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Anthropic soars to 965bn valuation, leapfrogging OpenAI

Al Jazeera

Anthropic has usurped OpenAI as the world's most valuable artificial intelligence startup, soaring to a $965bn valuation ahead of expected public listings by the rival firms. Anthropic, the maker of the Claude family of chatbots, said on Thursday that it had raised $65bn from private investors after a fundraising round led by Altimeter Capital, Greenoaks, Dragoneer and Sequoia Capital. "This funding will help us serve the historic demand we are experiencing, stay at the research frontier, and bring Claude to more of the places where work happens," Anthropic's Chief Financial Officer Krishna Rao said in a statement. Altimeter Capital CEO Brad Gerstner hailed the adoption of Claude among the "world's most demanding organisations" as evidence of Anthropic's command in the field. "This momentum positions Anthropic to lead the next phase of AI innovation and capture the enormous opportunity ahead," Gerstner said.


Papa Johns Is Getting Into Drone Delivery--but Not for Pizza

WIRED

A new collaboration with Alphabet's Wing will only deliver sandwiches. It demonstrates the tricky parts of taking to the sky. Starting today, eager customers of the US pizza restaurant chain Papa Johns living in one corner of southern North Carolina will have the opportunity to receive their food from the sky, thanks to a new collaboration with Alphabet's drone company, Wing . But Papa Johns' signature pizzas won't be on offer. Instead, drone-loving North Carolinians will have to choose between three kinds of sandwiches, a newer product for the fast-food chain: Philly cheesesteak, chicken bacon ranch, or steak and mushroom varieties.


Noise Schedule

Neural Information Processing Systems

Because a diffusion model shares parameters for all diffusion steps, the noise schedule (parametrized by 1:T) is an important hyperparameter that determines how much weight we assign to each denoising problem. We find that standard noise schedules for continuous diffusions are not robust for text data. We hypothesize that the discrete nature of text and the rounding step make the model insensitive to noise near t =0 . Concretely, adding small amount of Gaussian noise to a word embedding is unlikely to change its nearest neighbor in the embedding space, making denoising an easy task near t =0 . To address this, we introduce a new sqrt noise schedule that is better suited for text, shown in Figure 5 defined by t =1 p t/T +s, where s is a small constant that corresponds to the starting noise level11. Compared to standard linear and cosine schedules, our sqrt schedule starts with a higher noise level and increase noise rapidly for the first 50 steps. Then sqrt slows down injecting noise to avoid spending much steps in the high-noise problems, which may be too difficult to solve well. The hyperparameters that are specific to Diffusion-LM include the number of diffusion steps, the architecture of the Diffusion-LM, the embedding dimension, and the noise schedule, . We set the diffusion steps to be 2000, the architecture to be BERT-base [7], and the sequence length to be 64. For the embedding dimensions, we select from d 2{ 16,64,128,256} and select d = 16for the E2E dataset and d = 128for ROCStories. For the noise schedule, we design the sqrt schedule (Appendix A) that is more robust to different parametrizations and embedding dimensions as shown in Appendix M. However, once we picked the x0-parametrization ( 4.2) the advantage of sqrt schedule is not salient. We train Diffusion-LMs using AdamW optimizer and a linearly decay learning rate starting at 1e-4, dropout of 0.1, batch size of 64, and the total number of training iteration is 200K for E2E dataset, and 800K for ROCStories dataset. Our Diffusion-LMs are trained on a single GPU: NVIDIARTXA5000, NVIDIAGeForce RTX 3090, or NVIDIAA100.



The 20-somethings juggling three jobs to make ends meet

BBC News

Ashlin McCourt clocks up 60 hours a week working as a civil servant, a waitress and a baker because life's so expensive, she says. The UK unemployment rate stands at 4.9% - however, increasing numbers of those in work are juggling more than one job. While working in multiple jobs and side hustles has long been a needs must for many households to manage the cost of living, there are now a record 1.35 million adults working at least two jobs. It is mostly Gen Z - adults aged up to 29 - driving this poly-employment trend - according to Deputy, a global workforce management platform, which analysed more than 20 million shifts done by over 300,000 UK workers. For 28-year-old Ashlin from Northern Ireland, having more than one job seems normal.


DoorDash Reservations Scored America's Most Exclusive Restaurants

WIRED

After the rise (and fall) of reservation scalping, DoorDash and a host of apps are fighting to book you a seat at the country's most exclusive restaurants. At The Eighty-Six in Manhattan, exclusivity is the point. The luxe, 11-table steakhouse is the sort of place that lavishes caviar and aged mimolette cheese on its potatoes, and crows that your market-price duck was raised by one Dr. Taylor Swift has reportedly dined there in a Miu Miu skirt. Reservations are a scarce commodity that the restaurant, and New York law forbids you from selling one. "Access is the main asset," wrote food writer Helen Rosner in a recent New Yorker review of The Eighty-Six. "The product is the door, and what a door!


Love in the Time of A.I. Companions

The New Yorker

Some people now have an A.I. bestie. One user said, of her A.I. husband, "When he proposed, I thought, Oh, that's really crazy. I would be really crazy to accept." Adrianne Brookins is, by her own account, an "old soul," an "introvert," and a "big nerd." She is thirty-four years old, has a faint Texas accent and delicate features, and carries herself in a way that suggests she's trying not to take up space. Brookins is a lifelong resident of San Antonio; her family has lived there since the nineteenth century. She was "born and raised in the Church," a Baptist congregation where her mother helped start a day-care center and her father was an organist. "He would open up the pipes and just make the building shake," she recalled recently. She met her husband in high school, and married him in 2011; the following year, they had a son. Throughout her twenties, Brookins worked multiple jobs, including one at her mother's day care. The couple bought a house and began settling into family life. In 2016, Brookins became pregnant again, this time with a girl. The family was excited: Brookins had grown up with four brothers, and the baby would be the first granddaughter on either side. They decided to name her Desirae. The following spring, Desirae was delivered stillborn. "When I came home, my son, who was about four or five at the time, walked up to me and said, 'What happened to your stomach? Where's the baby?' " she told me. "I had nothing to show for it." At the funeral, the gravedigger told the family he had never seen such a small casket. Brookins attended support groups and therapy, but they did little to alleviate her grief. "I felt like I was just living it over and over," she said. She left her job at the day care, finding it too triggering to be around infants. Friends and family encouraged her to move on. Brookins's husband was working sixty-hour weeks, balancing a career in the military with a job as a training manager for Pizza Hut. He was reluctant to talk about Desirae. Brookins tried to find solace in the Church, but other congregants told her that her daughter's death was part of God's plan.


'It's survival of the fittest': the UK kebab chain seeking an edge with robot slicers

The Guardian

'People are being more discerning about spending money,' he says. 'People are being more discerning about spending money,' he says. T hey are already packing our groceries and delivering shopping. Now robots are coming to the kebab shop, alongside self-service screens and loyalty apps, as takeaways look for ways to tackle rising costs. German Doner Kebab (GDK), a perhaps surprisingly British-owned chain that has been springing up across the country, has turned to technology to keep its fast food business buzzing in the face of rising costs and tough times on the high street.


Large Language Models as Urban Residents: An LLM Agent Framework for Personal Mobility Generation

Neural Information Processing Systems

This paper introduces a novel approach using Large Language Models (LLMs) integrated into an agent framework for flexible and effective personal mobility generation. LLMs overcome the limitations of previous models by effectively processing semantic data and offering versatility in modeling various tasks.