Latest news with #Gretel
Yahoo
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Wichita Falls Ballet Theatre presents twist on Hansel & Gretel
WICHITA FALLS (KFDX/KJTL) — A new, fun spin on a classic fairy tale is coming to Wichita Falls. The Wichita Falls Ballet Theatre will perform Hansel and Gretel in two performances at MSU's Fain Fine Arts Auditorium, on Friday, May 16, at 7 p.m. and Saturday, May 17, at 1 p.m. Tickets for the show are $25 and can be bought online. 'Hansel and Gretel' is a German fairy tale collected by the Brothers Grimm. It was published in 1812 as part of Grimms' Fairy Tales. Hansel and Gretel are siblings who are abandoned in a forest and fall into the hands of a witch who lives in a house made of bread, cake and sugar. The witch intends to fatten Hansel before eating him. Although Gretel saves her brother by pushing the witch into her oven, she escapes with the witch's treasure. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Globe and Mail
27-03-2025
- Business
- Globe and Mail
Should You Buy, Sell, or Hold Nvidia Stock on Gretel Acquisition News?
Nvidia (NVDA) is a technology company specializing in computing infrastructure, such as providing computer graphics and networking solutions. The company is known for popularizing the graphics processing unit (GPU) and for advancing the gaming industry. Nvidia's stock has had an interesting year so far, to say the least. The stock had a massive selloff when the market was introduced to artificial intelligence (AI) models from Chinese startup DeepSeek. NVDA's stock recorded the most significant one-day loss in history crashing 17%. Shares are down 16% in the year to date. Nvidia Completes AI Acquisition Nvidia has penned a deal to acquire synthetic data provider Gretel. The deal was closed for an undisclosed nine-figure amount that is reportedly higher than Gretel's latest $320 million valuation. The move will see around 80 of Gretel's employees being incorporated into Nvidia. Nvidia has been rolling out synthetic data generation tools for developers to train their AI models, and Gretel offers a synthetic data platform and a host of APIs that will support developers in these efforts. Experts believe in theory that the use of synthetic data can solve the data scarcity problem, something the industry has been struggling with since 2022 when ChatGPT's breakthrough. This is a problem that suggests there may not be enough data to accurately train AI models and allow them to make good predictions. Synthetic data is machine-produced, non-human data which mimics real-world data. It is created using statistical methods and techniques like deep learning and generative AI. In the place of real data, synthetic data can help train models. However it is to be noted that experts do warn that synthetic data in generative AI models has its own sets of risks. Interestingly, Gretel raised more than $67 million before being acquired by Nvidia, and in December 2023, it penned a deal with Microsoft (MSFT) to join the Microsoft for Startups Pegasus program and in November 2024, the two companies announced a Gretel Azure OpenAI Service partnership. Nvidia Outscores Analysts Nvidia announced its fourth-quarter results for its fiscal 2025 on Feb. 26, posting a profit of $22.09 billion. It can be translated to a profit of $0.89 per share, beating analysts' $0.84 per share estimates. The company also posted revenue of $39.33 billion for the quarter, easily outscoring analysts' $37.72 billion estimates. On a full-year basis, Nvidia posted a profit of $72.88 billion, translated to $2.94 per share, with total revenue of $130.5 billion. For first quarter of its fiscal 2026, management anticipates revenue in the range of $43 billion with GAAP gross margin at 70.6%. Analyst Opinions on NVDA Stock Despite the recent turmoil surrounding NVDA, analysts maintain a solid position on Nvidia with a 'Strong Buy' consensus rating and a mean price target of $177.19. This reflects upside potential of more than 50% from the current trading level. The stock has been reviewed by 44 analysts and received 38 'Strong Buy' rating, two 'Moderate Buy' ratings, and four 'Hold' ratings.
Yahoo
19-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Report: Nvidia Acquires Synthetic Data Firm Gretel in Nine-Figure Deal
Nvidia (NVDA, Financials) acquired San Diego-based synthetic data provider Gretel in a deal exceeding the company's last valuation of $320 million, according to Wired. The exact terms of the transaction were not disclosed. Warning! GuruFocus has detected 3 Warning Signs with NVDA. Gretel creates synthetic data tools addressing data privacy issues and aiming at enhancing artificial intelligence model training. The firm offers application programming interfaces that let developers design generative AI models with enhanced security and privacy aspects. AI training, testing, and research spanning multimedia, tabular, and text-based forms all make extensive use of synthetic dataartistically created to duplicate real-world and its staff of around 80 people will be merged into Nvidia after the purchase; their technologies should improve the cloud-based generative artificial intelligence offerings of the action fits Nvidia's plan to grow its artificial intelligence ecosystem by including synthetic data tools for customizing and model training. The purchase tracks Gretel's past alliances, including a Microsoft Azure connection. Gretel joined the Microsoft for Startups Pegasus Program in December 2023; in November Microsoft revealed a relationship with Gretel Azure OpenAI claims Gretel obtained around $67 million in venture money before the purchase. This article first appeared on GuruFocus. Sign in to access your portfolio
WIRED
19-03-2025
- Business
- WIRED
Nvidia Bets Big on Synthetic Data
Mar 19, 2025 11:27 AM Nvidia has acquired synthetic data startup Gretel to bolster the AI training data used by the chip maker's customers and developers. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang addresses participants at the keynote of CES 2025 in Las Vegas, Nevada. Photograph:Nvidia has acquired synthetic data firm Gretel for nine figures, according to two people with direct knowledge of the deal. The acquisition price exceeds Gretel's most recent valuation of $320 million, the sources say, though the exact terms of the purchase remain unknown. Gretel and its team of approximately 80 employees will be folded into Nvidia, where its technology will be deployed as part of the chip giant's growing suite of cloud-based, generative AI services for developers. The acquisition comes as Nvidia has been rolling out synthetic data generation tools, so that developers can train their own AI models and fine-tune them for specific apps. In theory, synthetic data could create a near-infinite supply of AI training data and help solve the data scarcity problem that has been looming over the AI industry since ChatGPT went mainstream in 2022—although experts say using synthetic data in generative AI comes with its own risks. A spokesperson for Nvidia declined to comment. Gretel was founded in 2019 by Alex Watson, John Myers, and Ali Golshan, who also serves as CEO. The startup offers a synthetic data platform and a suite of APIs to developers who want to build generative AI models, but don't have access to enough training data or have privacy concerns around using real people's data. Gretel doesn't build and license its own frontier AI models, but fine-tunes existing open source models to add differential privacy and safety features, then packages those together to sell them. The company raised more than $67 million in venture capital funding prior to the acquisition, according to Pitchbook. Gretel also did not immediately respond to a request for comment from WIRED. Unlike human-generated or real-world data, synthetic data is computer-generated and designed to mimic real-world data. Proponents say this makes the data generation required to build AI models more scalable, less labor intensive, and more accessible to smaller or less-resourced AI developers. Privacy-protection is another key selling point of synthetic data, making it an appealing option for health care providers, banks, and government agencies. Nvidia has already been offering synthetic data tools for developers for years. In 2022 it launched Omniverse Replicator, which gives developers the ability to generate custom, physically accurate, synthetic 3D data to train neural networks. Last June, Nvidia began rolling out a family of open AI models that generate synthetic training data for developers to use in building or fine-tuning LLMs. Called Nemotron-4 340B, these mini-models can be used by developers to drum up synthetic data for their own LLMs across 'health care, finance, manufacturing, retail, and every other industry.' During his keynote presentation at Nvidia's annual developer conference this Tuesday, Nvidia cofounder and chief executive Jensen Huang spoke about the challenges the industry faces in rapidly scaling AI in a cost-effective way. 'There are three problems that we focus on,' he said. 'One, how do you solve the data problem? How and where do you create the data necessary to train the AI? Two, what's the model architecture? And then three, what are the scaling laws?' Huang went on to describe how the company is now using synthetic data generation in its robotics platforms. Synthetic data can be used in at least a couple different ways, says Ana-Maria Cretu, a postdoctoral researcher at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland, who studies synthetic data privacy. It can take the form of tabular data, like demographic or medical data, which can solve a data scarcity issue or create a more diverse dataset. Cretu gives an example: If a hospital wants to build an AI model to track a certain type of cancer, but is working with a small data set from 1,000 patients, synthetic data can be used to fill out the data set, eliminate biases, and anonymize data from real humans. 'This also offers some privacy protection, whenever you cannot disclose the real data to a stakeholder or software partner,' Cretu says. But in the world of large language models, Cretu adds, synthetic data has also become something of a catchall phase for 'How can we just increase the amount of data we have for LLMs over time?' Experts worry that, in the not-so-distant future, AI companies won't be able to gorge as freely on human-created internet data in order to train their AI models. Last year, a report from MIT's Data Provenance Initiative showed that restrictions around open web content were increasing. Synthetic data in theory could provide an easy solution. But a July 2024 article in Nature highlighted how AI language models could 'collapse,' or degrade significantly in quality, when they're fine-tuned over and over again with data generated by other models. Put another way, if you feed the machine nothing but its own machine-generated output, it theoretically begins to eat itself, spewing out detritus as a result. Alexandr Wang, the chief executive of Scale AI—which leans heavily on a human workforce for labeling data used to train models—shared the findings from the Nature article on X, writing, 'While many researchers today view synthetic data as an AI philosopher's stone, there is no free lunch.' Wang said later in the thread that this is why he believes firmly in a hybrid data approach. One of Gretel's cofounders pushed back on the Nature paper, noting in a blog post that the 'extreme scenario' of repetitive training on purely synthetic data 'is not representative of real-world AI development practices.' Gary Marcus, a cognitive scientist and researcher who loudly criticizes AI hype, said at the time that he agrees with Wang's 'diagnosis but not his prescription.' The industry will move forward, he believes, by developing new architectures for AI models, rather than focusing on the idiosyncrasies of data sets. In an email to WIRED, Marcus observed that 'systems like [OpenAI's] o1/o3 seem to be better at domains like coding and math where you can generate—and validate—tons of synthetic data. On general purpose reasoning in open-ended domains, they have been less effective." Cretu believes the scientific theory around model collapse is sound. But she notes that most researchers and computer scientists are training on a mix of synthetic and real-world data. 'You might possibly be able to get around model collapse by having fresh data with every new round of training,' she says. Concerns about model collapse haven't stopped the AI industry from hopping aboard the synthetic data train, even if they're doing so with caution. At a recent Morgan Stanley tech conference, Sam Altman reportedly touted OpenAI's ability to use its existing AI models to create more data. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has said he believes it may be possible to build 'an infinite data-generation engine,' one that would maintain its quality by injecting a small amount of new information during the training process (as Cretu has suggested). Big Tech has also been turning to synthetic data. Meta has talked about how it trained Llama 3, its state-of-the-art large language model, using synthetic data, some of which was generated from Meta's previous model, Llama 2. Amazon's Bedrock platform lets developers use Anthropic's Claude to generate synthetic data. Microsoft's Phi-3 small language model was trained partly on synthetic data, though the company has warned that 'synthetic data generated by pre-trained large-language models can sometimes reduce accuracy and increase bias on down-stream tasks.' Google's DeepMind has been using synthetic data, too, but again, has highlighted the complexities of developing a pipeline for generating—and maintaining—truly private synthetic data. 'We know that all of the big tech companies are working on some aspect of synthetic data,' says Alex Bestall, the founder of Rightsify, a music licensing startup that also generates AI music and licenses its catalog for AI models. 'But human data is often a contractual requirement in our deals. They might want a dataset that is 60 percent human-generated, and 40 percent synthetic.'
The Guardian
24-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Hansel and Gretel review – Northern Ballet ditch the witch in peril-free eco-fable
Traditionally, Hansel and Gretel is a tale of tasty delight and grisly dread. Northern Ballet's new version for young audiences chucks out the gingerbread cottage and the witch who has unsavoury plans for the siblings. Rather than fearing the forest, the duo learn to love and respect green spaces in a breezy, 40-minute eco-fable with as little jeopardy as the company's sugar-spun version of Little Red Riding Hood a few years ago. But this peril-free, meandering story is often witty in its compositions (by Colin Scott) and choreography (by Harris Beattie and George Liang), both with a helping of music-hall tomfoolery. The show also has an attractive, economical patchwork design by Ali Allen that matches the environmental message and creates a collage of town and countryside. This Hansel and Gretel live in an urban apartment with their father – there's no stepmother in sight – and are glued to video games. Dad despairs of them so takes them for a walk in the woods: cue a relatable scene for parents in the audience as he bounds out into the fresh air, with the kids dragging their heels behind him. Andrew Tomlinson, dressed in a dandified business suit that matches the monochrome cityscape, stands with chest stretched and hands on hips like an adventurer surveying awe-inspiring terrain. Archie Sherman's Hansel and Julie Nunès's Gretel are a kerfuffle of huffs and shrugs, arms folded and lips pursed. Left alone, the duo encounter characters that shift their perspective. The first are a pair of birdwatchers – greeting them with great rippling hand shakes – whose beloved birds are represented by rod puppets and accompanied by fleet notes on flute (Sarah Bull) and clarinet (Joanna Rozario), from a quartet directed by pianist Ewan Gilford. The ensemble sits at the side of the stage so young audiences can enjoy the musicians' characterful movements, too, and identify the sounds of each instrument. Alexander Volpov's cello is best at conveying the weary melancholy of a rubbish monster (Bruno Serraclara) who shuffles along with glowing eyes, weighed down by a coat of litter, looking as if a bottle bank's innards have been spewed out. A pirouetting nature spirit (Mayuko Iwanaga) appears under Abbi Fearnley's emerald lighting and, like a disappointed teacher, rebukes the siblings when they carelessly toss their sweet wrappers away. Instead of a witch, the children encounter the Lady of the Wood (Gemma Coutts) who shares the joy of gardening. The dancing can at times appear as didactic as the plot, with the siblings mimicking first the scampering, feet-flicking birdwatchers and finally their green-fingered host. There is an over-extended jig of a finale, and an overwhelming sense that the original story has got as lost as Hansel and Gretel themselves, but there are appealing performances and even the sorrowful rubbish monster is treated to a fairytale transformation. Touring until 7 June
