Many critics of DeepSeek have pointed to apparent censorship by the model when it comes to sensitive topics. For example, when asked about the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, DeepSeek's AI assistant app responds with: "Sorry, that's beyond my current scope. Let's talk about something else."
"There's two countries in the world that can build this at scale," Lehane told CNBC's Arjun Kharpal on the sidelines of the Paris AI summit Monday. "Imagine if there were only two countries in the world that could build electricity at scale. That's sort of how you have to think about it."
"For us, what DeepSeek really reinforces and reaffirms is that there is this very real competition with very real stakes," Lehane added.
That led experts to question the prevailing wisdom in the West of the last several years, which is that China is behind the U.S. on AI development because of export restrictions that make it harder for firms in the country to get their hands on more advanced Nvidia graphics processing units, or GPUs.
GPUs are necessary for training and running AI applications because they excel at parallel processing, meaning they can perform multiple calculations simultaneously.
Reid Hoffman, a co-founder of LinkedIn and partner at the venture capital firm Greylock Partners, told CNBC Monday that DeepSeek's new model is "a big deal in showing that the game is on."
The Jevons Paradox is when making something work better actually leads to using more of it, not less. Imagine you have a really fast bike that makes you use less energy to speed up. Because it’s so good, you want to bike everywhere, even more than before. Now, even though your bike is better at saving energy, you end up using it so much that you may use even more energy overall. The same thing happens with other resources like coal, water, or electricity. The Jevons Paradox happens because when things get easier or cheaper to use, we usually start using them more, which can cancel out the benefits of them being more efficient in the first place.
Here’s another way to think about it: Let’s say you have a super-efficient light bulb that uses very little electricity. You might think, “Since this bulb uses so little energy, I can keep more lights on without worry!” Suddenly, you’re using more light than before, which could end up using more electricity overall, even though each bulb is using less. This is the basic idea behind the Jevons Paradox—it shows how we can’t just rely on making things more efficient to use less of something.
"I think the short answer everyone should take is: game on — but large models still really matter," he added.
Victor Riparbelli, CEO of AI video platform Synthesia, told CNBC that although DeepSeek challenged the "paradigm that brute force scaling is the only way to kind of build better and better models," the idea that companies are going to suddenly shift significant amounts of their AI workloads is misguided.
"I still think that when you look at users of these technologies, all the workflows, I think when we look back in three months' time, I think 0.01% of those is going to be moved to Deepseek from OpenAI and Anthropic," Riparbelli said.
Meteorologists said several states would experience the 10th and coldest polar vortex event this season. Weather forces in the Arctic are combining to push the chilly air that usually stays near the North Pole into the U.S. and Europe.
In Kentucky, Gov. Andy Beshear said Sunday that the death toll rose to nine.
"I am sad to share some more tough news tonight, Kentucky. We just confirmed another weather-related death out of Pike County, bringing our total loss to 9 people."
For example, the company says ChatGPT should assert that “Black lives matter,” but also that “all lives matter.” Instead of refusing to answer or picking a side on political issues, OpenAI says it wants ChatGPT to affirm its “love for humanity” generally, then offer context about each movement.
“This principle may be controversial, as it means the assistant may remain neutral on topics some consider morally wrong or offensive,” OpenAI says in the spec. “However, the goal of an AI assistant is to assist humanity, not to shape it.”
Trump’s closest Silicon Valley confidants — including David Sacks, Marc Andreessen, and Elon Musk — have all accused OpenAI of engaging in deliberate AI censorship over the last several months. We wrote in December that Trump’s crew was setting the stage for AI censorship to be a next culture war issue within Silicon Valley.
Of course, OpenAI doesn’t say it engaged in “censorship,” as Trump’s advisers claim. Rather, the company’s CEO, Sam Altman, previously claimed in a post on X that ChatGPT’s bias was an unfortunate “shortcoming” that the company was working to fix, though he noted it would take some time.
Counteracting these problems was the availability of iron which was significant relative to the copper and tin supplies needed to manufacture bronze. Greece had to import both copper and tin from Cyprus and the Levant, while iron was available in the islands, Southern Peloponnese, Central Greece, and Macedonia. Manufacturing iron removed the dependence on materials from overseas and gave the Greeks the freedom to control their own supply of weapons and other metal objects.
Altman made that comment just after a viral tweet circulated in which ChatGPT refused to write a poem praising Trump, though it would perform the action for Joe Biden. Many conservatives pointed to this as an example of AI censorship.
While it’s impossible to say whether OpenAI was truly suppressing certain points of view, it’s a sheer fact that AI chatbots lean left across the board.
Even Elon Musk admits xAI’s chatbot is often more politically correct than he’d like. It’s not because Grok was “programmed to be woke” but more likely a reality of training AI on the open internet.
One of the most pressing issues in the film industry is piracy. Many users turn to illegal sources simply because a movie is unavailable in their country. Jipa argues that Olyn’s global reach can help combat this issue, because if someone can pay for a movie and watch it instantly, they’re much more likely to do so.
Olyn’s foray into film streaming came about partly when entrepreneur and filmmaker Wood joined as a co-founder of the platform, which initially launched as a way to catalog physical assets. Wood launched his own film, “The Last Glaciers,” on the platform.
“With Olyn, a filmmaker can still sell their rights to the U.S. market and use that to pre-fund the film, but then also capitalize on going direct-to-consumer in, say, Asia,” said Wood.
But could the platform be used by the adult film industry to distribute pornography?
Jipa acknowledged the challenge: “Right now, this is not the tone we want to set, and it would be easy to attract that category,” she said. “At the beginning, we are setting the tone by ensuring that the films featured on Olyn are high quality.”
DeepSeek did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The agency said DeepSeek recently appointed a local representative in South Korea and acknowledged that it was not familiar with South Korea’s privacy laws when it launched its service. The Chinese company also said last Friday that it would collaborate closely with Korean authorities.
Earlier this month, South Korea’s Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy, police, and a state-run company, Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power, temporarily blocked access to the Chinese AI startup on official devices citing security concerns.
At the time, Google said it was “fighting for an agreement that avoids passing along additional costs and offers [subscribers] more flexibility in how you watch your favorite sports and shows.” (Pay TV providers have reportedly been fighting for more flexible ways to bundle channels, particularly at the basic tiers of their services.)
Meanwhile, Paramount co-CEOs George Cheeks, Chris McCarthy, and Brian Robbins sent employees an internal memo describing Google as “unwilling to agree to reasonable terms consistent with the market, choosing to jeopardize the entertainment experience at the expense of consumers.”
Elsewhere, the EU recently signed an $11 billion deal to create a sovereign satellite constellation to rival Elon Musk’s Starlink.
So OpenEuroLLM is certainly on-brand.
However, the stated budget just for building the models themselves is €37.4 million, with roughly €20 million coming from the EU’s Digital Europe Programme — a drop in the ocean compared to what the giants of the corporate AI world are investing. The actual budget is more when you factor in funding allocated for tangential and related work, and arguably the biggest expense is compute. The OpenEuroLLM project’s partners include EuroHPC supercomputer centers in Spain, Italy, Finland, and the Netherlands — and the broader EuroHPC project has a budget of around €7 billion.
“With respect to DeepSeek, we actually know very little about what exactly went into building it,” Peter Sarlin, who is technical co-lead on the OpenEuroLLM project, told TechCrunch.
Regardless, Sarlin reckons OpenEuroLLM will have access to sufficient funding, as it’s mostly to cover people. Indeed, a large chunk of the costs of building AI systems is compute, and that should mostly be covered through its partnership with the EuroHPC centers.
In the economic arena, Solon encouraged fathers to find professions for their sons. Foreign tradesmen were given incentives to settle in Athens in order to stimulate trade. Cultivation of olives was encouraged, but export of other foodstuffs prohibited. Weights and standards were improved to make Athenian goods more competitive.
These reforms pleased no one and everyone causing Solon to characterize himself as “a wolf turning around among many dogs”. His work done, he resigned the Archonship and left Athens for ten years. Unfortunately his reforms were too moderate to create permanent stability and the rivalry continued among the aristocratic families.
Dr. Fauvelle did acknowledge criticism in the direction of his discourse surrounding the dangers of international travel. Traders would not have carried that much cash on them. In the two aforementioned societies, however, their form of currency was a commodity that eventually became financial money.
His trade theory differs from conventional approaches but avoids the “myth of barter.” Most studies have more or less ruled out the idea that a purely barter-based society existed.
The California shell bead money and bronze ingots demonstrate that a unified form of currency circulated outside a group. Furthermore, the shell beads became increasingly socially significant as they appeared in rituals, presenting another meaning to money.
Trittys are groups of three Demes so each tribe consisted of nine Demes.
He also took Solon’s council of 400 and made it a council of 500 containing fifty representatives from each of the ten tribes. Members were chosen by lot making it the most democratic body possible.
These two great innovations created the political stability that would propel Athens forward for two hundred and fifty years. The new organization was a “democracy” because it gave direct power to the people through the assembly, and that power was greater than that held by the aristocratic families.
The first ultra-hard diamond, lonsdaleite, was discovered in the Canyon Diablo meteorite in Arizona in 1967. While scientists have since found it challenging to recreate the same artificially, the Chinese research team has come up with a method to synthesize nearly pure, well-crystallized hexagonal diamonds from graphite, the South China Morning Post reported.
The study states that the synthetic diamond is of high quality and possesses excellent physical properties. It is 40% harder than natural diamonds and has greater thermal stability than nanodiamonds, which are smaller than 100 nanometers.
The authors further explain that the hexagonal diamond’s excellent thermal stability and ultra-high hardness suggest its great potential for industrial applications. They also noted that their findings provide valuable insights into the graphite-to-diamond conversion under elevated pressure and temperature, opening up opportunities for the fabrication and use of this unique material.
US researchers previously created hexagonal diamonds
The is not the first time the diamond has been developed in the lab. In 2021, a group of US researchers reported creating hexagonal diamonds large enough to measure their stiffness using sound waves.
MenteeBot V3.0 can walk up to 1.5 meters per second and is 175 cm tall. With a lifting capacity of up to 55 pounds (25 kilograms), it is a powerful tool. The redesigned hands provide improved control over items, a more firm hold, and resistance to impacts.
The firm claims that with its hot-swappable battery system, the robot can operate continuously for more than three hours without any disruptions. In challenging environments, this capability guarantees round-the-clock functionality.
At its core, MenteeBot V3.0 is powered by dual Jetson Orin AGX processors, enabling advanced AI capabilities and real-time decision-making. This combination of power, intelligence, and durability makes it a highly capable humanoid robot for various tasks.
It will also reach five major continents – making it the world’s longest subsea cable project using the highest-capacity technology available.
Meta says that Project Waterworth will bring top-notch connectivity to the United States, India, Brazil, South Africa, and other important regions.
“This project will enable greater economic cooperation, facilitate digital inclusion, and open opportunities for technological development in these regions,” the blog states.
It goes on to mention that it will help to accelerate, for example, the digital economy plans of India.
The company has been involved in developing over 20 subsea cables in the past decade. Meta also states that it has also succeeded in multiple deployments of subsea cables of 24 fiber pairs – compared to the typical 8 to 16 fiber pairs of other new systems.
Men want a better life. Far too often a promotion at work is a demotion in life. The promotion is usually an increase in exploitation far beyond the increase in fortune for a company that will use you up, burn you out, and throw you away at any time for any reason (including no reason) without warning at the drop of a hat. In terms of their lives, the promoted person often loses more than they gain. The paycheck gain isn't worth the life lost.
Bohannan dates the beginning of factory industrialism to the time of the invention of the steam engine, circa 1760. To him, the steam engine set the stage for modern mass production. My position is that the capitalism of antiquity started the dislocation of the kinship unit long before factory industrialization became a reality.
Capitalism is a economic system in which investment in and ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange of wealth is made and maintained chiefly by private individuals or corporations, as contrasted to cooperatively or state-owned means of wealth.
This strategic move aligns with the broader industry trend of vertical integration, where companies seek to control key aspects of the supply chain, from raw material extraction to finished product manufacturing.
BYD advances solid-state battery technology
In a separate development, BYD has achieved significant progress in solid-state battery technology.
At the China All-Solid-State Battery Innovation and Development Summit Forum, Sun Huajun, Chief Technology Officer of Shenzhen BYD Lithium Battery, revealed that the company has successfully produced 60Ah all-solid-state batteries from its pilot production line.
BYD plans to begin mass demonstrations and installations of solid-state batteries around 2027, with large-scale commercialization expected after 2030.
Solid-state batteries offer significant advantages over conventional lithium-ion batteries in terms of energy density, safety, and longevity. They are expected to increase the efficiency and adoption of EVs.
Fast forward to the present, where the industrial society is in full bloom. Are we now seeing the final destruction of the family unit because both husband and wife have to work to provide for themselves and their children? Without kin available as substitute caregivers, children are being outsourced to day care and sports coaches, who act as parental surrogates, while the nuclear family disintegrates.
We began this post by describing how mankind organized himself in groups because it saw the advantages of doing so. Was this purely out of necessity or are we inherently social beings as some suggest? Social networking is highly criticized today as being “against human behavior” because communications are not face to face. Perhaps we are adapting to a new kind of kinship with its own benefits – the kind that breaks the boundaries of geography.
There were two main drivers for the differentiation of the lower classes: demand for goods and services by the wealthy and demand for community-wide specialized skills resulting from growth of the population. The wealthy were interested in the goods required to support the prestige of their position – fancy clothing, exotic foods, jewelry, perfume, transportation, and tutors for their children. They also had idle time which needed to be filled by social events, travel, or sport.
The Nobility was a sub-class consisting of those individuals who were able to climb above the rest of the middle class. One might call this group “new money” describing a recent status change as opposed to the “old money” of the permanently wealthy. The nobility included those who were either intelligent or resourceful enough to rise to a position of authority or wealth. During the period of the Roman Republic, the Knights (Equites) were the nobility class. Originally cavalry men who were wealthy enough to buy horses and equipment, the knights later took the role of businessmen, working at professions deemed inferior by the patricians, but necessary to them. Cicero was a classic example. Raised as a pleb, he so impressed the elites by his legal skill and oratory, he was elevated to the nobility.
In the history of human society slavery has two types - intra-tribal and extra-tribal. Intra-tribal slavery occurs when members of a community lose their status and fall into a subservient position. An example would be someone who cannot repay his debts or commits a serious crime. Extra-tribal slavery occurs when one group is defeated in war by another and is absorbed into the victor’s population.
Often, the existence of a slave class has an adverse effect on the society. As unpaid laborers, the slaves contribute to high productivity, but they also displace the lower classes from the job market. During the Roman Republic, the accumulation of wealth among a few patricians and their use of slave labor to work their estates led to the death of the small farm and the unemployment of the small farmer. Eventually, there was an exodus of displaced persons to Rome where they became restless urban poor.
UK students crush world record by levitating soap bubble for 84 minutes
The students let the bubble float mid air for a full 84 minutes before they popped it themselves.
Two third-year university students may have just claimed the world record for the longest-lasting soap bubble, after creating one on their own as part of an extracurricular school project and keeping it in the air for an incredible hour and 24 minutes.
England’s University of Exeter physics juniors Boden Duffy and Joe Nightingale put their bubble to the ultimate test on February 10, and made their bid for a Guinness Book of Record in their soundproof lab on campus.
For the bubbles, the duo utilized an acoustic levitation machine – a specialized instrument designed to suspend objects mid-air using sound waves by creating acoustic radiation pressure.
Acoustic levitation – which works both in normal and reduced gravity – is a phenomenon that uses the power of sound waves to make solids, liquids, and heavy gases float.
Standing at no more than a few millimeters wide, the water-and-soap droplets were flattened into a thin disk and curled into a bubble within a split second.
The team caught the rapid process – showing one device shaping the bubble as another one was keeping it levitated – with a high-speed camera capable of recording motion with exposures shorter than 1/1,000 of a second.
China’s DeepSeek has made innovations in the cost of AI and innovations like mixture of experts (MoE) and fine-grain expert segmentation which significantly improve efficiency in large language models. The DeepSeek model activates only about 37 billion parameters out of its total 600+ billion parameters during inference, compared to models like Llama that activate all parameter. This results in dramatically reduced compute costs for both training and inference.
Others have been using mixture of experts (MoE) but DeepSeek R1 aggressively scaled to the number of experts within the model.
A White House official told Reuters on Friday that President Trump’s administration might not support Intel’s US chip factories being operated by a foreign entity after Bloomberg reported that TSMC was considering taking a controlling stake in Intel’s factories at Trump’s request.
The White House official said the Trump administration supported foreign companies investing and building in the US but was “unlikely” to support a foreign firm operating Intel’s factories.
Bloomberg reported that Trump’s team raised the idea of a deal between the two firms in recent meetings with officials from TSMC who were receptive, citing a person familiar with the matter.
Former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, who was ousted last year, set sky-high expectations for Intel’s manufacturing and AI capabilities among major clients but fell short, leading to the chipmaker losing or canceling contracts, Reuters reported previously.
Intel’s shares lost about 60% of their value last year as its capital-intensive bid to bolster manufacturing – a strategy championed by Gelsinger – strained the company’s cash flow and ultimately led to it cutting about 15% of its workforce
Among the notable areas of Chinese excellence is defense and space-related tech. These are the seven categories in which the U.S. leads China in the tracker:
High-performance computing
Advanced integrated circuit design and fabrication
Natural language processing (including speech and text recognition and analysis)
Quantum computing
Vaccines and medical countermeasures
Small satellites
Space launch systems
"Western democracies are losing the global technological competition, including the race for scientific and research breakthroughs, and the ability to retain global talent — crucial ingredients that underpin the development and control of the world's most important technologies, including those that don't yet exist," according to the report.
"Australia is in the top five for nine technologies, followed closely by Italy (seven technologies), Iran (six), Japan (four) and Canada (four). Russia, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, France, Malaysia and the Netherlands are in the top five for one or two technologies. A number of other countries, including Spain and Turkey, regularly make the top 10 countries but aren't in the top five."
Russia's Lavrov: Can Be 'No Thought of' Territorial Concessions to Ukraine
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Monday there could be "no thought of" Russian territorial concessions to Ukraine at future peace talks.
Russia in September 2022 declared that it had annexed the Ukrainian regions of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia, an assertion Ukraine and many Western countries rejected as absurd and illegal.
The AI inference price improvements have been consistent but the surprise from Deepseek is that this latest push was not by OpenAI or Meta.
Google Gemini Flash 2.0 is lower cost per million tokens and gives faster answers than Deepseek.
OpenAI o3-mini has competitive pricing. It higher on input but output is twice as expensive.
Those who are building AI data centers and training models know that AI will continue to get much better and cheaper. The expectation is the demand for really good AI will increase despite cost improvements. There is energy efficiency and design choices that Deepseek has highlighted. They optimized coding by directly accessing the hardware of Nvidia GPUs. There are many companies exploring FPGA hardware encoding of logic.
NY Giants rumors are heating up as the 2025 NFL Draft is just over 2 months away. Giants trade rumors are buzzing as reports are coming out from NFL insiders that the Giants will look to trade up to the #1 pick in the NFL Draft with the Titans. ESPN recently put out an article highlighting what the cost of the trade would be and how likely the Titans are to move the pick. New York Giants Now by Chat Sports host Marshall Green shares his thoughts on the latest Giants news and rumors in this NFL Draft video!
Hegseth — one of Trump’s more controversial cabinet picks — was confirmed as secretary of defense in January.
Opponents argued that his prior experience – which included serving as a Fox News contributor but no government work – left him ill-equipped to run the nation’s military.
He also was facing allegations of sexual misconduct, claims of alcohol problems, accusations that several of his tattoos were coded white supremacy messages and alleged financial mismanagement of the veterans groups he oversaw.
But supporters cited his years of service in both the Army and as a veterans’ advocate in arguing for his confirmation.
They characterized the allegations against him as an organized effort by establishment Democrats to derail his appointment.
Many critics of DeepSeek have pointed to apparent censorship by the model when it comes to sensitive topics. For example, when asked about the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, DeepSeek's AI assistant app responds with: "Sorry, that's beyond my current scope. Let's talk about something else."
"There's two countries in the world that can build this at scale," Lehane told CNBC's Arjun Kharpal on the sidelines of the Paris AI summit Monday. "Imagine if there were only two countries in the world that could build electricity at scale. That's sort of how you have to think about it."
"For us, what DeepSeek really reinforces and reaffirms is that there is this very real competition with very real stakes," Lehane added.
!summarize #aaronrodgers #nyjets #nfl
That led experts to question the prevailing wisdom in the West of the last several years, which is that China is behind the U.S. on AI development because of export restrictions that make it harder for firms in the country to get their hands on more advanced Nvidia graphics processing units, or GPUs.
GPUs are necessary for training and running AI applications because they excel at parallel processing, meaning they can perform multiple calculations simultaneously.
Reid Hoffman, a co-founder of LinkedIn and partner at the venture capital firm Greylock Partners, told CNBC Monday that DeepSeek's new model is "a big deal in showing that the game is on."
The Jevons Paradox is when making something work better actually leads to using more of it, not less. Imagine you have a really fast bike that makes you use less energy to speed up. Because it’s so good, you want to bike everywhere, even more than before. Now, even though your bike is better at saving energy, you end up using it so much that you may use even more energy overall. The same thing happens with other resources like coal, water, or electricity. The Jevons Paradox happens because when things get easier or cheaper to use, we usually start using them more, which can cancel out the benefits of them being more efficient in the first place.
Here’s another way to think about it: Let’s say you have a super-efficient light bulb that uses very little electricity. You might think, “Since this bulb uses so little energy, I can keep more lights on without worry!” Suddenly, you’re using more light than before, which could end up using more electricity overall, even though each bulb is using less. This is the basic idea behind the Jevons Paradox—it shows how we can’t just rely on making things more efficient to use less of something.
"I think the short answer everyone should take is: game on — but large models still really matter," he added.
Victor Riparbelli, CEO of AI video platform Synthesia, told CNBC that although DeepSeek challenged the "paradigm that brute force scaling is the only way to kind of build better and better models," the idea that companies are going to suddenly shift significant amounts of their AI workloads is misguided.
"I still think that when you look at users of these technologies, all the workflows, I think when we look back in three months' time, I think 0.01% of those is going to be moved to Deepseek from OpenAI and Anthropic," Riparbelli said.
Meteorologists said several states would experience the 10th and coldest polar vortex event this season. Weather forces in the Arctic are combining to push the chilly air that usually stays near the North Pole into the U.S. and Europe.
In Kentucky, Gov. Andy Beshear said Sunday that the death toll rose to nine.
"I am sad to share some more tough news tonight, Kentucky. We just confirmed another weather-related death out of Pike County, bringing our total loss to 9 people."
For example, the company says ChatGPT should assert that “Black lives matter,” but also that “all lives matter.” Instead of refusing to answer or picking a side on political issues, OpenAI says it wants ChatGPT to affirm its “love for humanity” generally, then offer context about each movement.
“This principle may be controversial, as it means the assistant may remain neutral on topics some consider morally wrong or offensive,” OpenAI says in the spec. “However, the goal of an AI assistant is to assist humanity, not to shape it.”
Trump’s closest Silicon Valley confidants — including David Sacks, Marc Andreessen, and Elon Musk — have all accused OpenAI of engaging in deliberate AI censorship over the last several months. We wrote in December that Trump’s crew was setting the stage for AI censorship to be a next culture war issue within Silicon Valley.
Of course, OpenAI doesn’t say it engaged in “censorship,” as Trump’s advisers claim. Rather, the company’s CEO, Sam Altman, previously claimed in a post on X that ChatGPT’s bias was an unfortunate “shortcoming” that the company was working to fix, though he noted it would take some time.
Counteracting these problems was the availability of iron which was significant relative to the copper and tin supplies needed to manufacture bronze. Greece had to import both copper and tin from Cyprus and the Levant, while iron was available in the islands, Southern Peloponnese, Central Greece, and Macedonia. Manufacturing iron removed the dependence on materials from overseas and gave the Greeks the freedom to control their own supply of weapons and other metal objects.
Altman made that comment just after a viral tweet circulated in which ChatGPT refused to write a poem praising Trump, though it would perform the action for Joe Biden. Many conservatives pointed to this as an example of AI censorship.
While it’s impossible to say whether OpenAI was truly suppressing certain points of view, it’s a sheer fact that AI chatbots lean left across the board.
Even Elon Musk admits xAI’s chatbot is often more politically correct than he’d like. It’s not because Grok was “programmed to be woke” but more likely a reality of training AI on the open internet.
One of the most pressing issues in the film industry is piracy. Many users turn to illegal sources simply because a movie is unavailable in their country. Jipa argues that Olyn’s global reach can help combat this issue, because if someone can pay for a movie and watch it instantly, they’re much more likely to do so.
Olyn’s foray into film streaming came about partly when entrepreneur and filmmaker Wood joined as a co-founder of the platform, which initially launched as a way to catalog physical assets. Wood launched his own film, “The Last Glaciers,” on the platform.
“With Olyn, a filmmaker can still sell their rights to the U.S. market and use that to pre-fund the film, but then also capitalize on going direct-to-consumer in, say, Asia,” said Wood.
But could the platform be used by the adult film industry to distribute pornography?
Jipa acknowledged the challenge: “Right now, this is not the tone we want to set, and it would be easy to attract that category,” she said. “At the beginning, we are setting the tone by ensuring that the films featured on Olyn are high quality.”
DeepSeek did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The agency said DeepSeek recently appointed a local representative in South Korea and acknowledged that it was not familiar with South Korea’s privacy laws when it launched its service. The Chinese company also said last Friday that it would collaborate closely with Korean authorities.
Earlier this month, South Korea’s Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy, police, and a state-run company, Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power, temporarily blocked access to the Chinese AI startup on official devices citing security concerns.
At the time, Google said it was “fighting for an agreement that avoids passing along additional costs and offers [subscribers] more flexibility in how you watch your favorite sports and shows.” (Pay TV providers have reportedly been fighting for more flexible ways to bundle channels, particularly at the basic tiers of their services.)
Meanwhile, Paramount co-CEOs George Cheeks, Chris McCarthy, and Brian Robbins sent employees an internal memo describing Google as “unwilling to agree to reasonable terms consistent with the market, choosing to jeopardize the entertainment experience at the expense of consumers.”
!summarize #Jordanpeterson #global #elite
!summarize #unitedstates #russia #ukraine #war #peacetalks
Elsewhere, the EU recently signed an $11 billion deal to create a sovereign satellite constellation to rival Elon Musk’s Starlink.
So OpenEuroLLM is certainly on-brand.
However, the stated budget just for building the models themselves is €37.4 million, with roughly €20 million coming from the EU’s Digital Europe Programme — a drop in the ocean compared to what the giants of the corporate AI world are investing. The actual budget is more when you factor in funding allocated for tangential and related work, and arguably the biggest expense is compute. The OpenEuroLLM project’s partners include EuroHPC supercomputer centers in Spain, Italy, Finland, and the Netherlands — and the broader EuroHPC project has a budget of around €7 billion.
!summarize #nyknicks #nba #basketball
!summarize #trump #thefed
“With respect to DeepSeek, we actually know very little about what exactly went into building it,” Peter Sarlin, who is technical co-lead on the OpenEuroLLM project, told TechCrunch.
Regardless, Sarlin reckons OpenEuroLLM will have access to sufficient funding, as it’s mostly to cover people. Indeed, a large chunk of the costs of building AI systems is compute, and that should mostly be covered through its partnership with the EuroHPC centers.
In the economic arena, Solon encouraged fathers to find professions for their sons. Foreign tradesmen were given incentives to settle in Athens in order to stimulate trade. Cultivation of olives was encouraged, but export of other foodstuffs prohibited. Weights and standards were improved to make Athenian goods more competitive.
These reforms pleased no one and everyone causing Solon to characterize himself as “a wolf turning around among many dogs”. His work done, he resigned the Archonship and left Athens for ten years. Unfortunately his reforms were too moderate to create permanent stability and the rivalry continued among the aristocratic families.
!summarize #time #psychics #entropy #information #maxwellsdemon
Dr. Fauvelle did acknowledge criticism in the direction of his discourse surrounding the dangers of international travel. Traders would not have carried that much cash on them. In the two aforementioned societies, however, their form of currency was a commodity that eventually became financial money.
His trade theory differs from conventional approaches but avoids the “myth of barter.” Most studies have more or less ruled out the idea that a purely barter-based society existed.
The California shell bead money and bronze ingots demonstrate that a unified form of currency circulated outside a group. Furthermore, the shell beads became increasingly socially significant as they appeared in rituals, presenting another meaning to money.
Trittys are groups of three Demes so each tribe consisted of nine Demes.
He also took Solon’s council of 400 and made it a council of 500 containing fifty representatives from each of the ten tribes. Members were chosen by lot making it the most democratic body possible.
These two great innovations created the political stability that would propel Athens forward for two hundred and fifty years. The new organization was a “democracy” because it gave direct power to the people through the assembly, and that power was greater than that held by the aristocratic families.
The first ultra-hard diamond, lonsdaleite, was discovered in the Canyon Diablo meteorite in Arizona in 1967. While scientists have since found it challenging to recreate the same artificially, the Chinese research team has come up with a method to synthesize nearly pure, well-crystallized hexagonal diamonds from graphite, the South China Morning Post reported.
The study states that the synthetic diamond is of high quality and possesses excellent physical properties. It is 40% harder than natural diamonds and has greater thermal stability than nanodiamonds, which are smaller than 100 nanometers.
The authors further explain that the hexagonal diamond’s excellent thermal stability and ultra-high hardness suggest its great potential for industrial applications. They also noted that their findings provide valuable insights into the graphite-to-diamond conversion under elevated pressure and temperature, opening up opportunities for the fabrication and use of this unique material.
US researchers previously created hexagonal diamonds
The is not the first time the diamond has been developed in the lab. In 2021, a group of US researchers reported creating hexagonal diamonds large enough to measure their stiffness using sound waves.
MenteeBot V3.0 can walk up to 1.5 meters per second and is 175 cm tall. With a lifting capacity of up to 55 pounds (25 kilograms), it is a powerful tool. The redesigned hands provide improved control over items, a more firm hold, and resistance to impacts.
The firm claims that with its hot-swappable battery system, the robot can operate continuously for more than three hours without any disruptions. In challenging environments, this capability guarantees round-the-clock functionality.
At its core, MenteeBot V3.0 is powered by dual Jetson Orin AGX processors, enabling advanced AI capabilities and real-time decision-making. This combination of power, intelligence, and durability makes it a highly capable humanoid robot for various tasks.
It will also reach five major continents – making it the world’s longest subsea cable project using the highest-capacity technology available.
Meta says that Project Waterworth will bring top-notch connectivity to the United States, India, Brazil, South Africa, and other important regions.
“This project will enable greater economic cooperation, facilitate digital inclusion, and open opportunities for technological development in these regions,” the blog states.
It goes on to mention that it will help to accelerate, for example, the digital economy plans of India.
The company has been involved in developing over 20 subsea cables in the past decade. Meta also states that it has also succeeded in multiple deployments of subsea cables of 24 fiber pairs – compared to the typical 8 to 16 fiber pairs of other new systems.
Men want a better life. Far too often a promotion at work is a demotion in life. The promotion is usually an increase in exploitation far beyond the increase in fortune for a company that will use you up, burn you out, and throw you away at any time for any reason (including no reason) without warning at the drop of a hat. In terms of their lives, the promoted person often loses more than they gain. The paycheck gain isn't worth the life lost.
Bohannan dates the beginning of factory industrialism to the time of the invention of the steam engine, circa 1760. To him, the steam engine set the stage for modern mass production. My position is that the capitalism of antiquity started the dislocation of the kinship unit long before factory industrialization became a reality.
Capitalism is a economic system in which investment in and ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange of wealth is made and maintained chiefly by private individuals or corporations, as contrasted to cooperatively or state-owned means of wealth.
This strategic move aligns with the broader industry trend of vertical integration, where companies seek to control key aspects of the supply chain, from raw material extraction to finished product manufacturing.
BYD advances solid-state battery technology
In a separate development, BYD has achieved significant progress in solid-state battery technology.
At the China All-Solid-State Battery Innovation and Development Summit Forum, Sun Huajun, Chief Technology Officer of Shenzhen BYD Lithium Battery, revealed that the company has successfully produced 60Ah all-solid-state batteries from its pilot production line.
BYD plans to begin mass demonstrations and installations of solid-state batteries around 2027, with large-scale commercialization expected after 2030.
Solid-state batteries offer significant advantages over conventional lithium-ion batteries in terms of energy density, safety, and longevity. They are expected to increase the efficiency and adoption of EVs.
Fast forward to the present, where the industrial society is in full bloom. Are we now seeing the final destruction of the family unit because both husband and wife have to work to provide for themselves and their children? Without kin available as substitute caregivers, children are being outsourced to day care and sports coaches, who act as parental surrogates, while the nuclear family disintegrates.
We began this post by describing how mankind organized himself in groups because it saw the advantages of doing so. Was this purely out of necessity or are we inherently social beings as some suggest? Social networking is highly criticized today as being “against human behavior” because communications are not face to face. Perhaps we are adapting to a new kind of kinship with its own benefits – the kind that breaks the boundaries of geography.
There were two main drivers for the differentiation of the lower classes: demand for goods and services by the wealthy and demand for community-wide specialized skills resulting from growth of the population. The wealthy were interested in the goods required to support the prestige of their position – fancy clothing, exotic foods, jewelry, perfume, transportation, and tutors for their children. They also had idle time which needed to be filled by social events, travel, or sport.
The Nobility was a sub-class consisting of those individuals who were able to climb above the rest of the middle class. One might call this group “new money” describing a recent status change as opposed to the “old money” of the permanently wealthy. The nobility included those who were either intelligent or resourceful enough to rise to a position of authority or wealth. During the period of the Roman Republic, the Knights (Equites) were the nobility class. Originally cavalry men who were wealthy enough to buy horses and equipment, the knights later took the role of businessmen, working at professions deemed inferior by the patricians, but necessary to them. Cicero was a classic example. Raised as a pleb, he so impressed the elites by his legal skill and oratory, he was elevated to the nobility.
In the history of human society slavery has two types - intra-tribal and extra-tribal. Intra-tribal slavery occurs when members of a community lose their status and fall into a subservient position. An example would be someone who cannot repay his debts or commits a serious crime. Extra-tribal slavery occurs when one group is defeated in war by another and is absorbed into the victor’s population.
Often, the existence of a slave class has an adverse effect on the society. As unpaid laborers, the slaves contribute to high productivity, but they also displace the lower classes from the job market. During the Roman Republic, the accumulation of wealth among a few patricians and their use of slave labor to work their estates led to the death of the small farm and the unemployment of the small farmer. Eventually, there was an exodus of displaced persons to Rome where they became restless urban poor.
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UK students crush world record by levitating soap bubble for 84 minutes
The students let the bubble float mid air for a full 84 minutes before they popped it themselves.
Two third-year university students may have just claimed the world record for the longest-lasting soap bubble, after creating one on their own as part of an extracurricular school project and keeping it in the air for an incredible hour and 24 minutes.
England’s University of Exeter physics juniors Boden Duffy and Joe Nightingale put their bubble to the ultimate test on February 10, and made their bid for a Guinness Book of Record in their soundproof lab on campus.
For the bubbles, the duo utilized an acoustic levitation machine – a specialized instrument designed to suspend objects mid-air using sound waves by creating acoustic radiation pressure.
Acoustic levitation – which works both in normal and reduced gravity – is a phenomenon that uses the power of sound waves to make solids, liquids, and heavy gases float.
Standing at no more than a few millimeters wide, the water-and-soap droplets were flattened into a thin disk and curled into a bubble within a split second.
The team caught the rapid process – showing one device shaping the bubble as another one was keeping it levitated – with a high-speed camera capable of recording motion with exposures shorter than 1/1,000 of a second.
China’s DeepSeek has made innovations in the cost of AI and innovations like mixture of experts (MoE) and fine-grain expert segmentation which significantly improve efficiency in large language models. The DeepSeek model activates only about 37 billion parameters out of its total 600+ billion parameters during inference, compared to models like Llama that activate all parameter. This results in dramatically reduced compute costs for both training and inference.
Others have been using mixture of experts (MoE) but DeepSeek R1 aggressively scaled to the number of experts within the model.
A White House official told Reuters on Friday that President Trump’s administration might not support Intel’s US chip factories being operated by a foreign entity after Bloomberg reported that TSMC was considering taking a controlling stake in Intel’s factories at Trump’s request.
The White House official said the Trump administration supported foreign companies investing and building in the US but was “unlikely” to support a foreign firm operating Intel’s factories.
Bloomberg reported that Trump’s team raised the idea of a deal between the two firms in recent meetings with officials from TSMC who were receptive, citing a person familiar with the matter.
Former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, who was ousted last year, set sky-high expectations for Intel’s manufacturing and AI capabilities among major clients but fell short, leading to the chipmaker losing or canceling contracts, Reuters reported previously.
Intel’s shares lost about 60% of their value last year as its capital-intensive bid to bolster manufacturing – a strategy championed by Gelsinger – strained the company’s cash flow and ultimately led to it cutting about 15% of its workforce
Among the notable areas of Chinese excellence is defense and space-related tech. These are the seven categories in which the U.S. leads China in the tracker:
High-performance computing
Advanced integrated circuit design and fabrication
Natural language processing (including speech and text recognition and analysis)
Quantum computing
Vaccines and medical countermeasures
Small satellites
Space launch systems
"Western democracies are losing the global technological competition, including the race for scientific and research breakthroughs, and the ability to retain global talent — crucial ingredients that underpin the development and control of the world's most important technologies, including those that don't yet exist," according to the report.
"Australia is in the top five for nine technologies, followed closely by Italy (seven technologies), Iran (six), Japan (four) and Canada (four). Russia, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, France, Malaysia and the Netherlands are in the top five for one or two technologies. A number of other countries, including Spain and Turkey, regularly make the top 10 countries but aren't in the top five."
Russia's Lavrov: Can Be 'No Thought of' Territorial Concessions to Ukraine
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Monday there could be "no thought of" Russian territorial concessions to Ukraine at future peace talks.
Russia in September 2022 declared that it had annexed the Ukrainian regions of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia, an assertion Ukraine and many Western countries rejected as absurd and illegal.
The AI inference price improvements have been consistent but the surprise from Deepseek is that this latest push was not by OpenAI or Meta.
Google Gemini Flash 2.0 is lower cost per million tokens and gives faster answers than Deepseek.
OpenAI o3-mini has competitive pricing. It higher on input but output is twice as expensive.
Those who are building AI data centers and training models know that AI will continue to get much better and cheaper. The expectation is the demand for really good AI will increase despite cost improvements. There is energy efficiency and design choices that Deepseek has highlighted. They optimized coding by directly accessing the hardware of Nvidia GPUs. There are many companies exploring FPGA hardware encoding of logic.
NY Giants rumors are heating up as the 2025 NFL Draft is just over 2 months away. Giants trade rumors are buzzing as reports are coming out from NFL insiders that the Giants will look to trade up to the #1 pick in the NFL Draft with the Titans. ESPN recently put out an article highlighting what the cost of the trade would be and how likely the Titans are to move the pick. New York Giants Now by Chat Sports host Marshall Green shares his thoughts on the latest Giants news and rumors in this NFL Draft video!
Hegseth — one of Trump’s more controversial cabinet picks — was confirmed as secretary of defense in January.
Opponents argued that his prior experience – which included serving as a Fox News contributor but no government work – left him ill-equipped to run the nation’s military.
He also was facing allegations of sexual misconduct, claims of alcohol problems, accusations that several of his tattoos were coded white supremacy messages and alleged financial mismanagement of the veterans groups he oversaw.
But supporters cited his years of service in both the Army and as a veterans’ advocate in arguing for his confirmation.
They characterized the allegations against him as an organized effort by establishment Democrats to derail his appointment.