challenger
Sam Altman Says AI 'Jobs Apocalypse' He Once Predicted Probably Won't Happen. What Changed?
Sam Altman Says AI'Jobs Apocalypse' He Once Predicted Probably Won't Happen. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman speaks during the BlackRock Infrastructure Summit on March 11, 2026 in Washington, DC. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman speaks during the BlackRock Infrastructure Summit on March 11, 2026 in Washington, DC. Throughout his rise to becoming one of the most influential CEOs in artificial intelligence, OpenAI's Sam Altman made repeated bold assertions about the impact that the new technology would have on jobs. He has said that AI will "probably replace most of the jobs people do today," that entire job categories will be "totally, totally gone," and that those impacted by the dramatic shifts will "find all sorts of new things to do. Now, however, Altman appears to have changed his tune, saying he is "delighted to be wrong" about the impact AI would have on employment. I don't think we're going to have the kind of jobs apocalypse that some of the companies in our space advocate or talk about, he said during a virtual interview at a Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) conference in Sydney on Tuesday. "I thought there would have been more impact on entry-level white-collar jobs being eliminated by now than has actually happened, Altman said.
Your guide to the California state controller race: Democrat Malia Cohen faces challengers
Things to Do in L.A. From left, Meghann Adams, Malia Cohen and Herb Morgan are running for state controller in the California primary election. California voters will choose who oversees the state's finances as incumbent Malia Cohen faces Republican Herb Morgan, a finance executive, and Meghann Adams, a school bus driver and Peace and Freedom Party member. Morgan proposes using blockchain and AI technology for real-time spending transparency, while Adams advocates corporate audits and redirecting billions toward education, housing and healthcare for working-class Californians. Cohen improved financial report timeliness but fell short on promised audits of homelessness programs, the DMV and Employment Development Department. The state's fiscal watchdog oversees the intake and outtake of public funds and audits departments across the state.
Top Two Algorithms Revisited
Top two algorithms arose as an adaptation of Thompson sampling to best arm identification in multi-armed bandit models for parametric families of arms. They select the next arm to sample from by randomizing among two candidate arms, a leader and a challenger. Despite their good empirical performance, theoretical guarantees for fixed-confidence best arm identification have only been obtained when the arms are Gaussian with known variances. In this paper, we provide a general analysis of top-two methods, which identifies desirable properties of the leader, the challenger, and the (possibly non-parametric) distributions of the arms. As a result, we obtain theoretically supported top-two algorithms for best arm identification with bounded distributions. Our proof method demonstrates in particular that the sampling step used to select the leader inherited from Thompson sampling can be replaced by other choices, like selecting the empirical best arm.
The Challenger: When Do New Data Sources Justify Switching Machine Learning Models?
Digalakis, Vassilis Jr, Pรฉrignon, Christophe, Saurin, Sรฉbastien, Sentenac, Flore
We study the problem of deciding whether, and when an organization should replace a trained incumbent model with a challenger relying on newly available features. We develop a unified economic and statistical framework that links learning-curve dynamics, data-acquisition and retraining costs, and discounting of future gains. First, we characterize the optimal switching time in stylized settings and derive closed-form expressions that quantify how horizon length, learning-curve curvature, and cost differentials shape the optimal decision. Second, we propose three practical algorithms--a one-shot baseline, a greedy sequential method, and a look-ahead sequential method. Using a real-world credit-scoring dataset with gradually arriving alternative data, we show that (i) optimal switching times vary systematically with cost parameters and learning-curve behavior, and (ii) the look-ahead sequential method outperforms other methods and is able to approach in value an oracle with full foresight. Finally, we establish finite-sample guarantees, including conditions under which the sequential look-ahead method achieve sublinear regret relative to that oracle. Our results provide an operational blueprint for economically sound model transitions as new data sources become available.
Guided Self-Evolving LLMs with Minimal Human Supervision
Yu, Wenhao, Liang, Zhenwen, Huang, Chengsong, Panaganti, Kishan, Fang, Tianqing, Mi, Haitao, Yu, Dong
AI self-evolution has long been envisioned as a path toward superintelligence, where models autonomously acquire, refine, and internalize knowledge from their own learning experiences. Yet in practice, unguided self-evolving systems often plateau quickly or even degrade as training progresses. These failures arise from issues such as concept drift, diversity collapse, and mis-evolution, as models reinforce their own biases and converge toward low-entropy behaviors. To enable models to self-evolve in a stable and controllable manner while minimizing reliance on human supervision, we introduce R-Few, a guided Self-Play Challenger-Solver framework that incorporates lightweight human oversight through in-context grounding and mixed training. At each iteration, the Challenger samples a small set of human-labeled examples to guide synthetic question generation, while the Solver jointly trains on human and synthetic examples under an online, difficulty-based curriculum. Across math and general reasoning benchmarks, R-Few achieves consistent and iterative improvements. For example, Qwen3-8B-Base improves by +3.0 points over R-Zero on math tasks and achieves performance on par with General-Reasoner, despite the latter being trained on 20 times more human data. Ablation studies confirm the complementary contributions of grounded challenger training and curriculum-based solver training, and further analysis shows that R-Few mitigates drift, yielding more stable and controllable co-evolutionary dynamics.