<During an appearance on MSNBC's "The Katie Phang Show" Mary Trump, the niece of former president Donald Trump offered up a way to "humiliate" him to his 2024 GOP presidential nomination rivals.

Speaking with the host, the now-indicted former president's niece called him a "loser" and then related a story about his childhood that, she claims, still irks him to this day.

Asked by the host if Trump rivals should "Take a page out of Donald Trump's playbook and go for the jugular?" Mary Trump shot back, "Katie, it amazes me that they have not done that yet."

"Again, I think it's because they're restrained by their fear of his stranglehold on the base -- I guess they should be," she conceded. "You know, if they were serious people, they would understand that they have a huge opportunity to take Donald out without having to contradict him in terms of policy as if there is such a thing these days or politics."

"Just call him what he is: he is a loser, he loses constantly, he has never legitimately won anything in his life," she continued. "He is a thin-skinned baby who has nothing to offer but white grievance."

"If I were one of these candidates, I would simply show up to a debate with a bowl of mashed potatoes because that was his very first experience of humiliation was when he was being a total brat before my grandmother put dinner on the table," she recalled. "My dad had just ordered to shut him up and stop him from tormenting his little brother Robert. Took a bowl of mashed potatoes, dumped it on Donald's head."

"He hates that story," she added. "He has never been able to laugh at himself in a healthy way. It's really not difficult to get under that extraordinarily thin skin of his.">

<As part of the debt ceiling deal, one surprise concession that made it into the bill was the approval of the Mountain Valley Pipeline, a 304-mile natural gas connection from northwest West Virginia to southern Virginia.

A pet project of West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin that had been mired in Congress, the law forces action on permits that should push the project forward.

However, there was no public reason to believe that the pipeline was in the deal at all, which makes the actions of one mystery trader — who made a killing on its inclusion — somewhat suspicious, according to a Bloomberg analysis of trading data.

Shares in Equitrans Midstream Corporation were down 35% last year. On May 24, a few days before an agreement was struck, a mystery trader bought 100,000 call options — essentially bets on a stock-price increase — on Equitrans Midstream. Then, on May 27, the debt deal including the Mountain Valley Pipeline was struck.

Following that announcement, Equitrans Midstream shares jumped 49%.

From the looks of it, the bet earned the trader $7.5 million as of last Friday, according to Bloomberg. The options are still outstanding, so that number could grow in the event that Equitrans Midstream continues to rally.

That kind of perfect timing is, needless to say, fishy. The deal on Mountain Valley was kept secret up until the debt deal was announced. Some are suspicious enough they want it investigated for potential insider trading.

Equitrans said neither they nor any executives were involved in the transactions. Manchin himself said he knew nothing about the options trade. The negotiations were played very close to the vest between House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and the White House. Ethics watchdogs want answers, according to Bloomberg.

Members of Congress are barred from trading on confidential information, though a 2021 Insider investigation found repeated violations of the STOCK Act among members. >

<<stone.....One question I have is that of monitoring - I posted a notice showing how subtle trolling can be, and how hard it might be for <CG> to be effective....>

This has persisted--if at a far lower and less strident rate than before--but the same passive-aggressive tone has persisted.

<Many people are worried about the future of AI—including the minds involved with creating that very future. Tech executives and CEOs from AI corporations, including such companies as OpenAI and Deepmind, have signed a simple-yet-haunting 22-word statement about the potential dangers of AI: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”

The statement is purposefully vague and avoids details as to how mitigating this growing risk should be made a priority, but the statement shows a high level of concern about AI among the very people behind the burgeoning technology. The statement, posted to the Center for AI Safety, is a “coming out” for AI experts worried about the technology’s future, according to the center’s Executive Director Dan Hendrycks.

“There’s a very common misconception, even in the A.I. community, that there only are a handful of doomers [sic],” Hendrycks told The New York Times. “But, in fact, many people privately would express concerns about these things.”

The threats of AI aren’t necessarily that a super-advanced artificial life form will enslave and exterminate humanity like in The Terminator. The Center for AI Safety’s website details a more subtle view of our doom, including AI’s potential role in designing more effective chemical weapons, supercharging disinformation campaigns, and exacerbating societal inequality.

These worries are nothing new. Fears about AI are nearly as old as the technology’s inception, and have played a large role in science fiction for nearly a century. Isaac Asimov created the Three Laws of Robotics back in 1942, and in the 1965 sci-fi novel Dune, AI is completely banned throughout the known galaxy in an attempt to save humanity.

In March, tech leaders—including Elon Musk (a longtime spokesperson for AI’s dangers) and other top AI researchers—called for a six-month moratorium on AI research “more powerful than GPT-4,” the latest version of OpenAI’s large multimodal model. In April, the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence released its own letter urging for the development of ways to “ensure that society is able to reap the great promise of AI while managing its risks.” And just earlier this month, AI expert Geoffrey Hinton, known as the “father of AI,” similarly expressed fears about the growing technology—going so far as to say he regretted his life’s work.

Not all AI experts are joining in on the hand-wringing. A computer scientist at Princeton University told the BBC that “current AI is nowhere near capable enough for these risks to materialize. As a result, it’s distracted attention away from the near-term harms of AI,” such as its biased and exclusionary behavior. Regardless, both Microsoft and OpenAI have called on the U.S. government to regulate AI development, and the Senate Judiciary subcommittee held a panel regarding AI oversight in mid-May.

The doom-and-gloom future of AI is still unwritten, and some tech executives and experts are trying to keep it that way.>

<An employee at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence drained the resort’s swimming pool last October and ended up flooding a room where computer servers containing surveillance video logs were kept, sources familiar with the matter told CNN.

While it’s unclear if the room was intentionally flooded or if it happened by mistake, the incident occurred amid a series of events that federal prosecutors found suspicious.

At least one witness has been asked by prosecutors about the flooded server room as part of the federal investigation into Trump’s handling of classified documents, according to one of the sources.

The incident, which has not been previously reported, came roughly two months after the FBI retrieved hundreds of classified documents from the Florida residence and as prosecutors obtained surveillance footage to track how White House records were moved around the resort. Prosecutors have been examining any effort to obstruct the Justice Department’s investigation after Trump received a subpoena in May 2022 for classified documents.

Prosecutors have heard testimony that the IT equipment in the room was not damaged in the flood, according to one source.

Yet the flooded room as well as conversations and actions by Trump’s employees while the criminal investigation bore down on the club has caught the attention of prosecutors. The circumstances may factor into a possible obstruction conspiracy case, multiple sources tell CNN, as investigators try to determine whether the events of last year around Mar-a-Lago indicate that Trump or a small group of people working for him, took steps to try to interfere with the Justice Department’s evidence-gathering.

Subpoenas for surveillance

Agents first subpoenaed the Trump Organization for Mar-a-Lago surveillance footage last summer, before the August search by the FBI. But as more classified documents were found through the end of last year, investigators sought more surveillance footage from the Trump Organization, sources tell CNN. That included an additional subpoena after the FBI search in August and a request from the Justice Department for the Trump Organization to preserve additional footage in late October, according to one of the sources.

At least two dozen people – from Mar-a-Lago resort staff to members of Trump’s inner circle at the Florida estate – have been subpoenaed to testify in front of the federal grand jury investigating the former president’s handling of classified documents and possible obstruction of justice, CNN previously reported.

Prosecutors for special counsel Jack Smith have been asking questions in recent months about the handling of surveillance footage at Mar-a-Lago resort and discussions Trump’s employees had about the surveillance system after the subpoena last summer for the footage, according to multiple sources.

Recently, investigators have asked questions indicating they are trying to determine if workers at Mar-a-Lago received specific direction from above, particularly from Trump himself, to obstruct the investigation.

Investigators have in recent weeks asked Trump employees whether it’s possible there are gaps in the surveillance footage that was turned over, and whether it could have been tampered with, according to the sources. That detail was first reported by the New York Times. The special counsel’s office declined to comment for this story.

Focus on Trump employees

Prosecutors from the special counsel’s office have focused their obstruction inquiries around Trump, Trump’s body man Walt Nauta and a maintenance worker who helped Nauta move boxes of classified documents ahead of federal agents searching the property last summer, and potentially others, sources told CNN.

The sources say that the maintenance worker is the person who drained the pool that led to the flooding of the IT room where the surveillance footage was held.

Last month, longtime Trump Organization executives Matthew Calamari Sr. and his son Matthew Calamari Jr., who each held senior roles overseeing security at Trump properties and the surveillance of the Florida club, appeared before the grand jury.

At the time, Investigators were interested in both the maintenance worker’s conversations and a text message from Nauta to Calamari Sr. where Nauta asked to talk. An attorney for Nauta declined to comment for this story. A spokesman for Trump and an attorney representing the maintenance worker did not immediately respond to a request to comment....>

<....Moving boxes

In addition to asking about the surveillance tapes, prosecutors have questioned witnesses about Nauta and the maintenance worker moving boxes after the Justice Department first subpoenaed Trump for classified documents last May.

Three weeks after that subpoena, Trump’s attorney Evan Corcoran searched a storage room where boxes with documents from the White House had been kept. Corcoran found about three dozen classified documents, and he turned them over to FBI agents the following day when investigators came to Mar-a-Lago on June 3.

Corcoran told the DOJ at the time that he was led to believe by many people that there were no additional classified or White House documents at the resort and that all White House documents would be in the storage room when he searched it.

But surveillance footage that was subsequently turned over to the Justice Department showed Nauta and the maintenance worker moving document boxes around the resort, including into that storage room just before Corcoran searched it for classified documents. Corcoran handed over 38 records he found to the FBI the next day, yet the FBI found more than a hundred more documents with classified markings in August, both in Trump’s office and in the storage room.

The Justice Department has subsequently said in court that it believes “government records were likely concealed and removed from the Storage Room.”

Detailed notes Corcoran took from that time period about his efforts representing Trump also made no mention that he was aware of any boxes of documents being moved in or out of the storage room he was directed to search to comply with the DOJ’s demands, one source told CNN.

Earlier this year, prosecutors took the extraordinary step of subpoenaing Corcoran, arguing that attorney-client privilege did not apply because his discussions with the former president may have been part of Trump’s attempt to advance a crime. In March, a judge ordered Corcoran, who has recused himself from representing Trump in the Mar-a-Lago case, to provide additional testimony. The sealed court proceeding made clear, sources have told CNN, that Corcoran is not a target of the investigation.

When Nauta spoke to the FBI last year, he initially said he hadn’t handled boxes or sensitive documents at Mar-a-Lago, CNN previously reported. But after the FBI obtained the surveillance footage, he changed his story and said Trump had directed him to move the boxes, according to the previous CNN reporting. Nauta stopped speaking with investigators last fall after changing attorneys.

The maintenance worker more recently spoke to investigators in an interview, and his phone has been seized, some of the sources now tell CNN. Neither has been charged with any crime.>

<Former FBI general counsel and special counsel prosecutor Andrew Weissmann said Monday he thinks the indictment of Donald Trump will come this week because the Department of Justice is being pressured to move things forward.

The prediction was part of a conversation with MSNBC's Nicolle Wallace about the possible venue for trial if Trump is indicted — Florida or Washington, D.C.

Secrets and Laws, an account that purports to be run by a former CIA lawyer, mentioned that there has been little conversation about the potential venue. Brandon Van Grack, a former Justice Department national security official, is hoping for Washington, while national security analyst Marcy Wheeler expects Florida will be the location. Another commentator, LegalNerd, walked through the potential charges and what the law says about the venue.

Weissmann agreed that the open issue is where charges would be brought and who would be charged alongside Trump.

"Those charges may be ones that can only be brought in a different jurisdiction because there are constitutional rules about where charges can be brought," he explained.

"I should say, ...it is conceivable that Donald Trump would be charged in Florida and not D.C. I don't think that will be the case. But I do think the one thing I'm pretty confident of is that we are going to see charges with respect to the classified documents case, and it seems by all accounts it's going to be this week because I think that DOJ will feel that internal pressure to move this along."

He later said in the Manhattan case with D.A. Alvin Bragg, Trump's lawyers came in to speak before the grand jury before the indictment, and he explained at that time it was an indicator that they were at the end of the probe.

Trump's lawyers met with the DOJ on Monday,>

<Former Republican Justice Department officials are sounding the alarm that a second term for Donald Trump would spell disaster for the rule of law — and could shatter the anti-autocratic guardrails that held in his first term, reported The Guardian on Monday.

"Former DoJ officials, some Republicans and academics say that if Trump becomes the Republican nominee and is elected again in 2024, he would most likely appoint officials who would reflexively do his bidding, target dissenters he deems part of the 'deep state' and mount zealous drives to rein in independent agencies," reported Peter Stone.

Donald Ayer, a former deputy attorney general during the George HW Bush administration, sounded a particularly dire alarm and told the publication that "of all the many reasons Donald Trump’s candidacy should be rejected out of hand, none is more important than his utter disdain for the rule of law – the idea that we are a society governed by rules and not by the will of one person.'"

Ayer did not hold back, painting Trump as an existential threat to the country.

“In his first term, aided by attorney general William Barr, who made a pretense of believing in even-handed justice, Trump was still able to grossly misuse the Department of Justice as a political campaign tool, to do favors for his friends, and to seriously undermine the separation of powers," said Ayer. “There would be no arguable adults in the room in a second Trump DoJ. Beyond pardons for the January 6 criminals and politically motivated prosecutions, one can expect a broader pattern of abuses aimed at securing his autocratic power.”

Notably, even Barr, whom Ayer praised, spent much of his time weaponizing the Justice Department for political use, particularly trying to bury the conclusions of the Mueller report, but he drew the line at using it to overturn the electoral process.

Trump has already hinted he will go much further, the report noted, by holding a rally in Waco, Texas, as a dark nod to far-right antigovernment extremists who use the Branch Davidian siege as a rallying cry for domestic terrorism. He has also outlined a plan to roll back merit reforms at the civil service so he can purge career government officials who are disloyal to him, which was thwarted when he left office but could be reinstated if he returns.

“If Trump were re-elected, we can look forward to a swift and deep decline in the rule of law,” former DOJ inspector general Michael Bromwich told The Guardian. “Top levels of the DoJ would be staffed with election deniers; there would be a wholesale exodus of talented career personnel from every division of DoJ; and large numbers of January 6 insurrectionists would be pardoned. After four more years, the Department of Justice as we know it would be in tatters.”

All of this comes as Trump faces criminal indictment in New York for business fraud, and as he increasingly anticipates charges in the federal investigation of classified documents hoarded at his Mar-a-Lago country club.>

<Much of Arizona is experiencing long-term drought, according to the Arizona Department of Water Resources. But despite the water shortage, one Saudi Arabian company is allowed to pump unlimited amounts of Arizona’s precious groundwater to grow crops for its home country, CBS News reported.

What’s happening?

Like California, Arizona’s water situation is concerning. Even after a wet winter, the state has not recovered from what many have called a “megadrought.”

According to the Arizona Department of Water Resources, there are no statewide restrictions on water usage other than a rule that “water should only be used for beneficial purposes.”

However, local governments are expected to determine what kind of water conservation measures are needed in their areas.

This may explain why Fondomonte Arizona, the Saudi Arabian company operating in Arizona, has not yet faced any restrictions.

CBS News reported that the company, a subsidiary of Almarai Co., is using water pumped from underground to grow alfalfa, “one of the most water-intensive crops there is.”

In fact, alfalfa requires so much water that it’s actually illegal to grow it in Saudi Arabia’s own deserts. Yet, thus far, Arizona’s lawmakers have not prevented the company from growing the crop on state land to ship back to the Middle East.

Why is it a problem to use water this way?

Since Arizona has a dry climate and receives very little rain on average, residents rely on groundwater and river water for all of their needs. Homes, businesses, and agriculture all rely on these sources.

But Arizona Republic reported that overuse and drought are drying up both. The Colorado River’s level is dropping, too, and aquifers are emptying at an alarming pace.

As water gets more scarce, Arizona residents will start to suffer. Water prices will rise, and some areas may experience shortages. Restrictions like forbidding lawn sprinklers may be necessary to ensure there’s enough water to go around. If the problem gets severe enough, it could impact farming as well.

What’s being done about the waste?

The Attorney General of Arizona, Kris Mayes, is strongly opposed to the company’s current water usage. She intends to have its leases for state land canceled to prevent any further waste.

“It is a scandal that the State of Arizona allowed this to happen,” said Mayes, who made canceling the company’s leases a focal point of her recent campaign, CBS News reported. “We cannot afford to give our water away frankly to anyone, let alone the Saudis, for free.”>

<Former President Donald Trump lashed out at former White House lawyer Ty Cobb in a rant on his Truth Social platform on Monday evening, appearing to threaten legal action against him.

"Ty Cobb is a disgruntled former Lawyer, who represented me long ago, and knows absolutely nothing about the Boxes Hoax being perpetrated upon me by the DOJ for purposes of interfering with the upcoming 2024 Presidential Election, where I am substantially leading all “comers,” including Republicans and Democrats," wrote Trump.

"His words are angry, nasty, and libelous, only because I did not continue using him (and paying him), and for good reason," Trump continued. "He will be held legally responsible for his false statements!"

Cobb has been one of the most prominent figures warning that the former president is in serious legal jeopardy in special counsel Jack Smith's investigation of classified documents hoarded at Mar-a-Lago. In May, Cobb said that Trump will "go to jail" for his attempts to conceal the documents from authorities.

Trump has claimed that he had the authority to declassify the documents he took — even without telling anyone or going through any formalized process. But a reported audiotape reveals Trump telling guests at his Bedminster golf club in New Jersey he couldn't share with them classified information in a document he held detailing a plan to strike Iran, suggesting he knew his claims about classification power weren't true. Cobb has said the audio "eviscerates" his defense.

This comes as the president's lawyers met with Jack Smith and DOJ prosecutors, as a charging decision is expected soon in the investigation.>

<AI chatbots have a problem: They lose money on every chat.

The enormous cost of running today’s large language models, which underpin tools like ChatGPT and Bard, is limiting their quality and threatening to throttle the global AI boom they’ve sparked.

Their expense, and the limited availability of the computer chips they require, is also constraining which companies can afford to run them and pressuring even the world’s richest companies to turn chatbots into moneymakers sooner than they may be ready to.

“The models being deployed right now, as impressive as they seem, are really not the best models available,” said Tom Goldstein, a computer science professor at the University of Maryland. “So as a result, the models you see have a lot of weaknesses” that might be avoidable if cost were no object — such as a propensity to spit out biased results or blatant falsehoods.

What happens when ChatGPT lies about real people?

The tech giants staking their future on AI rarely discuss the technology’s cost. OpenAI (the maker of ChatGPT), Microsoft and Google all declined to comment. But experts say it’s the most glaring obstacle to Big Tech’s vision of generative AI zipping its way across every industry, slicing head counts and boosting efficiency.

The intensive computing AI requires is why OpenAI has held back its powerful new language model, GPT-4, from the free version of ChatGPT, which is still running a weaker GPT-3.5 model. ChatGPT’s underlying data set was last updated in September 2021, making it useless for researching or discussing recent events. And even those who pay $20 per month for GPT-4 can send only 25 messages every three hours because it’s so expensive to run. (It’s also much slower to respond.)

Those costs may also be one reason Google has yet to build an AI chatbot into its flagship search engine, which fields billions of queries every day. When Google released its Bard chatbot in March, it opted not to use its largest language model. Dylan Patel, chief analyst at the semiconductor research firm SemiAnalysis, estimated that a single chat with ChatGPT could cost up to 1,000 times as much as a simple Google search.

In a recent report on artificial intelligence, the Biden administration pinpointed the computational costs of generative AI as a national concern. The White House wrote that the technology is expected to “dramatically increase computational demands and the associated environmental impacts,” and that there’s an “urgent need” to design more sustainable systems.

Even more than other forms of machine learning, generative AI requires dizzying amounts of computational power and specialized computer chips, known as GPUs, that only the wealthiest of companies can afford. The intensifying battle for access to those chips has helped to make their leading providers into tech giants in their own right, holding the keys to what has become the technology industry’s most prized asset.

Why Nvidia is suddenly one of the most valuable companies in the world Silicon Valley came to dominate the internet economy in part by offering services like online search, email and social media to the world free, losing money initially but eventually turning hefty profits on personalized advertising. And ads are probably coming to AI chatbots. But analysts say ads alone probably won’t be enough to make cutting-edge AI tools profitable anytime soon.

In the meantime, the companies offering AI models for consumer use must balance their desire to win market share with the financial losses they’re racking up.

The search for more reliable AI also is likely to drive profits primarily to the chipmakers and cloud computing giants that already control much of the digital space — along with the chipmakers whose hardware they need to run the models.

It’s no accident that the companies building the leading AI language models are either among the largest cloud computing providers, as with Google and Microsoft, or have close partnerships with them, as OpenAI does with Microsoft. Companies that buy those firms’ AI tools don’t realize they’re being locked into a heavily subsidized service that costs much more than what they’re currently paying, said Clem Delangue, CEO of Hugging Face, an open-source AI company.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman indirectly acknowledged the problem at a Senate hearing last month, when Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) warned that if OpenAI were to try to make ChatGPT addictive in a way that harms kids, Congress “will look very harshly” on it. Altman said Ossoff needn’t worry: “We try to design systems that do not maximize for engagement. In fact, we’re so short on GPUs, the less people use our products, the better.”...>

<....The expense of AI language models starts with developing and training them, which requires gargantuan amounts of data and software to identify patterns in language. AI companies also typically hire star researchers whose salaries can rival those of pro athletes. That presents an initial barrier to any company hoping to build its own model, though a few well-funded start-ups have succeeded — including Anthropic AI, which OpenAI alumni founded with financial backing from Google.

Then, each query to a chatbot like ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Bing or Anthropic’s Claude is routed to data centers, where supercomputers crunch the models and perform numerous high-speed calculations at the same time — first, interpreting the user’s prompt, then working to predict the most plausible response, one “token,” or four-letter sequence, at a time.

That sort of computational power requires GPUs, or graphics processing units, that were first made for video games but were found to be the only chips that could handle such heavy computer tasks as large language models. Currently, just one company, Nvidia, sells the best of those, for which it charges tens of thousands of dollars. Nvidia’s valuation recently rocketed to $1 trillion on the anticipated sales. The Taiwan-based company that manufactures many of those chips, TSMC, has likewise soared in value.

“GPUs at this point are considerably harder to get than drugs,” Elon Musk, who recently purchased some 10,000 GPUs for his own AI start-up, told a May 23 Wall Street Journal summit.

Those computing requirements also help to explain why OpenAI is no longer the nonprofit it was founded to be.

Started in 2015 with the stated mission of developing AI “in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return,” by 2019, it had switched to a for-profit model to attract investors, including Microsoft, which pumped in $1 billion and became OpenAI’s exclusive computing provider. (Microsoft has since poured in $10 billion more and integrated OpenAI’s technology with Bing, Windows and other products.)

Exactly how much chatbots like ChatGPT cost to run is a moving target, as companies work to make them more efficient.

In December, not long after its launch, Altman estimated the cost of ChatGPT at “probably single-digits cents per chat.” That might not sound like much, until you multiply it by upward of 10 million users per day, as analysts have estimated. In February, SemiAnalysis calculated that ChatGPT was costing OpenAI some $700,000 per day in computing costs alone, based on the processing needed to run GPT-3.5, the default model at the time.

Multiply those computing costs by the 100 million people per day who use Microsoft’s Bing search engine or the more than 1 billion who reportedly use Google, and one can begin to see why the tech giants are reluctant to make the best AI models available to the public.

The new Bing told our reporter it ‘can feel or think things’

“This is not a sustainable equation for the democratization or wide availability of generative AI, the economy or the environment,” said Sid Sheth, founder and CEO of d-Matrix, a start-up working to build more efficient chips for AI.

Google said in its February announcement of Bard that it would initially run on a “lightweight” version of the company’s LaMDA language model because it required “significantly less computing power, enabling us to scale to more users.” In other words, even a company as wealthy as Google wasn’t prepared to foot the bill of putting its most powerful AI technology into a free chatbot.

The cost-cutting took a toll: Bard stumbled over basic facts in its launch demonstration, shearing $100 billion from the value of Google’s shares. Bing, for its part, went off the rails early on, prompting Microsoft to scale back both its personality and the number of questions users could ask it in a given conversation.

Such errors, sometimes called “hallucinations,” have become a major concern with AI language models as both individuals and companies increasingly rely on them. Experts say they’re a function of the models’ basic design: They’re built to generate likely sequences of words, not true statements.

Another Google chatbot, called Sparrow, was designed by the company’s DeepMind subsidiary to search the internet and cite its sources, with the goal of reducing falsehoods. But Google has not released that one so far....>

<....ChatGPT ‘hallucinates.’ Some researchers worry it isn’t fixable.

Meanwhile, each of the major players is racing for ways to make AI language models cheaper.

Running a query on OpenAI’s new, lightweight GPT-3.5 Turbo model costs less than one tenth as much as its top-of-the-line GPT-4. Google is making its own AI chips, which it claims are more efficient than Nvidia’s, as are start-ups like d-Matrix. And numerous start-ups are building on open-source language models, such as Meta’s LLaMA, so that they don’t have to pay OpenAI or Google to use theirs — even though those models don’t yet perform as well and may lack guardrails to prevent abuse.

The push for smaller, cheaper models marks a sudden reversal for the industry, said Maryland’s Goldstein.

“We spent the last four years just trying to make the biggest models we could,” he said. But that was when the goal was to publish research papers, not release AI chatbots to the public. “Now, just within the last few months, there’s been a complete turnaround in the community, and suddenly everyone’s trying to build the smallest model they can to control the costs.”

For consumers, that could mean the days of unfettered access to powerful, general-purpose AI models are numbered.

Microsoft is already experimenting with building advertisements into its AI-powered Bing results. At the Senate hearing, OpenAI’s Altman wouldn’t rule out doing the same, although he said he prefers a paid subscription model.

Both companies say they’re confident the economics will eventually pencil out. Altman told the tech blog Stratechery in February, “There’s so much value here, it’s inconceivable to me that we can’t figure out how to ring the cash register on it.”

Yet critics note that generative AI also comes with costs to society.

“All this processing has implications for greenhouse gas emissions,” said Bhaskar Chakravorti, dean of global business at Tufts University’s Fletcher School. The computing requires energy that could be used for other purposes — including other computing tasks that are less trendy than AI language models. That “could even slow down the development and application of AI for other, more meaningful uses, such as in health care, drug discovery, cancer detection, etc.,” Chakravorti said.

Based on estimates of ChatGPT’s usage and computing needs, data scientist Kasper Groes Albin Ludvigsen estimated that it may have used as much electricity in January as 175,000 people — the equivalent of a midsize city.

For now, the tech giants are willing to lose money in a bid to win market share with their AI chatbots, Goldstein said. But if they can’t make them profitable? “Eventually you come to the end of the hype curve, and the only thing your investors are going to look at, at that point, is your bottom line.”

Still, Goldstein predicted many people and companies will find generative AI tools hard to resist, even with all their flaws. “Even though it’s expensive,” he said, “it’s still far less expensive than human labor.”>

<Earlier this year, Austin Independent School District (Austin ISD) teacher Sophia DeLoretto-Chudy said she was pulled into a "check-in meeting" with school administration over a list of concerns. Most notably among them: "We've noticed an intentional attempt in teaching your students about their legal and constitutional rights."

In response to this, Sophia made a TikTok video documenting the administration's notes on her teaching, as well as the events that would later play out – including her subsequently being placed on leave and terminated.

Over 3.2 million people have viewed Sophia's now-viral video and tens of thousands followed her account in hopes of keeping up with this quickly turning story.

So what happened? Well, in line with Texas Senate Bill 1828, which mandates that all state schools hold a Holocaust Remembrance Week to teach history surrounding genocide, Hitler's dangerous rise to power, and concentration camps, Sophia conducted a lesson on Hitler's use of education. "My students learned about recognizing propaganda and why Hitler went into schools to teach nazi ideology and nationalism," she told BuzzFeed.

Students made parallels to signs of nationalism they were familiar with, including the US practice of having students recite the pledge of allegiance every morning in schools.

As a part of the lesson, students also learned about rights US citizens have today in comparison to restrictions placed on those in 1940s Germany. And this led some to practice protesting, Sophia explained. "The issue my admin had wasn't with the lesson plan, but with my students' decision to protest the pledge of allegiance by sitting and not reciting it with the rest of the school," she said. "They have loved learning about their first amendment protection of freedom of speech and have been excited by protest movements all throughout the year."

However, it's important to note that Texas in particular has a law mandating every single student to pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States and the Texas state flag daily.

According to Sophia, her students' protest was seen as "indoctrination" by administration. "My vice principal said she was concerned I was 'indoctrinating' my students," the 27-year-old said. "She didn't believe that they were smart enough to make the decision to protest the pledge on their own and that they didn't 'fully understand a decision that big.'"....>

<....This was not the first time Sophia butted heads with admin. Previously, she said the school discouraged teachers from speaking on basic women's health. "During human physiology week...I was not allowed to tell my students that I also have a period because I have a uterus."

Then, on April 27, Sophia said the head of HR recommended she be put on leave and that her contract not be renewed for the next school year.

In a letter Sophia sent to BuzzFeed that is addressed by the school district's Chief Human Capital Officer, recommendations for her termination were based on the following:

"Use of a computer, school mail, or any other means of communication that is harassing, offensive, or disruptive to the school operations; and any activity, school-connected or otherwise, that, because of publicity given it, or knowledge of it among students, faculty, and community, impairs or diminishes the employee’s effectiveness in the District."

In Sophia's eyes, she says her termination is the result of "embarrass[ing] my administrator in a TikTok."

In a statement sent to parents, Sophia said the administration, "Clarified that the reason I was pulled from the classroom had nothing to do with the list of concerns I received from [admin], not a parent complaint from our campus, nor anything to do with the subject matter I was teaching or how I was dressed. I was pulled from teaching and investigated strictly because of the TikTok that went viral overnight."

BuzzFeed reached out to Austin ISD for comment. We'll update you if or when they respond.

This incident comes amidst much controversy surrounding the state of Texas and laws passed that restrict fact-based education.

For one, educators state-wide are encouraged to share "opposing views" when teaching about the Holocaust. And, according to the Texas Tribune, Texas has banned more books than any other state – most of which include works with POC or LGBT+ characters and stories at their center.

Meanwhile, schools across the nation are experiencing a shortage of educators as the professionals fight for better pay and more respect within the classroom. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, about 300,000 public school educators quit their jobs between February 2020 and May 2022, and 77% of teachers in Texas say they've seriously considered quitting.

Sophia's now-former school district Austin ISD has more than 250 openings, non-profit Raise Your Hand Texas reports.

Though Sophia is heartbroken over the events, she acknowledged that she understands her path forward and plans to "put more of my focus" on work in the non-profit space, "motivating young voters," and helping her community where she can.>

<Raw Story reported last week that Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) missed the vote for raising the debt ceiling, which she had opposed. But a reporter at Axios spotted her rushing up the steps of the Capitol just as the vote was being closed. She'd missed it and the press knew.

A new video from CNN showed it wasn't just the word of a reporter that observed Boebert racing up the steps, they got her on video.

A CNN producer was heard on video saying, "They closed it."

"They closed it?" Boebert shouted back.

"Yeah," the producer said. Boebert paused, but then continued running up the steps of the Capitol.

First, Boebert claimed that there was no such thing as the debt ceiling and that it was all "fake news."

"Tomorrow's bill is a bunch of fake news and fake talking points that will do nothing to rein in out-of-control federal spending," she said.

"No excuses," Boebert said on June 3. " I was ticked off they wouldn't let me do my job, so I wouldn't take the vote. Once again, Washington's power machine shoved a multi-trillion-dollar bill down our throats, refused to allow debate or amendments, disregarded everything we fought for, in January to actually allow representatives to do their jobs, and instead, they served us up a crap sandwich."

She claimed that she simply refused to be part of it. In fact, she tried to be a part of it and then missed it.

As a fact check, there were 81 proposed amendments, and 14 of those were either co-sponsored or even introduced by Boebert.

As it turns out, she did show up for the vote.

When CNN released the video of her racing up the steps, it called her office to ask for an explanation for the Twitter claim that it was a "protest."

"A spokesperson responded by providing a link to Boebert’s Thursday statement, which outlined her opposition to the bill but did not substantiate her subsequent assertion in the social media video that she had missed the vote on purpose," said CNN.

“I certainly wasn’t afraid to vote against the bill, as I have been advocating against it all week,” Boebert said in the statement.

Former White House press secretary Jen Psaki dragged Bobert while subbing for Chris Hayes' show Monday night. "You snooze you lose," the screen said.

"I can't stop watching that," Psaki chuckled.

News 9 Denver's Kyle Clark did his own commentary on the matter Monday, saying that Bobert had a note put in the Congressional record that she missed the debt ceiling vote because she was "unavoidably detained."

"Now she's saying she skipped the vote on purpose as a protest," said Clark. "Both cannot be true and Boebert knows which one of her claims is a lie. Congresswoman Boebert often gets a pass from the media for making outrageous and false statements because she does it so often. That's not fair to the Coloradans in her district or to the elected officials who do not blatantly lie to voters. I can hear you saying, 'Oh, all politicians lie all the time.' Except they don't. We have covered countless conservatives and progressives and everywhere in between, politicians who strive to tell the truth every day. They don't all offer up obvious, clumsy lies that insult the intelligence of voters."

He closed by saying that if a politician makes something up they will always call them out, but it "doesn't give anyone else the license to lie, even if they make it part of their personal brand."

"Here's why this matters," Jon Cooper tweeted. "Yes, it exposes Lauren as incompetent. But it also exposes her as a LIAR. Because she CLAIMED her no-show vote was a form of protest because the bill was a "crap sandwich.” She was so smug and so proud in another video claiming that she skipped the vote because 'they wouldn't let me do my job.' Gee. I thought her job was to vote."

"Every time a new Lauren Boebert joke goes viral a bunch of MAGA dipsh-ts tell me they gonna boycott my movies," said Liam Nissan™. The Twitter user's name is Liam and he drives a Nissan car. He is not the actor.>

Who was appointed as the first director of CISA?

Chris Krebs.

The same Chris Krebs that stated that the election was the most secure in history.

The election fraud narrative is a fabrication by Donald Trump.

It's crystal clear.

<Fox News host Harris Faulkner is getting called out on Twitter for uttering a “blatant” falsehood about the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic as she criticized the protective measures that were in place during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Faulkner, who is getting a tryout in former host Tucker Carlson’s old primetime slot, claimed schools didn’t close in 1918.

Much like her predecessor, who became infamous for spreading COVID-19 misinformation, she was wrong.

School closures were not only common in 1918, studies have found they were effective in reducing the excess death rate from Spanish flu ― and so many people responded that a “community note” correcting the misinformation was appended.

“We didn’t even have penicillin back then,” Faulkner also said, despite the fact that penicillin isn’t used for flu as antibiotics do not work against viruses. “We did sacrifice. We suffered. But then we pressed on.”

That “sacrifice” included 50 million dead globally including 675,000 in the United States, according to the CDC.>