Month: April 2024

Enlarge / Google, Anthropic, Cohere, and Mistral have each released AI models over the past two months as they seek to unseat OpenAI from the top of public rankings. (credit: FT)

The increasing power of the latest artificial intelligence systems is stretching traditional evaluation methods to breaking point, posing a challenge to businesses and public bodies over how best to work with the fast-evolving technology.

Flaws in the evaluation criteria commonly used to gauge performance, accuracy, and safety are being exposed as more models come to market, according to people who build, test, and invest in AI tools. The traditional tools are easy to manipulate and too narrow for the complexity of the latest models, they said.

The accelerating technology race sparked by the 2022 release of OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT and fed by tens of billions of dollars from venture capitalists and big tech companies, such as Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, has obliterated many older yardsticks for assessing AI’s progress.

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  Kobo's Libra Colour is the higher-end of the two color Kobos, with a 7-inch screen, physical page-turn buttons, and stylus compatibility. [credit: Kobo ]

Color e-readers have been a thing for a while, but until now, the biggest companies with the most extensive book ecosystems—Amazon, mainly, but also Barnes & Noble and Rakuten Kobo—have only sold traditional black-and-white models.

That changes on April 30th, when Kobo releases its first color e-readers: the $149.99 Kobo Clara Colour and $219.99 Kobo Libra Colour. Both devices look a lot like their black-and-white predecessors, the Kobo Libra 2 and Kobo Clara 2E, but with colorful screens instead of black-and-white ones.

Kobo is also refreshing the black-and-white version of the Clara, called the Clara BW to distinguish it from the color model. It's mostly identical to the old Clara 2E model, but with the faster dual-core processor from the color models. It sells for $129.99, $10 cheaper than the Clara 2E.

Joaquin Phoenix won an Oscar for his portrayal of a failed stand-up comedian struggling with mental illness in the 2019 film Joker, director Todd Phillips' controversial interpretation of the classic Batman villain. The honor was richly deserved. In my review, I called it a "masterful performance" that "transforms the narrative into something more than a competent-but-unremarkable tale of hard knocks driving a troubled man to violence." The film ended up topping $1 billion globally at the box office—the first R-rated movie to do so, making it the highest-grossing R-rated film ever.

Now Phoenix is reprising that role in Phillips' follow-up, Joker: Folie à Deux, costarring Lady Gaga as Harley Quinn. It's hard to imagine Phillips matching his earlier achievement, but Warner Bros. released the first teaser last night, and quite frankly, the film looks fantastic.

(Spoilers for the 2019 film below.)

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  United Launch Alliance's Delta IV Heavy rocket lifted off for the final time on Tuesday. [credit: United Launch Alliance ]

I've got a guilty secret that I can now share—I loved the Delta IV Heavy rocket.

No, I didn't love the price, which was preposterous, at times approaching $400 million. This precluded Delta from having any other customers than the US government. I didn't love the low flight rate, just 16 missions in 20 years. This prevented the rocket's operator, United Launch Alliance, from ever approaching anything remotely like efficient operations.

But there were two things I adored about the Delta IV Heavy rocket, which made its final launch on Tuesday. I loved watching it take flight. And I love that, warts and all, it demonstrated that private companies could develop a heavy lift rocket. The Delta booster, although the product of decades of traditional space development, offered a glimpse of the commercial launch future that we're living in today.