Prediction: This Artificial Intelligence (AI) Company Will Be Acquired in 2025There’s no place like Chicago. There’s no place like Chicago. There’s no place like Chicago. Especially when it comes to recognizing the storytelling charm of L. Frank Baum. Baum wrote his classic children’s book, “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” while living in Chicago’s Humboldt Park neighborhood. It was published in 1900, with illustrations by Chicago-based artist William Wallace Denslow. In 1939, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer released the film, “The Wizard of Oz,” and there seems to be no end to the popularity as each generation embraces the tale of a colorful collection of characters embarking on adventure, finding themselves and overcoming adversity. A statue of Dorothy and Toto, the fictional characters made famous in the book and film, “The Wizard of Oz,” is located in Chicago’s Oz Park. (Chicago Park District) The film was introduced to television audiences in the 1950s and has enjoyed regular airings pretty much ever since. In the 1970s, “The Wiz” opened on stage and then film. The early 2000s brought “Wicked,” the theatrical blockbuster. And this holiday season, “Wicked” the movie, starring Ariana Grande, Cynthia Erivo and Jeff Goldblum, opens across the country. But Chicago’s love reaches beyond the entertainment industry. In 1970 Chicago opened Oz Park at 2021 N. Burling St., featuring statues of Dorothy and Toto, the Scarecrow, the Lion and the Tin Man. On the corner of North Humboldt Boulevard and West Wabansia Avenue, a mosaic by artist Hector Duarte and 70-foot section of “yellow brick” walkway installed by nonprofit developer Bickerdike now grace the site where Baum’s house once stood. Though there seems to be no end to the story’s life, it is the original film, one of the earliest to introduce technicolor in scenes, that connects those of us who grew up in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s. It was a magical time when families gathered around the television to watch films and programs together. Of course, by today’s standards it was also a maddening time before streaming and recording, back when you had to wait for the local station to air your favorite movie and, once a date was announced, you had to clear your schedule and ride out the commercials. To a millennial that must sound brutal. But it was all we knew and we reacted with delight and anticipation. Chicago Tribune L. Frank Baum, seen here in Chicago in 1908, wrote his classic children’s book, “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” while living in Chicago’s Humboldt Park neighborhood. (File photo) There was something neat about knowing the same movie was airing at the same time on the same night in millions of living rooms across the country, that all of us were scared, hopeful and enchanted in unison. Kind of like watching the Super Bowl or the World Series. To this day, the film transports me back to one of my best childhood memories: Watching my mom become a child again each time she saw the opening credits roll across our TV screen. It was as if she became a child again. She adored the characters, loved the good vs. evil plot, related to the themes of struggle, fear, friendship, acceptance and adventure. And she belted out “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” with abandon. And we, her children, loved watching her love it all. She also no doubt felt somewhat of a kinship with Dorothy after the 1967 Oak Lawn tornado brought a swath of destruction too close to our Chicago Ridge bungalow. Truth be told, we all can relate to the story. At times we all feel like strangers battling our way through a world of misunderstanding and cruelty. We all want to believe that home is not so much a place, but a feeling of being safe and loved. And wouldn’t it be neat if the answers we so desperately seek are already deep within ourselves? According to Smithsonian magazine, Baum’s book became a fast bestseller and introduced a new genre to the world of children’s literature. “Until this point, American children read European literature; there had never been a successful American children’s book author,” the article said. “Unlike other books for children, ‘The Wizard of Oz’ was pleasingly informal; characters were defined by their actions rather than authorial discourse; and morality was a subtext rather than a juggernaut rolling through the text.” Baum wrote 14 books in the Oz series, beginning with “The Marvelous Land of Oz” (1904) and ending with “Glinda of Oz,” which was published posthumously in 1920, according to the Library of Congress. A new generation may want to learn more about L. Frank Baum, author of “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” when the screen adaptation of the musical, “Wicked: Part I,” opens in movie theaters this weekend. Cynthia Erivo, left, plays Elphaba and Ariana Grande is Glinda. (Giles Keyte/Universal Pictures) The “Wizard of Oz” film, starring Garland, Ray Bolger and Frank Morgan, first aired on television in 1956 and for the next 35 years, it was shown regularly. Now 85, the movie still resonates with the public. And it seems there is no shortage of spinoffs and theories about the inspiration for the story. In a recent story in Smithsonian magazine ( www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-feminist-inspired-witches-of-oz-180985334 ), writer Evan I. Schwartz states, “the real-life backstory of the witches of Oz ... involves a hidden hero of the 19th-century women’s rights movement and the most powerful woman in Baum’s life: his mother-in-law, Matilda Electa Joslyn Gage.” Schwartz explains: “Gage was known for her radical views and confrontational approach. At the Statue of Liberty unveiling in 1886, she showed up on a cattle barge with a megaphone, shouting that it was ‘a gigantic lie, a travesty and a mockery’ to portray liberty as a woman when actual American women had so few rights.” Another theory is the story is a political allegory, with each character representing a different, disgruntled component of society — the Tin Man is mistreated factory workers, the Scarecrow is troubled farmers, etc., according to one essay ( historycollection.com/16-hidden-symbolic-messages-in-the-wizard-of-oz-you-may-have-missed ). Politics aside, at its core, “The Wizard of Oz” is a good adventure tale, much like “The Hobbit.” It features a journey, evil, camaraderie and fellowship. And, of course, there’s magic. The film opens in black and white, giving the windswept Kansas landscape a bleak, tired vibe. After the storm, Dorothy awakens to a colorful world of imagination. Every year, my mother “oohed and aahed” at the technical transition. I took her to see both “The Wiz” and “Wicked” soon after the productions opened in Chicago’s theater district. Of course, she loved them. She loved every trip we made back into the city where she grew up. I also bought her Baum’s classic, “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” which she read for the first time as a grandma. Were she still alive, I would take her to see the section of yellow brick road in Humboldt Park. So I could hear her say, “There’s no place like Chicago.” Donna Vickroy is an award-winning reporter, editor and columnist who worked for the Daily Southtown for 38 years. She can be reached at donnavickroy4@gmail.com.
JOHOR BAHRU – All autogates at the Bangunan Sultan Iskandar (BSI) customs, immigration and quarantine (CIQ) complex are now operational and huge crowds at the bus halls have started to disperse. At press time, about 46 autogates at the bus arrival and exit halls and KTM station have been reactivated in stages on late Dec 8. “The situation is slowly returning to normal, and we expect everything to be back to normal soon,” a security official said, adding that the autogates have been down since noon on Dec 8 due to a massive technical glitch. The official said the cause of the widespread failures of all autogates at the bus halls and the KTM station leading to Singapore has yet to be identified. At the height of the outage, tens of thousands of people were stuck at BSI for up to four hours while immigration officers had to manually clear people for travel. Immigration had also activated contra lanes to divert travellers at the entry and exit bus halls. However, all immigration clearance for cars, motorcycles and heavy vehicles were spared from the glitch. Other government agencies were also functioning without any issues at the complex. “This has never happened before at the JB CIQ, and it comes at the worst time, especially on a Sunday with a huge number of people, including Singaporeans, coming in for the long school holidays. “Some of them have been stuck for hours due to the long lines at the bus arrival and exit halls,” the official said, adding that additional security was brought in to ensure order at the complex. Singapore’s Immigration and Checkpoints Authority (ICA) also issued a travel advisory asking people to delay their journey to Johor Baru to help ease the situation. Earlier, many members of the public took to social media to express their frustration about the long delays. – THE STAR/ ASIA NEWS NETWORK
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On Sunday morning, a lightning offensive by Syrian rebels ended with the dramatic fall of Damascus, marking the collapse of Bashar al-Assad 's regime after 13 years of devastating civil war. One of the most consequential moments in the Middle East's recent history was set in motion by a chain of events that few could have anticipated, least of all Hamas and Israel, whose war inadvertently played a pivotal role. Now comes the tough part, where the Middle East either gets better, or even worse. The fall of Assad is a stark reminder of how unintended consequences shape history. Israel and the West were long ambivalent about Assad's fate. He is a butcher who used chemical weapons against his own people and led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands, yet his control over Syria offered predictability, even tacit stability, in a volatile region. And critically, the coalition arrayed against him seemed dominated by Islamists – and, let's face it, the West has hated political Islam ever since the mullahs of Iran engineered the US hostage crisis 45 years ago. This is, at the end of the day, Samuel Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations." It's real. In the unintended consequences bucket, Assad's ability to cling to power for so long relied heavily on Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militia that until recently was one of the most powerful non-state armies in the world. But Hezbollah was thrashed by Israel in the recent fighting in Lebanon—and it is probably not a coincidence that the decisive rebel offensive came immediately thereafter. The unravelling can be traced back to the catastrophic Oct. 7, 2023, assault by Hamas on Israel, in which the Iran-backed Palestinian terrorist group massacred 1,200 people and kidnapped about 250 back into Gaza. That triggered an unprecedented Israeli response that ended up decimating the Iran-led "Axis of Resistance." In Gaza, Israel systematically dismantled Hamas' leadership (while causing horrific damage to Gaza's civilian population). In Lebanon, Hezbollah decided to pile on, launching over a year of rocket attacks the day after the Hamas invasion, and it too has suffered devastating losses. And in Syria, Israeli strikes on Iranian assets further weakened the position of Assad, who had turned his country into a superhighway of Iranian arms delivery to Hezbollah in Lebanon. These strikes targeted weapons depots, Iranian bases, and key logistical routes, severely degrading Tehran's ability to support its proxies. The cumulative effect of these actions left the Axis of Resistance fragmented, demoralized, and weakened. Moreover, Iran, the architect of this regional alliance, has been grievously exposed, and Israeli air strikes have weakened its air defences. Its proxies are fractured, and its credibility as a regional powerbroker is in tatters. The toppling of Assad also weakens Russian influence in the Middle East, as Moscow was a key supporter of his regime. For Israel, all this is a double-edged sword. The dismantling of the Axis of Resistance represents a strategic victory, but the risks are significant. Rebel forces now controlling Syria are dominated by groups with ties to extremist ideologies, including Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, a group with al-Qaeda roots. This raises the specter of Syria becoming a failed state—or worse, a terrorist stronghold. Moreover, Assad's fall may invite new powers into Syria's vacuum. Turkey, Russia, and others could assert influence, potentially destabilizing the region further. For Israel, the stakes are high. The chaos could spill into neighboring Lebanon and Iraq, and no amount of military might can fully insulate Israel from the ripple effects of a fractured Syria. Amid this madness, we should remember something ironic. Originially, the opposition to Assad was liberal rebels who wanted a democratic Syria—the Free Syrian Army. What ultimately sealed Assad's fate was his calculated decision in 2011 to release Islamist prisoners from his jails. His hope was to discredit the opposition by making it unpalatable to the West; he figured he could ride the tiger. That tiger has now devoured him. Global fear and loathing of Islamism is preventing a genuine wave of celebration over the demise of a butcher. Many governments right now are wondering about the intentions of Hayat Tahrin al-Sham, despite the fact they have distanced themselves from al-Qaeda in recent years. That's why Israel has attacked Syrian chemical weapons depots—fearing they may fall into Islamist hands—and seized a strategic section of the Hermon mountaintop. The United States is headed into an isolationist frame of mind. President-elect Donald Trump has argued that this is "not our fight." Think again: Few things today are more important than preventing Syria from becoming a terrorist haven for global jihad. The fall of Assad's regime is a monumental moment, not just for Syria but for the entire Middle East. It underscores the impermanence of even the most entrenched autocracies. Assad's Baathist dictatorship, seemingly unassailable for decades, has crumbled. Many in the region are asking: could the Islamic theocracy in Iran, reviled by its people and a cancer upon the world, be next? Dan Perry is the former Cairo-based Middle East editor and London-based Europe/Africa editor of the Associated Press, the former chairman of the Foreign Press Association in Jerusalem and the author of two books. Follow him at danperry.substack.com . The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.Secret Showdown: Blockchain Titans Take on the IRS in a Battle That Could Reshape the Future of Digital FinanceWhy your favorite catalogs are smaller this holiday seasonChildren, pregnant women and people with mental health conditions will receive better support for alcohol and drug issues in a major funding boost. or signup to continue reading The $235 million package, expanding or establishing more than a dozen services, comes as policing, health and political leaders prepare to chart a new course for drug policy in NSW. Some $6.4 million across four years has been set aside to provide early intervention for 11 to 17-year-olds with moderate to severe substance use. The Cicada service, connected to Sydney's children's hospitals, links children and parents with pediatricians, nurses, social workers and other experts. Rates of underage drinking have been declining in recent decades but about one in every 11 underage teens engages in risky drinking at least once a month, according to . Funding will also be directed to programs targeting pregnant women, Aboriginal people, people with mental health conditions and people in the criminal justice system. They are among the most vulnerable groups that make up an estimated 1.4 million Australians with a substance abuse problem. The NSW government said the funding would significantly boost the alcohol and other drug workforce including those with Indigenous or lived experience backgrounds. "The programs we are investing in will ensure that people with complex needs receive wrap-around support and care to help people recover and rebuild their lives in the community," Health Minister Ryan Park said on Sunday. The new funding is drawn from $500 million set aside by the then-coalition government in 2022 in response to a major independent inquiry into the drug ice. About two-thirds of the newly announced package will be directed to government and non-government services in regional NSW. That's in addition to more than $30 million dedicated to support services in Murrumbidgee and northern NSW in early November during the regional swing of the state's landmark drug summit. The last and largest set of meetings will be held on Wednesday and Thursday in Sydney. Modelled on a week-long forum in 1999 that was the impetus for Australia's first supervised injecting room, the summit is bringing together experts, senior police, community leaders and MPs from across the political spectrum to build consensus for drug policy changes. Harm reduction advocates hope it can deliver health-focused reforms after recent inquiries delivered little more than incremental change. 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This month marks the 75th anniversary of the adoption by the Constituent Assembly of the draft Constitution of India, on November 26, 1949. The Union government has announced that it intends to commemorate this momentous occasion with a special joint sitting of Parliament. There are bound to be several self-congratulatory speeches, from all sides of our fractious political divide. But the speech that should haunt us all is that of the principal draftsman of the Constitution, B.R. Ambedkar, on the eve of the Constitution’s adoption. On November 25, 1949, in his magisterial summation of the work of the Drafting Committee he chaired, and before commending its work to the Assembly, he pointedly observed: “however good a Constitution may be, it is sure to turn out bad because those who are called to work it, happen to be a bad lot. However bad a Constitution may be, it may turn out to be good if those who are called to work it, happen to be a good lot.” The working of the Constitution, Dr. Ambedkar pointed out, depended on how the people and the political parties applied it. The drafters had made provision for relatively easy amendment, so as to permit the document to keep up with the needs of the times. But the rest depended on the way successive generations of its custodians chose to implement it. The lacunae that B.R. Ambedkar identified Dr. Ambedkar highlighted the fact that “there is complete absence of two things in Indian society” — equality and fraternity. “On the 26th of January 1950,” he declared, “we are going to enter into a life of contradictions. In politics we will have equality and in social and economic life we will have inequality. In politics we will be recognizing the principle of one man one vote and one vote one value. In our social and economic life, we shall, by reason of our social and economic structure, continue to deny the principle of one man one value. How long shall we continue to live this life of contradictions? How long shall we continue to deny equality in our social and economic life?” In calling for a social and not merely political democracy to emerge from the Constitution, Dr. Ambedkar stressed the absence of fraternity as the second major ingredient that was missing in India. “Fraternity means a sense of common brotherhood of all Indians — of Indians being one people. It is the principle which gives unity and solidarity to social life.” But thanks to the caste system — the entire structure of caste, he averred, was ‘anti-national’ — religious divisions and the absence of a common sense of nationhood among some Indians, fraternity had not yet been achieved. But it was indispensable, since liberty, equality and fraternity were all intertwined and could not flourish independently of one another. “Without equality,” he pointed out, “liberty would produce the supremacy of the few over the many. Equality without liberty would kill individual initiative. Without fraternity, liberty would produce the supremacy of the few over the many. Without fraternity, liberty and equality could not become a natural course of things. It would require a constable to enforce them.” What has changed Today, 75 years later, it is well worth asking what progress we have made to achieve the aims of the Constitution’s drafters, and in particular to fill the lacunae that Dr. Ambedkar identified. Equality has advanced, no doubt, with the abolition of untouchability being accompanied by the world’s oldest and farthest-reaching affirmative action programme, in the form of reservations, initially for Scheduled Castes and then for the Other Backward Classes (OBC). These reservations, which were initially intended to be temporary, have now been entrenched in our system and may be said to be politically unchallengeable. But the task of promoting social and economic equality, which Dr. Ambedkar pointed to, is far from complete. The clamour for further opportunities for those who believe that Indian society continues to deny them the equality of outcomes that the numbers warrant, continues to roil our politics. The escalating demand for a caste census is bound to have further implications for the evolution of India’s constitutional practice. As for fraternity, the mobilisation of votes in our contentious democracy in the name of caste, creed, region and language have ensured that the social and psychological sense of oneness that Dr. Ambedkar spoke about, is still, at best, a work in progress. But there is no doubt that the sense of nationhood that he felt had not yet come into existence has now become embedded across the country. One only needs to look at the crowds at a cricket match involving the Indian team, or the national outrage and mourning after an international conflict such as the Kargil war (1999) or the Galwan incident (2020), to be aware that there is a strong sense of nationhood despite the persistence of local or sectarian identities. Yet, by reifying caste reservations, India has promoted equality but arguably undermined fraternity. Fraternity had a special place in Dr. Ambedkar’s vision; the word was, in many ways, his distinctive contribution to India’s constitutional discourse. It also had an economic dimension, with the implicit idea that the assets of the better-off would be used to uplift the untouchables and other unfortunates. Fraternity would both result from and lead to the erosion of social and caste hierarchies. But, as the sociologist Dipankar Gupta has argued, the extension of reservations to the OBCs saw caste as ‘an important political resource to be plumbed in perpetuity’. Professor Gupta avers that this ‘is not in the spirit of enlarging fraternity, as the Ambedkar proposals are’; while Dr. Ambedkar’s ultimate aim was the annihilation of caste from Indian society, for Mandal, caste was not to be “removed”, but to be “represented”.’ It entrenched caste rather than eliminating it from public life. Highs and worrying lows This debate may well go on. Still, we can be grateful that the ascent to power of the very elements of Indian politics who had initially rejected the Constitution has not resulted in its abandonment. There is a certain irony to a Bharatiya Janata Party government celebrating a document that its forebears in the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the Jana Sangh had found “un-Indian” and devoid of soul. That soul has evolved over 75 years and 106 amendments, and the Constitution still thrives. But the hollowing out of many of the institutions created by the Constitution, the diminishing of Parliament, pressures on the judiciary and the undermining of the democratic spirit — leading to the V-Dem Institute labelling India as an “electoral autocracy”, policed by the “constable” Dr. Ambedkar warned against — mean that much still remains to be done by its custodians. “Independence,” Dr. Ambedkar said in concluding his memorable speech, “is no doubt a matter of joy. But let us not forget that this independence has thrown on us great responsibilities. By independence, we have lost the excuse of blaming the British for anything going wrong. If hereafter things go wrong, we will have nobody to blame except ourselves.” Seventy-five years later, let us vow to the reduce the number of things we need to blame ourselves for — and let the Constitution show us the way. Shashi Tharoor is a fourth-term Indian National Congress Member of the Lok Sabha for Thiruvananthapuram, and the award-winning author of 26 books, including ‘The Battle of Belonging: On Nationalism, Patriotism and What it Means to be Indian’ (2021). He is a member of the Congress Working Committee. Published - November 26, 2024 01:00 am IST Copy link Email Facebook Twitter Telegram LinkedIn WhatsApp Reddit constitution / parliament / Parliament proceedings / India / history / politics / political parties / Reservation / unrest, conflicts and war / Bharatiya Janata Party / Independence DaySometimes, a bowler outsmarts you; other times, you’re the architect of your own downfall. Rishabh Pant ’s dismissal on day three morning would fall under the latter. In his attempt to play a reverse sweep, Pant ended up miscuing it to third man to lose his wicket and reducing India to 191 for 6. The Australians could sense the beginning of the end. The stands were buzzing with excitement. For India, situation looked grim. ET Year-end Special Reads Take That: The gamechanger weapon's India acquired in 2024 10 big-bang policy moves Modi government made in 2024 How governments tried to rein in the social media beast Enter Nitish Kumar Reddy . And the rest is a story for future generations to get inspired. Reddy has batted with confidence and commitment all through the tour, notching up three 40-plus scores. But this was different. The allrounder from Andhra Pradesh was preferred over a specialist batter of the calibre of Shubman Gill for this Test. The pressure on him was enormous. It’s one thing to bat with the tail and play your shots, and grinding it out to save the follow-on is another. None of this seemed to faze Reddy. He didn’t shy away from playing his shots and raced to 20 at nearly run-a-ball. After lunch, with India still needing 31 runs to avoid the follow-on, Reddy and his partner, Washington Sundar , had their task cut out. The second new ball was just seven overs away. Australia knew that negotiating the new ball wouldn’t be easy. Mitchell Starc and Pat Cummins were primed to attack with the fresh red cherry. Reddy, however, had other ideas. Immediately after the new ball was taken, he unfurled a range of shots. Maybe that’s where he won the first mini-battle. Australia weren’t expecting the counter punch and for a few minutes, runs just flowed. India saved the follow-on in no time and Reddy raced to his maiden Test fifty. 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By the time the umpires called for an early tea, the deficit was down to 148. Reddy was on 85 and the MCG buzzed with anticipation that something special was on the horizon. However, after the rain break, Australian bowlers showed more discipline. They tightened their lines and made sure that they didn’t concede easy run. Nitish had no choice but to dig in and play the waiting game. He needed to resist the urge for a release shot, just as Steve Smith had done against Jasprit Bumrah. But there’s a world of difference between Smith, with 34 Test hundreds to his name, and Reddy, still searching for his maiden century. That contrast is what made this innings so special. It was a knock defined by shades: caution blended with flashes of aggression, and a determination to fight. Just when it seemed that the hundred was within reach, he lost his partner, Sundar who had played wonderfully for a composed fifty under pressure. At just 22, Sundar is already being touted as India’s go-to spin-bowling all-rounder in the post-Ravi Ashwin era. Sundar’s departure forced Reddy to recalibrate. He now had to farm the strike to protect the tail. Jasprit Bumrah, however, didn’t last long, and what followed was pure drama. Reddy was on 99 when Mohammed Siraj was left to negotiate three balls from Pat Cummins. The tension was palpable. Each ball Siraj faced drew loud roars from the crowd. When the final ball was safely negotiated, the MCG erupted in celebration. The stage was now set for Reddy to make history. Scott Boland bowled full, and Reddy came down on it in a flash, lifting it elegantly over mid-on. His eyes followed the ball for a fraction longer, ensuring it had ‘four’ written all over it. Seeing it racing to the boundary, he knelt down and put his helmet on the bat handle and raised his left hand towards the sky to enact the hero’s pose from the movie Bahubali. As Sunil Gavaskar put it, Reddy scored one of the greatest hundreds in the history of Indian cricket . More importantly, he kept India in the game. If India end up saving the game, or maybe winning it, Reddy’s effort will go down as the best knock played in the year 2024. (You can now subscribe to our Economic Times WhatsApp channel )Los Alamos Chief Engineer Joins Nuclear Fusion Startup Fuse to Lead Federal Business
Australia's economy continues to limp along at a sub-par pace, new data is expected to confirm, in line with federal government warnings. The national accounts report for the September quarter is expected to show gross domestic product expanded by a sluggish 0.4 per cent in the three months, and by 1.1 per cent over the year, according to economists. While this might be a tad higher than the pace for both measures recorded by the Australian Bureau of Statistics in the June quarter, it would be the slowest rate of expansion since December 1991 excluding the COVID-19 pandemic. In a ministerial statement on the economy to the federal parliament on November 20, Treasurer Jim Chalmers acknowledged the economy had continued to grow "but barely". "But any growth at all in these circumstances is welcome given many other countries have gone backwards," he added. One of the key drivers of economic growth is consumer consumption and spending. Some clues on how the consumer side is faring will be reflected in the statistics bureau's retail spending data for October, due on Monday, and a tally of the value of residential dwellings for the September quarter due on Tuesday. The bureau will also release quarterly balance of payments numbers, which measure the nation's trade position, and business indicators on company profits, wage payments and inventories for the three months ended September. Elsewhere on Monday, CoreLogic will release its home value index for November, which could show a slowing in price growth, and the Reserve Bank of Australia's head of domestic markets David Jacobs will give a speech at a securitisation conference. Mr Jacobs' speech will be the last the financial markets will hear from bank officials before it reveals its next decision on interest rates on December 10. Inflation continues to be outside the bank's target band of two to three per cent, dashing hopes of a rate cut anytime soon. Last week, the Albanese government smashed through a big chunk of its legislative agenda, including changes for the bank. The Reserve Bank board will soon be split into two separate committees - one for interest rate settings and the other for governance - after Labor struck a deal with the Greens and crossbench senators to approve the overhaul. The split was a key recommendation in last year's review of the bank. Meanwhile, the Australian stock market is expected to open higher on Monday after Wall Street made solid gains in a shortened trading day. The US S&P 500 rose 33.64 points, or 0.6 per cent, to 6,032.28, the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 188.59 points, or 0.4 per cent, to 44,910.65, while the Nasdaq composite rose 157.69 points, or 0.8 per cent, to 19,218.17. During weekend trading the key ASX SPI200 Index futures contract added 21 points to 7012 points. The local market on Friday ended lower, with the ASX200 closing down just 8.1 points, or 0.1 per cent, at 8,436.2 and the All Ordinaries losing nine-tenths of a point to 8,699.1.
We predicted that Stability AI would shut down this year. The company has had a chaotic 2024 ... [+] punctuated by the departure of its CEO/cofounder Emad Mostaque, but it has not shut down. At this time last year, we published a list of 10 predictions about what would happen in the world of artificial intelligence in 2024. To keep ourselves honest, with 2024 now coming to a close, let’s revisit these predictions to see how things actually played out. There is much to learn from these retrospectives about the state of AI today. Interestingly, an online betting market about our 10 predictions popped up and has been active over the course of 2024. Take a look to see what the markets thought about our predictions. And keep an eye out for our 2025 AI predictions, coming out later this month! Prediction 1: Nvidia will dramatically ramp up its efforts to become a cloud provider. Outcome: Right FBI Warns iPhone, Android Users—Change WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Signal Apps What To Know About The UnitedHealthcare CEO Murder—As NYPD Releases New Photos Of Suspect iOS 18.2 Release Date: iPhone’s New Upgrade Is Hours Away Nvidia invested heavily to expand its DGX Cloud offering in 2024, nearly tripling its quarterly spend on cloud services and leaving little doubt that it considers this a major strategic priority. It now touts case studies from numerous happy customers of its AI-focused cloud offering, from Amgen to Deloitte to ServiceNow. For now, Nvidia offers its cloud service in partnership with the major cloud providers Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. But make no mistake: while Nvidia and the cloud providers are deeply reliant on each other today, these giants increasingly find themselves on a competitive collision course. Nvidia may hope to cut out the middleman by offering its chips directly to end customers rather than relying on the cloud vendors as intermediaries. Meanwhile, Amazon, Google and Microsoft are all developing their own homegrown AI chips to lessen their dependence on and compete more directly with Nvidia. It will be fascinating to watch this “frenemy” dance play out in the years ahead. Prediction 2: Stability AI will shut down. Outcome: Wrong Things went from bad to worse for Stability AI at the beginning of 2024. CEO/founder Emad Mostaque was pushed out of the company in March. Several key personnel departed around the same time, including star researcher Robin Rombach, leading insiders to describe the company as “totally hollowed out” and “in a death spiral.” The company underwent a round of layoffs in April. It seemed as if Prediction 2 were bound to come true. But the company has not shut down. Over the summer, it hired a new CEO, managed to raise a lifeline of additional funding, and persuaded its cloud providers to forgive hundreds of millions of dollars in current and future debt. The company even convinced legendary filmmaker James Cameron to join its board of directors. The Stability AI that exists today may be a shell of its former headline-grabbing self, but the company remains a going concern. Prediction 3: The terms “large language model” and “LLM” will become less common. Outcome: Wrong At least Andrej Karpathy agreed with the point we were making here. In a tweet a few months ago, Karpathy wrote: “It's a bit sad and confusing that ‘Large Language Models’ have little to do with language; it’s just historical. They are highly general purpose technology for statistical modeling of token streams. A better name would be Autoregressive Transformers or something. They don’t care if the tokens happen to represent little text chunks. It could just as well be little image patches, audio chunks, action choices, molecules, or whatever.” We agree. As we argued last year, we still maintain that “large language model” is not the best term for today’s frontier AI models. But the reality is that the terms “large language model” and “LLM” have not become any less widely used in 2024. Maybe in 2025 the terminology will begin to better align with the technology. Prediction 4: The most advanced closed models will continue to outperform the most advanced open models by a meaningful margin. Outcome: Right The release of Meta’s state-of-the-art open-weight Llama 3 models this year, combined with persistent delays in the release of OpenAI’s GPT-5, may have made it tempting to conclude that the performance gap between closed and open models is closing. Then OpenAI dropped o1. o1, OpenAI’s new reasoning model, has opened up an entirely new vista in artificial intelligence research. In his seminal 2019 essay The Bitter Lesson , Rich Sutton emphasized “the great power of general purpose methods, of methods that continue to scale with increased computation even as the available computation becomes very great.” Sutton posited that “the two methods that seem to scale arbitrarily in this way are search and learning .” Before o1, frontier AI models relied heavily on the second method and largely neglected the first. o1 has changed this. Rather than improving AI by massively scaling learning during training , o1 introduces a new paradigm of massively scaling search during inference . Because it is so recent and so novel, o1’s full significance is not yet widely appreciated. But it will profoundly impact AI’s trajectory in the years ahead. It is true that open-weight alternatives to o1 have already emerged, mere months after o1’s launch, including some—like Alibaba’s QwQ-32B-Preview —that appear to rival o1 in performance. This is not surprising, and it does not change the fact that the most important zero-to-one innovations in AI continue to come out of the closed labs. As we wrote last year: “As in many other domains, catching up to the frontier as a fast follower, after another group has defined it, is easier to achieve than establishing a new frontier before anyone else has shown it is possible. For instance, it was considerably riskier, more challenging and more expensive for OpenAI to build GPT-4 using a mixture-of-experts architecture, when this approach had not previously been shown to work at this scale, than it was for Mistral to follow in OpenAI’s footsteps several months later with its own mixture-of-experts model.” Prediction 5: A number of Fortune 500 companies will create a new C-suite position: Chief AI Officer. Outcome: Right In 2024, organizations from Eli Lilly to Morgan Stanley to Qualtrics to Accenture Federal Services announced that they were creating a Chief AI Officer (or equivalent) role, appointing leaders to oversee their organizations’ AI efforts. Considering that AI strategy remains a top priority for virtually every enterprise today, expect to see more companies follow suit in 2025. Prediction 6: An alternative to the transformer architecture will see meaningful adoption. Outcome: Right The transformer remains the dominant AI architecture today, by far. But 2024 proved to be the year that, to quote last year’s article, “a challenger architecture broke through and won real adoption, transitioning from a mere research novelty to a credible alternative AI approach used in production.” That alternative architecture is the state space model (SSM). Mamba , today’s most prominent state space model, has been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times on Hugging Face since its publication about a year ago. Mamba has inspired a number of variants that are in wide use today, from Vision Mamba to Mixture-of-Experts Mamba to MambaByte . As one example, well-funded Israeli startup AI21 Labs built its flagship model (named Jamba) on the Mamba architecture. Cartesia, a young startup out of Chris Ré’s Stanford lab focused on productizing and commercializing SSMs, has seen significant growth this year. Its generative audio models—built on the SSM architecture—have emerged as a serious challenger to industry leaders ElevenLabs and OpenAI thanks to their superior efficiency, latency and ability to handle long inputs. (Other challenger architectures also made progress this year—for instance liquid neural networks —but none have yet achieved the real-world adoption that state space models have.) Prediction 7: Strategic investments from cloud providers into AI startups—and the associated accounting implications—will be challenged by regulators. Outcome: Right Hyperscalers’ investments into AI startups have faced plenty of regulatory scrutiny this year. The FTC is actively investigating Microsoft’s investments in OpenAI. U.K. officials announced in October that they are looking into Google’s $2 billion investment into Anthropic. Regulators have also challenged Amazon’s investments in Anthropic and even Microsoft’s modest investment in Mistral, though these latter two have been cleared. These regulatory inquiries have centered more on antitrust concerns than on accounting violations associated with “roundtripping.” Prediction 8: The Microsoft/OpenAI relationship will begin to fray. Outcome: Right A steady drumbeat of news has come out over the course of 2024 pointing to the growing tension and misalignment between OpenAI and Microsoft. (A recent New York Times headline was worded almost identically to our prediction: “Microsoft and OpenAI’s Close Partnership Shows Signs of Fraying.”) OpenAI and Microsoft increasingly compete directly to sell similar AI products to the same enterprise customers. They have each struck deals this year to work with the other’s competitors, diversifying away from their once ironclad alliance. Microsoft has recently launched partnerships with Anthropic , Mistral and Cohere ; OpenAI, for its part, announced a landmark alliance with Apple this summer. Other sources of friction that have spilled out into the open in 2024 include disputes over computing resources and the appointment of controversial DeepMind cofounder Mustafa Suleyman as Microsoft’s new AI chief. Prediction 9: Some of the hype and herd mentality behavior that shifted from crypto to AI in 2023 will shift back to crypto in 2024. Outcome: Wrong We wrote in last December’s predictions article: “Crypto is out of fashion right now, but make no mistake, another big bull run will come. In case you haven’t noticed, after starting the year under $17,000, the price of bitcoin has risen sharply in the past few months, from $25,000 in September to over $40,000 today. A major bitcoin upswing may be in the works, and if it is, plenty of crypto activity and hype will ensue.” This has proven prescient. Bitcoin has been on a tear in recent months, setting new all-time highs on a weekly basis. Three days ago the price of bitcoin crossed $100,000 for the first time ever, marking a major milestone. Venture funding has begun pouring back into crypto. With crypto-hater Gary Gensler out at the SEC and a crypto-friendly Trump administration about to take office, this bull run may just be getting started. So why did we grade this prediction as “Wrong”? While crypto has made a comeback in 2024, the hype and herd mentality around AI has in no way moderated since this time last year; it has only grown more deafening. Prediction 10: At least one U.S. court will rule that generative AI models trained on the internet represent a violation of copyright. The issue will begin working its way up to the U.S. Supreme Court. Outcome: Wrong Nearly three dozen lawsuits are underway in the United States today on the issue of whether generative AI models trained on internet data represent a violation of copyright, or conversely are protected by the fair use doctrine. Every major AI provider, from OpenAI to Anthropic to Meta, has been caught up in the litigation. But a meaningful ruling has not yet been issued in a single one of these cases. In other words, expecting this prediction to come true in 2024 reflected an overoptimistic assessment of how quickly U.S. courts move. But substantive rulings from the courts on these cases are coming soon. Summary judgment decisions are expected within months in two different cases on this topic, one against Nvidia and another against legal AI startup ROSS Intelligence. By the first or second quarter of 2025, we will have much more signal (though by no means the final verdict) about where courts are landing on this critical issue. See here for the original article with our 2024 AI predictions. See here for our 2023 AI predictions, and see here for our retrospective on them. See here for our 2022 AI predictions, and see here for our retrospective on them. See here for our 2021 AI predictions, and see here for our retrospective on them.Situation more serious than before; crisis for Minister Saji Cherian even with party support