Alien: Earth begins where most Alien stories end: with a crew of blue-collar workers realizing that they are, and have always been, doomed. Deemed expendable by their employers over the monsters in the cargo hold (at least the crew of the USCSS Maginot, unlike the Nostromo, knew the monsters were the mission), they are made mortally aware of their place at the bottom of several food chains at once. With the FX show's fifth episode, cheekily titled "In Space, No One …," creator Noah Hawley takes us back to the Maginot's corridors to give viewers a rendition of Alien in miniature, retrofitting the sturdy bones of Ridley Scott's seminal film to his own ends. This may sound like a cynical enterprise, but it's par for the course for Alien. As Slate's own Sam Adams has noted, the series is Hollywood's greatest non-franchise, a collection of films (and comic books and video games) constantly remixing a few primary colors into compelling new shades.

On June 18, AI image-generation company Midjourney released a tool that lets users create short video clips using their own images as a template. Days later, Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian posted on X about how he used the tech to animate a photo of his late mother, which shows him as a child wrapped in her embrace. In the artificial video, she laughs and smiles before rocking him in her arms. "Damn, I wasn't ready for how this would feel," he wrote. "This is how she hugged me.

At the Microsoft Inspire partner event today, the Windows maker announced pricing for its AI-infused Copilot for Microsoft 365. The suite of contextual artificial intelligence tools, the fruit of the company's OpenAI partnership, will cost $30 per user for business accounts. In addition, the company is launching Bing Chat Enterprise, a privacy-focused version of the AI chatbot with greater security and peace of mind for handling sensitive business data. Revealed in March, Microsoft 365 Copilot is the company's vision of the future of work. The GPT-4-powered suite of tools lets you generate Office content using natural-language text prompts.

Transformer models, which leverage architectural improvements like self-attention, perform remarkably well on Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. The self-attention mechanism is position agnostic. In order to capture positional ordering information, various flavors of absolute and relative position embeddings have been proposed. However, there is no systematic analysis on their contributions and a comprehensive comparison of these methods is missing in the literature. In this paper, we review major existing position embedding methods and compare their accuracy on downstream NLP tasks, using our own implementations. We also propose a novel multiplicative embedding method which leads to superior accuracy when compared to existing methods. Finally, we show that our proposed embedding method, served as a drop-in replacement of the default absolute position embedding, can improve the RoBERTa-base and RoBERTa-large models on SQuAD1.1 and SQuAD2.0 datasets.

Microsoft today announced PyTorch Enterprise, a new Azure service that provides developers with additional support when using PyTorch on Azure. PyTorch is a Python-centric open-source machine learning framework with a focus on computer vision and natural language processing. It was originally developed by Facebook and is, at least to some degree, comparable to Google's popular TensorFlow framework. Frank X. Shaw, Microsoft's corporate VP for communications, described the new PyTorch Enterprise service as providing developers with "a more reliable production experience for organizations using PyTorch in their data sciences work." With PyTorch Enterprise, members of Microsoft's Premier and Unified support program will get benefits like prioritized requests, hands-on support and solutions for hotfixes, bugs and security patches, Shaw explained.

Corey Shaw, assistant vice president of talent acquisition at Canada Life Assurance Company, adopted a recruiting AI platform a few years ago for high-volume roles, such as work in a contact center. The firm employs about 11,000, and recruiters were sometimes overwhelmed with resumes. The company has had enough experience with Ideal, which uses AI to conduct an initial screening of candidates based on their applications, to know that its product would work, Shaw said. But adoption of the software has ushered in other changes as well. The introduction of AI recruiting tools is having two significant impacts on Canada Life's recruiting operations.

Upon his retirement from veterinary practice--the last 2 decades of which he spent in specialty care where he helped to establish the model of a referral hospital--Neil Shaw, DVM, DACVIM, started thinking about how treatment protocols in general practices could be improved. His primary concern: how to scale what is done in specialty practices for use in general practices. Preventive care protocols are well established in general practice, Shaw says, but "models for treating common illnesses and injuries in primary care practice really have not been well established." "Not all cases need to be referred," he tells Adam Christman, DVM, MBA, in this episode of the Vet Blast Podcast. And he saw technology as the only way to accomplish that goal.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is here, and its benefits are seemingly limitless. There is a flip side though--there always is. AI experts, and those involved with AI, are concerned that if we do not proceed with caution, some of the strange things predicted in science-fiction movies such as 2001: A Space Odyssey may be more truth than fiction. Elon Musk told The New York Times that his experience with AI at Tesla allows him to say with confidence, "We're headed toward a situation where AI is vastly smarter than humans." He adds, "That doesn't mean everything goes to hell in five years. It just means that things get unstable or weird."

A group of 226 engineers and other Google workers have formed a union, according to an article and opinion piece in the New York Times. Called the Alphabet Workers Union, it is affiliated with the Communications Workers of America and was organized in secret over the last year or so. "We are joining together -- temps, vendors, contractors, and full-time employees -- to create a unified worker voice," wrote the Parul Koul and Chewy Shaw, the executive chair and vice chair of the Alphabet Workers Union. "We want Alphabet to be a company where workers have a meaningful say in decisions that affect us and the societies we live in." The union represents a small minority of the company's 260,000 strong employee and contractor workforce.

In celebration of New York Magazine's 50th anniversary, this series, which will continue through October 2018, tells the stories behind key moments that shaped the city's culture. In the summer of 1988, the hedge-fund manager Donald Sussman took a call from a former Columbia University computer-science professor wanting advice on his new Wall Street career. "I'd like to come see you," David Shaw, then 37 years old, told Sussman. Shaw had grown up in California, receiving a Ph.D. at Stanford University, then moved to New York to teach at Columbia before joining investment bank Morgan Stanley, which had a new secretive trading group that was using computer modeling. A neophyte in the ways of Wall Street, Shaw wanted Sussman, who founded the investment firm Paloma Partners, to look at an offer he had received from Morgan Stanley's rival, Goldman Sachs.