Latest news with #TheImitationGame
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
FTX Limited Series a Go at Netflix With Julia Garner, Anthony Boyle Starring
Netflix has greenlit a series about the rise and fall of cryptocurrency exchange FTX and the two central figures involved — Sam Bankman-Fried and Caroline Ellison. The streamer has formally ordered The Altruists, which will chronicle how Bankman-Fried and Ellison 'two hyper-smart, ambitious young idealists tried to remake the global financial system in the blink of an eye — and then seduced, coaxed, and teased each other into stealing $8 billion.' Julia Garner, who had been in talks to star in the drama, and Anthony Boyle will play Ellison and Bankman-Fried, respectively. More from The Hollywood Reporter 'The Thursday Murder Club' Is on the Case in Teaser for Chris Columbus Netflix Movie John Mulaney's Fight With Three 14-Year-Olds Was a Bit of a Letdown - Because It Had to Be Netflix, BBC Studios Team on Comedy Podcast 'The Big Pitch With Jimmy Carr' Graham Moore (The Imitation Game, The Outfit) and Jacqueline Hoyt (The Leftovers, The Underground Railroad) will serve as co-showrunners on the series. James Ponsoldt (Shrinking) is set to direct. The Altruists comes from Barack and Michelle Obama's Higher Ground Productions, which has an overall deal at Netflix. 'For nearly three years now, Sam and Caroline's story has been my daily obsession,' said Moore. 'I'm so grateful to my friends at Netflix and Higher Ground for loving this story not only as much as I do, but in the same way that I do. And we can't wait to show all of you why.' FTX went under in late 2022 after a run on customer withdrawals at the crypto exchange brought to light an $8 billion imbalance in its books. Bankman-Fried was convicted in November 2023 on seven charges of fraud and conspiracy; Ellison, who was co-CEO of a related hedge fund, Alameda Research — and Bankman-Fried's former girlfriend — testified against him after pleading guilty to other charges. The Altruists brings Garner back to Netflix, where she won three Emmys for her role on Ozark and also was nominated for Inventing Anna. She'll next be seen in The Fantastic Four: First Steps, where she plays the Silver Surfer, when the Marvel movie hits theaters in July. Boyle's credits include FX's Say Nothing and Apple's Masters of the Air and Manhunt. Moore, Hoyt and Ponsoldt will executive produce the series with Vinnie Malhotra and Jessie Dicovitsky for Higher Ground, Scoop Wasserstein for New York Magazine/Vox Media Studios, Tonia Davis, Lauren Morelli and Garner. The Altruists is one of several TV and film projects delving into Bankman-Fried and FTX. Lena Dunham is writing a feature film for Apple and A24, and Amazon's Prime Video ordered a limited series from Joe and Anthony Russo's AGBO and writer David Weil shortly after FTX imploded. On the nonfiction side, Mark Wahlberg's Unrealistic Ideas and Fortune magazine are teaming on a documentary, and Bloomberg has also produced a doc about the company's collapse. Best of The Hollywood Reporter 'The Studio': 30 Famous Faces Who Play (a Version of) Themselves in the Hollywood-Based Series 22 of the Most Shocking Character Deaths in Television History A 'Star Wars' Timeline: All the Movies and TV Shows in the Franchise
Campaign ME
26-05-2025
- Campaign ME
The illusion of control: How prompting Gen AI reroutes you to 'average'
After speaking on a recent AI panel and hearing the same questions come up again and again, I realised something simple but important: most people don't actually understand the difference between artificial intelligence and the kind of AI we interact with every day. The tools we use, ChatGPT, image generators, and writing assistants, aren't just 'AI'. They're generative AI (GenAI), a very specific category of machine learning built to generate content by predicting what comes next. As someone who moves between research and creative work, I don't see GenAI as a magic tool. I see it more like a navigation system. Every time we prompt it, we're giving it directions, but not on an open map. We're working with routes that have already been traveled, mapped, and optimised by everyone who came before us. The more people follow those routes, the more paved and permanent they become. So while it may feel like you're exploring something new, most of the time you're being rerouted through the most popular path. Unless you understand how the model was trained, how it predicts, and what its limitations are, you'll keep circling familiar ground. That's why I believe we need to stop treating Gen AI like cruise control and start learning how it actually works. If your prompts have ever felt like they're taking you in loops, you're not imagining it, you're just following a road that was already laid. Let's look at where it came from, how GenAI works, and what it means when most of our roads lead to the same place. History: From logic machines to language models The term artificial intelligence was coined in 1956 at the Dartmouth Summer Research Project. Early AI systems focused on symbolic reasoning and logical problem-solving but were constrained by limited computing power. Think of the cryptography machine in Morten Tyldum's 2014 movie, The Imitation Game. These limitations contributed to the first AI winter in the 1970s, when interest and funding declined sharply. By the early 2000s, advances in computing power, algorithm development, and data availability ushered in the big data era. AI transitioned from theoretical models to practical applications, automating structured data tasks such as recommendation engines like Amazon's e-commerce and that of Netflix, early social media ranking algorithms, and predictive text tools like Google's autocomplete. A transformative milestone came in 2017 when Google researchers introduced the Transformer architecture in the seminal paper Attention Is All You Need. This innovation led to the development of large language models (LLMs) and foundational structures of today's generative AI systems. Functionality: How Gen AI thinks in averages Everything begins with the training data: massive amounts of text, cleaned, filtered, and then broken down into small parts called tokens. A token might be a whole word, a piece of a word, or even punctuation. Each token is assigned a numerical ID, which means the model doesn't actually read language, it processes streams of numbers that stand in for language. Once tokenised, the model learns by predicting the next token in a sequence, over and over, across billions of examples. But not all data is treated equally. Higher-quality sources, like curated books or peer-reviewed articles, are weighted more heavily than casual internet text. This influences how often certain token patterns are reinforced. So, if a phrase shows up repeatedly in high-quality contexts, the model is more likely to internalise that phrasing as a reliable pattern. Basically, it learns what an 'average' response looks like, not the mathematical average, but by converging on the most statistically stable continuation. This averaging process isn't limited to training. It shows up again when you use the model. Every prompt you enter is converted into tokens, passed through layers of the model where each token is compared with every other using what's called self-attention, a kind of real-time weighted averaging of context. These weightings are not revealed to the user prompting. The model then outputs the token it deems most probable, based on all the patterns it has seen. This makes the system lean heavily toward the median, the safe middle of the distribution. It's why answers often feel polished but cautious, they're optimised to avoid being wrong by aiming for what is most likely to be right. You can change the 'averaging' with a setting called temperature, which controls how sharply the model focuses on the median results. At low temperature, the model stays close to the statistical center: safe, predictable, and a bit dull. As you raise the temperature, the model starts scattering probabilities away from the median, allowing less common, more surprising tokens to slip in. But with that variation comes volatility. When the model output moves away from the centre of the distribution, you get randomness, not necessarily creativity. So whether in training or in real-time generation, Gen AI is built to replicate the middle. Its intelligence, if we can call it that, lies in its ability to distill billions of possibilities into one standardised output. And while that's incredibly powerful, it also reveals the system's fundamental limit: it doesn't invent meaning, it averages it. Gen AI prompting: Steering the system without seeing the road Prompting isn't just about asking a question, it's about narrowing in on the exact statistical terrain the model has mapped during training. When we write a prompt, we are navigating through token space, triggering patterns the model has seen before, and pulling from averages baked into the system. The more specific the prompt, the tighter the clustering around certain tokens and their learned probabilities. But we often forget that the user interface is smoothing over layers of complexity. We don't see the weighted influences of our word choices or the invisible temperature settings shaping the randomness of the response. These models are built to serve a general audience, another kind of average, and that makes it even harder to steer them with precision. So while it may feel like prompting is open-ended, it's really about negotiating with invisible distributions and system defaults that are doing a lot more deciding than we think. Prompt frameworks like PICO (persona, instructions, context, output) or RTF (role, task, format) can help shape structure, but it's worth remembering, they, too, are built around assumptions of what works most of the time for most people. That's still an average. Sometimes you'll get lucky and the model's output will land above your own knowledge, it will sound brilliant, insightful, maybe even novel. But the moment you hand it to someone deep in the subject, it becomes obvious: it sounds like AI. That's the trick, understanding the average you're triggering and knowing whether it serves your purpose. Who will read this? What will they expect? What level of depth or originality do they need? That's what should shape your prompt. Whether you use a structured framework, or just write freely, what matters is clarity about the target and awareness of the terrain you're pulling from. And sometimes, the best move is tactical: close the chat, open a fresh window. The weight of previous tokens, cached paths, and context history might be skewing everything. It's not your fault. The averages just got noisy. Start again, recalibrate, and aim for a better median. Conclusion: When the average becomes the interface One of the things that worries me is how the companies behind GenAI are learning to optimise for the average. The more people use these tools with prompt engineering templates and frameworks, the more the system starts shaping itself around those patterns. These models are trained to adapt, and what they're adapting to is us, our habits, our shortcuts, our structured formats. So what happens when the interface itself starts reinforcing those same averages? It becomes harder to reach anything outside the probable, the expected, the familiar. The weird, the original, the statistically unlikely, those start to fade into the background. This becomes even more complicated when we look at agentic AI, the kind that seems to make decisions or deliver strong outputs on its own. It can be very convincing. But here's the issue: it's still built on averages. We risk handing over not just the task of writing or researching, but the act of thinking itself. And when the machine is tuned to reflect what's most common, we're not just outsourcing intelligence, we're outsourcing our sense of nuance, our ability to hold an opinion that doesn't sit neatly in the middle. So the next time an AI gives you something that feels weirdly brilliant or frustratingly obvious, stop and consider what's really happening. It's not inventive. It's navigating, pulling from the most common, most accepted, most repeated paths it's seen before. Your prompt triggered that route, and that route reflects the prompts of thousands of others like you. Once you understand that, you can start steering more intentionally. You can recognise when your directions are being rerouted through popular lanes and when it's time to get off the highway. And sometimes, when the output is so average it feels broken, the smartest move is simple: close the window, reset the route, and start over. Because every now and then, the only way to find something new is to stop following the crowd. By Hiba Hassan, Head of the Design and Visual Communications Department, SAE Dubai
News18
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- News18
Only Benedict Cumberbatch Could Make An Arm Sling Look This Good At Cannes
Last Updated: Benedict Cumberbatch attended the 2025 Cannes Film Festival for the screening of his latest film, The Phoenician Scheme. Benedict Cumberbatch, known for his roles in Sherlock and The Imitation Game, attended the 2025 Cannes Film Festival for the screening of his latest film, The Phoenician Scheme. The actor arrived at the Grand Theatre Lumiere on Sunday, May 18, accompanied by his wife Sophie Hunter. The 48-year-old actor kept it classic in a black tuxedo, but what truly caught everyone's attention was his right arm in a sling. While the cause of the injury remains unknown, Cumberbatch didn't let it cramp his style. He completed the look with a sleek wristwatch, brown sunglasses, and confidently posed on the red carpet. On the other hand, Sophie, 47, brought old-school glamour to the event. She wore a deep red gown that featured a fitted waistline that gave a vintage 1950s feel. Her accessories included silver earrings that peeked through her curled brown hair. The couple stood close as they posed for photographers, with Sophie gently placing a hand on her husband's shoulder. Later, she held his hand as they walked the red carpet together. Take a look here: Benedict and Sophie have been together since 2009 after meeting on the set of Burlesque Fairytales. They got married in 2015 and are parents to three children – Christopher, Hal and Finn. Cumberbatch stars in The Phoenician Scheme, a film directed by Wes Anderson from a story co-written with Roman Coppola. The project marks Anderson's return to Cannes after Asteroid City in 2023 and The French Dispatch in 2021. The film's cast includes Michael Cera, Riz Ahmed, Benicio del Toro, Rupert Friend, Mia Threapleton, Jeffrey Wright, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Antonia Desplat and Bill Murray. Con lo que parece ser una mano desconchabadita llegó Benedict Cumberbatch muy guapo y con los zapatos bien boleados a la alfombra roja de"El Esquema Fenicio" en el Festival de Cannes en Francia The Phoenician Scheme is an espionage black comedy with a dark tone that follows the complicated bond between Zsa-zsa Korda (Benicio del Toro), a hugely wealthy and influential arms and aviation tycoon seen as one of Europe's richest men, and his only daughter, Sister Liesl (Mia Threapleton), who is a nun. Though he has ten children, Korda names Sister Liesl as his sole heir, putting them in the path of scheming tycoons, foreign terrorists and dangerous assassins during a new business move. The film is scheduled to release in select theatres on May 30. A wider release will follow on June 6. First Published:
Argaam
16-05-2025
- Business
- Argaam
Decoding The Enigma
The codebreakers were not just unravelling a tapestry of encrypted messages but grappling with the ever-shifting sands of the Enigma code that the Germans wielded like a weapon. Each day brought with it not just the challenge of uncovering existing patterns but the exhilarating unpredictability of anticipating fresh alterations in the code's complexities, elements that could change with the dawn of a new day. This resilience and relentless pursuit of meeting a challenge stood out as one of the most memorable scenes in the acclaimed American film The Imitation Game, capturing the intense pressure the team faced as they raced against time to decipher messages that felt as elusive as shadows. Fast forward to 2025, and a similar veil of unpredictability looms over the global economic landscape, which looks replete with surprises after the election of President Donald Trump. His decisions do send ripples through media and markets alike, making the task of strategic forecasting seem almost never ending, as just when one believes they have achieved clarity, new developments reset the situation. Just as the codebreakers had to navigate the shifting variables of the Enigma code, today's leaders and strategists should come to terms with the rapid and often unforeseen changes associated with Trump's unique style in governance. In light of the prevailing unpredictability in today's world, we must critically assess whether our strategic contingency planning is robust enough to navigate the complexities ahead. The recently released annual report of the 2030 Vision rightly emphasizes the significant achievements and the extensive progress made at different sectors under Vision 2030, which has transformed the kingdom and placed it in a markedly improved position on the global stage. But have we truly learned from past events? While these impressive achievements are commendable, they also highlight the importance of maintaining a vigilant mindset and ensuring that contingency plans are in place to address any future uncertainties. Trump's approach often manifests in sudden shifts in policy or rhetoric that can leave observers trying to "decode" his decisions and strategies continually; thus, fostering a sense of resilience becomes crucial, enabling stakeholders in the kingdom to adapt and respond effectively to the dynamic political landscape the new US administration creates. Moreover, it is essential to adjust the expectations and goals of Vision 2030. Such adjustments would ensure that the strategy remains relevant and aligned with external political developments, allowing for a more resilient approach to achieving the kingdom's long-term objectives. Resilience is defined as the ability of a disrupted system to return to the pre-disruption state. In project management and strategic planning, this involves anticipating potential disruptions and developing robust contingency plans to address them effectively. The high tariffs imposed by the US on various countries, chiefly China which promised it would 'fight to the end', lead to a significant shift in global supply chains. For Saudi Arabia, these tariffs would lead sooner or later to increased costs and fluctuating availability of imported materials, a scenario that could directly affect some project timelines. Contingency planning not only mitigates financial uncertainty but also ensures operational continuity, enabling organizations to adapt swiftly to changing market conditions and sustain their growth trajectory. As Saudi Arabia gears up for high-profile events like the FIFA World Cup in 2034, the need for an accurate assessment of time contingencies and cost of some materials becomes critical. Traditional risk assessment methods might not fully capture how such geopolitical disruptions influence local projects. By prioritizing this phase, different sectors – including the energy sector which's exempted from the sweeping US tariffs - can foster a proactive culture that values preparedness, ultimately enhancing their ability to navigate unforeseen challenges. We must try hard to 'decode' the unpredictable signals in a highly dynamic political and economic global landscape. The journey of resilience requires not only acknowledging past disruptions but also weaving them into the fabric of today's strategic planning. In an ever-changing context and a world that only accepts the strong and adaptable, resilience remains the smartest language of survival.
Yahoo
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt's sci-fi flop has just been added to Prime Video
A star-studded sci-fi flop of recent years has made its way onto Prime Video in the UK and Ireland. Released in 2016, Passengers stars Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt as Aurora and Jim, two colonists who are suddenly woken up during their suspended hibernation journey to a colonised planet and risk dying a horrible death. But not even the double whammy star power of Lawrence and Pratt could save Passengers from negative reviews. The film from director Morten Tyldum and writer Jon Spaihts may boast a stacked cast — with Michael Sheen, Laurence Fishburne, and Andy García joining the two protagonists — but it only has a 30% critics' score on Rotten Tomatoes. Related: Despite the scathing reviews, and a debate over the film's handling of consent and some problematic sex scenes, Passengers fared decently at the box office, ultimately earning $303.1 million worldwide. If you wish to take a look for yourself and decide what to make of Passengers, the film was added to Prime Video yesterday in both the UK and Ireland. Prior to Passengers, Tyldum directed biopic The Imitation Game, starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing, as well as Keira Knightley in the role of Joan Clark. Related: For the movie, the filmmaker earned a Best Director nomination at the 2014 Oscars, but lost to Alejandro G Iñarritu for Birdman. Tyldum has also directed for television, being behind the camera of episodes of Apple TV+ series Defending Jacob and Silo. Passengers is streaming on Prime Video in the UK and Ireland. In the US, the film is available on the same platform. Digital Spy's first print magazine is here! Buy in newsagents or now, priced at £7.99.£18.99 at at at at EE at Audible£99.00 at Amazon at at at at at at at EE at at at at £91.40 at at at Amazon at at at Pandora£19.00 at Game£29.98 at at EE at at at at at Sky Mobile at at Game£123.99 at at at at Three at at at at Pandora at at at at at Fitbit£1199.00 at AO£79.99 at at at at at £49.99 at at at at at at at at at at at at at at at John Lewis£44.99 at at at at at John Lewis & Partners at at Amazon at at at at at at John Lewis at Three£32.99 at Amazon at at at at at John Lewis & Partners at at at at Fitbit$29.85 at at at Amazon at at Amazon at at Apple£21.99 at at at at Three at at at at at at at at at at at at at at at EE£249.00 at John Lewis at Audible at at John Lewis at EE at at £379.00 at at at at Amazon at at at Apple at at at Microsoft at at Three at at at John Lewis at at Samsung at at Apple£1199.00 at AO£79.00 at Samsung£22.00 at Amazon at at crunchyroll£79.98 at at at John Lewis at at at John Lewis & Partners£299.00 at Microsoft$365.00 at Microsoft at at at at at at Amazon at at at at at John Lewis at now at at at John Lewis & Partners at at at at at Microsoft£399.00 at John Lewis at at at £6.65 at at at at at at at at at at at at at at at at at at at at at You Might Also Like PS5 consoles for sale – PlayStation 5 stock and restocks: Where to buy PS5 today? IS MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE 7 THE BEST IN THE SERIES? OUR REVIEW AEW game is a modern mix of No Mercy and SmackDown
