Ford, once a big client, now has its own internal design lab modeled by Ideo to emulate the design firm’s own process.

Meanwhile, issues that Ideo often speaks on publicly, like DEI and the environment, simply do not generate much revenue. The source estimates Ideo did all of $2 million in climate-related work in the past year.

what I cheered as an analyst was Altman’s clear articulation of the company’s priorities: lower price first, speed later. You can certainly debate whether that is the right set of priorities (I think it is, because the biggest need now is for increased experimentation, not optimization), but what I appreciated was the clarity.

The fact that Microsoft is benefiting from OpenAI is obvious; what this makes clear is that OpenAI uniquely benefits from Microsoft as well, in a way they would not from another cloud provider: because Microsoft is also a product company investing in the infrastructure to run OpenAI’s models for said products, it can afford to optimize and invest ahead of usage in a way that OpenAI alone, even with the support of another cloud provider, could not. In this case that is paying off in developers needing to pay less, or, ideally, have more latitude to discover use cases that result in them paying far more because usage is exploding.

You can, in effect, program a GPT, with language, just by talking to it. It’s easy to customize the behavior so that it fits what you want. This makes building them very accessible, and it gives agency to everyone.

Stephen Wolfram explained: For decades there’s been a dichotomy in thinking about AI between “statistical approaches” of the kind ChatGPT uses, and “symbolic approaches” that are in effect the starting point for Wolfram|Alpha. But now—thanks to the success of ChatGPT—as well as all the work we’ve done in making Wolfram|Alpha understand natural language—there’s finally the opportunity to combine these to make something much stronger than either could ever achieve on their own.

This new model somewhat alleviates the problem: now, instead of having to select the correct plug-in (and thus restart your chat), you simply go directly to the GPT in question. In other words, if I want to create a poster, I don’t enable the Canva plugin in ChatGPT, I go to Canva GPT in the sidebar. Notice that this doesn’t actually solve the problem of needing to have selected the right tool; what it does do is make the choice more apparent to the user at a more appropriate stage in the process, and that’s no small thing.

ChatGPT will seamlessly switch between text generation, image generation, and web browsing, without the user needing to change context. What is necessary for the plug-in/GPT idea to ultimately take root is for the same capabilities to be extended broadly: if my conversation involved math, ChatGPT should know to use Wolfram|Alpha on its own, without me adding the plug-in or going to a specialized GPT.

the obvious technical challenges of properly exposing capabilities and training the model to know when to invoke those capabilities are a textbook example of Professor Clayton Christensen’s theory of integration and modularity, wherein integration works better when a product isn’t good enough; it is only when a product exceeds expectation that there is room for standardization and modularity.

To summarize the argument, consumers care about things in ways that are inconsistent with whatever price you might attach to their utility, they prioritize ease-of-use, and they care about the quality of the user experience and are thus especially bothered by the seams inherent in a modular solution. This means that integrated solutions win because nothing is ever “good enough”

the fact of the matter is that a lot of people use ChatGPT for information despite the fact it has a well-documented flaw when it comes to the truth; that flaw is acceptable, because to the customer ease-of-use is worth the loss of accuracy. Or look at plug-ins: the concept as originally implemented has already been abandoned, because the complexity in the user interface was more detrimental than whatever utility might have been possible. It seems likely this pattern will continue: of course customers will say that they want accuracy and 3rd-party tools; their actions will continue to demonstrate that convenience and ease-of-use matter most.

Before we have sorted out who or what failed and why, many people have focused on restricting gun access. I will not blithely dismiss that discussion. There is simply no getting around the fact that America has a lot of guns, and it would not be intellectually honest to dispute that the mass availability of guns makes attacks like this easier to commit. Were there to be a wholesale gun confiscation in America, there would doubtless be fewer attacks like this.

The inability of society to properly monitor and manage people experiencing mental health crises is behind many problems, and is largely attributable to the well-intentioned but ultimately problematic choice to deinstitutionalize mental health care in favor of a model of community-based management.

I’m certainly not advocating for “re-institutionalization” but clearly something has to change, and the pendulum needs to swing back toward stronger interventions. Maine and the nation can design a better system that preserves humane treatment while simultaneously taking seriously the need to protect both society, and those like Card who desperately needed help and didn’t get it.

An airstrike near the Jabaliya refugee camp had just killed at least 27 people, mostly women and children, according to Hamas authorities, and dozens were wounded. When asked how he would clean their wounds, he said that he would use what little tap water they had, even if it was mixed with sewage.

When Israel severed electricity to Gaza, the desalination plants all shut down. So did the wastewater treatment stations. That has left the entire territory without running water. People buy dwindling jugs from municipal sanitation stations, scour for bottles in supermarkets or drink whatever fetid liquid may dribble out of their pipes.

It took 35-year-old Noor Swirki two hours on Saturday to find a box of six bottles she will try to stretch throughout the coming days. She took her first shower in a week Saturday, using a cup of polluted tap water and splashing it over her husband and two children before rubbing the remaining moisture on her skin. “We are here without anything, even the most basic thing,” she said, shouting over the persistent noise of crying children in the U.N. shelter in southern Khan Younis, where she sought refuge after an airstrike demolished her Gaza City apartment. “We’re worried about our safety in the bombing and now there’s this other issue of survival.”

“Deliberately targeting civilians, carrying out disproportionate attacks, and indiscriminate attacks which kill or injure civilians are war crimes. Israel has a horrific track record of committing war crimes with impunity in previous wars on Gaza. Palestinian armed groups from Gaza, must refrain from targeting civilians and using indiscriminate weapons, as they have done in the past, and most intensively in this event, acts amounting to war crimes.”

The disaster that befell Israel on the holiday of Simchat Torah is the clear responsibility of one person: Benjamin Netanyahu. The prime minister, who has prided himself on his vast political experience and irreplaceable wisdom in security matters, completely failed to identify the dangers he was consciously leading Israel into when establishing a government of annexation and dispossession, when appointing Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir to key positions, while embracing a foreign policy that openly ignored the existence and rights of Palestinians.

A prime minister indicted in three corruption cases cannot look after state affairs, as national interests will necessarily be subordinate to extricating him from a possible conviction and jail time.

“What can I add that has not already been said?” Kelly said, when asked if he wanted to weigh in on his former boss in light of recent comments made by other former Trump officials. “A person that thinks those who defend their country in uniform, or are shot down or seriously wounded in combat, or spend years being tortured as POWs are all ‘suckers’ because ‘there is nothing in it for them.’ A person that did not want to be seen in the presence of military amputees because ‘it doesn’t look good for me.’ A person who demonstrated open contempt for a Gold Star family – for all Gold Star families – on TV during the 2016 campaign, and rants that our most precious heroes who gave their lives in America’s defense are ‘losers’ and wouldn’t visit their graves in France. Ad Feedback “A person who is not truthful regarding his position on the protection of unborn life, on women, on minorities, on evangelical Christians, on Jews, on working men and women,” Kelly continued. “A person that has no idea what America stands for and has no idea what America is all about. A person who cavalierly suggests that a selfless warrior who has served his country for 40 years in peacetime and war should lose his life for treason – in expectation that someone will take action. A person who admires autocrats and murderous dictators. A person that has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution, and the rule of law. “There is nothing more that can be said,” Kelly concluded. “God help us.”

“Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes, the man he hired to create the network, saw a market that felt ignored and stereotyped when attention was paid. Like any good business — and journalism is a business — they set out to reach that market.

“Fox News had some good early ambitions. But fairly early on in its existence, the network pivoted far away from straight news and intelligent conservative commentary, and leaned heavily toward the loudmouths. And after that, it went from promoting the bloviators to platforming the outright liars. That was the moment the network completely jumped the shark and pivoted from presenting alternative viewpoints to presenting an alternate reality. This is Rupert Murdoch’s most meaningful political legacy—dutifully carrying water for Trump’s MAGA movement that banished real conservatism,” Lewis wrote. “Instead of elevating conservatism, Murdoch helped undermine conservatism as a serious philosophy, skewing instead toward tabloid conspiracy theories like birtherism and ‘rigged’ election allegations.”

“Wednesday night, we witnessed over two hours of fear-mongering and gaslighting, of cynicism and whataboutism, of canned talking points and memorized one-liners,” Hasan said. Despite the “pious-sounding, high-minded” tone struck by many candidates, their responses lacked substance and underscored their lack of seriousness in the race. “Forget a vision for America. These people have no vision for the Republican Party — a party that lost the House in 2018, lost the presidency and the Senate in 2020 and only narrowly regained the House in 2022,” he added. “It was another reminder that the Republican Party of the United States is not a normal center-right or conservative party… These are political pygmies, trailing a disgraced front-runner who is facing 91 criminal counts in four different jurisdictions.”

The broader issue is that the video industry finally seems to be facing what happened to the print and music industry before them: the Internet comes bearing gifts like infinite capacity and free distribution, but those gifts are a poisoned chalice for industries predicated on scarcity. When anyone could publish text, most text-based businesses went from massive profitability to terminal decline; when anyone could distribute music the music industry could only be saved by tech companies like Spotify helping them sell convenience in place of plastic discs.

thanks to COVID a lot of people fell out of the habit of going to the movie theater, and it appears around 25% of the audience permanently found something better to do with their time; that same reality applies to TV. Just as newspapers once thought the Internet was a boon because it increased their addressable market, only to find out that it also drastically increased competition for readers’ attention, Hollywood has to face the reality that the ability to make far more shows extends not only to studios but also to literally anyone.