Latest news with #BritishAmerican
Los Angeles Times
21-05-2025
- Business
- Los Angeles Times
OpenAI teams up with former Apple design chief Jony Ive as AI race heats up
Jony Ive, a former Apple executive known for designing the iPhone, is joining forces with OpenAI, the San Francisco startup behind popular chatbot ChatGPT. On Wednesday, OpenAI said it's buying io, an AI devices startup that Ive founded a year ago, for nearly $6.5 billion in an all-stock deal, the largest acquisition in OpenAI's history. 'We have the opportunity here to kind of completely reimagine what it means to use a computer,' OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman said in a video with Ive about the partnership. The pair don't specify what AI devices they're working on, but Altman called it 'the coolest piece of technology that the world will have ever seen.' The partnership shows how OpenAI is taking on some of the world's most powerful tech companies including Google, Apple and Meta that are also working on AI-powered devices to shape the future of computing. Chirag Dekate, a VP analyst at Gartner, said the announcement reflected an 'inflection point' in the tech industry, where future products and services will offer users more personalized and proactive assistance. 'This shift suggests a future where technology is less about the tools themselves and more about the intelligently orchestrated experiences they enable,' he said in an email. Globally, spending on generative AI is expected to total $644 billion in 2025, an increase of 76.4% from 2024, according to a forecast by Gartner, a research and advisory firm based in Connecticut that focuses on technology. The race to build AI-powered wearable gadgets and roll out more AI tools that can generate video, text and code and help people shop also means that major tech companies are recruiting top-tier talent. Earlier in May, OpenAI hired Fidji Simo, a former top Meta executive and the chief executive of grocery delivery startup Instacart, to lead the startup's applications team. Ive, a British American designer, is a well-known figure in the tech industry because he designed some of Apple's iconic products such as the Macbook, iPhone, iPad and iPod. Joining Apple in the 1990s, Ive became Apple's chief design officer in 2015. He left the company in 2019 and started LoveFrom, a creative collective and design firm that worked with brands including OpenAI. Silicon Valley tech companies have been working on gadgets, including headsets and glasses, for years but they're still not as ubiquitous as the smartphone. There have also been major flops such as Humane's AI pin, a wearable virtual voice-operated assistant that was criticized for various issues such as providing inaccurate information and overheating. In February, San Francisco-based Humane shut down the AI pin after it was acquired by Hewlett-Packard. But the fumbles haven't stopped tech companies from barreling forward with building glasses, brain-computer interfaces and humanoid robots as they look to a future beyond the smartphone. When Google released smart glasses in 2013 that could shoot photos and videos, the company faced concerns about people using the device to surreptitiously record other people or read text while ignoring others. But the gadget resurfaced years later. This week, Google unveiled a prototype of its AI smart glasses at its annual I/O developer conference in Mountain View, demonstrating how people can use the device to search for information about a painting, travel and other topics without having to type on their smartphone. The search giant is partnering with eyewear brands Warby Parker and Gentle Monster on smart glasses. Last year, Santa Monica-based Snap unveiled the fifth generation of Spectacles, its augmented reality glasses that overlay digital objects on the physical world. The device, which was only available for developers, allowed people to play with virtual pets, conjure up images with a voice command or swing a virtual golf club. Meta teamed up with Ray-Ban on smart glasses that include an AI assistant that can answer questions, translate and help take a photo. It's also working on a more powerful pair of AR glasses that lets people take video calls, get recipe recommendations and multitask in other ways. And Apple, which unveiled a pricey mixed-reality headset known as the Vision Pro in 2023, is also reportedly working on smart glasses. In the video with Altman, Ive said the products that people use to connect to technology are decades old, so it's 'just common sense to at least think surely there's something beyond these legacy products.' 'I have a growing sense that everything I've learned over the last 30 years has led me to this place and to this moment,' Ive said in the video.
Korea Herald
25-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Korea Herald
Popular British American series ‘Gangs of London' returns, with Korean flair
Korean director becomes first Asian director to helm the series The popular British American crime series "Gangs of London" is back with its much-anticipated third season — and this time, it's bringing a distinctly Korean flair. "Gangs of London" follows the stories of multinational crime organizations in London who clash for power after the head of the city's largest crime family is assassinated. The first two seasons of the series garnered significant popularity, with the show having clinched multiple British Academy of Film and Television Arts awards for its action-packed scenes and plot laced with twists. The latest season kicks off as hundreds across London are killed after unknowingly ingesting cocaine mixed with fentanyl. As the body count rises, chaos ensues among the criminal organizations that delivered the product, sparking a hunt for the person responsible for the contamination of the drugs. The third season comes with a significant creative shift. It's now helmed by acclaimed Korean filmmaker Kim Hong-sun, who previously created hit Korean crime flicks such as 'Traffickers,' 'The Con Artists' and 'The Chase." The director said his involvement with the popular overseas series came as interest in Korean content rose globally. "Thanks to great seniors, producers, investors, broadcasters and actors, Korean films and shows have gained a lot of global recognition. Around that time, I happened to be traveling to several international film festivals with 'Project Wolf Hunting.' After attending the Toronto International Film Festival, I had a meeting in the US, and that's when I came across AMC, one of the co-producers of 'Gangs of London,'' he said during a press conference held in Yongsan-gu, Seoul, Friday. 'This project is a British-US co-produced show, and through that connection, I became close with AMC's executive producers and kept in touch. Coincidentally, the executive producer of this project really liked my previous work, 'Project Wolf Hunting,' which led to us forming a connection and eventually me getting involved in the project.' Though new to episodic television, Kim approached "Gangs of London" Season 3 with a cinematic lens. 'Even during filming, about 80 percent felt like working on a movie and only about 20 percent felt like a series. Since the first and second seasons had distinct and intense styles depending on each director, I looked forward to expressing my own style as a Korean director in Season 3 and enjoyed working on it with that anticipation.' Kim also revealed that some signature K-drama storytelling elements have been incorporated into the new season. 'Korean dramas often end in a way that cuts off in the middle, making you want to watch the next episode,' he said. 'I incorporated a lot of that kind of directing into this project.' He further noted the new season will diverge tonally from its predecessors. 'Season 1 stood out for its realistic, brutal and intense action sequences, while Season 2 had a strong horror vibe. For Season 3, I aimed to make it feel more Korean, more grounded and more dynamic," he said. "My main focus was to highlight the characters. While Seasons 1 and 2 told the stories of multinational gangs operating in the underground, Season 3 aimed to depict the 'upper ground' of London. Rather than back alleys, I wanted to show the front-facing, crowded areas — capturing all of London to create a clear distinction.'
Arab News
05-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Arab News
Spider-Man actor Andrew Garfield to attend MEFCC Abu Dhabi
DUBAI: British American actor Andrew Garfield, known for playing Spider-Man, will appear at this year's Middle East Film & Comic Con. The three-day event will take place from April 18-20 at the Abu Dhabi National Exhibition Center. A post shared by Middle East Film & Comic Con (@mefcc) The actor will join a list of celebrities that includes Charlie Cox and Vincent D'Onofrio from Marvel's 'Daredevil: Born Again,' 'Star Wars' actor Ian McDiarmid, famous for portraying Emperor Palpatine in the space saga; and 'Stranger Things' star Natalia Dyer. A post shared by Middle East Film & Comic Con (@mefcc) Also joining the line-up are Grant Gustin, otherwise known as Barry Allen / The Flash, and Emily Rudd, the navigator of Netflix's record-smashing, live-action show 'One Piece.' The stars are expected to take part in a panel discussion and will be available for autograph sessions. Japanese voice actors Kotono Mitsuishi, Daiki Yamashita, Hideo Ishikawa and Kentaro Ito, and US voice actress Colleen O'Shaughnessey, will also attend.
Yahoo
04-04-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Abolition wasn't fueled by just moral or economic concerns – the booming whaling industry also helped sink slavery
Historians have long debated whether the end of slavery in the United States was primarily driven by moral campaigns or economic changes. But what if both perspectives are looking at only part of the puzzle? We are experts in economic development and social movements. Our new research uncovers what we believe to be a surprising and overlooked factor in the decline of slavery in the U.S. – the rise of the whaling industry. Starting around 1650, whaling expanded along the Northeast coast of the British American colonies. Whaling expeditions killed whales and brought back to port valuable animal products like oil, used for lamps and other items, and whalebone, used for products ranging from corsets to combs. Whalers also brought spermaceti, a waxy substance that comes from a sperm whale's head and is used to produce candles and lubricants for precision machinery like watches and clocks. At its peak, in the 1850s, the American whaling industry alone employed 50,000 to 70,000 workers who worked on an estimated 700 to 800 ships. In the decades before cheap oil helped many industries truly take off, whaling played an important, but often overlooked, role in laying the groundwork for the antislavery movement. Black sailors made up perhaps 20% to 30% of whaling crews. Of these sailors, some were enslaved and used their hard-won earnings to buy their freedom. Some of these sailors went on to finance abolitionist efforts. Others built houses of worship. The whaling industry that produced oil to illuminate 19th-century lamps also added fuel to the fire of the antislavery movement. The city motto of New Bedford, Massachusetts – lucem diffundo, or 'I diffuse light' in Latin – referred to the candles and lamps the whaling industry lit, as well as the moral clarity some whalers aspired to promote. Slavery in the American colonies began in 1619 with a small enslaved population that grew to about 500,000 by the American Revolution in 1775. As slavery became institutionalized in law and American culture, the number of enslaved people grew, primarily in the South, to as many as 4 million in the years leading up to the Civil War in 1861. The first half of the 1800s saw a surge of abolitionist activism, rooted in early Quaker efforts and Indigenous wisdom. Abolitionism reshaped American politics into a fuller democracy, linking Black resistance, feminist struggles and labor rights to the broader fight for democracy and human rights. The decline and eventual abolition of slavery has been portrayed as the result of tireless activism and moral persuasion by early Quaker advocates like Benjamin Lay who considered slavery one of the worst sins. Abolitionists like Frederick Douglass would later go on to advocate for the Civil War to force a moral reckoning on the South. The result was an antislavery moral high ground from which the United Kingdom, and later the U.S., could measure other countries and monitor the high seas. Another common explanation for the end of slavery is the economic argument that slavery declined as fossil fuel-powered machinery replaced enslaved labor on farms and even in factories. Our research challenges this binary by showing that before steam engines transformed industry, whaling played an overlooked role in challenging the proposition that slavery was America's most economically profitable form of labor organization at the time. We analyzed data from U.S. Census records and the logbooks of American whaling voyages from 1790 to 1840 – systematized in a dataset maintained by the Mystic Seaport Museum and New Bedford Whaling Museum. This data came from well before the 1859 discovery and exploitation of oil in Pennsylvania. The results were striking: When the whaling industry brought back more oil, bone and spermaceti to specific ports, the proportion of enslaved people in the corresponding states declined. Statistically speaking, we saw a nearly perfect 1-to-1 inverse relationship between whaling and slavery. When whaling products went up 1%, slavery proportions went down by almost the same amount in that state in the following years. What's more, we mapped these findings geographically and discovered that the more whaling occurred, the more widely decreases in slavery occurred in nearby states. In other words, our statistics suggest that increases in whaling led to decreases in slavery, and this effect diffused across state lines. Whaling was the first global industry in the colonies that eventually became the U.S. Whaling hubs like the Massachusetts towns of Nantucket and New Bedford and the island of Martha's Vineyard became some of the wealthiest communities in the country. Whaling was also one of the few industries where Black Americans, both free and formerly enslaved, could make money and become wealthy. Individuals of all backgrounds could rise through the whaling industry ranks based on skill rather than birth. It also required a risk-embracing and entrepreneurial mindset, as immortalized in a song that the writer Herman Melville has the crew sing in the 1851 book Moby-Dick: 'So, be cheery, my lads! may your hearts never fail! / While the bold harpooner is striking the whale!' By contrast, the plantation economy relied on rigid racial hierarchies and hereditary enslavement. Prince Boston was one example of an enslaved whaler, who, in 1773 at the age of 23, won the right in the local Nantucket court to purchase his own freedom from his owner, who lived locally, with the money he earned on a harpoon crew. This watershed moment saw the court make a precedent that was probably illegal at the time, but which supported and defended both the whaling industry as well as the aspirations of the people needed to make it thrive. Prince Boston's free-born nephew, Absolom Boston, become the first Black whaling captain in 1822 – one of approximately 50 Black and Native captains in the American whaling industry throughout its history. The economic power generated by whaling helped fund the abolitionist movement in tangible ways. Wealthy Quaker merchants in whaling towns, like Martha's Vineyard, were some of the earliest and most fervent supporters of abolition. Elihu Coleman, a Nantucket Quaker, wrote one of the first antislavery pamphlets in America in 1733. Douglass, the famed abolitionist and formerly enslaved man from Maryland, found refuge in New Bedford, a whaling town with a strong antislavery tradition. Whaling profits financed the construction of meeting houses and schools for free Black communities in these towns. The African Baptist Society in Nantucket, for example, was built by Black whalers who had achieved financial independence through their trade. As an industry, whaling provided a meritocratic career path before fossil fuel mechanization made slavery obsolete. While industrialization eventually made enslaved labor less profitable by the mid- and late-1800s, whaling had already eroded slavery's economic and social foundations decades earlier. Of course, whaling itself was not a morally pure endeavor. It was dangerous and devastating to whale populations. The American whaling industry killed perhaps 32,000 whales over the 74 years between 1835 and 1909. The global harvest of whales was many times greater. The U.S. officially outlawed whaling in 1971. Yet, whaling's role in funding abolition and providing economic opportunities for free Black Americans is undeniable. It was, in many ways, a bridge between the world of forced labor and the energy-driven economy of the modern age. This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Topher L. McDougal, University of San Diego and Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, University of San Diego Read more: Juneteenth offers new ways to teach about slavery, Black perseverance and American history What really started the American Civil War? Slavery and war are tightly connected – but we had no idea just how much until we crunched the data The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Yahoo
30-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Ahead of this week's ISA deadline, here's what a spare £10k could achieve!
The coming week will see the end of one tax year. A new one will begin next weekend. By then, it will be too late to contribute to an ISA using the current year's allowance. Once that contribution period ends, it is gone forever, although a new tax year and new ISA allowance is around the corner. Each investor has to make their own choices about how much to contribute to an ISA and what to invest it in. To illustrate some such choices, however, here is what £10,000 invested in a Stocks and Shares ISA today could potentially achieve. Share prices can go up, move down or edge sideways over time. For example, over the past five years, the FTSE 100 index has moved up by 57%. So a £10,00 investment in a FTSE 100 tracker fund five years ago would now be worth around £15,700. I would welcome that sort of growth in my own portfolio. But the number is flattered by the fact that five years ago the FTSE 100 was still struggling as the stock market digested the implications of the pandemic. Even if I wanted to target that sort of growth rate in coming years, though, my move would not be to track the index but rather to buy a carefully selected basket of individual shares. Over the past five years, after all, some individual shares have done brilliantly. Nvidia is up 1,634%, for example. I think a savvy investor could spend time now trying to figure out what businesses look cheap relative to their long-term commercial prospects. The sort of gain seen at Nvidia is exceptional. But it does happen – and some shares on sale today will end up soaring over the next few years. The job for an investor is trying to figure out which ones. While capital gains are appealing for me, they can be cut down in size if an ISA's dealing fees, account administration costs, and the like are high. So I think a smart investor will take time to compare different choices on the market when deciding what suits their personal needs best. As well as the potential for capital gain, passive income is a reason many people like to use their ISA allowance buying dividend shares. The average yield of the FTSE 100 is around 3.5%. On a £10,000 ISA that means around £350 per year. But some FTSE 100 shares offer more. For example, I own shares in Lucky Strike manufacturer British American Tobacco (LSE: BATS). Making and selling cigarettes is cheap to do but can be very profitable. That can generate sizeable cash flows that help support a juicy dividend. British American has grown its dividend per share annually for decades and currently yields 7.6%. A £10,000 ISA invested at a 7.6% yield would earn around £760 in dividends annually. An investor could compound them for 20 years. By then they would be earning around £3,290 of dividends annually. Note that, while I own shares in British American, I do not only own those. Cigarette smoking rates are declining, and the company's non-cigarette business strategy remains to be proven. Even a good business can run into difficult times. So, I always keep my ISA diversified. The post Ahead of this week's ISA deadline, here's what a spare £10k could achieve! appeared first on The Motley Fool UK. More reading 5 Stocks For Trying To Build Wealth After 50 One Top Growth Stock from the Motley Fool C Ruane has positions in British American Tobacco P.l.c. The Motley Fool UK has recommended British American Tobacco P.l.c. and Nvidia. Views expressed on the companies mentioned in this article are those of the writer and therefore may differ from the official recommendations we make in our subscription services such as Share Advisor, Hidden Winners and Pro. Here at The Motley Fool we believe that considering a diverse range of insights makes us better investors. Motley Fool UK 2025 Sign in to access your portfolio
