The Who’s Who Behind the Modern Artificial Intelligence Movement
Technology

The Who’s Who Behind the Modern Artificial Intelligence Movement

While artificial intelligence has taken the limelight over the past year, technology that can appear to operate like human brains has been top of mind for researchers, investors and tech executives in Silicon Valley and beyond for more than a decade.Here are some of the people involved in the origins of the modern A.I. movement who have influenced the technology’s development.Credit...Jim Wilson/The New York TimesSam AltmanMr. Altman is the chief executive of OpenAI, the San Francisco A.I. lab that made the chatbot ChatGPT that went viral over the past year and ushered in recognition of the power of generative artificial intelligence. Mr. Altman helped start OpenAI after meeting with Elon Musk about the technology in 2015. At the time, Mr. Altman ran Y Combinator, the Silicon Valley start-...
Who is Miriam Adelson, the casino billionaire buying the Dallas Mavericks from Mark Cuban?
Sports

Who is Miriam Adelson, the casino billionaire buying the Dallas Mavericks from Mark Cuban?

The Dallas Mavericks have long been associated with Mark Cuban, its voluble owner for the last 22 years. But that relationship took an unexpected twist Tuesday with the news that Cuban is set to sell a controlling share in the franchise to the casino billionaire Miriam Adelson and her family. The Athletic’s Shams Charania reported that the Mavericks were valued at roughly $3.5 billion in the sale and that Adelson would get a majority stake in the team. Marc Stein was the first to report that Adelson was buying part of the club and that Cuban would retain control of its operations.While Cuban would continue to run basketball operations while retaining a minority interest in the franchise — a rare occurrence — the Mavericks seem as if they will be Adelson’s team soon, pending league approval...
Why Doctors and Pharmacists Are in Revolt
Economy

Why Doctors and Pharmacists Are in Revolt

Dr. John Wust does not come off as a labor agitator. A longtime obstetrician-gynecologist from Louisiana with a penchant for bow ties, Dr. Wust spent the first 15 years of his career as a partner in a small business — that is, running his own practice with colleagues.Long after he took a position at Allina Health, a large nonprofit health care system based in Minnesota, in 2009, he did not see himself as the kind of employee who might benefit from collective bargaining.But that changed in the months leading up to March, when his group of more than 100 doctors at an Allina hospital near Minneapolis voted to unionize. Dr. Wust, who has spoken with colleagues about the potential benefits of a union, said doctors were at a loss on how to ease their unsustainable workload because they had less ...
Fate of Billions for Opioid Victims From Sacklers Rests With Supreme Court
Health

Fate of Billions for Opioid Victims From Sacklers Rests With Supreme Court

The speed with which the court scheduled the case may reflect its awareness of the opioid problem. But legal experts said its ruling would be unlikely to dwell on the public health crisis. The court, they said, will focus narrowly on the liability shield, an increasingly popular, though contentious, bankruptcy tactic.“I’m sure, though, that even if the opioid crisis doesn’t show up anywhere in the opinion, the court has to be bearing in mind that cities, states and individuals have been desperately waiting for these funds. They need to know the answer to this question so they can figure out what to do next,” said Adam Zimmerman, who teaches mass tort law at the University of Southern California’s Gould School of Law.Though numerous pharmaceutical companies have been sued for their roles in...
‘Medical Freedom’ Activists Take Aim at New Target: Childhood Vaccine Mandates
News

‘Medical Freedom’ Activists Take Aim at New Target: Childhood Vaccine Mandates

For more than 40 years, Mississippi had one of the strictest school vaccination requirements in the nation, and its high childhood immunization rates have been a source of pride. But in July, the state began excusing children from vaccination if their parents cited religious objections, after a federal judge sided with a “medical freedom” group.Today, 2,100 Mississippi schoolchildren are officially exempt from vaccination on religious grounds. Five hundred more are exempt because their health precludes vaccination. Dr. Daniel P. Edney, the state health officer, warns that if the total number of exemptions climbs above 3,000, Mississippi will once again face the risk of deadly diseases that are now just a memory.“For the last 40 years, our main goal has been to protect those children at hig...
Make Sure Your Google Accounts Are Active, or They Might Be Deleted
Technology

Make Sure Your Google Accounts Are Active, or They Might Be Deleted

If you have not used one of your Google accounts for a long time, you might want to this week. Inactive accounts will start vanishing on Dec. 1.Google announced in May that it would start deleting accounts that had been idle for two years and said the policy would begin in December.That means that anything stored in Gmail or other Google products like Photos, Docs, Drive, Meet and Calendar could be deleted.Accounts are considered active if a user signs in and performs any one of a number of actions, including reading or sending an email, watching a YouTube video or using Google’s search. The user must be logged in to the account for the action to count.The company said when it announced the policy that it was for security reasons: Accounts that have not been used for a long time are more l...
Marie-Louise Eta, Union Berlin’s quiet Champions League trailblazer
Sports

Marie-Louise Eta, Union Berlin’s quiet Champions League trailblazer

This season, The Athletic is following Union Berlin, a Bundesliga club from the former East Germany who were playing regional-level football less than 20 years ago, on their inaugural Champions League journey for our series Iron In The Blood.GO DEEPERIs the Premier League still on course for an extra Champions League spot?As Union Berlin’s players drifted down the tunnel and the stands in Braga’s Municipal Stadium emptied to the tune of one last song over the PA system, Marie-Louise Eta stood alone by the side of the pitch for a moment, lost in her thoughts.Union had just picked up a second successive point in the Champions League on the road — that was the good news.The bad news was that Union had carelessly squandered a lead against a team that had played with 10 men for more than an hou...
Dr Pepper Halftime Scholarship Giveaway Error Draws Ire of Fans
Economy

Dr Pepper Halftime Scholarship Giveaway Error Draws Ire of Fans

The Big 12 Championship game between the Texas Longhorns and the Oklahoma State Cowboys on Saturday evening delivered the kind of controversy-mired barn burner that inspires legions of college football fans to pack stadiums and jam sports bars every weekend.But the real competition, it turned out, was not between the football teams (Texas won a one-sided 49-21 affair), but between two college students competing in the Dr Pepper Tuition Giveaway challenge at halftime, a college football tradition.Each student had to lob as many footballs as they could into their respective Dr Pepper-branded bin five yards away within the allotted time.Ryan Georgian, a freshman at the University of Pennsylvania, and Gavin White, a junior at Ohio State University, were tied at 10 points each at the end of reg...
Freed Palestinians Were Mostly Young and Not Convicted of Crimes
News

Freed Palestinians Were Mostly Young and Not Convicted of Crimes

Israel released a total of 240 Palestinian prisoners and detainees in exchange for 105 hostages freed by Hamas during a weeklong pause in hostilities, an arrangement that diplomats had tried to extend before it collapsed into fighting on Friday morning.A New York Times analysis of data on the Palestinians released showed that a majority of them had not been convicted of a crime. There were 107 teenagers under 18, including three girls. Another 66 teenagers were 18 years old. The oldest person released was a 64-year-old woman.The negotiations for the seven rounds of exchange — one for each day of the pause — had centered on women and children on either side of the conflict. Citizens of Thailand, the Philippines and Russia, who were freed through separate talks, also numbered among the hosta...
Don’t Be Afraid of the iPhone’s NameDrop Feature, Experts Say
Technology

Don’t Be Afraid of the iPhone’s NameDrop Feature, Experts Say

Police departments from New Jersey to California have been sounding the alarm in recent days about NameDrop, a new feature of the Apple iPhone’s latest operating system that allows users to wirelessly exchange contact information.Apple declined to comment, but experts say the warnings that “scammers and thieves” could exploit the feature to harvest a user’s personal information appear to be overblown, if not entirely unfounded.For starters, the devices must be practically touching for NameDrop to work, and both users must agree to share the information.Mark Bartholomew, a law professor who focuses on cyber law at the University at Buffalo, said that NameDrop had enough stopgaps in place to prevent someone’s information from being stolen.“To the extent there’s panic here about nonconsensual...