Latest news with #Kantor
Scotsman
19 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
Edinburgh Fringe theatre reviews: Sugar Murder at the Fringe 2 + more
Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter, get the latest news and reviews from our specialist arts writers Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... Sugar ★★★★ Assembly Checkpoint (Venue 322) until 24 August Tomáš Kantor has their audience palm in hand and hand in glove in Sugar, a one-person powerhouse about the landscape of Sugar Dating. 'Hey sugar babes!' Kantor purrs from the stage. 'Have I got any daddies in the audience?' Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Sugar is the story of how they meet Richard – the sugar daddy for whom they went 'full method' in a fallow period of acting work. Their objective is simple: find a daddy, write a cabaret. 'Strap in,' Kantor teases. 'Or should I say strap on?' Sugar | Meagan Harding Written by Ro Bright (also known for their Scotsman Fringe First Award winning play Daffodils), Sugar is impeccably conceived. The lighting, sound, and set design elevate this cabaret-confessional to concert-level proportions, and Kantor transitions seamlessly between characters, audience engagement, spoken word, and song. Richard sometimes assumes the form of a blow-up doll, and he is otherwise known by his baritone in a series of scenes featuring keyboards, a cello and a ukulele. 'May I make contact with your lap?' Kantor asks one audience member, before asking another: 'How much would you pay to have sex with me?' Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman remains their idol and guru, as they negotiate their terms and requirements. Not only must their date be an experienced sugar daddy, but they also can't be too old, and they absolutely cannot be transphobic or have internalised homophobia. This becomes increasingly difficult, however, as the shape of Sugar attests. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad 'What would Julia do?' Kantor asks themselves, yet another guiding principle. Contained within this work, ostensibly created for 'easy consumption,' is a vital message of the ways in which the trans, queer and non-binary communities must perform for their safety every day. Sugar is politically, aesthetically, and theatrically astute – it might just be the hottest ticket in town, in more ways than one. Josephine Balfour-Oatts Jackie! A New Musical ★★★ Gilded Balloon Patter Hoose (Venue 24) until 25 August The dazzling smile, the little pillbox hats, the strawberry-pink Chanel suit spattered with her husband's blood on the day of his 1963 assassination in Dallas. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad The image of Jackie Kennedy - journalist, First Lady, and wife to two of the 20th century's most powerful men - is one of the most iconic in recent history; and in their new musical Jackie!, the co-writing team of Joe McNeice, Max Alexander-Taylor and Nancy Edwards go hell-for-leather at the task of dramatising and satirising her life between the early 1950s, when she met and married Jack Kennedy, and her 1968 retreat into a well-protected private life with Aristotle Onassis. The result, though, is a slightly chaotic hour of theatre that looks more like a work in progress, over-stuffed with ideas, tonal shifts, and possible strands for development, than any kind of finished show. The Kennedy menfolk - including Jack's brother Robert, and their sinister old father Joe Kennedy - pop in and out of the four doors on the set like yo-yos; and as Jack and Jackie enter the White House, there is a parade of feebly-caricatured celebrity visitors from Liberace to Elvis Presley, all adding their cents'-worth of comment. The songs have a sub-Tom-Lehrer satirical density that requires a less frantic performance style for full appreciation. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad And though Nancy Edwards herself is radiant as Jackie, the deafening volume at which the music and songs are pushed towards the audience seems all too typical of a show that never - in this version - gives itself a moment to breathe, and to come fully to life. Joyce McMillan Murder at the Fringe 2 ★★★ Braw Venues @ Hill Street (Venue 41) until 24 August A sequel that improves on the original, this neat interactive murder mystery by Edinburgh Little Theatre tweaks the formula their first outing which debuted last year. It still owes a debt to the old ITV panel show, Whodunnit?, but here the audience are the detectives. Professor Stiff has been found dead in the Gynaecology Department of an Edinburgh hospital and — armed with pens and notepads provided — you're asked to quiz all the possible suspects after they give their testimony. This gives a procession of actors the chance to show how well they know their character's backstory and how well they can improvise under questioning. This works as many of the performers are clearly experienced and the case is led by another veteran thesp, the show's director, Paul Murray, as the Detective Inspector. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad This ensures that the investigation never loses its focus, but it's the interaction with the audience that distinguishes it. It's well worth quizzing a possible perp on some detail in their statement as this often leads to a hitherto undiscovered clue. Last year, the final verdict was left to the audience, this year it provides a definitive confession and full m.o. which is both ingenious and feasible. Rory Ford The Unstoppable Rise of Ben Manager ★★ Pleasance Courtyard – Above (Venue 33) until 25 August A winner of the 2025 Charlie Hartill Theatre Fund, this corporate satire has an oddly toothless bite. Unemployed Ben Weaver steals a lanyard from a mysterious corpse before a job interview. Mistaken for the real deal, he's promptly parachuted into a managerial role where his chief responsibilities are spouting corporate jargon and making futile PowerPoints. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad In a predictably absurd twist, he hurtles up the corporate ladder until he stumbles upon the grubby truths underpinning his corporate world. Performances are impressive, with a deftly composed score to accompany, but there's little insight beyond the surface. Easy jabs at corporate vacuousness are low hanging fruit, and the flirtation with surrealism comes across as second-rate Kafka. The seismic forces of AI promise to remould the way the world works. But the most obvious existential threat to Ben and his lanyard class goes unaddressed. Alexander Cohen The Fit Prince (who gets switched on the square in the frosty castle the night before (insert public holiday here)) ★★ Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 33) until 25 August Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad The creators of previous hits Diana: The Untold and Untrue Story and Gwyneth Goes Skilling, Linus Karp and Joseph Martin, struggle to create a similarly sharply silly comedy without a real-life story to base it on. The super progressive, a bit Scandinavian setting of Swedonia is better characterised than the thinly drawn protagonists, a prince looking for love (Linus) and a New York baker going by the name of Butcher (Martin). Audience participation that was so effective previously is over-indulged in. But as the band BAAB (rearrange the letters), Linus and Martin shine with a hilarious megamix of hits, culminating with Dunkirk and Movement King. Maybe next year they'll get their own show. Sally Stott Faster in the Attic ★★ Greenside @ George Street (Venue 236) until 23 August There's three good performances and a handful of solid scenes in this drama by New York playwright Grace Tomblin Marca but, disappointingly, it falls short of the mark. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad When astrophysicist Jay (Mackenzie Grace) dies in an apparent suicide while researching supermassive black holes, her partner, Andrea (Branwyn Ritchie) comes to suspect foul play after piecing together her last days with friends and colleagues (all played by Lora Margerum). The impact of this terrible event is never felt as everyone — including Amy — seems to cope remarkably well. Frustratingly, the end feels like a placeholder and the furiously unconvincing stage violence is at odds with the rest of the piece, but there's the bones of something better here. Rory Ford Gross Domestic Product ★★ Greenside @ Riddles Court (Venue 16) until 22 August There's a fine performance by Aker Okoye at the centre of this misfiring dystopian bureaucratic comedy by Christian Lockerbie, but it can't make up for an ill-thought through premise. Okoye plays Finlay, a young man captured by civil servants and tied to a chair in Whitehall at the behest of 'The System,' an electronic program designed to foster economic growth. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad The reasons for Finlay's kidnapping are never clear — even with the big information dump at the end — and while the violence visited upon him aims to be darkly funny, it's just grimly unconvincing and increasingly tiresome. Rory Ford
Euronews
03-06-2025
- Business
- Euronews
French start-up H Company releases new AI agents 'cheaper' than rivals
French artificial intelligence (AI) start-up H Company, which launched last year and raised hundreds of millions of euros in investment before it had even released its first product, brought out three new AI agents on Tuesday. 'We are all in on the agentic race, that's our path. We are even potentially ahead with really good results in computer use technologies,' Charles Kantor, the company's CEO and co-founder, told Euronews Next. Agentic AI models, or AI agents, do not just process information but also try to plan and complete tasks and solve problems. However, Kantor said that humans would 'always be at the centre' of their AI models, so that if the agent wrote an email, it would just be a draft and only the human would be able to send the message. The three models that H has released are called Runner H, Tester H, and Surfer H. H said that the three products reflect the company's vision for a 'trusted, action-oriented AI that delivers task execution beyond traditional chatbots'. It claims that it achieves a 92.2 per cent success rate, while reducing costs by up to 5.5 times against competitors such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. Runner H allows users to automate workflows and streamline tasks. Kantor said it was 'a more advanced version of Manus,' he said, referring to the Chinese AI agent. It is aimed at consumer use. Surfer H allows you to surf the web and navigate browser environments, and the company claims the model achieved a 92.2 per cent task completion accuracy on the WebVoyager benchmark at $0.13 (€0.11) per task. This is much cheaper than competitors, such as OpenAI's Operator agent, which costs $200 (€175) per month for its Pro subscription plan. 'It's really like almost an agent acting on your behalf, using planning to visual capabilities to recognise interfaces, clicking, scrolling, acting, fetching information, and so on,' Kantor said. Tester H is the final new model, which is built more for enterprise use with one of the big things it can do being software testing. But it can also do things such as smart email replies. You can ask the agent to read your recent emails, and it can draft template answers. But the agent will not hit send; only the human can do this. H said that the three products reflect the company's vision for a 'trusted, action-oriented AI that delivers task execution beyond traditional chatbots'. All the models are trained on synthetic data, which means it uses artificially generated data designed to mimic real-world data, allowing the company to meet Europe's GDPR rules on data protection. According to Kantor, he personally uses H's AI models for the interconnection between tools such as emails and documents to prepare information, such as for billing or drafting emails. But he also uses it for preparing company content that is then reviewed, such as for ads and markets. 'When you start to review the work of an agent, you start to feel the productivity,' he said. H Company created a buzz when it launched last year. Kantor was a university professor at Stanford while the start-up's other co-founders came from DeepMind. Meanwhile, investment came from LVMH's CEO Bernard Arnault, Iliad founder Xavier Niel, Amazon, Samsung, and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, among others. But just several months after launch, three of the co-founders - Daan Wierstra, Karl Tuyls, and Julien Perolat - quit due to 'operational differences,' the company said in a LinkedIn post. For Kantor, the situation surrounding their departure is 'in the past'. 'We had this kind of strategic disalignment, but now they are ambassadors of the company, and H's vision is really clear,' he said. 'We want to be at the state of the art in terms of action models and the agentic space, and we want this technology to benefit humanity'. The company now has around 70 employees in Paris and in the United Kingdom and has a big research and engineering department. 'It's kind of the concerto of age. You need to be able to really orchestrate in the right manner: Product, research, and engineering synergies to build category-defining AI,' he said. For Kantor, agentic AI is the next phase of AI, which will be vital to physical AI, which NVIDIA spoke of at length two weeks ago. 'We're gonna see a lot of companies thriving worldwide, but also in France, in robotics. I think Agent AI is gonna be the heart, the gist, I may say, of many fields,' Kantor said, referring to computer games, simulated worlds, and robotics. 'The software part of robotics is gonna be based on agentics, superintelligence. The opportunities are numerous'.
Yahoo
13-05-2025
- Sport
- Yahoo
Georgia Tech WBB sends strong message by hiring top assistant
After a decade of success at UConn, Ben Kantor has joined the Georgia Tech women's basketball program as an assistant coach under head coach Karen Blair. Kantor arrives in Atlanta fresh off helping UConn win the 2025 National Championship and brings a resume packed with experience at the highest level. Advertisement During his two years as a full-time assistant coach, UConn made back-to-back Final Fours, went undefeated in Big East play, and captured four conference titles. Over 10 seasons with the Huskies, Kantor contributed to two national championships and eight Final Four appearances. Blair expressed excitement over Kantor's arrival and detailed their longtime professional relationship. They have a shared vision for success at Georgia Tech. 'Adding a coach with Ben's national championship and Final Four experience is a game-changer, Blair said. Related: Ex-NBA and Georgia Tech standout sues Fulton County after release from prison Kantor's coaching journey began in support roles, including video coordinator stints at SMU, Memphis, and later UConn. He was also a temporary assistant during UConn's 2020-21 season impacted by COVID-19. His early career included assistant roles at Colgate and Houston Baptist. Advertisement Kantor, a University of Illinois graduate and former women's team practice player, expressed gratitude for the opportunity, highlighting the chance to reunite with Blair. 'We've talked about this day for over 15 years,' he said. 'To finally work together again and help bring her championship vision to life is both humbling and exciting.' Kantor's addition gives Georgia Tech a coach with proven success and a clear commitment to excellence.
Yahoo
13-05-2025
- Yahoo
Lewis County crash claims life of driver
TOWN OF TURIN, N.Y. (WWTI) – A Monday afternoon crash in Lewis County has claimed the life of one person. According to the Lewis County Sheriff's Office, a 1988 Ford dump truck operated by 49-year-old David Kantor was traveling eastbound of Lyman Road. Authorities said that Lyman failed to negotiate a curve in the roadway. New York State budget tweaks Foundation Aid formula The dump truck then struck a parked trailer and an excavator located on the Gomer Hill Road. Kantor was transported to a nearby landing zone and where airlifted to SUNY Upstate Medical Center in Syracuse. However, he later died as a result of his injuries. The investigation is currently ongoing to Sheriff's officials. The New York State Collision Reconstruction Unit and Commercial Vehicle Unit, Lyons Falls Ambulance, Turin Fire Department, Town of Turin Highway Department and Groff's Towing all assisted on the scene. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
29-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Durbin to keep pushing card bill
This story was originally published on Payments Dive. To receive daily news and insights, subscribe to our free daily Payments Dive newsletter. Sen. Dick Durbin is retiring, but that doesn't mean he's done with credit card reform efforts. The Illinois Democrat announced last week that he wouldn't seek re-election next year and his four-decade congressional career will end in January 2027. Still, he plans to use some of his dwindling days in the Senate to continue a crusade for the Credit Card Competition Act. A spokesperson for his office confirmed that intent by email on Thursday. That's the piece of legislation that would force bank card issuers to ensure that credit card processing systems always make a network other than Visa and Mastercard available to retailers, restaurants and other merchants. It would be no small change, given that Visa and Mastercard handle about 87% of all transactions when consumers swipe their cards, according to industry research firm Nilson Report. (That's all cards, but they dominate the market for credit cards alone too.) The idea behind the legislation is that it would create an opening for more competitors to challenge the duopoly, ultimately cutting card processing costs. Durbin, 80, has pushed the bill in the past two congressional sessions, with backing from Kansas Republican Roger Marshall. But so far this year, the legislation hasn't resurfaced, despite Durbin's promises it will. Durbin is waiting for the right moment, says Doug Kantor, who serves as general counsel for the National Association of Convenience stores and who has been a major proponent of the proposal since it landed in 2022. Durbin's camp is keeping an eye out for a larger bill that would be a suitable vehicle for carrying the legislation across the finish line, Kantor said in an interview last week. The lack of movement this year has probably been a result of the chambers being preoccupied with other major issues like the budget, he said. The Merchants Payments Coalition, which includes the National Retail Federation and the National Restaurant Association, among others, has also encouraged the legislation. 'There is a broad and growing recognition that the credit card companies don't do business the right way, and this bill may be one piece of addressing that,' Kantor said. But things aren't so clear across the aisle. Marshall's office has steadfastly not responded to requests for comment on the reintroduction of the legislation in recent weeks, despite his very vocal support last year. On the House side, Arkansas Republican French Hill, who is chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, doesn't see the bill going anywhere because Congress shouldn't be in the position of refereeing between retailers and banks, he said recently. 'This isn't the way to resolve it,' Hill said during an event hosted this month by the media outlet Punchbowl News. The lack of Republican interest may have something to do with other financial services priorities being floated by newly elected President Donald Trump, like his fascination with cryptocurrencies. That may be propelling a Republican congressional focus on pursuing stablecoin legislation. In addition, interest groups on the other side of the fight, in particular the Electronic Payments Coalition and Bank Policy Institute, have not let up this year in skewering the CCCA proposal with press releases, statements and event appearances. 'We're taking this extremely seriously,' EPC Executive Chairman Richard Hunt said at the Punchbowl News event, contending the bill is a favor for big box retailers that would undercut card rewards and security. Hunt lamented Durbin's success 15 years ago in passing his namesake amendment to the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which ushered in limitations for fees in processing debit card transactions. Congressional Republicans are still seeking to blunt the impact of that law. A pack of House Republicans, including Hill, last month wrote to the Federal Reserve to reverse course on a planned reduction of the debit fee cap prescribed by that law. For the long-time Democratic Senate whip, Republican control of both chambers and the White House has not only weakened Durbin's power, it has seemingly reset the agenda. Some congressional colleagues have moved on to new card industry legislation that aims to protect consumers from high credit card interest rates. Part of Durbin's decision to retire may have been influenced by younger peers eager to take on leadership. He may find he has to leave his card reform agenda for them, if they're interested. Recommended Reading Republicans pressure Fed on debit card fees
