Still, there is a paradox in the label, because the high point of the Polis was also the beginning of the end. The accomplishments of the Athenians made them arrogant and they abused their partners in the Delan League. Hubris had them believing they could defeat the Spartan Army so they launched the Peloponnesean War in 431 B.C, only to see their political system destroyed after twenty seven years of conflict.
With Athens weak, Sparta felt it had to control Greece to protect itself but did not have the skill. She was engaged in a series of adventures during the thirty year period after the Peloponnesian War until Leuctra, when her military might was destroyed for forever. Thebes stepped in and spent nine years (371-62) trying to control northern Greece, but following the Battle of Mantinea its hegemony came to an end. Greece was now vulnerable as a divided people and that division would leave it ripe for the taking by an autocrat.
In 52 B.C. Julius Caesar, near the end of his war against Gaul, had one great enemy left – the charismatic Arvernian, Vercingetorix. Expelled from Gergovia, for being too rash, Vercingetorix raised an army on his own, and assumed the role of commander. His strategy against Caesar was simple -- use superior cavalry to harass the Romans and drive them away. Caesar, understanding his own weakness, compensated by recruiting Germans to strengthen his own cavalry units. After a series of reversals, Vercingetorix was forced to retreat to the walled city of Alesia with his army of 80,000.
No obstacle would deter Caesar, however. He knew direct attack was impossible because of the hilltop position of the city, so he planned a siege to starve the Gauls into surrender. Caesar had 12 legions with auxiliaries ready to bring to bear on the enemy. It was mid-summer, 52 B.C.
"A decade from now, we will look back and recognize how quixotic it was for the U.S. government of the mid-2020s to attempt to limit the ability of people in 150 countries to perform fast multiplications," wrote John Villasenor, a nonresident senior fellow at Brookings and professor of electrical engineering, law, public policy, and management at UCLA.
Before the circumvallation could be completed, however, Vercingetorix sent a party of tribal leaders through the breech on a mission to recruit allies and bring them back as reinforcements. We move on to chapter LXXII.
In any technology war, questions about what countermove the U.S. should make next inevitably run up against the awareness that any notion of controlling innovation through measures like restricting exports is not guaranteed to work – and may even backfire. Among the risks cited by Brookings: spurring the development of a global AI ecosystem anchored outside the U.S.; pushing more nations into building stronger technology ties with China; and allowing non-U.S. makers of advanced chips to grow global market share at the expense of the U.S. companies behind the original innovations.
“Caesar, on learning these proceedings from the deserters and captives, adopted the following system of fortification; he dug a trench twenty feet deep, with perpendicular sides, in such a manner that the base of this trench should extend so far as the edges were apart at the top. He raised all his other works at a distance of four hundred feet from that ditch; [he did] that with this intention, lest (since he necessarily embraced so extensive an area, and the whole works could not be easily surrounded by a line of soldiers) a large number of the enemy should suddenly, or by night, sally against the fortifications; or lest they should by day cast weapons against our men while occupied with the works.
Having left this interval, he drew two trenches fifteen feet broad, and of the same depth; the innermost of them, being in low and level ground, he filled with water conveyed from the river. Behind these he raised a rampart and wall twelve feet high: to this he added a parapet and battlements, with large stakes cut like stags' horns, projecting from the junction of the parapet and battlements, to prevent the enemy from scaling it, and surrounded the entire work with turrets, which were eighty feet distant from one another.”
These stakes being sunk into this trench, and fastened firmly at the bottom, to prevent the possibility of their being torn up, had their branches only projecting from the ground. There were five rows in connection with, and intersecting each other; and whoever entered within them were likely to impale themselves on very sharp stakes. The soldiers called these "cippi." Before these, which were arranged in oblique rows in the form of a quincunx, pits three feet deep were dug, which gradually diminished in depth to the bottom. In these pits tapering stakes, of the thickness of a man's thigh, sharpened at the top and hardened in the fire, were sunk in such a manner as to project from the ground not more than four inches; at the same time for the purpose of giving them strength and stability, they were each filled with trampled clay to the height of one foot from the bottom:
The tech sector was quick to do its outreach to the new administration, with several major CEOs at the inauguration, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang meeting with President Trump at the White House in recent weeks for a discussion that included chip restrictions to China.
Trump also called Deepseek a "wake-up call for our industries that we need to be laser-focused on competing to win."
Particularly relevant to Deepseek in the AI diffusion rules are controls surrounding closed AI model weights, essential to the training process that develops how AI systems think and respond to queries.
"In part, DeepSeek was able to get around the speed limit imposed on chips allowed for sale to China in 2022, but banned in 2023, when the U.S. realized that the limit imposed was the wrong one," said Chorzempa.
And I quote Toynbee’s description of the villages and clans:
“Thus, about 700 B.C., there were at Sparta, over and above the three privileged clan groups, five locally organized communities, embracing both the clansmen and a large unprivileged population besides. These five were: Pitane, the seat of the Agiadai-clan and their clients (containing the burial place of the Agiad phratria: N.W. of the agora: Limnai, the seat of the Eurypontidai clan and their clients (tombs of the Eurypontid phratria, on the street which seems to have branched N.E. from the agora) on the low lands bordering the Eurotas-bed: Kynosoura, the long ridge S. of Limnai, occupied by the community from Lakedaimon: and Mesoa, between these three, and S. of the agora, occupied by the Minyai from Therai and their clients. Lastly, Amyklai, two miles S. of the Tiasa (Magoula) river, left in possession of its old inhabitants.”
"DeepSeeks seems to have optimized heavily with clever software and hardware engineering to sort of neuter the speed limit meant to hold those chips back," Chorzempa said.
AI rivals will continue to do more with less
There are other aspects to the evolving AI race which show gaps that are narrowing for other reasons.
"The story is really about the gap being closed between open source and closed source models," said Alexandra Mousavizadeh, CEO of Evident, an AI consulting firm. "Now the open source models are getting much closer to the capabilities of the closed ones, and we see the price driving down to zero," Mousavizadeh said.
Pyrrhus was born in 319 B.C, the son of Aeacides, King of Epirus, and Phthia, second cousin to Alexander the Great. Aeacides was deposed in 317 B.C. and his family took refuge with Glaukias, King of the Taurantians. Aeacides died in 313 B.C. so Pyrrhus, as heir, was placed his father’s throne by Glaukias in 306 at the age of 13. Deposed again in 302 B.C, Pyrrhus went on to serve under his brother-in-law Demetrius Poliorcetes, son of Antigonus, satrap of Alexander. In 298 B.C. he was sent to Egypt as a hostage after a treaty was concluded between Ptolemy and Demetrius.
"You can't really gatekeep," Mousavizadeh said, noting that there is lots of sharing that occurs in the open source environment, "regardless of governmental policy."
If DeepSeek's success leads to export controls on advanced chips intended to slow Chinese AI efforts that become even stricter, it should also be clear they are no silver bullet. "They're not a way to duck the competition between the US and China," wrote Dario Amodei, CEO of gen AI startup Anthropic, in a blog post last week. "In the end, AI companies in the US and other democracies must have better models than those in China if we want to prevail. But we shouldn't hand the Chinese Communist Party technological advantages when we don't have to."
His issue isn't with the AI researchers in China, but the government to which they are ultimately beholden. "In interviews they've done, they seem like smart, curious researchers who just want to make useful technology," Amodei wrote about DeepSeek. "But they're beholden to an authoritarian government that has committed human rights violations, has behaved aggressively on the world stage, and will be far more unfettered in these actions if they're able to match the US in AI."
"The second-mover can move very quickly, especially if we've already done the innovation," Karp said, describing DeepSeek as derivative of U.S. models with "improvements at the margins."
He expects a "huge policy discussion" to make sure innovations are not exported, but Karp added that in the end, "the real advantage goes to the first mover as long as the first mover is running hard. ... We have the lead, we have to focus on making sure we keep it. Our adversaries are gonna copy anything they can."
In its earnings report last week, Affirm reported better-than-expected quarterly revenue and posted a surprise profit from the holiday period. The stock rocketed 22% after the announcement.
Affirm's active consumer base grew 23% year over year to 21 million users. The Affirm Card now has 1.7 million active users, up more than 136% from the year-ago quarter. Card volume has more than doubled.
In June, Affirm and Apple announced plans for U.S. Apple Pay users on iPhones and iPads to be able to apply for loans directly through Affirm.
But now Pyrrhus had become bored with Italy and looked to move on once again. As Plutarch tells it, “there came to him from Sicily men who offered to put into his hands the cities of Agrigentum, Syracuse, and Leontini, and begged him to help them to drive out the Carthaginians and rid the island of its tyrants; and from Greece, men with tidings that Ptolemy Ceraunus with his army had perished at the hands of the Gauls, and that now was the time of all times for him to be in Macedonia, where they wanted a king.”
Pyrrhus decided Sicily would be more interesting because it could serve as a gateway to Africa, so he proceeded there.
Musk has his own AI company called xAI which is behind the chatbot Grok.
CNBC has reached out to Toberoff, Tesla and X for comment.
'I'm not the one who tweeted funding secured'
Altman also dismissed a suggestion from Musk earlier this year that OpenAI lacks the money to contribute to President Donald Trump's multi-billion-dollar "Stargate" joint venture aimed at investing in U.S. computing infrastructure needed to train and run frontier AI models.
Named king, he sought to rid the island of Carthaginians, but his popularity quickly declined after he began to act like a tyrant. The Sicilians sought aid to expel him, but before they took action, Pyrrhus sailed back to Tarentum. The Romans used two consular armies to push him out of Italy in 275 B.C. and he was finished with Rome for good. Returning to Epirus, Pyrrhus sought war with Antigonus over Macedonia. After a few victories, he became restless once again.
Cleonymus, pretender to the Spartan throne asked Pyrrhus to back his claim with an army so he headed south to Sparta in 272 B.C. He was hesitant to destroy the city with no walls and delays caused by indecision allowed the Spartans to prepare a defense. The attack was unsuccessful.
Plutarch tells us what happened next. “He could accomplish nothing, and met with fresh losses, he went away, and fell to ravaging the country, purposing to spend the winter there. But Fate was not to be escaped. For at Argos there was a feud between Aristeas and Aristippus; and since Aristippus was thought to enjoy the friendship of Antigonus, Aristeas hastened to invite Pyrrhus into Argos. Pyrrhus was away entertaining one hope after another, and since he made one success but the starting point for a new one, while he was determined to make good each disaster by a fresh undertaking, he suffered neither defeat nor victory to put a limit to his troubling himself and troubling others.”
Pyrrhus took his army to Argos and fought a difficult battle within the city walls. His army took the market place but the fighting was treacherous because the streets were too narrow for elephants and he did not know the city. During a street battle, Pyrrhus was injured by a roof tile thrown down on him by an old woman and, before he could regain his senses, was beheaded by an adversary. The head was sent to Antigonus who wept at the death of such a renowned family member.
Von der Leyen said Europe needed to focus on a unique approach to AI development, including a focus on science and technology, adoption in complex applications using its wealth of industrial manufacturing data, and bringing together talent from different countries and sectors.
She added that the EU wants to ensure every innovative European company has the ability to access the AI power it needs through supercomputers, and to replicate the collaborative success of CERN, the world's largest particle physics laboratory based in Geneva, Switzerland.
Positive uses of AI will include boosting competitiveness, protecting security, shoring up public health and democratizing access to information, she explained.
So the world lost an enigma – a man of many talents as a strategist and military leader, an aristocrat who was comfortable as king, but also a man who bored easily and gave up what he had won more often than not. When politics made his conquests stale, Pyrrhus invariably moved on to the next battle hoping for a better outcome.
Plutarch states “…Pyrrhus would seem to have been always and continually studying and meditating upon this one subject (warfare), regarding it as the most kingly branch of learning; the rest he regarded as mere accomplishments and held them in no esteem. For instance, we are told that when he was asked at a drinking-party whether he thought Python or Caphisias the better flute-player, he replied that Polysperchon was a good general, implying that it became a king to investigate and understand such matters only.
Vance also took aim at Europe on Tuesday, saying that officials in the continent have become too heavily focused on regulating AI and adding guardrails to the tech rather than embracing the opportunity and its growth potential.
Touting America as "the leader" in AI, Vance said that the U.S. wants its European allies to foster a more favorable attitude to the technology than it has done to date.
"Just because we're the leader doesn't mean we want to or need to go it alone, of course," Vance said, adding that "America wants to partner with all of you, and we want to embark on the AI revolution before us with the spirit of openness and collaboration."
A list of some of the biggest AI funding rounds in 2024 speaks to the different areas that are attracting attention. Anthropic (large language models, generative AI), Waymo (self-driving), Anduril (defense), xAI (applications), Databricks (processing and managing data, especially AI data) and Vantage (data centers and infrastructure) were among the top-ten biggest fundraisers of 2024.
Although OpenAI feels like the poster child for AI right now, it did not raise the most money last year. That spot was taken by Databricks, which raised $10 billion, compared to OpenAI’s $6.6 billion.
With the advent of the phalanx, arms buried with the dead went out of favor because they lost their value as a status symbol. The new middle class could afford the weapons that would make them equals.
The Dealroom report was commissioned to coincide with a week of AI events in Paris around the French government’s AI Action Summit. Part of the event’s agenda is focused on the question of how to champion more equitable AI development across more markets, beyond the U.S.
For those who believe AI companies are under-supported outside of that market, Dealroom’s figures lay bare how that works. A full 42% ($80.7 billion) of venture capital raised in the U.S. went to AI startups last year, compared to just 25% ($12.8 billion) in Europe, and 18% across the rest of the world. China was the standout last year with $7.6 billion invested.
My subject matter derives from a combination of influences, including efforts to broadly cover the subject matter, finding the truth (and excitement) in history, and reflecting on topics that stimulate me. But my readers matter too, because a major goal of this blog is to stimulate interest in ancient history, so if the posts are not relevant and interesting, I will have failed.
Looking at the 279 posts, I see about ¼ which have been read in high volume, ½ in moderate volume, and ¼ largely ignored. In some cases the former and the latter make me scratch my head at the number of reads, but I won’t question why people read a particular post in high volume. I'm very interested, however, in determining why good posts have not been read.
As for VC firms, Dealroom found that Antler made the most investments in the field last year, with a16z, General Catalyst, Sequoia and Khosla Ventures rounding out the top five.
Insurance co's stand to lose billions from disasters like the LA fires; Comulate raises $20M to build tech to help them work more smoothly
Unimaginable disasters like the fires in Los Angeles with their hundreds of billions of dollars in destruction put a huge focus on the role the insurance industry plays in the process of rebuilding. Those events will also lead to major financial losses at the insurance companies themselves. And longer term, all of this will put a spotlight on how well insurance companies are run behind the scenes. Today, a startup that’s building technology for that purpose is announcing a funding round on the back of fast growth.
Comulate company had previously only raised $5 million from investors that included Spark Capital. It’s not disclosing valuation.
Jordan Katz, the CEO who co-founded the company with CTO Michael Mattheakis, said in an interview that the pair did not set out to build a startup targeting the insurance industry.
Initially, the two — who respectively worked at Asana and Brex — wanted to build tools for people like themselves. “SaaS for SaaS,” said Katz. There was one small problem, however.
For example, in the case of billing and revenue management, a lot of the tooling that companies have been using has been generic enterprise at best, and at worst populated with a lot of manual processes that are error-prone and time-consuming. (Workday, the co-lead investor here, is a prime example of that wide-platform approach: Comulate’s narrow focus was one reason why Workday invested.)
The problem that Comulate is targeting is a classic one in enterprise IT: typically, a process is largely ignored and accepted for what it is, until something critical happens where systems are stretched and they break under pressure.
While the startup does not bill itself as an “AI” startup, it does lean into the idea that “every company is now an AI company.” Comulate uses machine learning to speed up processes and AI tooling in areas like analytics. The company claims that it has saved customers some 260,000 hours in work as a result.
Caesar’s plan was to hurry to Domitius who was shadowing Scipio in Thessaly. Pompey read Caesar’s mind and began a march to Scipio. Domitius foraging west ran into advance scouts of Pompey who bragged Pompey’s plan to him. Sensing danger to himself, Domitius diverted south to join Caesar at Aeginium.
Pompey had spread the lie of a total victory at Dyrrhachium, endangering Caesar’s march east, because cities would not open their gates to him. Gomphi resisted and sent word to Scipio saying they were strong enough to hold out until his rescue, but Caesar took the city in a 24 hour siege and plundered it as an example. The next town, Metropolis wisely embraced Caesar as a friend and opened its doors to him.
!summarize #matthewstafford #nygiants #nfl
Still, there is a paradox in the label, because the high point of the Polis was also the beginning of the end. The accomplishments of the Athenians made them arrogant and they abused their partners in the Delan League. Hubris had them believing they could defeat the Spartan Army so they launched the Peloponnesean War in 431 B.C, only to see their political system destroyed after twenty seven years of conflict.
With Athens weak, Sparta felt it had to control Greece to protect itself but did not have the skill. She was engaged in a series of adventures during the thirty year period after the Peloponnesian War until Leuctra, when her military might was destroyed for forever. Thebes stepped in and spent nine years (371-62) trying to control northern Greece, but following the Battle of Mantinea its hegemony came to an end. Greece was now vulnerable as a divided people and that division would leave it ripe for the taking by an autocrat.
!summarize #qualcomm #glennbeck
In 52 B.C. Julius Caesar, near the end of his war against Gaul, had one great enemy left – the charismatic Arvernian, Vercingetorix. Expelled from Gergovia, for being too rash, Vercingetorix raised an army on his own, and assumed the role of commander. His strategy against Caesar was simple -- use superior cavalry to harass the Romans and drive them away. Caesar, understanding his own weakness, compensated by recruiting Germans to strengthen his own cavalry units. After a series of reversals, Vercingetorix was forced to retreat to the walled city of Alesia with his army of 80,000.
No obstacle would deter Caesar, however. He knew direct attack was impossible because of the hilltop position of the city, so he planned a siege to starve the Gauls into surrender. Caesar had 12 legions with auxiliaries ready to bring to bear on the enemy. It was mid-summer, 52 B.C.
"A decade from now, we will look back and recognize how quixotic it was for the U.S. government of the mid-2020s to attempt to limit the ability of people in 150 countries to perform fast multiplications," wrote John Villasenor, a nonresident senior fellow at Brookings and professor of electrical engineering, law, public policy, and management at UCLA.
!summarize #automotive #global #trade
Before the circumvallation could be completed, however, Vercingetorix sent a party of tribal leaders through the breech on a mission to recruit allies and bring them back as reinforcements. We move on to chapter LXXII.
In any technology war, questions about what countermove the U.S. should make next inevitably run up against the awareness that any notion of controlling innovation through measures like restricting exports is not guaranteed to work – and may even backfire. Among the risks cited by Brookings: spurring the development of a global AI ecosystem anchored outside the U.S.; pushing more nations into building stronger technology ties with China; and allowing non-U.S. makers of advanced chips to grow global market share at the expense of the U.S. companies behind the original innovations.
“Caesar, on learning these proceedings from the deserters and captives, adopted the following system of fortification; he dug a trench twenty feet deep, with perpendicular sides, in such a manner that the base of this trench should extend so far as the edges were apart at the top. He raised all his other works at a distance of four hundred feet from that ditch; [he did] that with this intention, lest (since he necessarily embraced so extensive an area, and the whole works could not be easily surrounded by a line of soldiers) a large number of the enemy should suddenly, or by night, sally against the fortifications; or lest they should by day cast weapons against our men while occupied with the works.
Having left this interval, he drew two trenches fifteen feet broad, and of the same depth; the innermost of them, being in low and level ground, he filled with water conveyed from the river. Behind these he raised a rampart and wall twelve feet high: to this he added a parapet and battlements, with large stakes cut like stags' horns, projecting from the junction of the parapet and battlements, to prevent the enemy from scaling it, and surrounded the entire work with turrets, which were eighty feet distant from one another.”
!summarize #unitedstates #population
These stakes being sunk into this trench, and fastened firmly at the bottom, to prevent the possibility of their being torn up, had their branches only projecting from the ground. There were five rows in connection with, and intersecting each other; and whoever entered within them were likely to impale themselves on very sharp stakes. The soldiers called these "cippi." Before these, which were arranged in oblique rows in the form of a quincunx, pits three feet deep were dug, which gradually diminished in depth to the bottom. In these pits tapering stakes, of the thickness of a man's thigh, sharpened at the top and hardened in the fire, were sunk in such a manner as to project from the ground not more than four inches; at the same time for the purpose of giving them strength and stability, they were each filled with trampled clay to the height of one foot from the bottom:
!summarize #artlaffler #waste #government #economy
!summarize #nyjets #aaronrodgers #nfl
The tech sector was quick to do its outreach to the new administration, with several major CEOs at the inauguration, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang meeting with President Trump at the White House in recent weeks for a discussion that included chip restrictions to China.
Trump also called Deepseek a "wake-up call for our industries that we need to be laser-focused on competing to win."
Particularly relevant to Deepseek in the AI diffusion rules are controls surrounding closed AI model weights, essential to the training process that develops how AI systems think and respond to queries.
"In part, DeepSeek was able to get around the speed limit imposed on chips allowed for sale to China in 2022, but banned in 2023, when the U.S. realized that the limit imposed was the wrong one," said Chorzempa.
!summarize #howardmarks #investing #emotions #money
And I quote Toynbee’s description of the villages and clans:
“Thus, about 700 B.C., there were at Sparta, over and above the three privileged clan groups, five locally organized communities, embracing both the clansmen and a large unprivileged population besides. These five were: Pitane, the seat of the Agiadai-clan and their clients (containing the burial place of the Agiad phratria: N.W. of the agora: Limnai, the seat of the Eurypontidai clan and their clients (tombs of the Eurypontid phratria, on the street which seems to have branched N.E. from the agora) on the low lands bordering the Eurotas-bed: Kynosoura, the long ridge S. of Limnai, occupied by the community from Lakedaimon: and Mesoa, between these three, and S. of the agora, occupied by the Minyai from Therai and their clients. Lastly, Amyklai, two miles S. of the Tiasa (Magoula) river, left in possession of its old inhabitants.”
"DeepSeeks seems to have optimized heavily with clever software and hardware engineering to sort of neuter the speed limit meant to hold those chips back," Chorzempa said.
AI rivals will continue to do more with less
There are other aspects to the evolving AI race which show gaps that are narrowing for other reasons.
"The story is really about the gap being closed between open source and closed source models," said Alexandra Mousavizadeh, CEO of Evident, an AI consulting firm. "Now the open source models are getting much closer to the capabilities of the closed ones, and we see the price driving down to zero," Mousavizadeh said.
Pyrrhus was born in 319 B.C, the son of Aeacides, King of Epirus, and Phthia, second cousin to Alexander the Great. Aeacides was deposed in 317 B.C. and his family took refuge with Glaukias, King of the Taurantians. Aeacides died in 313 B.C. so Pyrrhus, as heir, was placed his father’s throne by Glaukias in 306 at the age of 13. Deposed again in 302 B.C, Pyrrhus went on to serve under his brother-in-law Demetrius Poliorcetes, son of Antigonus, satrap of Alexander. In 298 B.C. he was sent to Egypt as a hostage after a treaty was concluded between Ptolemy and Demetrius.
!summarize #amc #stock #price #trade #investing
"You can't really gatekeep," Mousavizadeh said, noting that there is lots of sharing that occurs in the open source environment, "regardless of governmental policy."
If DeepSeek's success leads to export controls on advanced chips intended to slow Chinese AI efforts that become even stricter, it should also be clear they are no silver bullet. "They're not a way to duck the competition between the US and China," wrote Dario Amodei, CEO of gen AI startup Anthropic, in a blog post last week. "In the end, AI companies in the US and other democracies must have better models than those in China if we want to prevail. But we shouldn't hand the Chinese Communist Party technological advantages when we don't have to."
!summarize #payroll #economy
His issue isn't with the AI researchers in China, but the government to which they are ultimately beholden. "In interviews they've done, they seem like smart, curious researchers who just want to make useful technology," Amodei wrote about DeepSeek. "But they're beholden to an authoritarian government that has committed human rights violations, has behaved aggressively on the world stage, and will be far more unfettered in these actions if they're able to match the US in AI."
"The second-mover can move very quickly, especially if we've already done the innovation," Karp said, describing DeepSeek as derivative of U.S. models with "improvements at the margins."
He expects a "huge policy discussion" to make sure innovations are not exported, but Karp added that in the end, "the real advantage goes to the first mover as long as the first mover is running hard. ... We have the lead, we have to focus on making sure we keep it. Our adversaries are gonna copy anything they can."
In its earnings report last week, Affirm reported better-than-expected quarterly revenue and posted a surprise profit from the holiday period. The stock rocketed 22% after the announcement.
Affirm's active consumer base grew 23% year over year to 21 million users. The Affirm Card now has 1.7 million active users, up more than 136% from the year-ago quarter. Card volume has more than doubled.
In June, Affirm and Apple announced plans for U.S. Apple Pay users on iPhones and iPads to be able to apply for loans directly through Affirm.
But now Pyrrhus had become bored with Italy and looked to move on once again. As Plutarch tells it, “there came to him from Sicily men who offered to put into his hands the cities of Agrigentum, Syracuse, and Leontini, and begged him to help them to drive out the Carthaginians and rid the island of its tyrants; and from Greece, men with tidings that Ptolemy Ceraunus with his army had perished at the hands of the Gauls, and that now was the time of all times for him to be in Macedonia, where they wanted a king.”
Pyrrhus decided Sicily would be more interesting because it could serve as a gateway to Africa, so he proceeded there.
Musk has his own AI company called xAI which is behind the chatbot Grok.
CNBC has reached out to Toberoff, Tesla and X for comment.
'I'm not the one who tweeted funding secured'
Altman also dismissed a suggestion from Musk earlier this year that OpenAI lacks the money to contribute to President Donald Trump's multi-billion-dollar "Stargate" joint venture aimed at investing in U.S. computing infrastructure needed to train and run frontier AI models.
Named king, he sought to rid the island of Carthaginians, but his popularity quickly declined after he began to act like a tyrant. The Sicilians sought aid to expel him, but before they took action, Pyrrhus sailed back to Tarentum. The Romans used two consular armies to push him out of Italy in 275 B.C. and he was finished with Rome for good. Returning to Epirus, Pyrrhus sought war with Antigonus over Macedonia. After a few victories, he became restless once again.
Cleonymus, pretender to the Spartan throne asked Pyrrhus to back his claim with an army so he headed south to Sparta in 272 B.C. He was hesitant to destroy the city with no walls and delays caused by indecision allowed the Spartans to prepare a defense. The attack was unsuccessful.
Plutarch tells us what happened next. “He could accomplish nothing, and met with fresh losses, he went away, and fell to ravaging the country, purposing to spend the winter there. But Fate was not to be escaped. For at Argos there was a feud between Aristeas and Aristippus; and since Aristippus was thought to enjoy the friendship of Antigonus, Aristeas hastened to invite Pyrrhus into Argos. Pyrrhus was away entertaining one hope after another, and since he made one success but the starting point for a new one, while he was determined to make good each disaster by a fresh undertaking, he suffered neither defeat nor victory to put a limit to his troubling himself and troubling others.”
Pyrrhus took his army to Argos and fought a difficult battle within the city walls. His army took the market place but the fighting was treacherous because the streets were too narrow for elephants and he did not know the city. During a street battle, Pyrrhus was injured by a roof tile thrown down on him by an old woman and, before he could regain his senses, was beheaded by an adversary. The head was sent to Antigonus who wept at the death of such a renowned family member.
Von der Leyen said Europe needed to focus on a unique approach to AI development, including a focus on science and technology, adoption in complex applications using its wealth of industrial manufacturing data, and bringing together talent from different countries and sectors.
She added that the EU wants to ensure every innovative European company has the ability to access the AI power it needs through supercomputers, and to replicate the collaborative success of CERN, the world's largest particle physics laboratory based in Geneva, Switzerland.
Positive uses of AI will include boosting competitiveness, protecting security, shoring up public health and democratizing access to information, she explained.
So the world lost an enigma – a man of many talents as a strategist and military leader, an aristocrat who was comfortable as king, but also a man who bored easily and gave up what he had won more often than not. When politics made his conquests stale, Pyrrhus invariably moved on to the next battle hoping for a better outcome.
Plutarch states “…Pyrrhus would seem to have been always and continually studying and meditating upon this one subject (warfare), regarding it as the most kingly branch of learning; the rest he regarded as mere accomplishments and held them in no esteem. For instance, we are told that when he was asked at a drinking-party whether he thought Python or Caphisias the better flute-player, he replied that Polysperchon was a good general, implying that it became a king to investigate and understand such matters only.
!summarize #china #jimfarley #automotive #battery #ford
Vance also took aim at Europe on Tuesday, saying that officials in the continent have become too heavily focused on regulating AI and adding guardrails to the tech rather than embracing the opportunity and its growth potential.
Touting America as "the leader" in AI, Vance said that the U.S. wants its European allies to foster a more favorable attitude to the technology than it has done to date.
"Just because we're the leader doesn't mean we want to or need to go it alone, of course," Vance said, adding that "America wants to partner with all of you, and we want to embark on the AI revolution before us with the spirit of openness and collaboration."
!summarize #elonmusk #rondesantis #doge #government
!summarize #tesla #stock #price #Robotaxi
A list of some of the biggest AI funding rounds in 2024 speaks to the different areas that are attracting attention. Anthropic (large language models, generative AI), Waymo (self-driving), Anduril (defense), xAI (applications), Databricks (processing and managing data, especially AI data) and Vantage (data centers and infrastructure) were among the top-ten biggest fundraisers of 2024.
Although OpenAI feels like the poster child for AI right now, it did not raise the most money last year. That spot was taken by Databricks, which raised $10 billion, compared to OpenAI’s $6.6 billion.
With the advent of the phalanx, arms buried with the dead went out of favor because they lost their value as a status symbol. The new middle class could afford the weapons that would make them equals.
The Dealroom report was commissioned to coincide with a week of AI events in Paris around the French government’s AI Action Summit. Part of the event’s agenda is focused on the question of how to champion more equitable AI development across more markets, beyond the U.S.
For those who believe AI companies are under-supported outside of that market, Dealroom’s figures lay bare how that works. A full 42% ($80.7 billion) of venture capital raised in the U.S. went to AI startups last year, compared to just 25% ($12.8 billion) in Europe, and 18% across the rest of the world. China was the standout last year with $7.6 billion invested.
My subject matter derives from a combination of influences, including efforts to broadly cover the subject matter, finding the truth (and excitement) in history, and reflecting on topics that stimulate me. But my readers matter too, because a major goal of this blog is to stimulate interest in ancient history, so if the posts are not relevant and interesting, I will have failed.
Looking at the 279 posts, I see about ¼ which have been read in high volume, ½ in moderate volume, and ¼ largely ignored. In some cases the former and the latter make me scratch my head at the number of reads, but I won’t question why people read a particular post in high volume. I'm very interested, however, in determining why good posts have not been read.
As for VC firms, Dealroom found that Antler made the most investments in the field last year, with a16z, General Catalyst, Sequoia and Khosla Ventures rounding out the top five.
Insurance co's stand to lose billions from disasters like the LA fires; Comulate raises $20M to build tech to help them work more smoothly
Unimaginable disasters like the fires in Los Angeles with their hundreds of billions of dollars in destruction put a huge focus on the role the insurance industry plays in the process of rebuilding. Those events will also lead to major financial losses at the insurance companies themselves. And longer term, all of this will put a spotlight on how well insurance companies are run behind the scenes. Today, a startup that’s building technology for that purpose is announcing a funding round on the back of fast growth.
Comulate company had previously only raised $5 million from investors that included Spark Capital. It’s not disclosing valuation.
Jordan Katz, the CEO who co-founded the company with CTO Michael Mattheakis, said in an interview that the pair did not set out to build a startup targeting the insurance industry.
Initially, the two — who respectively worked at Asana and Brex — wanted to build tools for people like themselves. “SaaS for SaaS,” said Katz. There was one small problem, however.
!summarize #jdvance #ai #regulation
For example, in the case of billing and revenue management, a lot of the tooling that companies have been using has been generic enterprise at best, and at worst populated with a lot of manual processes that are error-prone and time-consuming. (Workday, the co-lead investor here, is a prime example of that wide-platform approach: Comulate’s narrow focus was one reason why Workday invested.)
The problem that Comulate is targeting is a classic one in enterprise IT: typically, a process is largely ignored and accepted for what it is, until something critical happens where systems are stretched and they break under pressure.
While the startup does not bill itself as an “AI” startup, it does lean into the idea that “every company is now an AI company.” Comulate uses machine learning to speed up processes and AI tooling in areas like analytics. The company claims that it has saved customers some 260,000 hours in work as a result.
!summarize #ai #roadmap #technology
Caesar’s plan was to hurry to Domitius who was shadowing Scipio in Thessaly. Pompey read Caesar’s mind and began a march to Scipio. Domitius foraging west ran into advance scouts of Pompey who bragged Pompey’s plan to him. Sensing danger to himself, Domitius diverted south to join Caesar at Aeginium.
Pompey had spread the lie of a total victory at Dyrrhachium, endangering Caesar’s march east, because cities would not open their gates to him. Gomphi resisted and sent word to Scipio saying they were strong enough to hold out until his rescue, but Caesar took the city in a 24 hour siege and plundered it as an example. The next town, Metropolis wisely embraced Caesar as a friend and opened its doors to him.