L&G hikes bonus cap as boardroom pay soars
Legal & General plans to raise what boss Antonio Simoes could make to £8.3 million - nearly triple what he took home last year when some bonus targets were missed.
The murder that shocked America: How a seven-year-old girl was abducted and brutally murdered by driver delivering her Barbie Christmas present… and the chilling final image of her alive
More than three years later, as her killer faces the possibility of the death penalty, disturbing testimonies are exposing a calculated 'web of lies' behind Athena's death.
Missing nuclear official becomes TENTH person tied to dark pattern surrounding US secrets
Another key official who reportedly had access to America's nuclear secrets has gone missing, as a disturbing web of deaths and disappearances grows.
Researchers Build a Talking Robot Guide Dog to Help Visually Impaired People Navigate
"Only about 2% of visually impaired people in the United States use guide dogs," notes StudyFinds.com, "partly because breeding and training takes years and fewer than half the dogs in training actually graduate."
But someday there could be another option:
What if you could ask your guide dog where the nearest water fountain is and hear it answer back, complete with directions and an estimated walk time? Researchers at the State University of New York at Binghamton have built a robotic guide dog that can do something close to that, holding simple back-and-forth conversations about navigation with its handler, describing the surrounding environment, and talking through route options as it leads the way... Their work, presented at the 40th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pairs a large language model, a system that understands and generates language, with a navigation planner. Together, the two let the robot understand open-ended requests, suggest destinations, and adjust plans on the fly.
Thanks to Slashdot reader fjo3 for sharing the article.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Horror at NYC's Grand Central as machete-wielding man shouting that he's 'Lucifer' is shot dead by cops after stabbing three elderly commuters
At least three people were injured in a subway station stabbing spree inside tourist-heavy Grand Central Terminal in Midtown Manhattan.
Christopher Masterson's Scientology roots: How his famous family's religion formed a key part in Danny's rape case - as star makes career comeback with Malcolm In The Middle reboot
In the Noughties, brothers Christopher and Danny Masterson dominated the TV scene.
Evan Peters was 'traumatised' by American Horror Story and Jeffrey Dahmer roles that sucked him into 'darkness' and forced a career break - as he makes a comeback after taking time out for his mental health
Known for immersing himself in some of TV's most disturbing characters, Evan Peters has spent over a decade building a career in darkness.
Celebrities you didn't know were related: Hollywood's unexpected familial connections from Madonna and Pope Leo XIV to Brad Pitt and Barack Obama
From Hollywood heavyweights, global leaders, pop stars and even members of royalty, many of the biggest names have been found to be secretly related.
What Alessandra Ambrosio eats in a day to maintain her incredible figure as the Victoria's Secret vet turns 45
She is a renowned Brazilian supermodel who shot to fame in the early 2000s.
Russia 'violates Putin-declared ceasefire' with wave of drone strikes on Ukraine - despite Moscow and Kyiv both signalling end of war is near
Russia has violated a Kremlin-declared Easter ceasefire after it attacked Ukrainian positions with drones today.
Terry Crews' wife reveals Parkinson's treatment that stopped tremors: 'I can write my name again'
Terry Crews' wife Rebecca has opened up about the Parkinson's treatment that halted the tremors caused by the disease.
How Butlin's came back from the dead: As Britain's most famous holiday camp celebrates 90 years, the fascinating story of Billy Butlin himself - and why his catchphrase was banned
This weekend marks the 90th birthday of one of Britain's best loved holiday brands - but how different is Butlin's today compared to when its enterprising owner opened the first camp in 1936?
Zack Polanski is trying to fool the country into banning racing. But the Grand National proved why he must be stopped from blowing a £4.1bn hole in the economy, writes DOMINIC KING
DOMINIC KING AT AINTREE RACECOURSE: There is a world that Zack Polanski envisages in which none of this would have occurred. No joy, no history, no opportunity to say 'I was there'.
Omissions, Deceptions, Lying. The New Yorker Asks: Can Sam Altman Be Trusted?
A 17,000-word expose in the New Yorker reveals "several executives connected to OpenAI have expressed ongoing reservations about Altman's leadership." Reporters Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz spoke to "a hundred people with firsthand knowledge of how Altman conducts business," including current and former OpenAI employees and board members.
Among other revelations, internal messages from a few years ago show that OpenAI executives and board members "had come to believe that Altman's omissions and deceptions might have ramifications for the safety of OpenAI's products..."
At the behest of his fellow board members, [OpenAI cofounder] Sutskever worked with like-minded colleagues to compile some seventy pages of Slack messages and H.R. documents, accompanied by explanatory text... The memos, which we reviewed, have not previously been disclosed in full. They allege that Altman misrepresented facts to executives and board members, and deceived them about internal safety protocols. One of the memos, about Altman, begins with a list headed "Sam exhibits a consistent pattern of . . ." The first item is "Lying"....
In a tense call after Altman's firing, the board pressed him to acknowledge a pattern of deception. "This is just so fucked up," he said repeatedly, according to people on the call. "I can't change my personality." Altman says that he doesn't recall the exchange.... He attributed the criticism to a tendency, especially early in his career, "to be too much of a conflict avoider." But a board member offered a different interpretation of his statement: "What it meant was 'I have this trait where I lie to people, and I'm not going to stop.' " Were the colleagues who fired Altman motivated by alarmism and personal animus, or were they right that he couldn't be trusted?
Friday Altman responded in part to the article. ("I am not proud of being conflict-averse, which has caused great pain for me and OpenAI," he wrote in a blog post. "I am not proud of handling myself badly in a conflict with our previous board that led to a huge mess for the company.")
But the article also assembled similar stories from throughout Altman's career:
- At Altman's earlier startup Loopt, "groups of senior employees, concerned with Altman's leadership and lack of transparency, asked Loopt's board on two occasions to fire him as C.E.O.," according to Keach Hagey, author of the Altman biography The Optimist.
- During Altman's time as president of Y Combinator, "several Silicon Valley investors came to believe that his loyalties were divided. An investor told us that Altman was known to 'make personal investments, selectively, into the best companies, blocking outside investors.'" The article adds that in private, Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham "has been unambiguous that Altman was removed because of Y.C. partners' mistrust... On one occasion, Graham told Y.C. colleagues that, prior to his removal, 'Sam had been lying to us all the time.'"
- "In a meeting with U.S. intelligence officials in the summer of 2017, he claimed that China had launched an 'A.G.I. Manhattan Project,'" the article points out, "and that OpenAI needed billions of dollars of government funding to keep pace...." But one intelligence official "after looking into the China project, concluded that there was no evidence that it existed: 'It was just being used as a sales pitch.'"
- As California lawmakers considered safety testing for AI model, one legislative aide complained of "increasingly cunning, deceptive behavior from OpenAI". OpenAI later subpoenaed some of the bill's top supporters (and OpenAI critics), in some cases asking for their private communications to investigate whether Elon Musk was funding them. [The article notes an ongoing animosity between Altman and Musk. "When Altman complained on X about a Tesla he'd ordered, Musk replied, 'You stole a non-profit.'"]
And "Multiple prominent investors who have worked with Altman told us that he has a reputation for freezing out investors if they back OpenAI's competitors."
[M]ost of the people we spoke to shared the judgment of Sutskever and Amodei: Altman has a relentless will to power that, even among industrialists who put their names on spaceships, sets him apart. "He's unconstrained by truth," the board member told us. "He has two traits that are almost never seen in the same person. The first is a strong desire to please people, to be liked in any given interaction. The second is almost a sociopathic lack of concern for the consequences that may come from deceiving someone."
The board member was not the only person who, unprompted, used the word "sociopathic." One of Altman's batch mates in the first Y Combinator cohort was Aaron Swartz, a brilliant but troubled coder who died by suicide in 2013 and is now remembered in many tech circles as something of a sage. Not long before his death, Swartz expressed concerns about Altman to several friends. "You need to understand that Sam can never be trusted," he told one. "He is a sociopath. He would do anything."
Multiple senior executives at Microsoft said that, despite [CEO Satya] Nadella's long-standing loyalty, the company's relationship with Altman has become fraught. "He has misrepresented, distorted, renegotiated, reneged on agreements," one said... The senior executive at Microsoft said, of Altman, "I think there's a small but real chance he's eventually remembered as a Bernie Madoff- or Sam Bankman-Fried-level scammer."
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You're feeding your cat WRONG! Experts reveal why felines leave so much food to waste - and the simple way to ensure they finish the entire bowl
Any cat owner knows that getting your feline friend to eat their dinner isn't always so simple as putting some food in a bowl. Now, scientists have found out why.
Detective who interrogated Baby P's mother insists 'manipulative monster' should never be given a 'second chance' as she makes another bid for freedom
Tracey Connelly, 44, was jailed indefinitely in 2009 after allowing her son Peter - widely known as Baby P - to die in her care at home in north London in 2007 after a prolonged period of horrific abuse.
Grand National jockey is BANNED after he didn't allow his tired horse to stop before it fell at the final fence - while wearing Red Rum's hair in his gloves for his legendary granddad
Toby McCain-Mitchell, 24, is banned for 10 days after failing to pull up his horse Top Of The Bill, who required veterinary treatment after his fall.
I need time to rebuild my life and freezing eggs lets me do that... ex-A Place in the Sun presenter Danni Menzies reflects on new life in US
Scots TV star Danni Menzies has revealed she will freeze her eggs one more time before turning forty as she celebrated relocating to the States during New York's Dressed to Kilt event.
Iran threatens to ATTACK US warships in Strait of Hormuz as American destroyers pass through waterway for first time since conflict began
The threat of near-immediate retaliation came just after reports revealed that multiple US ships crossed the strait in a bold move that 'was not coordinated with Iran.'
It's an idyllic, private island fit for a king and even comes with its own helicopter hangar... but to call Eilean Righ home it'll cost at least £10 million
It's an idyllic, private island fit for a king and even comes with its own helicopter hangar and shooting range.