OpenAI is reportedly on the verge of a roughly 500 billion valuation, a figure that would make it the most valuable private company in the world--bigger than SpaceX, TikTok's parent company Bytedance, and even public giants like Palantir. It's a staggering number for a company with an "astronomical burn rate." How is this even possible? As Axios reports, there are actually two deals in play: a SoftBank-led round valuing the company at 300 billion, which won't close until year's end, and a secondary sale of employee shares at a far steeper 500 billion valuation. Most of the cheaper shares have already been snapped up, leaving investors to fight over the pricier ones.

I'm your host, Blake Montgomery, currently enjoying Shirley Jackson's eerie final novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Surveillance is industrializing and privatizing. My colleagues Johana Bhuiyan and Jose Olivares report on the companies aiding Donald Trump's immigration crackdown, which are running a victory lap after their latest quarterly financial reports: Palantir, the tech firm, and Geo Group and CoreCivic, the private prison and surveillance companies, said this week that they brought in more money than Wall Street expected them to, thanks to the administration's crackdown on immigrants. "Well, as usual, I've been cautioned to be a little modest about our bombastic numbers," said Alex Karp, the Palantir chief executive, in an investor call earlier this week. Then he crowed about the company's "extraordinary numbers" and his "enormous pride" in its success.

Pretrained language models (LMs) are susceptible to generate text with nonfac-tual information. In this work, we measure and improve the factual accuracy of large-scale LMs for open-ended text generation.

"We were very much impressed. At the same time, we were afraid." Inside the quest to map the universe with mysterious bursts of radio energy When our universe was less than half as old as it is today, a burst of energy that could cook a sun's worth of popcorn shot out from somewhere amid a compact group of galaxies. Some 8 billion years later, radio waves from that burst reached Earth and were captured by a sophisticated low-frequency radio telescope in the Australian outback. The signal, which arrived in June 2022, and lasted for under half a millisecond, is one of a growing class of mysterious radio signals called fast radio bursts. In the last 10 years, astronomers have picked up nearly 5,000 of them.

Or fix us, which requires us to believe AI can be a therapist despite the evidence to the contrary? Or should it inform us with cold, to-the-point responses that may leave users bored and less likely to stay engaged? It's safe to say the company has failed to pick a lane. Back in April, it reversed a design update after people complained ChatGPT had turned into a suck-up, showering them with glib compliments. GPT-5, released on August 7, was meant to be a bit colder.

Imagine asking a home assistant robot to find a "flat-head screwdriver" or the "medicine case near