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What OpenAIs Sora means for the future of truth

Mashable

There's a story from the earliest days of cinema that seems applicable to Sora, the text-to-video creation tool launched by OpenAI this week. And given that Sora's servers are struggling with demand, with many OpenAI subscribers still waiting to try it out, we've got time for stories. You probably know of Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station (1896) by the Lumiere brothers, even if you've never seen it. Like Sora, the Lumieres created very short movies that showcased the latest tech. We're talking cinematograph rather than AI rendering, and a luxurious 50 seconds of film rather than the maximum 20 seconds allowed in Sora videos.


Chinese citizen allegedly photographed Vandenberg base with drone, says it was 'probably not a good idea'

Los Angeles Times

Nearly a mile above Vandenberg Space Force Base in Santa Barbara County, a hacked drone soared through restricted airspace for roughly an hour. The lightweight drone photographed sensitive areas of the military facility on Nov. 30, including a complex used by SpaceX, according to federal investigators. The drone then descended back to the ground, where the pilot and another man waited at a nearby park. Four security officers from the military base arrived on the scene and asked the men if they had seen a drone flying through the area, unaware that one of them had tucked the drone under his jacket. Authorities identified that man as 39-year-old Yinpiao Zhou, a Chinese citizen and a lawful permanent resident of the U.S.


Dozens of drones trailed a Coast Guard vessel off New Jersey: US lawmaker

FOX News

Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., opens up about the aerial systems spotted in the Garden State on'The Story.' A U.S. Coast Guard official said one of its vessels was trailed by dozens of drones off the coast of New Jersey recently, according to Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J. Smith, a guest on "The Story with Martha MacCallum" Tuesday, said he spent Monday night on the beach in Ocean County and spoke to several people, including a U.S. Coast Guard commanding officer stationed in Barnegat Light. Smith learned from the Coast Guard commander that the night before, "one of their 47-foot vessels, boats, was trailed very closely by more than a dozen of these drones." "Now, that to me, is very, very, not just suspicious, provocative, and this could be a foreign power, whether it be [Vladimir] Putin, or it could be Xi Jinping in China, or the Middle East, we can't rule any of that out," the congressman said. Photos taken in the Bay Shore section of Toms River of what appear to be large drones hovering in the area at high altitudes in New Jersey on Sunday, Dec. 8, 2024.


MasterClass On Call gives you on-demand access to AI facsimiles of its experts

Engadget

MasterClass is expanding beyond pre-recorded video lessons to offer on-demand mentorship from some of its most popular celebrity instructors. And if you're wondering how the company has gotten some of the busiest people on the planet to field your questions, guess what? The answer is generative AI. On Wednesday, MasterClass debuted On Call, a new web and iOS app that allows people to talk with AI versions of its instructors. As of today, On Call is limited to two personas representing the expertise of former FBI hostage negotiator Chris Voss and University of Berkeley neuroscientist Dr. Matt Walker.


On the 5th day of OpenAI, ChatGPT partners with Apple for iOS 18.2

ZDNet

With the holiday season upon us, many companies are finding ways to take advantage through deals, promotions, or other campaigns. OpenAI has found a way to participate with its "12 days of OpenAI" event series. On Wednesday, OpenAI announced via an X post that starting on Dec. 5, the company would host 12 days of live streams and release "a bunch of new things, big and small," according to the post. Also: OpenAI's Sora AI video generator is here - how to try it Here's everything you need to know about the campaign, as well as a round-up of every day's drops. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman shared a bit more details about the event, which kicked off at 10 a.m.


Israeli strikes kill five in southern Lebanon amid shaky ceasefire

Al Jazeera

At least five people have been killed in Israeli attacks on several towns in southern Lebanon, the country's Health Ministry has said, amid a fragile ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah. "An Israeli enemy drone strike on the town of Ainata killed one person and wounded another," the ministry said. An "Israeli strike on the town of Bint Jbeil killed three people," while a third "on Beit Lif killed one person", it added. There was no immediate comment from the Israeli military on the attacks. Israel's army escalated its attacks on Lebanon in late September after more than 11 months of cross-border exchanges of fire with the Lebanese armed group Hezbollah, which began firing rockets towards Israel after the Palestinian group Hamas's attack on southern Israel on October 7, 2023.


ChatGPT with Siri integration is now live for iPhone, iPad, and Mac

Mashable

The latest in a string of announcements from OpenAI is the official release of ChatGPT on Apple Intelligence. With new ChatGPT integration, iPhone users can invoke ChatGPT through Siri, as part of Apple Intelligence's Writing Tools, and with Camera Control on iPhone 16 which can process visual data. The Apple and OpenAI partnership was announced last summer's WWDC which unveiled Apple's suite of AI tools called Apple Intelligence. Through the partnership, iPhone users can connect with ChatGPT as an extension of specific tasks. Coinciding with this announcement, Apple released the iOS 18.2 update on Wednesday.


Congratulations to the #NeurIPS2024 award winners

AIHub

This simple, intuitive methodology allows autoregressive (AR) transformers to learn visual distributions fast and generalize well: VAR, for the first time, makes GPT-style AR models surpass diffusion transformers in image generation. On ImageNet 256 256 benchmark, VAR significantly improve AR baseline by improving Frechet inception distance (FID) from 18.65 to 1.73, inception score (IS) from 80.4 to 350.2, with around 20x faster inference speed. It is also empirically verified that VAR outperforms the Diffusion Transformer (DiT) in multiple dimensions including image quality, inference speed, data efficiency, and scalability. Scaling up VAR models exhibits clear power-law scaling laws similar to those observed in LLMs, with linear correlation coefficients near -0.998 as solid evidence.


We need to know whether the drones over New York and New Jersey pose a threat to the homeland

FOX News

State Sen. John Bramnick joins'Fox & Friends' to discuss the upcoming meeting with Gov. Phil Murphy and officials over mysterious drone sightings in their state. Two years ago, a Chinese balloon the size of three school buses hovered 60,000 feet in the air, drifting across the continental U.S. for seven days. It passed over sensitive security areas, including Malmstrom Air Force Base in Great Falls, Montana, that's home to stockpiles of missiles and nuclear defense infrastructure. Only after it was shot down did we learn this "civilian research airship" that President Biden claimed "was not a major security breach" was communicating with China through an American internet service provider and equipped with thousands of pounds of equipment, including a "massive surveillance payload." One would think the President of the United States and our nation's federal law enforcement agencies would have learned a lesson from this blatant security breach.


Jarvis, Google's web-browsing AI, is now officially known as Project Mariner

Engadget

Earlier today, Google debuted Gemini 2.0. The company says its new machine learning model won't just enhance its existing products and services. It will also power entirely new experiences. To that point, Google previewed Project Mariner, an AI agent that can navigate within a web browser. Mariner is an experimental Chrome extension that is currently available to select "trusted testers."