artificial intelligence (AI) company said it had sold $75bn in shares priced at $135 each. The share price matches the estimate SpaceX gave last week, leaving the firm's expected initial stock market value to be nearly $1.8tn. At that value, chief executive Elon Musk - already the richest man in the world - is set to become the world's first trillionaire. Once shares start trading, their value could rise or fall depending on how many shares are made available for sale, and how strong the demand is for those shares.
Massive Effigy of Elon Musk Raised Over Times Square to Protest Grok
Activists raised a 40-foot-tall inflatable Elon Musk in Manhattan to draw attention to the risk he allegedly poses to investors. It was surrounded by black banners with statements alleging "Grok makes AI child porn" and "SpaceX owns Grok," referring to the Musk-owned AI chatbot whose image-generation tool was used to create a flood of sexualized images of minors earlier this year. Masked attendants stood nearby, handing out flyers with additional information, but they would not speak with the media. The demonstration was helmed by Safe AI Now (SAIN), which describes itself as "a coalition of faith leaders, family advocates, child development experts, online safety organizations, educators, legal professionals, technologists, and concerned citizens," ahead of SpaceX's initial public offering on Friday. The location was strategically chosen--right in front of the Nasdaq and the offices of JP Morgan, one of the banks participating in the IPO .
Waymo's monthly membership seems like a bad deal
Waymo's monthly membership seems like a bad deal Waymo's monthly membership seems like a bad deal You'll pay way mo' for a lot less compared to the competition. Waymo -- the Alphabet-owned driverless taxi service which has seen a rapid expansion in recent years -- is rolling out a new rewards program today. The service is called Waymo Premier, and it promises priority pickups along with a 10 percent in-app rebate applied to future rides. Subscribers will also get fee-free cancellations, though only up to five a month. Lastly, Premier gives subscribers the chance to be among the first to use Waymo in new cities as the service expands, which is certainly one way to reframe the concept of paying to beta test those new coverage areas.
Drone strikes on central Sudanese city kill up to 23: NGO
Drone strikes on the central Sudanese city of el-Obeid have killed up to 23 people, officials and a rights group have reported. Both sources reported on Thursday that overnight attacks had killed several people across the key hub in the southern Kordofan region. The reports concerned the latest in a series of attacks using unmanned aircraft, illustrating that drone warfare has become an increasingly prominent feature in the conflict, which erupted in April 2023 between the military government and paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF). Health officials at el-Obeid Hospital said that 15 were killed and more than 10 wounded in the attacks, which hit residential areas, a funeral gathering and a truck carrying food supplies, as well as areas near army positions. Emergency Lawyers blamed the attack on the RSF, which did not immediately claim responsibility.
DuSA: Fast and Accurate Dual-Stage Sparse Attention Mechanism Accelerating Both Training and Inference
This paper proposes the Dual-Stage Sparse Attention (DuSA) mechanism for attention acceleration of transformers. In the first stage, DuSA performs intrablock sparse attention to aggregate local inductive biases. In the second stage, DuSA performs interblock sparse attention to obtain long-range dependencies. Both stages have low computational complexity and can be further accelerated by memory acceleration attention mechanisms directly, which makes DuSA faster than some extremely fast attention mechanisms. The dual-stage sparse attention design provides a lower error in approximating vanilla scaled-dot product attention than the basic single-stage sparse attention mechanisms and further advances the basic sparse attention mechanisms to match or even outperform vanilla scaled-dot product attention. Even in some plug and play situations, DuSA can still maintain low performance loss. DuSA can be used in both training and inference acceleration. DuSA achieves leading performance in different benchmarks: long range arena, image classification, semantic segmentation, object detection, text to video generation, and long context understanding, and accelerates models of different sizes.
Drug Sites Hijacked Spotify's Search Ranking Through Fake Podcasts
A joint congressional report describes a spam operation that turned tens of thousands of fake podcasts into search-engine bait for illegal pharmacy and scam sites. For the past year, Spotify has been quietly purging tens of thousands of podcasts that advertised illegal online pharmacies. A report released Thursday by Senator Maggie Hassan, ranking member of the Joint Economic Committee, faults the company for acting only after news outlets exposed the content and her office spent nearly a year pressing for answers. None of what it removed was sent to law enforcement, the report says. Spotify reportedly removed more than 57,000 podcast episodes and 3,000 shows, and took enforcement action against 3,500 accounts, all pushing links to illegal online pharmacies advertising opioids, benzodiazepines, and stimulants for sale without a prescription.