Latest news with #Brockman
Time of India
21-04-2025
- Health
- Time of India
AI's medical hits and misses: Some patients get relief from years of suffering; others are misdiagnosed
OpenAI president and cofounder Greg Brockman has claimed that artificial intelligence is beginning to make a meaningful difference in people's lives, particularly in areas such as medical diagnoses. In a recent post on X, Brockman said, 'I'm hearing more and more stories of ChatGPT helping people fix longstanding health issues.' He followed up with an anecdote involving a ChatGPT user, who had suffered from chronic back pain for over a decade. Despite trying physiotherapy and other treatments, relief had remained elusive. — gdb (@gdb) With all else failing, the individual fed detailed information into ChatGPT — including history, pain triggers, and exercises tried. The user claimed this led to a breakthrough, with pain levels decreasing by 60–70%. Not just ChatGPT Back in November, Elon Musk 's AI chatbot Grok made headlines for similar reasons. Users had begun uploading medical scans, including MRIs and X-rays, seeking diagnostic insights. Discover the stories of your interest Blockchain 5 Stories Cyber-safety 7 Stories Fintech 9 Stories E-comm 9 Stories ML 8 Stories Edtech 6 Stories Musk had encouraged this and urged users to 'try submitting x-ray, PET, MRI, or other medical images to Grok for analysis', adding that the tool 'is already quite accurate and will become extremely good'. Some reported helpful feedback. However, others were misdiagnosed, highlighting the risks of relying solely on AI for medical interpretation. Promise vs precision The role of AI in healthcare remains a widely debated topic, raising questions about its potential and its pitfalls. A study led by Dr Hirotaka Takita and Associate Professor Daiju Ueda at Osaka Metropolitan University's Graduate School of Medicine explored the diagnostic performance of generative AI. Their research, reported by IANS, found that the average diagnostic accuracy was 52.1%, with newer models performing on par with non-specialist doctors. However, specialists still outperformed AI significantly, maintaining a 15.8% higher diagnostic accuracy. Meanwhile, a Reuters-reported study revealed troubling disparities. AI systems were shown to recommend different treatment paths for the same condition based purely on a patient's socioeconomic and demographic profile. For example, advanced tests such as CT scans or MRIs were more often suggested for high-income patients, while low-income patients were more frequently advised against further testing — a mirror to the current inequalities in healthcare. On the other hand, in October last year, ET reported that Mumbai-based AI startup successfully assisted in diagnosing tuberculosis in a patient, whose symptoms had confused several doctors. Experts agree that AI has a role to play in assisting medical professionals, but its impact hinges on the quality and diversity of the data it is trained on. Caution is advised when using AI for self-diagnosis. 'Imperfect answers might be okay for people purely experimenting with the tool, but getting faulty health information could lead to tests or other costly care you don't actually need,' said Suchi Saria, director of the machine learning and healthcare lab at Johns Hopkins University.
Yahoo
03-04-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Local legislator files universal bills
HIGH POINT — Rep. Cecil Brockman, D-Guilford, filed four bills Wednesday to extend universal coverage statewide over school meals, pre-kindergarten enrollment, health insurance coverage and baseline minimum personal income. Brockman, the lone High Point resident in the 170-member N.C. General Assembly, has some of the poorest areas in the state in his 60th House District. 'These issues are all near and dear to my heart because I've seen firsthand the disparities produced by all of these problems, and I am committed to addressing them at home and across the state,' Brockman said. Brockman faces the task of advancing the bills in a House chamber dominated by Republicans. 'These universal bills are common-sense legislation that will make a difference for those who have been neglected for too long,' he said. 'I call on all of my colleagues to join me in passing these bills and making North Carolina great for all of us.' The bills House Bill 712 would direct the N.C. Department of Commerce to establish and maintain a Pay-It-Forward Fund to provide a universal monthly income of up to $3,000 per person for up to five years to people who are currently receiving job training, performing volunteer work for 40 hours a week or both. The program would be funded in part by an increased income tax percentage for state residents who have previously benefited from the fund. House Bill 713 would establish a universal school breakfast and lunch program for each school to provide cost-free breakfast and lunch to each student every school day. House Bill 714 would direct the N.C. Commissioner of Insurance to establish and maintain a state-run universal health care benefit plan offering plans to residents with standards applicable to the federal Affordable Care Act. House Bill 715 would create a universal pre-kindergarten program at a cost of $13.3 million per year. pjohnson@ | 336-888-3528 | @HPEpaul
Yahoo
28-02-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
U.S. energy secretary, OpenAI co-founder say AI race is 'Manhattan Project 2' in Oak Ridge visit
Standing in a building that hosts the world's second fastest supercomputer at an original Manhattan Project site, U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright declared that competition with China to develop artificial intelligence capabilities amounts to another worldwide technology race. "We're at the start of Manhattan Project Two. It is critical, just like Manhattan Project One, that the United States wins this race," Wright said during his Feb. 28 visit to Oak Ridge National lab alongside Greg Brockman, co-founder and president of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. "We could lose this race in many ways if we don't get energy right, we don't unleash American energy, (if) we can't win the race for artificial intelligence." AI models like OpenAI's o3-mini, specially trained for math and science problems, take high amounts of energy to develop. Large-scale data centers like Elon Musk's xAI data center in Memphis can use more than 100 megawatts of electricity, enough to power as many as 100,000 homes. OpenAI has had to become a construction company in addition to a software company, Brockman said. Earlier in the day, Wright and Brockman participated from the lab in a "1,000 Scientist AI Jam Session," an event across nine U.S. national laboratories in partnership with private AI companies Anthropic and OpenAI. The event invited scientists to use the latest AI models to test problems in their fields and provide feedback to improve the model responses. The ultimate goal is to integrate AI into the scientific research at labs like ORNL to speed up innovation for the public good, Brockman said. "People can start to see how AI can benefit them, not just as an abstract idea, but as something very tangible that is going to be part of their daily lives. And I think that advancing science is one of the most important things that we can do to actually benefit everyone," Brockman said. Wright, who was nominated by President Donald Trump in November and confirmed in a 59-38 vote by the Senate earlier this month, toured multiple Oak Ridge sites during his first visit. Joining Wright on Feb. 28 were U.S. Senator Bill Hagerty and U.S. Rep. Chuck Fleischmann, both of Tennessee. Echoing his policy priority to "unleash" American energy and restore the nation's "energy dominance," Wright said the U.S. was in a technological race with China, much like the race with Nazi Germany to develop an atomic weapon during World War II. Wright, formerly a gas and oil executive who pioneered large-scale hydraulic fracturing commonly known as fracking, became known for contrarian support for fossil fuels. Before a crowd of scientists at ORNL, Wright said scientific consensus on climate change does not amount to a climate crisis and that the greater problem facing the U.S. is its competition with China to generate more electricity and power AI discovery. "We want to deliver more affordable, reliable, secure energy to enable thriving in the United States, to allow Greg Brockman, his partners in OpenAI and other AI companies to win the AI race," Wright said. His visit to Oak Ridge followed a Feb. 26 visit to Los Alamos National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratory, two Department of Energy nuclear weapons labs in New Mexico. In Oak Ridge, the secretary visited the Y-12 National Security Complex, the former K-25 site and the Tennessee Valley Authority's Clinch River Nuclear Site, where the federal utility plans to build small modular reactors. At Y-12, Wright got to stamp the first weapon in a new generation of nuclear warheads, he said. Wright's visit follows a turbulent first month of the Trump administration for federal workers, thousands of whom have received termination letters as Elon Musk works to cut federal spending through the new Department of Government Efficiency. Some employees at the Y-12 Field Office, part of the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration, received termination letters before the administration offered their jobs back, a source with knowledge of the matter told Knox News. Speaking specifically of the federal workforce at ORNL, Wright said terminations would not be an issue at the Department of Energy's largest multiprogram science and tech lab. "There's a lot of news that's made way too much out of way too little," Wright said. "Of course, you'll see some reduction in total head count. I don't think here at a cutting-edge national lab that that's an issue at all. I wouldn't worry about that." The secretary's visit to Oak Ridge comes as the city attracts companies addressing a nuclear challenge farther upstream: rebuilding a U.S. supply of enriched uranium. Though elected officials in Oak Ridge have said there is no clear sign of federal spending cuts coming to projects in the city, President Trump told reporters in the White House on Feb. 14 that the U.S. is spending too much to modernize nuclear weapons and develop new nuclear weapons. The program across National Nuclear Security Administration sites is costing the U.S. government hundreds of billions of dollars and could cost up to $1.7 trillion, with the goal of deterring nuclear advances by China and Russia. Y-12 employees, who process the uranium and lithium components of nuclear weapons, are working on as many as seven different kinds of weapons at once. Officials in the National Nuclear Security Administration have called the workload "unprecedented" when combined with major infrastructure updates at the plant, which employs around 8,600 people. Wright emphasized Trump's business background when answering a question about whether he agrees with the president on the cost of nuclear weapons modernization. "He's passionate about our nuclear defense, about our deterrence and about the United States leading in that. No change in that plan," Wright said. "Does he want things done better or smarter? Yes. Are people here in this valley in Oak Ridge looking at how to be smarter? That's what we talked about yesterday." The Department of Energy increased its staff headcount by 20% under the Biden administration as nationwide energy prices increased, Wright said. In his hearing before Congress and in his public statements, Wright has championed fossil fuels like natural gas as a pathway to economic development. His vision of unleashing American energy includes reducing the regulatory burden on fossil fuel companies and utilities like TVA. In his visit to TVA's Clinch River Nuclear Site, the secretary said the utility would build the first small modular reactors in the U.S. and "launch a nuclear renaissance." TVA would "absolutely" partner with a private tech company to develop new nuclear technologies, TVA CEO Jeff Lyash told Knox News. Daniel Dassow is a growth and development reporter focused on technology and energy. Email: Signal: @danieldassow.24. Support strong local journalism by subscribing at This article originally appeared on Knoxville News Sentinel: U.S. energy secretary, OpenAI co-founder talk AI race in Oak Ridge
New York Times
04-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Alonzo Davis, 82, Whose L.A. Gallery Became a Hub for Black Art, Dies
Alonzo Davis, a Los Angeles-based artist whose murals and public sculptures celebrated the gyrating mix of cultures he encountered in Southern California, and whose gallery, Brockman, brought national awareness to the renaissance in Black art during the late 1960s, died on Jan. 27 in Largo, Md. He was 82. Christopher Heijnen, whose gallery, Parrasch Heijnen, represents Mr. Davis's work, confirmed the death, at a hospital. He did not specify a cause. Mr. Davis had moved to Hyattsville, Md., in the early 2000s. Across the country, the 1960s saw an explosion in Black cultural activity, but many Black painters and sculptors were frustrated in their efforts to break into the mainstream art market, which was dominated by white artists and gallery owners. The situation was especially acute in Los Angeles, where Black artists responded forcefully to the social and racial tumult set off by the civil rights movement and the unrest in the city's Watts section in 1965, rioting instigated by reports of police brutality at a traffic stop. That creative energy found a home at the Brockman Gallery, which Mr. Davis and his brother, Dale Brockman Davis, also an artist, founded in 1967 in Leimert Park, a neighborhood southwest of downtown Los Angeles. 'After the Watts riot, there were a lot of artists doing works that were politically significant,' Mr. Davis said in the 2006 documentary 'Leimert Park: The Story of a Village in South-Central Los Angeles,' directed by Jeannette Lindsay. 'We filled a gap and a void there. We just opened a window that had never been available, especially on the West Coast.' They did more than showcase artists. Brockman became a community hub where politics, art and education intersected. In 1973, the brothers created Brockman Productions, a partner organization that ran art festivals, concerts and continuing education programs for people in and around South-Central Los Angeles. Mr. Davis continued to grow as an artist himself. Influenced by his travels across the American South, Africa and Latin America, as well as by white artists like Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, he specialized in assemblages, mixed-media sculptures that blurred the line between representational and abstract work. He liked to work in series, taking a single element — a piece of fabric, a shaft of bamboo — then spending years iterating on it. Among his best-known series was 'Power Poles,' a decade-long exploration of burnished bamboo as a symbol of authority in West African cultures. Much of his work was public, often commissioned by local government agencies; in 2005, he created a version of 'Power Poles' for the Philadelphia International Airport. He was especially attracted to large murals, a common art form around Los Angeles. He painted streetside works throughout the 1970s, and in 1983 he was placed in charge of a 10-artist project to create murals along the city's freeways for the 1984 Olympics. Mr. Davis's contribution, 'Eye on '84,' was composed of three trompe l'oeil murals along a retaining wall on the Harbor Freeway. 'This is new imagery reflective of new energy; this is not the California myth,' he told The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1983. 'The murals will be like a color bath as you drive by them. They will be our new landmarks and will give a true picture of Los Angeles as a multicultural community.' Alonzo Joseph Davis Jr. was born on Feb. 2, 1942, in Tuskegee, Ala., near the Tuskegee Institute, where his father, Alonzo Sr., taught psychology and his mother, Agnes (Moses) Davis, was a librarian. His parents divorced when Alonzo was a teenager, after which he and his brother moved with their mother to Los Angeles. He received a bachelor's degree in art education from Pepperdine University in 1964, then spent several years teaching high school art in Los Angeles. He also painted and sculpted, but despaired over the way Black artists were shut out of galleries and art history programs. In 1966, he and his brother packed up their green Volkswagen Beetle for a cross-country pilgrimage of sorts, visiting prominent Black artists and creative communities across the South, in New York and in Canada. In New York, they met the painter Romare Bearden, whose work they would later show at Brockman. In Mississippi, they walked alongside the civil rights activist James Meredith during his 'March Against Fear' from Memphis to Jackson, Miss. Their last stop was Chicago, after which they drove almost nonstop to Los Angeles, talking about their experiences and plans. 'We are driving through what I would call the cornfields and the desert to get back to Los Angeles,' Mr. Davis said in a 2022 interview with the art company Black Art in America, 'and we thought, 'Wouldn't it be great if we could open an art gallery?'' They opened Brockman, named for their maternal grandmother, a year later. Mr. Davis returned to the classroom in 1970 to study at the Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles with Charles White, a Black artist and major influence on Mr. Davis's generation of painters. It was Mr. White who encouraged Mr. Davis to work in series. He received a bachelor's in fine arts in 1971 and a master's in fine arts in 1973, both from Otis. The Brockman Gallery proved a lasting success — so much so that Mr. Davis found little time for his own work. He wanted to travel, and in 1987 he left the gallery, and Los Angeles, to run a state arts program in Sacramento. A year later, he took a residency in Hawaii, after which he became a dean at the Art Institute of San Antonio. He was academic dean of the Memphis College of Art from 1993 to 2002, then moved to Maryland. His marriage to Rebecca Braithwaite ended in divorce. He is survived by his brother; his partner, Kay Lindsey; his daughters, Paloma Allen-Davis and Treasure Davis; and two grandsons. Within a few years of the Los Angeles Olympics, the murals that Mr. Davis and other artists had created in celebration were disappearing, covered by graffiti and worn away by freeway pollution, then painted over by the highway authority in 2007. The Mural Conservancy of Los Angeles began a yearlong restoration project in 2014. Many of the works were salvaged, but Mr. Davis's triptych, buried under decades of paint and soot, were lost forever.
Yahoo
31-01-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Valiant One' Review: No-Nonsense Action-Thriller About U.S. Soldiers Trapped in North Korea Gets the Job Done
An unpretentious B-movie made with A-grade effort, 'Valiant One' packs decent action and mostly sturdy drama into the tale of U.S. soldiers whose mission near the DMZ goes haywire and leaves them stranded in North Korea. The first film directed by longtime producer and production executive Steve Barnett ('300') doesn't add anything to the 'trapped behind enemy lines' playbook but does offer a pacy combination of well-executed combat scenes and reluctant-hero drama that should play especially well with military movie buffs. Boasting solid central performances by Chase Stokes ('Outer Banks' series) and Lana Condor ('To All the Boys' films), 'Valiant One' opens in limited U.S. cinemas on Jan. 31. 'Valiant One' is the kind of mid-size action movie we've seen much less of in commercial theatrical release since these straight-to-streaming days began. Though lacking the scale of a big-budget spectacular — it's no 'Black Hawk Down' — the film has good production values and could perform well on the strength of popular lead performers and its full-strength salute to those who serve. Politicians, bureaucrats and geo-political analysis are nowhere to be seen in a screenplay that's pro-military without getting too jingoistic. The focus is squarely on rank-and-file soldiers finding the courage and ingenuity to prevail when all hope seems lost. More from Variety Capitol Music Group Chief Steve Barnett to Retire Capitol Christian Music Group CEO Peter York Retiring After 37 Years in Leadership Roles Newcomer Lewis Capaldi Brings Capitol Gains Clocking in at a trim 87 minutes, 'Valiant One' doesn't have the time or inclination to explore its characters too deeply but deals efficiently with the basics. Stationed at Camp Humphreys in Pyeongtaek, 60 miles south of the DMZ, Sgt. Edward Brockman (Stokes) is a non-combat tech officer who eyes a future in Silicon Valley rather than a life in uniform. A gig economy-era soldier, if you like, and a far cry from the Navy SEALS whose real-life crash landing in the DMZ gave Barnett the inspiration for this story. Still, Brockman's no slacker and presents properly when ordered on a mission escorting annoying, wise-cracking civilian defense contractor Josh Weaver (Desmin Borges) on the maintenance of surveillance installations close to the North Korean border. Things go from routine to catastrophic when the team's helicopter gets blown off course in a freak storm and crash-lands in the DPRK. Observing time-honored war movie tradition, the mission's mortally wounded commanding officer, Lebold (Callan Mulvey), gives Brockman inspirational words and entrusts him with a service pistol that's been passed down through generations of his family of soldiers and will naturally play a significant practical and emotional role later in proceedings. The screenplay by Barnett and Eric Tipton sticks closely to such conventions as the inexperienced and ill-equipped Brockman — 'I'm just trained to analyze data,' he says — is suddenly thrust into command and must figure out how to get survivors including civilian Weaver, Korean American Cpl. Lee (Daniel Jun), Cpl. Ross (Jonathan Whitesell) and Cpl. Selby (Condor) to safety. What's refreshing is the significant role played by Selby, a Vietnamese-born medic whose tactical nous and compassion come to the fore when the group is forced to take shelter at the farmhouse of a frightened couple (Michael Cha, Jerina Son) and their young teenage daughter Binna (Diana Tsoy). Condor, whose personal background aligns closely with that of her character, is spot-on as the dedicated professional whose straight-talking ways help Brockman unlock his inner hero. Though Binna's ability to mentally recover and help Brockman's squad escape after witnessing her parents being shot dead by a North Korean army patrol is too good to be true, the story motors along nicely with skirmishes and shoot-outs en route to an exciting climax in a tunnel beneath the DMZ (actually mine tunnels in Vancouver, where the film was shot). The territory is familiar but the execution helps 'Valiant One' rise just a touch above the ordinary. The convincing and committed performances of Stokes, Condor and the rest of the ensemble is matched by solid action choreography and fluid widescreen photography by Daniel Stilling. Punchy tracks by rappers including Jelly Roll and Marqus Clae are neatly inserted alongside the fine orchestral score by Benjamin Backus. A fabulous old wood-fired truck used as a getaway vehicle is the jewel in the film's armory of hi-tech U.S. weaponry and antiquated North Korean machinery. Best of Variety The Best Albums of the Decade
