Author: CNN

CNN
 — 

The world’s most northerly forests could be a “time bomb” of planet-warming pollution as expanding wildfires have released record high levels of planet-heating pollution into the atmosphere, according to a new study.

Using new satellite data analysis techniques, researchers found that, since 2000, summer wildfires have expanded in boreal forests, which wrap around the northernmost parts of the Earth.

Boreal forest fires usually make up 10% of global wildfire-related carbon pollution. But in 2021, their contribution soared to 23%, according to the study, as extreme drought and heatwaves in Siberia and Canada helped drive intense fires.

“Boreal forests could be a time bomb of carbon, and the recent increases in wildfire emissions we see make me worry the clock is ticking,” said study author Steven Davis, a professor of earth system science at the University of California at Irvine, in a press release.

These forests, which cover huge swaths of Canada, Russia and Alaska, are the world’s largest land biome. They are also carbon dense, releasing 10 to 20 times more planet-heating carbon pollution for each unit of area burned by wildfires than other ecosystems, according to the study.

Boreal forests are one of the fastest warming biomes on Earth, and warmer and drier fire seasons are contributing to expanding wildfires.

Russia’s Siberian region experienced particularly bad wildfires in 2021 which burned nearly 45 million acres (18.16 million hectares) of Russian forest in 2021.

In July that year, reconnaissance pilot Svyatoslav Kolesov told CNN he couldn’t fly his plane in the far eastern Russian region of Yukutia because smoke from the fires was so thick.

The region is prone to wildfires and much of the land is covered in forests, but Kolesov said something has changed.

“New fires have appeared in the north of Yakutia, in places where there were no fires last year and where it had not burned at all before,” he said.

Wildfires are becoming larger and more intense and they are also happening in places that aren’t used to such extreme fires. The situation is likely to worsen as temperatures rise, study author Bo Zheng, an assistant professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing, told CNN via email.

Higher temperatures encourage the growth of vegetation, which then becomes exceptionally dry during heatwaves, increasing the risk of wildfires.

“We are facing dangerous positive feedback between climate and boreal fires,” Zheng said.

“Heatwaves and droughts are likely to occur more frequently over the boreal region, and the frequency and intensity of extreme wildfires like those in 2021 are likely to increase, with the release of CO2 emissions in turn leading to further global warming,” he added.

Jeff Wells, the vice president for boreal conservation at the conservation organization National Audubon Society, who was not involved in the study, told CNN that he was not surprised that the study had found such a high level of carbon pollution from boreal fires. But, he said, “the size of the spike in 2021 is shocking.”

The findings are “yet another stark warning” of the need to “drastically reduce CO2 emissions,” Wells said.

Wells also pointed to the role Indigenous communities play in protecting forests and peatlands.

“It is time the world recognizes the leadership and knowledge of Indigenous peoples and their governments in the boreal and across the world in stewarding their traditional territories, especially in the face of the increase in the size and frequency of wildfires,” said Wells.

CNN
 — 

Paris Saint-Germain president Nasser Al-Khelaifi has been implicated in a “kidnapping and torture” investigation in France, the Paris prosecutor’s office confirmed to CNN on Wednesday.

This follows allegations that Al-Khelaifi was involved in the transfer of “likely compromising” documents from a French-Algerian citizen, Tayeb Benabderrahmane, who claims to have been tortured in Qatari custody in 2020, according to a complaint submitted by Benabderrahmane’s lawyers to French authorities.

“On January 19, the Paris prosecutor’s office opened a preliminary investigation into acts of kidnapping; sequestration with torture and acts of barbarism in an organized gang; extortion in an organized gang; threats and acts of intimidation and association with criminals. This followed the receipt of two complaints with civil action regarding Mr Benabderrahmane,” the prosecutor’s office told CNN but did not name Al-Khelaifi.

The Paris prosecutor’s office confirmed to CNN Wednesday that three investigating judges have been assigned to the case. This typically denotes a progression from the preliminary investigation.

The complaint from Benabderrahmane’s lawyers does not specify what the alleged documents are, but claims that “they were likely to be compromising for certain high-level people in Qatar, even foreigners.”

Al-Khelaifi, who is a Qatari citizen, denies any wrongdoing. On Wednesday, his representative directed CNN to a statement which they said “Al-Khelaifi issued to L’Equipe in November, 2022.”

“You are talking about professional criminals,” Al-Khelaifi said. “They’ve changed their lawyers more times than they’ve changed their stories and their lies. It is the ultimate media manipulation.

“I’m just amazed so many people have taken their lies and contradictions as credible – but that’s the media world we’re in today. Justice will run its course – I don’t have time to talk about petty professional criminals.”

Lawyers representing Benabderrahmane, Romain Ruiz and Gabriel Vejnar, told CNN on Wednesday: “Mr. Tayeb Benabderrahmane welcomes the opening of this investigation by the French justice system and will naturally continue to defend his rights as he has done in the other proceedings he has initiated in order to establish the seriously detrimental nature of the treatment he has been subjected to by the Qatari authorities as well as by its representatives in France and abroad.

“Mr. Benabderrahmane wishes to emphasize that, contrary to what is often asserted, he has never been implicated in extortion or blackmail against Nasser Al-Khelaifi,” Ruiz and Vejnar added.

CNN
 — 

Wayne Shorter, a Grammy-winning saxophonist and composer who helped shaped the sound of contemporary jazz, has died, according to his publicist.

He was 89.

Shorter died Thursday in Los Angeles, his publicist Cem Kurosman with Blue Note Records told CNN in an email. No cause of death was shared.

Shorter was nominated for 23 Grammy Awards during his career and won 12 times. His first Grammy nomination was in 1973. His most recent win was in January for best improvised jazz solo performance for “Endangered Species.”

Shorter began playing the clarinet at age 16 but later turned his focus to the tenor sax before entering New York University in 1952.

Upon graduating in 1956, he played with jazz pianist Horace Silver until he was drafted into the Army. He served for two years, per the artist’s biography on Bluenote.com.

Throughout the late ’50s and into 1960s, Shorter joined various jazz groups and collaborated with jazz artists such as Maynard Ferguson, Joe Zawinul and Art Blakey. In 1964, he was recruited by legendary jazz trumpeter Miles Davis to join Davis’s Second Great Quintet band, with whom he played until 1970.

With Davis, Shorter was one of the Second Great Quintet band’s most prolific composers and contributed to hits such as “Nefertiti.”

In the 70s and 80s, Shorter played with various jazz bands and musicians, including a 15-year run in the group Weather Report, a group he co-founded, playing alongside Joe Zawinul and Miroslav Vitous until 1985.

Shorter went on to collaborate with various rock n’ roll legends. He toured with Carlos Santana in 1988, and contributed to the Rolling Stones’ 1997 hit album “Bridges to Babylon” on saxophone. In 1998, Shorter also contributed to jazz pianist Herbie Hancock’s “Gershwin World” album.

Other notable musicians Shorter worked with include Joni Mitchell and Steely Dan.

In 1999, Shorter received an honorary doctorate from the Berklee School of music alongside legendary rock artist David Bowie, who was also a skilled saxophone player.

“Wayne and myself were just so moved to hear our compositions coming back at us through your ears and abilities. It was dynamite,” Bowie said during his commencement address.

In 2010, Shorter received an honorary doctorate award from NYU during the university’s commencement at Yankee Stadium. He was a Kennedy Center honoree at the 2018 Kennedy Center Honors ceremony.

Hancock called Shorter his “best friend” in a statement shared to CNN on Thursday from Shorter’s publicist Alisse Kingsley at Muse Media, going on to say that the late musician “left us with courage in his heart, love and compassion for all, and a seeking spirit for the eternal future.”

“I carry his spirit within my heart always.”

The statement also said that Shorter is survived by his wife Carolina, daughters Miyako and Mariana, and his newborn grandson Max.

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CNN
 — 

Computers powered by human brain cells may sound like science fiction, but a team of researchers in the United States believes such machines, part of a new field called “organoid intelligence,” could shape the future — and now they have a plan to get there.

Organoids are lab-grown tissues that resemble organs. These three-dimensional structures, usually derived from stem cells, have been used in labs for nearly two decades, where scientists have been able to avoid harmful human or animal testing by experimenting on the stand-ins for kidneys, lungs and other organs.

Brain organoids don’t actually resemble tiny versions of the human brain, but the pen dot-size cell cultures contain neurons that are capable of brainlike functions, forming a multitude of connections.

Scientists call the phenomenon “intelligence in a dish.”

Dr. Thomas Hartung, a professor of environmental health and engineering at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Whiting School of Engineering in Baltimore, began growing brain organoids by altering human skin samples in 2012.

He and his colleagues envision combining the power of brain organoids into a type of biological hardware more energy efficient than supercomputers. These “biocomputers” would employ networks of brain organoids to potentially revolutionize pharmaceutical testing for diseases like Alzheimer’s, provide insight into the human brain and change the future of computing.

Research describing the plan for organoid intelligence laid out by Hartung and his colleagues was published Tuesday in the journal Frontiers in Science.

“Computing and artificial intelligence have been driving the technology revolution but they are reaching a ceiling,” said Hartung, senior study author, in a statement. “Biocomputing is an enormous effort of compacting computational power and increasing its efficiency to push past our current technological limits.”

While artificial intelligence is inspired by human thought processes, the technology can’t fully replicate all capabilities of the human brain. This gap is why humans can use an image or text-based CAPTCHA, or Completely Automated Public Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart, as an online security measure to prove they aren’t bots.

The Turing test, also known as the imitation game, was developed in 1950 by British mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing to assess how machines display intelligent behavior similar to that of a human.

But how does a computer really stack up against a human brain?

A supercomputer can crunch massive amounts of numbers faster than a human can.

“For example, AlphaGo (the AI that beat the world’s No. 1 Go player in 2017) was trained on data from 160,000 games,” Hartung said. “A person would have to play five hours a day for more than 175 years to experience these many games.” 

On the other hand, a human brain is more energy efficient as well as better at learning and making complex logical decisions. Something as basic as being able to tell one animal from another is a task the human brain easily does that a computer cannot.

Frontier, a $600 million supercomputer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, weighs a hefty 8,000 pounds (3,629 kilograms), with each cabinet weighing the equivalent of two standard pickup trucks. The machine exceeded the computational capacity of a single human brain in June — but it used a million times more energy, Hartung said.

“The brain is still unmatched by modern computers,” Hartung said.

“Brains also have an amazing capacity to store information, estimated at 2,500 (terabytes),” he added. “We’re reaching the physical limits of silicon computers because we cannot pack more transistors into a tiny chip.”

Stem cell pioneers John B. Gurdon and Shinya Yamanaka received a Nobel Prize in 2012 for developing a technique that allowed cells to be generated from fully developed tissues like skin. The groundbreaking research allowed scientists like Hartung to develop brain organoids that were used to mimic living brains and test and identify medicines that may pose risks to brain health.

Hartung recalled that he was asked by other researchers whether brain organoids could think or achieve consciousness. The question spurred him to consider feeding information to organoids about their environment and how to interact with it.

“This opens up research on how the human brain works,” said Hartung, who is also the codirector of the Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing in Europe. “Because you can start manipulating the system, doing things you cannot ethically do with human brains.”

Hartung defines organoid intelligence as “reproducing cognitive functions, such as learning and sensory processing, in a lab-grown human-brain model.”

The brain organoids that Hartung currently uses would need to be scaled up for OI, or organoid intelligence. Each organoid has about the number of cells one would find in a fruit fly’s nervous system. A single organoid is about one-three-millionth the size of the human brain, which means it is the equivalent of about 800 megabytes of memory storage.

“They are too small, each containing about 50,000 cells. For OI, we would need to increase this number to 10 million,” he said.

The researchers also need ways to communicate with the organoids in order to send them information and receive readouts of what the organoids are “thinking.” The study authors have developed a blueprint that includes tools from bioengineering and machine learning, along with new innovations. Allowing for different kinds of input and output across organoid networks would allow for more complex tasks, the researchers wrote in the study.

“We developed a brain-computer interface device that is a kind of an EEG (electroencephalogram) cap for organoids, which we presented in an article published last August,” Hartung said. “It is a flexible shell that is densely covered with tiny electrodes that can both pick up signals from the organoid, and transmit signals to it.”

Hartung hopes one day there will be a beneficial communication channel between AI and OI “that would allow the two to explore each other’s capabilities.”

The most impactful contributions of organoid intelligence might manifest in human medicine, the researchers said.

Brain organoids could be developed from skin samples of patients with neural disorders, allowing scientists to test how different medicines and other factors could impact them.

“With OI, we could study the cognitive aspects of neurological conditions as well,” Hartung said. “For example, we could compare memory formation in organoids derived from healthy people and from Alzheimer’s patients, and try to repair relative deficits. We could also use OI to test whether certain substances, such as pesticides, cause memory or learning problems.”

Brain organoids could also open up a new way of understanding human cognition.

“We want to compare brain organoids from typically developed donors versus brain organoids from donors with autism,” said study coauthor and co-investigator Lena Smirnova, a Johns Hopkins assistant professor of environmental health and engineering, in a statement.

“The tools we are developing towards biological computing are the same tools that will allow us to understand changes in neuronal networks specific for autism, without having to use animals or to access patients, so we can understand the underlying mechanisms of why patients have these cognition issues and impairments,” she said.

Using brain organoids to create organoid intelligence is still very much in its infancy. Developing OI comparable to a computer with the brain power of a mouse could take decades, Hartung said.

But there are already promising results that illustrate what is possible. Study coauthor Dr. Brett Kagan, chief scientific officer at Cortical Labs in Melbourne, Australia, and his team recently showed that brain cells can learn to play Pong, the video game.

“Their team is already testing this with brain organoids,” Hartung said. “And I would say that replicating this experiment with organoids already fulfills the basic definition of OI. From hereon, it’s just a matter of building the community, the tools, and the technologies to realize OI’s full potential.”

Creating human brain organoids capable of cognitive functions raises a number of ethical concerns, including whether they can develop consciousness or feel pain, and if those whose cells were used to make them have any rights concerning the organoids.

“A key part of our vision is to develop OI in an ethical and socially responsible manner,” Hartung said. “For this reason, we have partnered with ethicists from the very beginning to establish an ‘embedded ethics’ approach. All ethical issues will be continuously assessed by teams made up of scientists, ethicists and the public, as the research evolves.”

Including the public in the understanding and development of organoid intelligence is crucial, wrote Julian Kinderlerer, professor emeritus of intellectual property law at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, in a separately published policy outlook. Kinderlerer was not involved in the new OI study.

“We are entering a new world, where the interface between humans and human constructs blurs distinctions,” Kinderlerer wrote. “Society cannot passively await new discoveries; it must be involved in identifying and resolving possible ethical dilemmas and assuring that any experimentation is within ethical boundaries yet to be determined.”

Watching the development of artificial intelligence like ChatGPT has caused some to question how close computers are to passing the Turing test, writes Gary Miller, vice dean for research strategy and innovation and professor of environmental health sciences at Columbia University in New York City, in a separate Viewpoint article published Tuesday. Miller was not involved in the Johns Hopkins study.

While ChatGPT can efficiently collect information on the internet, it can’t react to a change in temperature like a cultured cellular system can, he wrote.

“Brain organoid systems could exhibit key aspects of intelligence and sentience,” Miller wrote.

“This demands a robust examination of the ethical implications of the technology, in which ethicists must be included. We must ensure that each step of the process is conducted with scientific integrity, while acknowledging that the larger issue is the potential impact on society. OI blurs the line between human cognition and machine intelligence, and the technology and biology are advancing at a speed that could outpace the ethical and moral discussions that are needed. This emerging field must take a vigorous approach to addressing the ethical and moral issues that come with this type of scientific advancement and must do so before the technology crashes into the moral abyss.”

New York
CNN
 — 

Tesla’s next vehicle assembly plant will be in Mexico near Monterrey, CEO Elon Musk announced Wednesday.

“We’re super excited about it,” Musk said during an investor day for the company. “We’ll continue to expand production at all of our existing factories. So this is not moving output to anywhere, from anywhere. This is supplemental production.”

The company currently has capacity to build about 2 million cars a year at four factories, in Fremont, California; Shanghai, China; Austin, Texas; and Berlin, Germany. It has set a goal of eventually building 20 million cars a year. The company delivered just over 1.3 million cars in 2022. The largest automaker in the world by production volume, Toyota, delivered just over 10 million cars globally in 2022.

Tesla did not comment on the cost of the new plant. The news was a confirmation of plans announced Tuesday by Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador for Tesla to build its next factory in the country. Reuters reported that Mexican officials said the plant could cost $1 billion.

The company estimates to build the additional plants needed to reach 20 million vehicles will cost a total of $150 billion to $175 billion, including the $28 billion in investment that it has already made in its history.

“Maybe this total investment looks large,” said CFO Zachary Kirkhorn. “I think its quite small relative to our ambitions.”

The company also announced that earlier Wednesday it built 4 million vehicles in its history.

Shares of Tesla

(TSLA) slipped more than 5% in after-hours trading Wednesday, although that was up a bit from a larger decline before Musk’s announcement more than three hours into the presentation. There had been hope by some investors that Tesla

(TSLA) would announce details about a next generation of vehicles. Musk declined to answer a question about the next generation vehicle.

“We will have a proper sort of product event,” Musk said. “We’d be jumping the gun if we were to answer that question.”

In response to another question from an analyst, Musk said he doesn’t anticipate Tesla ever having more than 10 different vehicles in its product lineup. He derided the broad offerings of competing automakers as simply a “shuffling” of many similar models.

The Inflation Reduction Act passed last year restored tax credits of up to $7,500 to buyers of the less expensive Tesla cars, the Model 3 and Model Y, as long as their list price is under $55,000. To qualify for the tax credit, the cars must be assembled in North America, so the eventual output from the plant in Mexico should qualify.

Most of the global automakers already have assembly plants in Mexico. According to Reuters, there are 20 auto assembly plants in the country. General Motors has three, Ford has two, including one that make its Mustang Mach-E, the EV SUV that is a competitor to Tesla. Stellantis — which builds cars under the Chrysler, Dodge, Ram and Jeep brands — has three.

In addition Toyota, Honda, Nissan, Volkswagen, Audi, Mazda, Mercedes, Kia and BMW all have plants in Mexico.

According to statistics from the US Trade Administration, a part of the Commerce Department, Mexican plants were producing just under 4 million cars a year in the years before the pandemic reduced the supply of auto parts, particularly computer chips, and auto production worldwide. They produced about 3.5 million cars last year. That makes it the seventh largest country in terms of auto production.

But 90% of the cars it builds are exported, with 76% destined for the United States.

CNN
 — 

Sirhan Sirhan, the man convicted of assassinating Sen. Robert F. Kennedy in 1968, was again denied parole Wednesday – more than a year after California’s governor shut down an earlier recommendation that he be released.

California’s Board of Parole Hearings decided Wednesday to deny Sirhan parole for three years, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation told CNN.

Wednesday’s proceeding was Sirhan’s 17th parole suitability hearing, Tessa Outhyse, a spokesperson for the corrections department, said. In August 2021, after 15 denials, the board had recommended Sirhan’s parole, but that was denied by the governor in January 2022.

The department cannot comment on the reasons for the board’s Wednesday decision, but a copy of the hearing’s transcript will be available in a few weeks, Outhyse said.

CNN has sought comment from Sirhan’s attorney.

Sirhan shot Kennedy in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, following a campaign event in which Kennedy celebrated primary victories in his run for the Democratic nomination for president in 1968.

Originally sentenced to death, Sirhan – 24 at the time of the shooting – received a commuted sentence of life in prison in 1972.

Sirhan, now 78, will remain at R.J. Donovan Correctional Facility in San Diego, Outhyse said.

In 1968, the 42-year-old Kennedy, younger brother of the assassinated President John F. Kennedy, was a leading contender for the Democratic presidential nomination against Vice President Hubert Humphrey and Sen. Eugene McCarthy.

On June 5, the night of his assassination, Kennedy had just appeared on live television in an Ambassador Hotel ballroom, where he had claimed victory over McCarthy in the California primary election. Moments later, he was fatally wounded in the hotel service pantry while on his way to a news conference set for a small banquet room just beyond the pantry. The shooting in the pantry was not captured by any cameras.

Sirhan was convicted of killing Kennedy and wounding five other people.

Three bullets struck Kennedy’s body while a fourth bullet passed harmlessly through the shoulder of his suit coat. Kennedy died the next day.

CNN
 — 

A Lufthansa flight traveling from Texas to Germany was diverted to Virginia’s Washington Dulles International Airport on Wednesday evening because of turbulence that left some passengers injured, an airport spokesperson said.

Lufthansa Flight 469, which took off from Austin, experienced “significant turbulence” and landed safely at Dulles, Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority spokesperson Michael Cabbage said.

Seven people were transported to hospitals, Cabbage said.

Brief but severe turbulence happened about 90 minutes after takeoff and resulted in minor injuries to some passengers, a statement given to CNN by a Lufthansa spokesperson reads.

“This was so-called clear air turbulence, which can occur without visible weather phenomena or advance warning,” the statement reads.

“The affected passengers were given initial care on board by the flight attendants trained for such cases. As the safety and well-being of passengers and crew members is the top priority at all times, the cockpit crew decided to make an alternate landing to (Dulles airport) after flying through the turbulence.”

The crew of the Airbus A330 reported reported encountering the turbulence at an altitude of 37,000 feet over Tennessee, the Federal Aviation Administration told CNN.

The flight landed at Dulles airport around 9:10 p.m., FAA spokesperson Ian Gregor said.

The FAA will investigate the incident, Gregor said.

Susan Zimmerman was among the passengers on board Flight 469 when it encountered the severe turbulence on Wednesday.

Zimmerman, who is from Austin and five months pregnant, told CNN she had just finished eating and was about to go to the lavatory when the turbulence hit.

“During dinner service, there suddenly was a wind shear, the plane increased altitude, then we fell 1,000 feet,” she said.

“It was like unexpectedly free-falling for five seconds off the top of a rollercoaster, plates and glassware were up at the ceiling, and my purse from the floor flew behind me to the right.”

She noted that on two occasions the plane felt like it was dropping suddenly and she could hear people screaming and glass breaking.

“I’m glad for the most part we are all OK. This was pretty shocking,” said Zimmerman. “There was a moment of ‘oh my God, am I going to meet my daughter.’”

Once the plane settled, she said items from the dinner service had been littered throughout the cabin as though there had been a food fight on board.

Zimmerman wasn’t injured, she said, but saw that others had been hurt. After the plane landed, first responders boarded the flight and tended to the injured, she said.

Zimmerman was offered medical treatment and an evaluation but said she was fine, adding that her unborn child must have been asleep during the ordeal because she started kicking and being active again 20 minutes later.

The airline offered Zimmerman a hotel voucher and she has been rebooked on a new flight departing Thursday, she said.

CNN
 — 

Prepare to see ChatGPT responses in even more places.

OpenAI is opening up access to its ChatGPT tool to third-party businesses, paving the way for the viral AI chatbot to be integrated into numerous apps and services.

The company on Wednesday said developers can now access ChatGPT’s application programming interface, or API, which will allow companies to integrate the tool’s chat functionality and answers into their platforms. Instacart, Snap and tutor app Quizlet are among the early partners experimenting with adding ChatGPT.

The move comes three months after OpenAI publicly released ChatGPT and stunned many users with the tool’s impressive ability to generate original essays, stories and song lyrics in response to user prompts. The initial wave of attention on the tool helped renew an arms race among tech companies to develop and deploy similar AI tools in their products.

The initial batch of companies tapping into OpenAI’s API each have slightly different visions for how to incorporate ChatGPT. Taken together, however, these services may test just how useful AI chatbots can really be in our everyday life and how much people want to interact with them for customer service and other uses across their favorite apps.

Snap, the company behind Snapchat, plans to offer a customizable chatbot that offers recommendations, helps users make plans or even writes a haiku in seconds. Quizlet, which has more than 60 million students using the service, is introducing a chatbot that can ask questions based on study materials to help students prepare for exams.

Shopify’s consumer app, Shop, and Instacart are both launching chatbots that could help inform customers’ shopping decisions. Instacart plans to use the tool to allow users to ask questions such as “How do I make great fish tacos?” or “What’s a healthy lunch for my kids?” Instacart also plans to launch an “Ask Instacart” chatbot later this year.

There is clearly demand for other businesses to follow suit. Dating website OkCupid has already experimented with using ChatGPT to write matching questions. Other companies like Fanatics have previously expressed interest in using similar technology to power a customer service chatbot.

“With the level of user interest and use, companies don’t want to be left behind, so there’s a base incentive to embrace new tech to remain competitive,” said Michael Inouye, an analyst at ABI Research. “If users engage more with a service that means more data for advertising, marketing of goods and services, and potentially stronger customer relationships.”

There are some risks, however. Although ChatGPT has gained significant traction among users, it has also raised some concerns, including about its potential to perpetuate biases and spread misinformation. Some school systems, such as in New York and Seattle, banned the use of ChatGPT in the classroom over concerns about students cheating. And JPMorgan Chase is temporarily clamping down on employee use due to limits on third-party software due to compliance concerns.

Passengers on the Greek train that crashed into a freight train in northern Greece on Tuesday night have described “nightmarish seconds” as the carriage overturned.

“We heard a big bang, (it was) 10 nightmarish seconds, we were turning over in the wagon until we fell on our sides, and until the commotion stopped, then there was panic, cables (everywhere) fire, the fire was immediate, as we were turning over we were being burned, fire was right and left,” Stergios Minenis, 28, told Reuters news agency.

“There was panic, for 10, 15 seconds it was chaos, tumbling over, fires, cables hanging, broken windows, people screaming, people trapped, it was two metres high from where we jumped to leave and beneath there were broken iron debris, but what could we do?”

Another passenger, pointing at Minenis, said: “We came down, a fire had erupted next to us, this man here he saw a hole, so we managed to get out from where we were.”

Prosecutor Creighton Waters argued to the jury that Alex Murdaugh was “manufacturing an alibi” by calling and texting his wife and son, among others, after they were killed.

Waters said Murdaugh was unable to answer important questions, such as the nature of his last conversation with his family and what he was doing during certain time periods that night.

Around 9:45 p.m., Murdaugh calls Maggie’s phone again, Waters said. During his testimony, Murdaugh told a detailed story about his phone falling into the console of the car during this time period.

Waters also pointed to data to show that Murdaugh was driving faster than usual to his mother’s house in Almeda and was making calls the entire trip.

“Because he knows he has to compress that timeline,” Waters said.

Waters said any “reasonable person” would remember the last conversation they had with their loved one if they were killed, but argued that Murdaugh “lies convincingly and easily and he can do it as a drop of a hat.”

“He’s manufacturing an alibi. He’s smart,” Waters said.

The prosecutor also noted to the jury the kinds of questions Murdaugh asked law enforcement after the murders. He said one of the first things Murdaugh did was point out to police how many phone calls he made that night.

“He knows what to do to try to prevent evidence from being gathered. If you listen to his statements again and you listen to the questions he asked, he’s asking questions like that, he’s trying to figure out what do the police have, what do they know,” Waters said.