Call of Duty release in 2024 is reportedly a new entry in the Black Ops series, set around the 1990s Gulf War. As per Windows Central, the title will feature a ‘nuanced’ narrative that jumps between different factions within the conflict, connecting to the Cold War. Keeping with the time period, weaponry and gadgets will bear a traditional look and feel, unlike the futuristic holographic-sited guns we’ve seen in recent Call of Duty games. Hopefully, Activision takes some lessons from the poorly-received Modern Warfare 3 and doubles down on the campaign aspects — otherwise, building the overarching lore seems futile, as players would simply begin skipping it for multiplayer.
As previously reported, Treyarch is leading development on Call of Duty 2024, having shifted its launch cycle by a year. For the uninitiated, Activision rotates between its three main developers for its annual Call of Duty games — Infinity Ward, Treyarch, and Sledgehammer Games — but broke the pattern last year by moving Treyarch’s Call of Duty from 2023 to 2024, leading to the short Modern Warfare 3 getting released early. The untitled Black Ops game is said to feature a two-year life cycle, with the promise of a lengthier early access period as a pre-order bonus. As per Windows Central, keen players will be able to experience the base game ‘several days’ before release, and weeks for multiplayer and Zombies modes. The title has been codenamed ‘Cerberus’ and marks a return of the round-based Zombies mode — a detour from the newly-launched MW3, which turned it into an open-world affair.
In July, actor Luke Charles Stafford (Secret Society of Lies) inadvertently leaked on Facebook that he was serving as the model for Call of Duty 2024’s lead role, which at the time was named Ratcliffe — which according to InsiderGaming, could very well be based on the British soldier Peter Ratcliffe, who was instrumental during the aforementioned Gulf War. Circling back to multiplayer, leaked images from earlier this year suggest that classic maps from the Black Ops series will return, though some of them could always be post-launch DLC. The game also has the added responsibility of winning back its core fanbase since fumbling Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, which currently holds a 56 rating on Metacritic. Activision has also held back on divulging sale numbers or flaunting its player base unlike last year’s Modern Warfare 2, which made $800 million (about Rs. 6,668 crore) in its first three days. The publisher put out a thank you note claiming that players have spent more time in MW3 than the remaining reboot trilogy, with no figures to back it up.
Last month, Microsoft finally completed its long-gestating acquisition of Activision Blizzard, with CEO Phil Spencer claiming that the Call of Duty franchise will maintain ‘100 percent parity‘ across all platforms, ensuring that PlayStation players don’t miss out on any exclusive content or limited-time early access or platform-exclusive beta weekends. The company also plans to bring the older COD catalogue to Xbox Game Pass by next year.
The new Call of Duty Black Ops game is expected to launch in late 2024, presumably across PC, PS5, and Xbox Series S/X.
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NEW YORK — Alice Brock, whose Massachusetts-based eatery helped inspire Arlo Guthrie’s deadpan Thanksgiving standard, “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree,” has died at age 83.
Alice Brock, who helped inspire Arlo Guthrie’s classic ‘Alice’s Restaurant,’ dies at 83
Her death, just a week before Thanksgiving, was announced Friday by Guthrie on the Facebook page of his own Rising Son Records. Guthrie wrote that she died in Provincetown, Massachusetts, her residence for some 40 years, and referred to her being in failing health. Other details were not immediately available.
“This coming Thanksgiving will be the first without her,” Guthrie wrote. “Alice and I spoke by phone a couple of weeks ago, and she sounded like her old self. We joked around and had a couple of good laughs even though we knew we’d never have another chance to talk together.”
Born Alice May Pelkey in New York City, Brock was a lifelong rebel who was a member of Students for a Democratic Society among other organizations. In the early 1960s, she dropped out of Sarah Lawrence College, moved to Greenwich Village and married Ray Brock, a woodworker who encouraged her to leave New York and resettle in Massachusetts.
Guthrie, son of the celebrated folk musician Woody Guthrie, first met Brock around 1962 when he was attending the Stockbridge School in Massachusetts and she was the librarian. They became friends and stayed in touch after he left school, when he would stay with her and her husband at the converted Stockbridge church that became the Brocks’ main residence.
On Thanksgiving Day, 1965, a simple chore led to Guthrie’s arrest, his eventual avoidance of military service during the Vietnam War and a song that has endured as a protest classic and holiday favorite. Guthrie and his friend, Richard Robbins, were helping the Brocks throw out trash, but ended up tossing it down a hill because they couldn’t find an open dumpster. Police charged them with illegal dumping, briefly jailed them and fined them $50, a seemingly minor offense with major repercussions.
By 1966, Alice Brock was running The Back Room restaurant in Stockbridge, Guthrie was a rising star and his breakout song was an 18-minute talking blues that recounted his arrest and how it made him ineligible for the draft. The chorus was a tribute to Alice — whose restaurant, Guthrie pointed out, was not actually called Alice’s Restaurant — that countless fans have since memorized:
You can get anything you want at Alice’s Restaurant / You can get anything you want at Alice’s Restaurant / Walk right in it’s around the back / Just a half a mile from the railroad track / You can get anything you want at Alice’s Restaurant.
Guthrie assumed his song was too long to catch on commercially, but it soon became a radio perennial and part of the popular culture. “Alice’s Restaurant” was the title of his million-selling debut album, and the basis of a movie and cookbook of the same name. Alice Brock would write a memoir, “My Life as a Restaurant,” and collaborate with Guthrie on a children’s book, “Mooses Come Walking.” At the time of her death, they had been discussing an exhibit dedicated to her at her former Stockton home, now the Guthrie Center, which serves free dinners every Thanksgiving.
Brock ran three different restaurants at various times, although she would later acknowledge she initially didn’t care much for cooking or for business. She would also cite her professional life as a cause of her marriage breaking up, while disputing rumors that she had been unfaithful to her husband. Her honor was immortalized by Guthrie, who late in “Alice’s Restaurant” advised: “You can get anything you want” at Alice’s Restaurant, “excepting Alice.”
This article was generated from an automated news agency feed without modifications to text.
Gigabyte unveiled its end-to-end artificial intelligence (AI) solution to train large language models (LLMs) locally on a device during AMD’s Computex 2024 event. The full-stack AI solution includes AI Top Utilities, AI Top Hardware, and AI Top Tutor, which encompass various aspects of training open-source AI models. AI Top Utilities is a training software with support for multiple open-source AI models, whereas AI Top Hardware offers the company’s AI-focused products. The AI Top Tutor is for those who require assistance in understanding how to make the most out of this solution.
Gigabyte AI Top offers solutions to train on-device AI
Making the announcement during the Computex 2024 event, the company unveiled AI Top as an all-encompassing solution that aims to “Train Your Own AI on Your Desk”. In a press release, the company detailed the various aspects of the offering which includes three divisions — software support, hardware support, and consultation and technical support. Notably, the announcement comes after the Gigabyte AI PC was introduced at Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2024.
Gigabyte AI Top Utility Photo Credit: Gigabyte
The AI Top Utility is a digital interface that allows local AI model training using new workflows. The company claims the software offers a user-friendly interface and real-time progress monitoring. It supports multiple open-source AI models with up to 236 billion parameters. The company claims the platform is more cost-effective and shows faster results compared to the cloud counterpart. It can also offload data to system memory and SSDs to surpass the limitations of VRAM size.
Next is the AI Top Hardware, which is essentially hardware offerings from the company. It features a series of AI optimised products that are power efficient and can handle AI training workloads. These hardware solutions also include upgradeable components. One of the primary hardware in this series includes AI Top Motherboard (TRX50) with configurable form factor, memory type and slots, graphics interface and more. AI Top Graphics Card, SSD, and PSU are also included.
The last offering in this solution is the AI Top Tutor. Positioning it as “on-desk AI coaching”, this is essentially the company’s AI-powered consultation and technical support system that offers insights, set-up guidance, and troubleshooting help. The company claims the coaching system will empower both beginners and professionals in starting on-device AI projects.
The company has not announced the pricing or availability of the Gigabyte AI Top solutions.
New research has revealed that volcanic eruptions occurred on the Moon’s far side billions of years ago, comparable to those observed on its visible side. This discovery was made through an analysis of lunar soil samples brought back by China’s Chang’e-6 spacecraft, the first mission to collect and return materials from this largely unexplored lunar region.
According to papers published November 15 in Science and Nature, scientists from two independent research teams identified volcanic rock fragments in the samples. One of the pieces was determined to be approximately 2.8 billion years old, while another, even older fragment, was dated to 4.2 billion years. These findings provide evidence of prolonged volcanic activity on the far side of the Moon, an area previously lacking direct geological data.
Distinct Characteristics of the Moon’s Far Side
The Moon’s far side differs significantly from its near side, which faces Earth and has been better explored. While the near side features flat, dark plains formed by ancient lava flows, the far side is marked by craters and lacks similar volcanic formations. According to Qiu-Li Li, a co-author of the study from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the stark geological contrasts between the two sides remain a subject of ongoing investigation.
Earlier research, including data from NASA‘s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, hinted at a volcanic history for the far side. However, the recent findings, published in the journals Science and Nature, offer the first physical evidence confirming such activity.
China’s Lunar Missions in Focus
China has been instrumental in advancing lunar exploration. In 2019, the Chang’e-4 mission became the first to land on the Moon’s far side. The Chang’e-5 mission later returned samples from the near side in 2020. The current study builds on these achievements, shedding light on over a billion years of volcanic eruptions on the Moon’s hidden hemisphere. Further research is expected to clarify how and why volcanic activity persisted for such an extended period.
Rockstar has removed the Social Club branding from its website, presumably in anticipation of GTA 6. As per the news account @videotechuk_ on Twitter, the publisher has replaced the nomenclature with simply ‘Rockstar Games’ and scrapped any references to ‘Social Club members.’ The online gaming service is also missing the old logo now, though players can still engage in multiplayer elements and accrue member-exclusive rewards from games like Grand Theft Auto V and Red Dead Redemption 2. For now, it’s unclear whether Rockstar would launch a new platform or simply update the existing application to usher in the new era, but traces of the branding still remain in-game.
“Most of the Social Club mentions are gone, completely. An end of an era,” the tweet reads, showing differences between the old and new info page, which now refers to subscribers as ‘Rockstar Games members.’ People online have also noticed that the signature Rockstar logo, which used to be black and yellow is now black-and-white. Sam Houser, co-founder of the studio previously confirmed that the first trailer for Grand Theft Auto 6 will be out in early December, which also marks the 25th anniversary celebration for Rockstar. While it’s generally expected that the trailer might drop during Geoff Keighley’s The Game Awards 2023 on the 8th, the publisher has, in the past, avoided making announcements at third-party shows, instead releasing it on their official channels.
It may appear Rockstar Games are gearing up to sunset the Social Club and launch a new platform. Today the new changes to the Rockstar Games websites brought a new change to the naming scheme of the Social Club to the ‘Rockstar Games Platform”. pic.twitter.com/XYVhd1xXtc
Rockstar has stayed utterly silent on any GTA 6 updates since revealing that it’s under development in 2022, presumably set in a fictionalised version of Miami and featuring two protagonists. An earnings report from parent company Take-Two, however, suggests that the game is eyeing a release in the fiscal year 2025, which in this case, is a window that opens in April 2024. The studio also suffered a massive data leak of in-development gameplay footage that showed the lead characters — an unnamed man and a woman — engaging in a daytime heist at a local diner. Marking the first female lead in the franchise, the tale is reportedly inspired by Bonnie and Clyde, the real-life American criminal couple who went around robbing banks and stores in the country, amidst the Great Depression.
It’s been 11 years since Grand Theft Auto V dropped on consoles, with Rockstar keeping it alive through minor performance upgrades for two generations and via GTA Online, the cash cow that offers near-endless multiplayer content for players. As of October, the game has sold 190 million copies worldwide, within which, a dataminer has now uncovered a string that points towards a sequel to Bully. The game has been long-rumoured to be in development, thanks to a leaked mocap casting call that mainly looked for teenagers — Rockstar never responded to the claims.
Grand Theft Auto 6 will probably release on the current-gen PS5 and Xbox Series S/X first, before heading to PC — as seen with previous Rockstar entries.
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OnePlus 12 and OnePlus 12R are getting the OxygenOS 15 open beta update in India. The two phones are the first in the entire OnePlus lineup to get the Android 15-based operating system (OS) update. The new OS update will introduce a redesigned user interface, artificial intelligence (AI) features, and faster processing. It also integrates Android’s new security features such as Google Play Protect’s live threat detection and theft protection. Apart from that, the update will also add Gemini AI assistant as the default virtual assistant to compatible handsets.
OnePlus 12, OnePlus 12R OxygenOS 15 Open Beta Update
In separate community posts, the Chinese brand announced that the open beta update was coming only to India at the current stage. The company said it will allow users to experience the new OS. However, it is also advised that since it is an open beta version, some features may not be available right away. Additionally, the version might not be stable as it is a beta build. Those who install it should accept the potential risks, the company added.
The OxygenOS 15 update offers faster performance, enhanced design, and AI capabilities. The OS update adds comprehensive “interruption animations” that enable faster transition between apps. This is aimed at eliminating lag times even during heavy usage. The update is also adding new AI-powered camera features. One such feature is AI Detail Boost which transforms low-resolution or cropped images into 4K resolution photos.
Another such feature is AI Unblur. It improves blurry images natively and makes the photos sharper. Additionally, AI Reflection Eraser allows users to remove reflections from images which are shot through glass.
While these features are powered by the company’s in-house AI models, OnePlus is also adding several Gemini-powered features. One of these is Circle to Search, which will now be available to compatible smartphones with the OxygenOS 15 update. Gemini will also power a new Pass Scan feature which is integrated within the camera app. It can be used to quickly scan boarding passes.
MSI Claw 8 AI Plus was announced by the company on Tuesday at Computex 2024. The handheld gaming PC is expected to arrive as the successor to the first-generation Claw model that launched in March this year to disappointing reviews that criticised its Intel Meteor Lake chip for unsatisfactory performance, especially when going up against the likes of Asus ROG Ally and Steam Deck OLED, despite costing more than them. With the Claw 8 AI Plus, a replacement for MSI’s console might soon be available.
MSI Claw 8 AI Plus announced
The company unveiled its next-generation handheld gaming PC – the Claw 8 AI Plus – during the ongoing Computex 2024 expo in Taipei. The new Intel Lunar Lake chip will power it, with MSI claiming it will be the “world’s first gaming handheld” to feature the aforementioned Intel Core Ultra processor.
Pricing for the MSI Claw 8 AI is yet to be announced by the company and we can expect more details to arrive in the coming months.
MSI Claw 8 AI Plus specifications
In a blog post, the company says it will sport an 8-inch Full HD display with a 120Hz refresh rate and VRR support.
The MSI Claw 8 AI Plus is also tipped to get a bigger battery, potentially up to 80Wh, according to a Verge report. This may bring it to par with the Asus ROG Ally X which was also announced at Computex 2024. The handheld PC will also get a second USB Type-C port with Thunderbolt 4 capabilities, according to MSI.
The potential ROG Ally X competitor will also get a wall-mounted charger, as well as an improved “tactile feel of the LB/RB buttons”.
For reference, the Asus ROG Ally X is powered by an AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme CPU, featuring a Zen 4 architecture with 8 cores. The chip is paired with an RDNA 3 iGPU and 24GB LPDDR5 RAM. Compared to the newly announced MSI Claw 8 AI Plus, it gets a slightly smaller 7-inch full-HD IPS display with a 120Hz refresh rate and a 7ms response time.
Claw x Fallout
Alongside the MSI Claw 8 AI Plus, the company announced that it is collaborating with Bethesda to launch a Claw x Fallout co-branded limited edition handheld gaming PC. MSI says it will feature a 7-inch display and a design inspired by various elements of Fallout, such as vaults, Pip-Boys, and robots.
This will offer “fans an immersive experience in the game’s post-nuclear apocalypse atmosphere”, MSI says.
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Samsung’s long-awaited XR wearable is expected to be ready for its debut sometime next year. The company is yet to reveal many details about its first extended reality (XR) smart glasses, however, new research coming out of China shows that the Korean brand’s upcoming XR device will share some features with Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses. The device, reportedly developed in partnership with Google and Qualcomm, could be released in the third quarter of 2025. The purported Samsung XR glasses may not have a display and is expected to pack a 12-megapixel camera.
New Details on Samsung’s XR Smart Glasses Surface
A research note by China-based Wellsen XR offers details about Samsung’s first XR smart glasses. As per the report, highlighted by Jukanlosreve (@Jukanlosreve) and Maeil Business Newspaper, Samsung has finalised plans to release AI smart glasses, and the company is eyeing to produce 5,00,000 units in the first batch. The smart glasses will reportedly be released in the third quarter of 2025.
The Samsung XR glasses will reportedly pack a Qualcomm AR1 chipset as the main processing unit and an NXP semiconductor as the auxiliary processing unit. Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses also run on the AR1 chipset. It is also said to come with a 12-megapixel camera with Sony IMX681 CMOS image sensor and 155mAh battery, similar to Meta’s Ray-Ban offering. It could weigh 50 grams.
The camera on the Samsung XR glasses is said to be capable of scanning QR codes, gesture recognition and “human recognition functions.” These functions could be performed by the pre-installed Gemini giant language model (LLM) in the wearable in collaboration with Google.
Samsung Electronics in its earnings announcement last month confirmed that the XR headset would be launched next year. However, the brand has not revealed the exact launch timeline yet. Samsung is expected to preview the device at its Galaxy Unpacked event for the Galaxy S25 series.
They come to protest in long convoys of tractors, sometimes bringing with them months’ worth of food supplies. Their demands may vary, but concerns about rising costs and falling incomes are common. From Paris and London to all over the world, the anger of farmers is increasing since 2021. DelhiAnd their protests are increasingly looking alike.
A farmer holds a placard reading “The Last Straw” during a farmers’ demonstration over inheritance tax changes in London, UK, on November 19. (Bloomberg)
In London, hundreds of farmers this week stormed Whitehall, the center of Britain’s government, to protest a proposed 20% inheritance tax, saying it would be a stab in the back.
Their anger reflects widespread discontent among many farming communities around the world, especially since the pandemic, including in India and mainland Europe. Dozens of farm groups across six continents have been protesting farm policies since 2021, according to the Center for International Policy Studies.
The scenes in London evoked memories of the standoff outside Delhi, where a revolt by farm unions during 2020-21 prompted the government to repeal three market-oriented farm laws.
There are even more echoes of Delhi in London. “No farmers, no food,” one protester said on the BBC. Another held a placard: “Small farmers will die. They will have to borrow to pay the taxes.” “Tax business, not farm. 20% inheritance tax? It’s ridiculous if you ask me,” said Sarah Bolden, a farmer from Wiltshire in southwest England.
These concerns are similar to the main issues raised by farmers in food bowl states like Punjab. “The reasons are different. The demands are different. But what may be common (about disillusionment) is the feeling that governments do not realize that the old ways are gone, and the new problems are new,” said Jeremy Clarke, London-based campaigner for the World Farmers Organization (WFO). Said. ), over the phone on Wednesday.
The latest challenges around the world largely stem from changing markets, declining profits and climate change, Clark said, resulting in an “unprecedented crisis.”
Celebrity TV presenter Jeremy Clarkson and James Dyson, a prominent business tycoon who supports Brexit, also joined the protest in London.
Farm unions in India, the world’s second-largest wheat and rice producer, are demanding a guarantee backed by law for minimum purchase prices of crops.
In Europe, farmers in the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Italy and France etc. have imposed restrictions on how much fertilizer they can use and even how many acres they can sow by driving tractors in their countries. Are. The EU’s new measures are part of concrete steps it is taking to meet climate and emissions targets. Subsidies for crop inputs are being cut. In India, experts say subsidies alone are not enough for producers to meet farming costs.
Farmers have also become politically wise. “In Europe, protests were held ahead of the EU parliamentary elections, while in India too farmers were seen intensifying protests ahead of key elections,” said Mukul Paranjape, a researcher at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay.
Although India does not tax agricultural income, farmers have long claimed that they never get federally set minimum prices for many commodities. Studies have shown that Indian farmers are “net taxed” or indirectly taxed due to the government’s efforts to keep food prices low.
India’s agriculture sector has not been generating enough revenue to keep farmers profitable for nearly two decades, according to a landmark 2018 report by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a 36-nation grouping, and think tank ICRIER.
The study looked at the agricultural sector’s gross receipts – or total assets without adjusting expenses – among other indices. Agriculture in India faces negative total revenues despite large subsidies, as income opportunities are missed due to frequent export bans and restrictions on storage. Therefore, the prices paid by farmers have exceeded the prices earned by them.
Agricultural movement is nothing new. The Farmers’ Alliance, an American agricultural movement during the 1870s, sought to improve economic conditions through collective bargaining through cooperatives and political advocacy.
Farmers in the US then faced the same problems as those in developing economies, such as India, a country with surplus agricultural labor and small landholdings. Small land plots generally lack economies of scale, which refers to falling costs with increasing production.
In January 1979, about 5000 farmers drove tractors to Washington, DC, in a movement known as the Tractorcade in protest of the Carter administration freezing all credit, as North Indian farmers did in Delhi in January 2021, A protest that turned violent.
The group leading the rebellion, Samyukta Kisan Morcha, has planned a new phase of protests from next month with its old demand: guaranteed minimum prices. The Central Government announces Minimum Support Price for more than 20 crops to determine the minimum rate, so that farmers can get basic price assurance.
However, government agencies procure only rice and wheat at assured rates in sufficient quantities, which means that many other produce, such as soybean, groundnut, mustard, millet, pulses and maize etc., are procured at any price depending on market offer. But are sold. ,
“These problems are not unique to India in the sense that European farmers think that regulations to make farming eco-friendly will affect their earnings. It is ultimately an income issue,” Paranjape said.
The centre-left Keir Starmer government will impose a 20% tax on inherited agricultural properties worth more than £1m from April 2026, which were previously exempt. Nevertheless, this is half the non-agricultural inheritance tax rate.
The argument for an inheritance tax has been influential, especially after the radical French economist Thomas Piketty published his book “Capital in the Twenty-First Century”, which proposed imposing a “confiscation” tax on inherited wealth to reduce inequality. The call was made.
Piketty, who managed centuries of data, argued that wages will always grow much slower than wealth and profits earned, leading to an ever-widening gap between rich and poor. Their solution is a globally coordinated wealth tax, so that wealthy wealth owners cannot move their assets to tax havens.
In a recent paper, Piketty has suggested a similar tax for India. “Raise an exceptionally large tax revenue while keeping 99.96 percent of adults untaxed. In the baseline scenario, a 2 percent annual tax on net wealth exceeds 33 percent inheritance tax on property worth Rs 10 crore and more A valuation of Rs 10 crore would yield revenue of 2.73 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP),” his India paper suggested.
In the UK, farm inheritance tax will similarly apply to large estates worth more than £1 million. However, farmers say that although they are “asset rich” in terms of the land they own, many are cash poor. Clarks said many farmers would be forced to sell their property.
“Farmers have no objection in paying taxes. Bring them forward, provided farmers can make profits that are equal to non-farm income,” Clarks said. The rising cost of farming is a common concern among farming communities.
According to the UK Department of Agriculture, there are approximately 210,000 agricultural estates worth £1 million or more that may be subject to inheritance tax. Clarks says pig farming costs have risen 54%, cattle farming costs 44% and grain farming costs 43% due to higher prices of feed, fuel and fertilizer as subsidies decline following Brexit .
According to government estimates, an average farm made a profit of around £45,300 last year. But farmers say this is an exaggerated estimate because it does not include low-income farms. Even in India, farmers complain of uncertainties from rising costs and bad weather.
India sets inflation-indexed minimum support prices such that they provide one and a half times the return on cost. However, farmers want these prices to be legally implemented. Furthermore, they want the government to comprehensively measure the cost of farming.
The government uses the so-called “A2” formula, a narrow measure that includes all out-of-pocket expenses, as well as the value of family labour. Farmers instead want the government to use the “C2 formula”, which includes actual payment costs (on seeds, fertilizer, irrigation, etc.) and interest on owned land and capital plus the estimated value of family labor and rents.
“Agriculture around the world is on its knees. Farmers have reached the end of the rope,” Clark said. Indian farmers also make the same allegations. There is a sense of a crack in the “social contract” between farmers and governments.
OpenAI and Sam Altman have been in the news for the last week for different reasons, including the firing episode and the much-anticipated return late Tuesday. However, a new story unfolded today after Reuters reported a letter written by researchers at OpenAI warning about an all-new AI discovery, Project Q* (or called Q Star).
The latest Reuters report highlights this AI breakthrough, which has been unreported so far. This all-new revelation opens up the debate about Altman’s intentions, too. It adds that the letter could be one of the factors leading to Altman’s firing.
What is Project Q*?
Based on the limited information on Project Q* shared in the Reuters report, it looks like Altman got a breakthrough in the company’s long search for artificial general intelligence (long for AGI). Altman’s blog earlier this year described AGI as “AI systems that are generally smarter than humans.”
He also talked about how if AGI was created successfully, it could help elevate humanity by pushing the global economy. However, Altman did mention the cons of this superintelligence, “AGI would also come with serious risk of misuse, drastic accidents, and societal disruption.”
“Because the upside of AGI is so great, we do not believe it is possible or desirable for society to stop its development forever; instead, society and the developers of AGI have to figure out how to get it right,” Altman said in a blog from February 2023.
As per the Reuters report, Project Q* could threaten humanity, which reminds us of the Terminator movies. It further adds that the new model on which Altman was working solved math problems, which is where it gets interesting.
Generative AI relies on mathematical models and broadly is a subset of machine learning. For AI to solve a math problem is algorithmic as it follows a pre-defined resolution path. To put some context, currently, generative AI is mainly used in writing be it typing emails for a particular need or how Gmail utilises for predicting your next word. The letter sent to the OpenAI board before Altman was fired flagged the new AI’s capabilities and stressed safety concerns, which seemed to be being given low priority.
OpenAI acknowledged its employees about Project Q* after the Reuters report. However, the exact details of what this breakthrough in AI meant weren’t disclosed.
Recapping the week’s episode at OpenAI, it took days for Sam Altman to be fired as the CEO and then reinstated. In solidarity with the narrative of “OpenAI is nothing without its people”, several OpenAI staff threatened to quit after Altman’s sudden firing. Apart from staff, Altman also got immense support from other senior executives like Greg Brockman, then President and co-founder at OpenAI. However, after negotiations with the new board, Altman re-joined as the CEO.
Between getting fired and being reinstated, Altman also got the opportunity to join Microsoft to lead a new advanced AI research team.
Is the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 5 the best foldable phone you can buy in India right now? We discuss the company’s new clamshell-style foldable handset on the latest episode of Orbital, the Gadgets 360 podcast. Orbital is available on Spotify, Gaana, JioSaavn, Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music and wherever you get your podcasts.
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