OpenAI Debuts GPT-4 Turbo That's 'More Powerful' and Less Expensive Than GPT-4

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Today at its first-ever developer conference, OpenAI unveiled GPT-4 Turbo, an improved version of its flagship text-generating AI model, GPT-4, that the company claims is both “more powerful” and less expensive. GPT-4 Turbo comes in two versions: one that’s strictly text-analyzing and a second version that understands the context of both text and images. The text-analyzing model is available in preview via an API starting today, and OpenAI says it plans to make both generally available “in the coming weeks.”

They’re priced at $0.01 per 1,000 input tokens (~750 words), where “tokens” represent bits of raw text — e.g., the word “fantastic” split into “fan,” “tas” and “tic”) and $0.03 per 1,000 output tokens. (Input tokens are tokens fed into the model, while output tokens are tokens that the model generates based on the input tokens.) The pricing of the image-processing GPT-4 Turbo will depend on the image size. For example, passing an image with 1080×1080 pixels to GPT-4 Turbo will cost $0.00765, OpenAI says. “We optimized performance so we’re able to offer GPT-4 Turbo at a 3x cheaper price for input tokens and a 2x cheaper price for output tokens compared to GPT-4,” OpenAI writes in a blog post shared with TechCrunch this morning.

GPT-4 Turbo boasts several improvements over GPT-4 — one being a more recent knowledge base to draw on when responding to requests. […] GPT-4 Turbo offers a 128,000-token context window — four times the size of GPT-4’s and the largest context window of any commercially available model, surpassing even Anthropic’s Claude 2. (Claude 2 supports up to 100,000 tokens; Anthropic claims to be experimenting with a 200,000-token context window but has yet to publicly release it.) 128,000 tokens translates to around 100,000 words or 300 pages, which for reference is around the length of Wuthering Height, Gulliver’s Travels and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. And GPT-4 Turbo supports a new “JSON mode,” which ensures that the model responds with valid JSON — the open standard file format and data interchange format.

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Source: Slashdot – OpenAI Debuts GPT-4 Turbo That’s ‘More Powerful’ and Less Expensive Than GPT-4

“I cannot wait to possess you”: Reading 18th century letters for the first time

bundles of 18th century letters in three piles

Enlarge / The letters before they were opened and read by Renaud Morieux at The National Archives, Kew. (credit: The National Archives / Renaud Morieux)

University of Cambridge historian Renaud Morieux was poring over materials at the National Archives in Kew when he came across a box holding three piles of sealed letters held together by ribbons. The archivist gave him permission to open the letters, all addressed to 18th century French sailors from their loved ones and seized by Great Britain’s Royal Navy during the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763).

“I realized I was the first person to read these very personal messages since they’re written,” said Morieux, who just published his analysis of the letters in the journal Annales Histoire Sciences Sociales. “These letters are about universal human experiences, they’re not unique to France or the 18th century. They reveal how we all cope with major life challenges. When we are separated from loved ones by events beyond our control like the pandemic or wars, we have to work out how to stay in touch, how to reassure, care for people and keep the passion alive. Today we have Zoom and WhatsApp. In the 18th century, people only had letters, but what they wrote about feels very familiar.”

England and France have a long, complicated history of being at war, most notably the Hundred Years’ War in the 14th and 15th centuries. The two countries were also almost continuously at war during the 18th century, including the Seven Years’ War, which was fought in Europe, the Americas, and Asia-Pacific as England and France tried to establish global dominance with the aid of their respective allies. The war technically evolved out of the North American colonies when England tried to expand into territory the French had already claimed. (Fun fact: A 22-year-old George Washington led a 1754 ambush on a French force at the Battle of Jumonville Glen.) But the conflict soon spread beyond colonial borders, and the British went on to seize hundreds of French ships at sea.

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Source: Ars Technica – “I cannot wait to possess you”: Reading 18th century letters for the first time

Critical vulnerability in Atlassian Confluence server is under “mass exploitation”

Critical vulnerability in Atlassian Confluence server is under “mass exploitation”

Enlarge

A critical vulnerability in Atlassian’s Confluence enterprise server app that allows for malicious commands and reset servers is under active exploitation by threat actors in attacks that install ransomware, researchers said.

“Widespread exploitation of the CVE-2023-22518 authentication bypass vulnerability in Atlassian Confluence Server has begun, posing a risk of significant data loss,” Glenn Thorpe, senior director of security research and detection engineering at security firm GreyNoise, wrote on Mastodon on Sunday. “So far, the attacking IPs all include Ukraine in their target.”

He pointed to a page showing that between 12 am and 8 am on Sunday UTC (around 5 pm Saturday to 1 am Sunday Pacific Time), three different IP addresses began exploiting the critical vulnerability, which allows attackers to restore a database and execute malicious commands. The IPs have since stopped those attacks, but he said he suspected the exploits are continuing.

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Source: Ars Technica – Critical vulnerability in Atlassian Confluence server is under “mass exploitation”

i.MX 8M Plus SBC with Dual GbE & TSN support

The TQ-Group recently launched a single board computer compatible with various NXP i. MX 8M Plus CPUs aimed at different applications. Some key features of the board are its camera support, dual GbE ports and extensive storage options. The core of the MBa8MP-RAS314 is the TQMa8MPxL module, which comes equipped with the versatile NXP i.MX […]

Source: LXer – i.MX 8M Plus SBC with Dual GbE & TSN support

Blade's Director Wants to Show Another Side of Mahershala Ali

Marvel’s upcoming Blade movie will introduce the beloved vampire hunter to the MCU and mark his first theatrical appearance since Wesley Snipes bowed out of the role with 2007’s Blade Trinity. Much has been made about what the movie is or isn’t, but for director Yann Demange, the film will be a great showcase for star…

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Source: Gizmodo – Blade’s Director Wants to Show Another Side of Mahershala Ali

OpenAI Offers To Pay For ChatGPT Customers' Copyright Lawsuits

Blake Montgomery reports via The Guardian: Rather than remove copyrighted material from ChatGPT’s training dataset, the chatbot’s creator is offering to cover its clients’ legal costs for copyright infringement suits. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said on Monday: “We can defend our customers and pay the costs incurred if you face legal claims around copyright infringement and this applies both to ChatGPT Enterprise and the API.” The compensation offer, which OpenAI is calling Copyright Shield, applies to users of the business tier, ChatGPT Enterprise, and to developers using ChatGPT’s application programming interface. Users of the free version of ChatGPT or ChatGPT+ were not included. […] Getty Images, Shutterstock and Adobe have extended similar financial liability protection for their image-making software. The announcement was made at the company’s first-ever developer conference today, where Altman said there are now 100 million weekly ChatGPT users. The company also announced a platform for making custom versions of ChatGPT for specific use cases — no coding required.

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Source: Slashdot – OpenAI Offers To Pay For ChatGPT Customers’ Copyright Lawsuits

Epic Games Admits In Court That Its PC Store Still Isn't Profitable

On Monday, during the first day of the Epic v. Google legal showdown over app store fees, both companies gave their opening statements and began poking at each other’s witnesses. And during the day, Epic admitted that its digital PC game store still isn’t profitable.

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Source: Kotaku – Epic Games Admits In Court That Its PC Store Still Isn’t Profitable

Half of the mass of an early galaxy is in its central black hole

Image of a field of stars with a large purple glow in the center.

Enlarge / Inset shows the JWST image of the galaxy in infrared, along with the X-rays from the black hole seen by the Chandra. While the X-ray source is far smaller than the galaxy, X-rays are much harder to remove. (credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO/Ákos Bogdán; Infrared: NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/L. Frattare & K. Arcand)

Researchers combing through some of the earliest galaxies in the Universe have found one that appears to have an actively feeding central black hole. Based on the amount of radiation it’s emitting, the researchers estimate that it accounts for roughly half of the mass of the entire galaxy it’s in—an astonishingly high fraction compared to modern galaxies.

The fact that such a large object can exist only half a billion years after the Big Bang places severe limits on how it could possibly have formed, strongly suggesting that supermassive black holes formed without ever having gone through an intermediate step involving a star.

Old X-rays

The earliest galaxies in the Universe that we know about have been identified using the James Webb Space Telescope, which took advantage of a galaxy cluster in the foreground that magnified more distant ones through gravitational lensing. Using the lens provided by a specific cluster, the Webb identified 11 galaxies that were imaged as they existed less than a billion years after the Big Bang.

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Source: Ars Technica – Half of the mass of an early galaxy is in its central black hole

YouTube Tests a 'Play Something' Button

Emma Roth reports via The Verge: YouTube appears to be testing a new “play something” button on its mobile app that directs you to a random video when you don’t know what to watch. As first spotted by Android Police, the prompt shows up between content as you scroll through the feed on your homepage — but only some users are seeing it. While Android Police mentions that the button only directs users to YouTube Shorts, one of my colleagues here at The Verge found that the feature also shows them random full-length videos. It’s still not clear if YouTube takes your watch history into account when picking the random videos it plays or how widely Google is rolling out this feature.

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Source: Slashdot – YouTube Tests a ‘Play Something’ Button

Laid-Off Dragon Age Testers Will Picket BioWare

Former quality assurance testers who worked on Dragon Age: Dreadwolf are preparing to picket outside Bioware’s Edmonton offices after being laid off earlier this year. Electronic Arts tried to block the protest but the developers prevailed in a ruling by the Alberta Labour Relations Board in Canada.

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Source: Kotaku – Laid-Off Dragon Age Testers Will Picket BioWare

World of Warcraft Is Letting One of Its Best Characters Grow Older With It

This past weekend at BlizzCon, fresh off the news that Blizzard—and the rest of Activision—would be joining Microsoft officially, the video game developer lifted the lid on the future of its longest-running game, World of Warcraft, in a big way. And in doing so, it reminded us in quite a stark way just how much time…

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Source: Gizmodo – World of Warcraft Is Letting One of Its Best Characters Grow Older With It

Samsung’s Galaxy S24 Ultra Is Coming for the iPhone 15 Pro With Its Own Titanium Build

It’s nearing the end of the year, which means once holiday shopping and sales are over, we’ll be talking about the next generation of new smartphones. Samsung typically starts us off for the year with the Galaxy flagship lineup. And next year, it could be accompanied by new fancy jargon to compete with the iPhone 15…

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Source: Gizmodo – Samsung’s Galaxy S24 Ultra Is Coming for the iPhone 15 Pro With Its Own Titanium Build

9 Ways to Make Google Chrome Safer and More Private

Google Chrome’s default settings are (surprise!) far from ideal for those who care about their privacy and security. And if you’re one of those people—but aren’t ready to jump ship to another, less intrusive browser like Brave or Tor—there are some easy ways to adjust your settings to reduce Google’s tracking on…

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Source: LifeHacker – 9 Ways to Make Google Chrome Safer and More Private

Bored Ape Conference Attendees Wake Up With Searing Eye Pain, Vision Loss

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Attendees at a conference for Bored Ape NFT owners are reporting waking up in the middle of the night following laser and blacklight-heavy performances with extreme eye pain and vision loss. Yuga Labs, the parent company of Bored Ape Yacht Club, hosted ApeFest in Hong Kong from November 3-5. The event was open to holders of Bored Ape NFTs, a crypto project that peaked in 2021 and recently crashed to a two-year low, costing many investors thousands of dollars.

“I woke up at 04:00 and couldn’t see anymore. Had so much pain and my whole skin is burned. Needed to go to the hospital,” one attendee posted on the last day of the event. “The doctor told me the uv of the lightning of the stage did it. It has the same effect as sunlight. Still can not see normally..” “Same here for me and +1. I had eyeglasses, so was a bit spared, but skin is burned and +1 had the same degree of issues with eyes,” someone replied. “The toilets may have been great, but what happened to our eyeballs last night at #ApeFest?” another attendee wrote, as a follow-up to a photo of him sitting on a toilet with his pants around his ankles in a room bathed in intense blacklights. “Been to lots of concerts, festivals, Burning Man, and never have I ever experienced fucked eyes like this.”

Even as they woke up in the middle of the night with blinding eye pain, some attendees still praised the organizers for the event. “Thanks for great apefest logistiscs guys @yugalabs & @BoredApeYC. Incredible event and met plenty of amazing people,” one wrote. “Still, as dozens of others, I’ve almost lost sight this night.” They suggested others get their eyes checked like they did, and said their eyes were burned by UV. “To the organisers: For the communication & awareness reasons, it would be fair to put together an official statement with recommendations what to do, as dozens of people you care about were exposed to serious health hazards and lots of suffering,” they continued. “You’re good guys so it should be easy for you to recognise the seriousness of it.” Photos and videos from the event show crowds of young men doing some of the worst moshing I’ve ever seen to performances and conference rooms soaked in blacklight and lasers. Where in the venue the damage was done is still unclear. Bored Ape Yacht Club acknowledged the issue in a post early Monday morning: “Apes, we are aware of the eye-related issues that affected some of the attendees of ApeFest and have been proactively reaching out to individuals since yesterday to try and find the potential root causes,” the official account tweeted. “Based on our estimates, we believe that much less than 1% of those attending and working the event had these symptoms. While nearly everyone has indicated their symptoms have improved, we encourage anybody who feels them to seek medical attention just in case.”

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Source: Slashdot – Bored Ape Conference Attendees Wake Up With Searing Eye Pain, Vision Loss

Toxic toddler fruit pouches: “Extremely high” lead levels sicken 7 in 5 states

The three pouches so far linked to lead contamination.

Enlarge / The three pouches so far linked to lead contamination. (credit: FDA)

At least seven children across five states have suffered acute lead poisoning linked to at least three brands of apple cinnamon fruit puree pouches marketed to children and sold nationwide, the Food and Drug Administration announced in an updated safety alert Friday.

The brands include WanaBana apple cinnamon fruit puree pouches, Schnucks brand cinnamon-flavored applesauce pouches, and Weis brand cinnamon applesauce pouches. All three have been recalled. Consumers should not buy, sell, serve, or eat any of these products. Any pouches that have already been purchased should be thrown away. Parents or guardians of any children who may have eaten the purees should talk with health care providers about blood lead tests.

In an October 28 alert, the FDA said it was working with authorities in the state of North Carolina who had identified four children with elevated blood lead levels in the western part of the state. North Carolina considers a child to have elevated blood lead levels if they have two consecutive blood lead test results greater than or equal to 5 micrograms per deciliter (µg/dl)—at which point the child becomes eligible for an investigation into the lead source. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention meanwhile has a threshold of 3.5 µg/dl to consider a blood lead level high, which corresponds to the 97.5th percentile of blood levels in a survey of US children.

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Source: Ars Technica – Toxic toddler fruit pouches: “Extremely high” lead levels sicken 7 in 5 states

Biggest Moments From OpenAI’s DevDay

OpenAI revealed a lot of significant innovations during its first-ever developer conference on Monday. The company reported it currently has two million developers and 100 million weekly active users, with 92% of Fortune 500 companies building on its products. OpenAI is the “most advanced and widely used AI platform…

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Source: Gizmodo – Biggest Moments From OpenAI’s DevDay

This Plugin Shows You Where Every Amazon Product Was Made

Most of us do at least some (if not the majority of) our shopping online now, but there are things we give up for that convenience. You can’t actually hold the item in your hands to see if reality lives up to the product description, so we often rely on bot-infested or fake reviews. But if you consider where the item…

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Source: LifeHacker – This Plugin Shows You Where Every Amazon Product Was Made