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Focus Features Promoter (10:12)

this episode is brought to you by Focus Features. Would you let AI pilot your plane? Raise your child? Decide your future? On March 27, Focus Features presents the AI Doc or How I Became an Apocalyptomist. Critics and audience at the Sundance and Southwest Film festivals. Call it the most urgent movie of our time, the AI doc or how I became an apocalyptimist. Rated PG13 only in theaters March 27.

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Brian McCullough (11:06)

Amazon has begun three hour deliveries in around 2,000 US cities and towns, and one hour deliveries in hundreds of those areas after recent pilots. More than 90,000 products are eligible for this super fast delivery. Quoting CNBC Our customers are busier than ever and are looking for new ways to save time while keeping their households running, udit Madan, Amazon's senior vice president of worldwide operations, said in a statement. More than 90,000 products are eligible for delivery in three hours or less, including pantry items, cleaning supplies, over the counter, medications, clothing and toys. Amazon said it expects to bring the service, which started via small scale tests late last year, to more areas of the country in the coming months. We're excited to say that two decades after prime launched, we're still innovating to make delivery even faster while maintaining the same everyday low prices and vast selection Amazon is known for, madan said. Amazon added a storefront shopping page in areas where the options are available, and shoppers will be able to filter search results for products that can't be delivered in one hour or three hours or less. Users can also check ultra fast delivery options on Amazon's Get It Fast site. Amazon got consumers hooked on fast shipping when it introduced free two day delivery alongside its prime loyalty program in 2005. By 2019, it made one day shipping the standard, and in the years since, it has poured money and resources into expanding same day delivery. Same day orders typically arrive within a few hours. In its quest to make deliveries even faster, Amazon has experimented with a number of programs that sought to leverage its sprawling fulfillment network and legions of on demand flex gig workers. The company in 2021 shut down its standalone prime now fast Delivery service. In 2024, Amazon discontinued a service that promised speedy delivery from mall and brick and mor retailers. More recently, the company has been testing 30 minute deliveries of household essentials and fresh groceries with a program called Amazon Now. The service is being piloted in Seattle, Washington and Philadelphia Pennsylvania, along with international markets like the United Arab Emirates, India, Brazil and Mexico. End quote. I guess it's not just sexy time mode in an old all hands meeting OpenAI CEO of Applications Fiji Simo apparently has described a strategy shift at OpenAI to refocus on coding and business users, urging staff to avoid side quests, quoting the Journal, OpenAI's top executives are finalizing plans for a major strategy shift to refocus the company around coding and business users, recognizing that a do everything all at once strategy has put them on the defensive. Fiji Simo OpenAI, CEO of Applications, previewed the changes to employees in an all hands meeting, telling them that top leaders including CEO Sam Altman and Chief Research Officer Mark Chen were actively looking at which areas to deprioritize. They expect to notify staff about the changes in the coming weeks. We cannot miss this moment because we are distracted by sidequests, simo told staff last week, according to remarks reviewed by the Wall Street Journal. We really have to nail productivity in general and particularly productivity on the business front. Last year, OpenAI announced an array of new products, including the video generator Sora, a web browser called Atlas, a new hardware device, and e commerce features for ChatGPT. Sam Altman has previously likened this approach to betting on a series of startups inside of OpenAI, and the strategy helped burnish the company's reputation as the pioneer of the AI era. OpenAI is under growing pressure from rival Anthropic, which has become the dominant AI provider for businesses thanks to the viral success of its Claude code and cowork offerings. These products, which include so called agents that can autonomously carry out complex tasks for users, have become all the rage in Silicon Valley and even sparked a global stock market sell off last month. Anthropic has placed fewer product bets than OpenAI has, focusing its efforts on the enterprise and coding market. The company has so far avoided image and video generation products. As an example. OpenAI and Anthropic have taken steps toward public listings that could take place as soon as this year, plans that have added extra urgency to the ferocious competition between the two companies. Neither company has disclosed specific timeline, but in some discussions OpenAI raised the prospect of an initial public offering in the fourth quarter of this year, the Wall Street Journal has reported. Simo told staff Anthropic success should serve as a wake up call for the company and that it had to regain the lead among software developers and enterprise customers. Current and former employees said that last year's do everything approach sometimes created a lack of focus and that it was at times difficult to understand OpenAI's strategic direction. That is a problem in many organizations. But the stakes are higher at OpenAI and other frontier labs, where the central issue is how to spend and allocate scarce computing capacity between projects. Computing resources often shifted from one team to another at the last minute, and the company's organizational structure grew complicated, the employees said. For example, OpenAI's Sora team was housed under the research division even though it was responsible for launching one of the company's most high profile products, they said. End quote. Finally, the robots are coming to Disney something something. Westworld Afterworld. To paraphrase Kurt Cobain quoting the Verge, Olaf from Frozen is coming to Disneyland Paris on March 26 and Hong Kong Disneyland this summer. The rare robot that crosses the uncanny valley as long as he keeps moving. And that is because Disney animators helped him train himself, sticking 100,000 virtual copies of the physical Olaf robot into a Nvidia powered simulation and rewarding him for screen accurate moves. It took just two days to train Olaf with an Nvidia RTX 4090 GPU. This absolutely is the future of how we're building robot characters, disney Imagineering Senior Vice President of R and D Kyle Laughlin tells the Verge. He says reinforcement learning is the true unlock that could let Disney populate entire lands full of interactive characters now that entire robots can be built in months instead of years. And while Disney Imagineering has done some of this with its Star wars droids before those were robots being robots, said Laughlin, this is our first animated character that we brought to life. To be crystal clear, Olaf is not artificially intelligent. The 35 inch tall, 33 pound robot may have 25 articulators and three computers, including an Nvidia Jetson Orin NX and a Raspberry PI. But it's not speaking for itself. It plays pre recorded lines from Olaf's voice actor Josh Gad while it performs animated moves. While Olaf blinks autonomously, it can't see you or look at you. That requires the operator to flick a joystick. The Steam Deck's other joystick tells Olaf where to walk, and the operator can swipe across a touchpad to quickly access page after page of conversation options. In my early demo, it wasn't yet get enough to carry on a conversation. A quick of course or sure was often all I got. Olaf was a challenge to develop, the team says, because robots traditionally don't have big weighty heads that rest on a small neck, it puts a lot of strain on that joint, making it prone to overheating. Olaf's clomp clomp clomp walking was a noisy challenge to solve as well. But in the reinforcement learning simulation, Disney was simply able to reward the 100,000 virtual Olafs who move without overheating that joint or making too much noise. It's like telling my 6 year old to stop running through the house. Can you just be a little bit quieter? That's pretty much what we had to do for Olaf, says Laughlin. It won't always be a human with a Steam deck at the controls, though. Olaf can be part of time coded performances tied directly into Disney's live entertainment choreography systems. Laughlin says that's one of the first ways he'll appear at Disneyland Paris. Those performances may even get more intriguing, Laughlin suggests, as Disney creates more robots, you can expect to see more robots from franchises together so they can interact. The real power is going to come from Olaf interacting with characters that he knows and loves. Not only performers, but also other characters that we haven't been able to bring to life without robotics, he hints. Disney Research has published an eight page white paper on how it created Olaf, including some of the exact components and formulas it used. End quote. Nothing more for you today. Talk to you tomorrow.