Latest news with #DavidRind
New York Times
30-05-2025
- Climate
- New York Times
Alarmed by Trump Cuts, Scientists Are Talking Science. For 100 Hours.
Before he started livestreaming a presentation on the history of climate research at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies from its New York City office, David Rind gave viewers a small heads-up. 'If you hear any noise in the background, this place is literally being torn apart with us still in it,' he said. Researchers were told to vacate the office and transition to remote work after NASA said it had ended the lease, as a result of vast federal cuts in recent months by the Trump administration. Dr. Rind's presentation was the first of many in a planned, 100-hour-long livestream organized by a group of climate scientists and meteorologists from across the United States designed to protest cuts to weather and climate science and call out potential risks to weather forecasts. The livestream started on Wednesday and is scheduled to run continuously through June 1, the first day of the Atlantic hurricane season. Since January, the Trump administration has made sweeping cuts to climate and weather research, including firing hundreds of scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Weather Service, ending federal monitoring of greenhouse gas emissions and dismissing authors of the National Climate Assessment, the United States' flagship climate report. 'Having reliable weather forecasts and climate projections is something that I think the American public has been able to take for granted for a very long time,' said Margaret Duffy, a climate scientist and an event organizer. 'These funding cuts directly affect the research that underlies those forecasts.' Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Yahoo
28-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Weight-loss drugs are already dropping in price; could they go even lower?
The price of weight loss drugs is falling, making them more accessible to consumers, and the price could get driven even lower. Highly sought-after drugs like Wegovy and Zepbound both retail at roughly $1,000 each and have been difficult for people without insurance to obtain. Despite the price drops, the drugs remain costly. Novo Nordisk cut the price of Wegovy by 23 percent for cash payments from $650 to $499 for uninsured patients or people without coverage. The drug's list price of $1,349 has remained unchanged. Meanwhile, Eli Lilly reduced Zepbound's starter dose to $349 and higher doses to $499 after launching a self-pay program called Lilly Direct. The new doses require patients to manually draw medication from a vial with a syringe. In prior years, people would pay about $1,500 a month for the drugs, but in recent months have been able to obtain the doses for roughly $400 to $500, according to NBC News. A May 2024 survey from the health policy group KFF found that half of U.S. adults say it's difficult to afford the medication. Pressure from Congress and increased competition are some of the factors that led the drugmakers to reduce the cost. This has led to patients paying less out of pocket because they can afford the cheaper prices or their insurance now covers the drugs. More insurance plans have allowed for the drugs because they have been proven to treat heart disease risk and obstructive sleep apnea. This month, a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine found Zepbound outperformed Wegovy in a head-to-head clinical trial. Dr David Rind, a primary care physician and the chief medical officer for the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review, told NBC News: 'You're talking $6,000 a year, and that is still probably more than insurers are paying right now.' He continued: 'If insurance is relying on the fact that not covering it will allow people to buy it out of pocket, as a primary care doctor, I have a lot of concerns about all my complaining about the price, these are drugs that we should want to give to lots of people, but it's been really hard to see how we can afford them.' But Rind said not to expect dramatic price drops in the foreseeable future. He said those cuts are likely to come when other weight-loss drugs being developed are approved, which could take several years.
CNN
29-01-2025
- Business
- CNN
Trump's ‘America First' Agenda Meets China's AI Advancement - CNN One Thing - Podcast on CNN Audio
President Donald Trump 00:00:04 thank you very much. And it's an honor to be here today. We have a first full day as president. We're back. David Rind 00:00:13 Last Tuesday, President Donald Trump gathered a trio of tech leaders for a big announcement at the White House. President Donald Trump 00:00:20 Together, these world leading technology giants are announcing the formation of Stargate. So put that name down in your books, because I think you're going to hear a lot about it. David Rind 00:00:32 SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison say they're going to invest up to $500 billion into this new company, Stargate, in the coming years to finance the building of massive data centers to help power artificial intelligence projects. Larry Ellison 00:00:52 The first of them are under construction in Texas, each building a half 1,000,000ft². David Rind 00:00:57 The fact that this an AI infrastructure announcement was among the very first things Trump rolled out on his first full day back in office, just underscored how badly his administration and advocates like Sam Altman want America to win the AI arms race against China. Sam Altman 00:01:15 But I do want to say I'm thrilled we get to do this in the United States of America. I think this will be the most important project of this era. David Rind 00:01:22 Well, less than a week later. John Berman 00:01:25 Alright, we do have breaking news. Stock markets open just a few minutes ago. And it's not pretty... David Rind 00:01:31 Known Chinese air company was wreaking havoc on Wall. Dana Bash 00:01:36 The Chinese startup is called Deep Sick and it says it spent less than $6 million to create its new AI model, challenging the notion that it takes hundreds of millions of dollars and sophisticated chips to develop AI products. Now, the Nasdaq. David Rind 00:01:52 Now some experts are asking, did deep seek just upend key assumptions about that arms race? My guest is CNN business reporter Matt Egan. We're going to explain how deep sea could reset Trump's America First agenda and his relationship with Big Tech's biggest titans. From CNN. This is one thing. I'm David Wright. So, Matt, what was this air announcement out of China that spooked the stock market so badly on Monday? Matt Egan 00:02:29 Well, it's really incredible. We had this tiny startup stun investors on Wall Street and really caused them to rethink some fundamental questions about AI. So we're talking about deep sea. This is a little known Chinese startup. David Rind 00:02:44 Yeah, I'd never heard of it before Monday. Matt Egan 00:02:46 I don't think many people had either. And it came out on January 20th with an announcement that its latest AI model can basically go toe to toe with the best AI models out there. And this was stunning by itself, but also the fact that they said they were able to build this AI model at a fraction of the cost of what other A.I. technologies are said to cost and with far fewer leading edge computer chips. All of that was just startling to investors and I would imagine officials in Washington. David Rind 00:03:26 And this is like GPT, right? It's basically a chat bot. You can ask questions. It searches the model that it has and it spits back an answer. Right? Matt Egan 00:03:35 Exactly. That's right. And the thinking had been that only the United States had that kind of technology. Right? The chat GPT, Google's Gemini, Anthropic's Claude. And all of a sudden we have this new player, deep sea that can do that. And again, it can do that. It said at a fraction of the cost. And so we saw a really dramatic impact in the market. There was basically a meltdown in the A.I. world. Boris Sanchez 00:04:03 Breaking news to CNN. US tech stocks took a dive today... Matt Egan 00:04:06 And computer chip makers, especially in video, which had been going straight up, crashed. Boris Sanchez 00:04:12 A chip maker and video a giant is also plummeting. You see it there, down a whopping 17%. Matt Egan 00:04:20 NVIDIA lost more than half $1 trillion in market value in one day. Is the biggest ever wipe out in a single day that we've ever seen. Other computer chip stocks also fell sharply. Even energy and power companies got caught up in this sell off. We saw companies like Constellation Energy, which is planning to bring back online nuclear plants. Even Three Mile Island is supposed to be brought back to help power these data centers. That's why we saw all those companies lose value really sharply. Well, tell. David Rind 00:04:56 Me about these chips then, because I thought the U.S. was trying to restrict the export of these very specialized chips that were developed in the U.S. to other countries like China so they don't get a leg up. So what happened? Matt Egan 00:05:09 That's exactly right. In theory, Deep Seek shouldn't really be possible because the U.S. has these very tough export restrictions that are supposed to be preventing the flow of leading edge computer chips and AI software from getting to China with this specific goal of slowing their progress on. So the fact that Deep Seek has done it has raised some questions. And there's a few schools of thought here. Erica Hill 00:05:39 Just a week before Donald Trump takes office, the Biden administration unveiling a fresh round of restrictions on the export of U.S. developed computer chips that power artificial intelligence. Matt Egan 00:05:49 Some argue that the export restrictions have backfired because they essentially forced China to come up with ways around the restrictions to innovate around them and to come up with new efficiencies to build their AI models. Erica Hill 00:06:07 These new restrictions are quite broad. They essentially divide the world into three tiers. The first tier is includes U.S. allies like South Korea, Japan, Australia, Taiwan. They will face no new restrictions. The second tier includes China and Russia, which are already blocked from buying advanced AI chips. They will now face restrictions on buying closed source A.I. models. Matt Egan 00:06:29 One researcher said We accidentally upped China's technical game. So that's one school of thought. But there's also some doubt about some of the claims that the U.S. is making. David Rind 00:06:43 Yeah, I was going to say, what kind of proof is this company putting forward that they were able to do this without these chips and at such a cheap cost? Matt Egan 00:06:51 We don't know. We don't know yet whether or not those claims are accurate. And that is part of the issue here. They're claiming that they built this on less than $6 million to train their model. Some experts that I talked to that are very skeptical about that figure. And there's also some skepticism about whether or not Deep Seek had access to the leading edge in Vedere computer chip. David Rind 00:07:23 There's some that could have gotten in some other way. Matt Egan 00:07:26 'Right. That perhaps they stockpiled some chips before certain restrictions went into effect or that they were buying a lot of those chips on what has been described to me as a very active black market or perhaps a combination of the two. I talked to Art Hogan. He's a veteran market strategist, and he said, look, China is claiming that they came up with a silver bullet here, but it could be like the guy in high school who says he has a girlfriend, but she's just at a different school. So there's some skepticism here. And that's important because if what happened is that China was able to get around the restrictions by stockpiling or through the black market or both, then that suggests that perhaps the export controls that were put in place by Trump 1.0 by President Biden and are in fact right now, that perhaps they should be strengthened. And there's some analysts that I talked to who say, look, it's been a game of Whac-A-Mole and there are loopholes. There's not enough enforcement and that President Trump is likely to double down here. David Rind 00:08:32 I was going to say, it seems like, you know, either way, this company had to get creative and had to find a way to kind of work around whatever was in place. So what does the Trump administration do from here? Because they've been, you know, touting these relationships with leaders in the field to build more data centers because they want to win this arms race. Right. So what has been Trump's reaction to all of this? Matt Egan 00:08:58 Well, President Trump said it's been a wake up call and he said that it really puts the onus on the tech industry, on Silicon Valley to do more. President Donald Trump 00:09:07 I really think if it's if it's fact and if it's true and nobody really knows if it is, but I view that as a positive because you'll be doing that too. So you won't be spending as much and you'll get the same result, hopefully. Matt Egan 00:09:20 And given the fact that he has surrounded himself with some hawks on China, such as Secretary of State Marco Rubio, it's easy to see how deep seek and this moment that we've seen in this reaction in the market could spur the Trump administration to take a tougher look at these export controls and do more to try to restrict the flow of leading edge technology to China. David Rind 00:09:46 Is there more to be done? Matt Egan 00:09:48 I'm told that there is, especially on enforcement, that to some extent this has been left up to companies, to police themselves. And I could see the Trump administration taking a tough look at what's been done on enforcement, what else can be done here. And look, David, that the stakes are massive for I mean, is this technology that has potential to reshape society. And there is this arms race and we knew there was an arms race. Yeah, but deep sick suggest that the arms race is closer than we had previously realized. David Rind 00:10:35 The fact that this is a Chinese company is interesting, right? Because I, I downloaded the app and I used it and I was asking it some questions. I asked it about Taiwan and I wanted to see what it would say. And it was giving me at first a bunch of like, I can't answer that right now. I don't have an answer to that. And eventually it said something to the tune of, you know, China recognizes the one China policy regarding Taiwan. I have to follow that because it is linked to the Chinese government. Right. So like, how much of a concern is that to American officials when you see a company like this, take these leaps and steps and it be linked to Chinese government? Matt Egan 00:11:16 There's obviously a lot of concerns about censorship when it comes to technology. But when you add in the deep sea China element, those concerns have got to go on steroids. Because to your point, China can and is said to already be censoring some of the results here. It's easy to see how that continues. And that is a very important thing when you consider that deep sea, this newest model's only been around for a little over a week, and yet it's already topping the charts on the Apple App Store. And so a lot of people are going to be using this and they're going to be asking questions about what's going on in the world. And it's not totally clear that they're going to be getting a real factual, objective answer. David Rind 00:12:05 From these countries that to ticktock. And the conversations are on there. And it seems like a much more blatant example of what the hawks talk about exactly are. Matt Egan 00:12:14 Tik Tok has these national security privacy concerns, according to many people in the government, because of its links to China. And again, those concerns are magnified and much clearer when it comes to deep sea and whatever comes after deep sea. David Rind 00:12:35 'Well, you know, so more broadly, when we talk about Silicon Valley and the whole concept of just how much investment is going to be needed to fuel the so-called A.I. revolution and whether it will actually revolutionize anything is kind of an open question at this point. I think it's fair to look at it with some skepticism. But like Mark Zuckerberg said that Metta would spend $65 billion on AI this year. Sam Altman from OpenAI. I predicted trillions trillions would be needed to fuel data centers. But if the numbers that DB Sic is putting out, you know, the 6 million or so to develop the model up to this point turns out to be true, wouldn't that basically just blow up this whole idea of we need to scale, we need to value this whole kind of business model that is undergirding Silicon Valley. Matt Egan 00:13:24 It would force a rethink of just how much money it's going to cost to build this AI boom. But it is important to make a distinction between training in a AI model and running it so deep. Sik has talked about how it didn't cost them very much to build this model, to train it, but that's different from running it. And if you have millions of people using deep seek, that is going to take a significant amount of computing power to answer all of those queries from the people around the world. And that is also going to consume a significant amount of money. There's just a lot of uncertainty here, and I think that's what happens sometimes when you have a game changing technology. There's a wide range of possibilities and there are moments like this deep sick moment that force a reevaluation of preconceived notions. David Rind 00:14:23 And we've seen Trump really stressing the need for less regulation on this industry to kind of prop up that growth here in the US. But there are questions as to the byproduct of that, right? Matt Egan 00:14:35 Listen, there's always a balance between having enough safeguards in place to innovate in a responsible way and not having so many safeguards that it stifles innovation and the building of the next great technology. I think the stakes here are even bigger because artificial intelligence is getting so smart that it has raised significant safety concerns. And I think some of those safety concerns have actually been pushed out of the spotlight recently by these advancements in China. But they do still exist. And so it's going to be really important to try to get that balance right between supporting the investment and the innovation and keeping it safe and also getting that balance right over time. When you have these swings in power in Washington, it's it's not going to be easy. David Rind 00:15:31 Yeah, there's there's not a lot of stability for an industry. It is constantly in flux. And that makes things really difficult going forward. Well, Matt, thank you for introducing me to Deep Sick. I feel like I at least have some understanding of it now. Matt Egan 00:15:43 Thank you. Of course. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. David Rind 00:16:00 One thing is a production of CNN Audio. This episode was produced by Paola Ortiz and me, David Rind. Our senior producers are Felicia Patinkin and Faiz Jamil. Matt Dempsey is our production manager. Dan Dzula is our technical director and Steve Lickteig is the executive producer of CNN Audio. We get support from Haley Thomas, Alex Manasseri, Robert Mathers, John Dianora, Leni Steinhart, Jamus Andrest, Nichole Pesaru and Lisa Namerow. Special thanks to Wendy Brundage. If you're new here, make sure you follow the show so you don't miss an episode we post on Wednesdays and Sundays. And if you like what you're hearing, leave a rating and a review wherever you listen. It helps other people discover the show and hate the more the merrier. Talk you on Sunday.
