King Charles and Queen Camilla put the royal seal of approval on Ascot as they join Peter Phillips and new bride Harriet Sperling in the sun for final day
Harriet, 45, opted for an elegant white maxi dress and matching white hat, clutching a small pink handbag as she held hands with a smartly-dressed Peter, 48.
Tech Pundit Cringely Co-Founds Startup '2Brains Inc' to Solve LLM Hallucinations
Long-time tech pundit Robert Cringely started his career at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab back in 1978. Last month 73-year-old Cringely explained why his site went on a two-year hiatus — and it's not just because of a heart attack and a stroke last July:
Just like everyone else, I've been busy all this time on Artificial Intelligence, founding with two partners a company called 2Brains... The work we were doing together is unfinished, but it's not stopped. The patents are filed, the architecture is documented, and the small team continuing the work includes me.
Cringely's first piece made the cast that "the trillion-dollar bet the AI industry is making right now may be wrong, and that there's an architectural alternative we've patented and built."
In Machines of Loving Grace, Amodei made the case that scaling compute would eventually solve essentially every hard problem in artificial intelligence. Buried in that optimism — or maybe not buried, maybe right out in the open — was a quiet absolution. Hallucinations, the embarrassing tendency of these systems to state falsehoods with total confidence, would take care of themselves. Make the models big enough, train them long enough, and the problem dissolves. You don't have to solve it. You just have to wait, and spend. And so the entire AI industry breathed a sigh of relief.
I have spent forty years watching this industry, and I know a permission slip when I see one.
Because that is what the essay became, whatever Amodei intended. It gave every other person writing nine- and ten-figure checks a reason not to worry about the one thing that should worry them most. The hallucination problem is the difference between a clever toy and a system a hospital or a bank or a court can actually rely on. It is the whole ballgame for enterprise AI. And the prevailing wisdom, blessed from the top, is that you needn't address it directly. Scale will provide...
A small company I helped start, 2Brains Inc., set out in 2022 to solve hallucinations — before ChatGPT, before the scaling consensus hardened into received truth, back when the polite assumption was that the problem was simply insurmountable. We did not solve it by waiting for bigger models. We solved it architecturally, by separating the part of the system that generates language from the part that retrieves and verifies facts, and reconciling the two before anything reaches the user. It runs on ordinary processors. It is cheap. And on the industry's own benchmark for this kind of faithfulness, it more than doubles the published baseline, with no fabricated facts in the verified case at all.
The article asks whether scaling will, at tremendous cost, eventually reduce hallucinations — or even worse, if the largest companies in the world "are spending a fortune chasing a cure that is not coming."
And last week Cringely pitched more advantages for their solution, noting that most prompts aren't even chatbot-level creative prompts — but just requests to retrieve simple data:
The reason 2Brains doesn't lie and the reason it's cheap are the same reason. It looks the fact up instead of guessing it — so it cannot fabricate, and the lookup runs on a processor that sips power instead of a chip that gulps it. Trust and thrift are not a trade-off you balance against each other. They fall out of a single design decision. You do not pay extra for the honest version. The honest version is the cheap version. That sentence is the whole company.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
'Tired' Georgia Toffolo reveals she got all dressed up for day five of Ascot before deciding not to go - but still shows off her incredible pink outfit
'Tired' Georgia Toffolo has revealed that she got all dressed up for day five of Ascot before deciding not to go - but has still shown off her incredible pink outfit.
Table for two: Moment thieves are caught on CCTV taking drills to pub to steal outside furniture
The hooded suspects were captured on CCTV footage as they dismantled tables outside the boozer.
Abuser who repeatedly raped a woman while also pouring hot tea over her gets 16-year term behind bars - as victim tells of hopes to 'start living again'
Vile abuser Bilal Alfroh, from Gorton, Manchester, who repeatedly raped a woman while pouring hot tea over her, has been jailed for 16 years and ordered to stay away from his victim for life
How Ukraine has humiliated Putin once again with huge drone strikes on his doorstep - prompting furious 'nuclear war' threats
The drone attack was Ukraine's largest offensive on Moscow in years and sparked fires in and around the city, forcing the airport to be evacuated.
Welcome to the Boston leave party - Tartan Army asked to come back for annual reunion after charming US city
After the heartache and the hangovers, defiant Tartan Army fans are bidding a fond - if slightly tipsy - farewell to Boston...
Lukashenko's lovers: How dictator hand picks 'watermelon battalion' of beauty queens for top jobs including 22-year-old Miss Belarus 'mistress'… while estranged wife lives in guarded estate
Over the years, Belarusian strongman Alexander Lukashenko has repeatedly been photographed alongside a succession of beautiful young beauty queens.
Peter Murrell told MSPs the SNP would report criminality to the police...just a day after he bought motorhome with embezzled cash
Brazen Peter Murrell insisted the SNP would willingly report criminality to the police - just hours after purchasing a luxury motorhome with money he had embezzled from the party.
Nine fight for life after Bedford train crash that killed driver and injured 100 while fury grows at Britain's ageing railway network as technical faults are blamed
Passengers suffered broken bones and were left 'spitting out blood' when a Luton Airport Express service ploughed into the back of a stationary East Midlands Railway train on Friday.
Brooklyn Beckham 'was paid $1M for DoorDash advert that's left his estranged family heartbroken' after being blasted for 'cashing in' on feud
The Beckhams are still in the midst of a bitter fallout and Brooklyn has most recently been accused of selling his family out for a big sum following the release of his two-part DoorDash commercial.
Waymo Recalls About 3,900 Robotaxis After Some Drove Into 'Freeway Construction Zones'
CNBC reports:
Waymo is recalling almost 3,900 robotaxis in the U.S. to fix software issues after some cars drove into freeway construction zones, according to notices filed with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The voluntary recall, the Alphabet-owned company's second in just over a month, followed 13 known incidents where Waymo robotaxis drove into construction zones on freeways in Phoenix, or entered freeway lanes with active construction in the San Francisco area, the filings published Thursday said...
A letter posted to the regulator's website... noted that, "Driving through a closed construction zone increases the risk of a crash..."
[Waymo said in a statement emailed to CNBC] "We voluntarily restricted freeway operations last month while making improvements, proactively notified state and federal regulators, and decided to file a voluntary software recall with NHTSA. We continue to safely serve riders on surface streets in all the cities where we operate...."
The company implemented another voluntary recall in May after some of its robotaxis had driven into flooded zones or standing water. The NHTSA Safety Board also initiated a probe of Waymo after a January incident in which a robotaxi illegally passed a stopped school bus.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Katy Perry takes brutal onstage dig at Orlando Bloom, John Mayer and more exes
The 41-year-old singer took public jabs at Orlando Bloom, John Mayer and Diplo during a rendition of Never Really Over in which she used a huge fake iPhone to reject their incoming calls.
Cellphone Alert System Breached in Brazil, Message Sent in Leetspeak
CNN reports:
An unauthorized alert bearing a mysterious message that was sent to cell phones in several states across Brazil on Saturday morning is suspected to be the work of hackers, the Brazilian government said. Devices lit up with the word "misantropi4," an alphanumeric spelling of the Portuguese word "misantropia," which in English translates to "misanthropy". The final letter "a" was substituted with a number '4' — a practice often used by hackers and termed "leetspeak.". The alert — categorized as "extreme" — was initially received in the southern state of Paraná, but a second warning was triggered a few minutes later for cell phones in the major cities of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Brazilian authorities said that the National Civil Defense's warning platform was taken offline after being targeted by a likely hacker attack, and the government is working to restore the tool once all security conditions are reestablished.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Plans to expand Essex special needs day centre
The organisation offers 'valuable support' for people with special needs
Cristiano Ronaldo's fiancée Georgina Rodriguez shares video of her partner's eldest son Ronaldo Jr's VERY lavish 16th birthday party
Cristiano Ronaldo's fiancée Georgina Rodriguez shared a video of her partner's eldest son Ronaldo Jr's very lavish 16th birthday party she threw this weekend.
Duchess of Gloucester shows off the look of love as she poses for photoshoot with her adoring prince husband to mark her 80th birthday
Birgitte beamed lovingly at her husband, the Duke of Gloucester in a brand-new portrait captured in the garden at Buckingham Palace to mark her 80th birthday.
TV star mom, 46, who appeared on 'quitting everything to change your life' show died in fire at luxury Caribbean beach resort that sent 1,700 tourists running for their lives
Francesca Valentino, 46, was killed after the fire tore apart The Viva Dominicus Bayahibe resort in La Altagracia, Dominican Republic, on Friday.
Dr Alex George is engaged! Former Love Island star pops the question to his mystery girlfriend during a romantic trip to Greece
Dr Alex George has revealed the happy news that he is engaged. Taking to Instagram on Saturday, he shared a carousel of pictures from his sunset proposal.
SMPTE Opens Entire Standards Catalog for Free, Removing Century-Old Paywall
The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers has published over 800 technical standards over the years (as a professional association for the media and entertainment industry).
But this week SMPTE "announced that its complete Standards catalog, the technical backbone behind everything from SDI and timecode to IP-based broadcast workflows, is now freely available to anyone in the global media technology community," reports the filmmaking news site CineD, arguing it's "one of the more meaningful structural shifts we have seen from a standards body in years" that could "reshape how smaller developers and educators engage with professional media technology."
The move covers all published Standards, Recommended Practices, Engineering Guidelines and Registered Disclosure Documents, plus every future release, ending a long-standing model in which individual documents often sold for well over $100 each. For more than a century, SMPTE Standards have quietly governed how images and sound move through the production chain. If you have ever recorded timecode in the HH:MM:SS:FF format, routed a signal over 3G-SDI, or built a facility around the ST 2110 suite for media over IP, you have relied on SMPTE specifications, whether you knew it or not... Until now, accessing the actual text of those documents usually meant paying per file, a barrier that this announcement removes entirely... The latest releases are available through the Recently Published Documents page on the SMPTE website, with the complete archive reachable through the SMPTE Standards Library...
There is also a practical, behind-the-scenes story here. The open-access move is part of a broader modernization of how SMPTE develops and publishes Standards. Recent initiatives include adopting GitHub-based workflows for version control, issue tracking and automation, transitioning to structured HTML-based authoring, and implementing an integrated publishing pipeline that streamlines document creation, review, validation and release... The most consequential beneficiaries are arguably not the large members already inside the system, but the developers, integrators, educators and manufacturers who previously worked around the paywall... The practical upshot is that developers and emerging markets can build from accurate primary specifications rather than secondhand sources, which matters enormously when a single misread tolerance or metadata field can break compatibility down the line.
This also fits a wider pattern of the industry moving toward openness. We have previously covered moments like GoPro's decision to make its CineForm codec open source and release the SDK, a codec that SMPTE itself standardized in 2015 as an open standard for acquisition and post production. Lowering the cost of knowledge tends to widen the pool of people who can contribute to it, and a freely readable standards library is a significant step in that direction for an organization that has historically sat behind a per-document fee.
"This was a decision we did not make lightly," says SMPTE President Rich Welsh. But "For 110 years, SMPTE has evolved alongside the media technology industry, helping to drive change and innovation — and we're not stopping now."
"Our industry is confronting transformative shifts, from IP-based workflows to AI authenticity and content provenance, and we find ourselves at another inflection point. We listened to our Members, Partners and the global Standards community, and the answer was clear: Interoperability is essential to the future of media. Now is the time to open the gates and ensure the next generation of media technology is built on a stronger, more accessible foundation."
Thanks to innocent_white_lamb (Slashdot reader #151,825) for sharing the news.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.