All posts tagged: New York Times

Saying ‘Thank You’ to ChatGPT Is Costly. But Maybe It’s Worth the Price.

Saying ‘Thank You’ to ChatGPT Is Costly. But Maybe It’s Worth the Price.

Published by skeptic

The question of whether to be polite to artificial intelligence may seem a moot point — it is artificial, after all. But Sam Altman, the chief executive of the artificial intelligence company OpenAI, recently shed light on the cost of adding an extra “Please!” or “Thank you!” to chatbot prompts. Someone posted on X last week: “I wonder how much money OpenAI has lost in electricity costs from people saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ to their models.” The next day, Mr. Altman responded: “Tens of millions of dollars well spent — you never know.” First thing’s first: Every single ask of a chatbot costs money and energy, and every additional word as part of that ask increases the cost for a server. Neil Johnson, a physics professor at George Washington University who has studied artificial intelligence, likened extra words to packaging used for retail purchases. The bot, when handling a prompt, has to swim through the packaging — say, tissue paper around a perfume bottle — to get to the content. That constitutes extra work. …

American rabbis condemn Trump’s Gaza plan in New York Times ad

American rabbis condemn Trump’s Gaza plan in New York Times ad

Published by skeptic

(RNS) — President Donald Trump’s announcement more than a week ago that he wanted the United States to take over the Gaza Strip and drive its Palestinian residents to neighboring countries initially stunned many American Jewish groups and leaders into silence. But slowly, they are beginning to weigh in. In a full-page ad in The New York Times Thursday (Feb. 13), some 350 rabbis and a host of Jewish celebrities condemned the plan. The ad read: “Trump has called for the removal of all Palestinians from Gaza. Jewish people say NO to ethnic cleansing!” Over the course of the week, the two largest American Jewish denominations, the Reform and Conservative movements, also issued statements objecting to Trump’s plan. The Rabbinical Assembly, representing the Conservative movement, said the plan was “anathema to Jewish values and international human rights law.” The Union for Reform Judaism said emptying Gaza was “neither an acceptable strategic nor moral action.” Still, establishment American Jewish organizations have issued neutral non-statements. And several of the big Jewish institutions, which typically offer unqualified support …

Biggest paywalled publishers in UK and US: new 2025 ranking

Biggest paywalled publishers in UK and US: new 2025 ranking

Published by Sam

Homepages for The Free Press, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and a magazine cover for Us Weekly. All appear in the 100k Club February 2025 edition. The world’s biggest English-language paywalled news and magazine publishers now have more than 44.7 million digital subscribers between them, according to updated research from Press Gazette. Our last ranking in December 2023 put that number on 39.5 million, meaning digital subscriber growth of 13% in just over a year (although some figures are outdated as not all publishers share them publicly, meaning growth may well be higher). Press Gazette’s 100k Club ranks English-language publishers with at least 100,000 paying digital-only subscribers (as opposed to print plus digital). Fifty publishers in the UK, US, Canada and Australia appear on the list. Substack’s paying subscribers have doubled in the past two years, leading it to overtake The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and Gannett to become the second-biggest publisher by digital subscriptions – albeit spread across multiple different publications on its platform. Four million people are paying …

New York Times-owned The Athletic reports quarterly profit for first time

New York Times-owned The Athletic reports quarterly profit for first time

Published by Sam

The New York Times building in Manhattan, 26 October 2022. Picture: Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto via Getty Images The Athletic made a profit in the third quarter of 2024 for the first time since its launch, according to the latest financial results from parent publisher The New York Times Company. NYT Co bought the loss-making sports news brand, which launched in 2016, for $550m in January 2022 and it has taken two-and-a-half years since then to get it into quarterly profit of $2.6m. This is an improvement from a loss of $2.4m in Q2, of $8.7m in Q1, $4.4m in Q4 2023 and $7.9m in Q3 last year. The publisher said the improvement was down to higher revenue in both subscriptions and advertising. Revenue was up 30% year-on-year to $44.7m for the quarter, with subscriptions making up 70% of that total for The Athletic, advertising (which was up 7% to $9m due to growth in direct-sold display) comprising 10% and other revenue such as Apple licensing making up the rest. Thanks for subscribing. Close On an investor …

New York Times adds new strand to bundle with podcast paywall

New York Times adds new strand to bundle with podcast paywall

Published by Sam

Picture: The New York Times The New York Times will this month begin drawing its popular podcasts behind its online subscriptions barrier. Listeners will be able to pass through the paywall if they have a New York Times news, All Access or NYT Audio login. And for the first time it will also be possible to purchase an audio-only subscription directly through third-party hosting platforms. New York Times head of subscription growth Ben Cotton told Press Gazette the launch hopes to find revenue in previously untapped audiences – and lure new subscribers into its All Access bundle. “What we’ve seen is that we have millions of listeners who continue to engage with us exclusively on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or another third-party platform,” Cotton said. “We see it as a natural evolution to extend subscription rules and offerings that we started to put in place on our own products to third-party platforms.” Thanks for subscribing. Close The New York Times already has its own paywalled audio app, NYT Audio, which is accessible to anyone with …

Report: Revamped Siri to Be at the Core of Apple’s New AI Strategy

Report: Revamped Siri to Be at the Core of Apple’s New AI Strategy

Published by skeptic

Apple’s shift to develop its own AI technology to keep up with competitors was today detailed in a The New York Times report. Citing sources familiar with Apple’s work, the report explains that the decision to revamp Siri was taken early last year by Apple’s most senior executives. Senior vice president of software engineering Craig Federighi and senior vice president of Machine Learning and AI Strategy John Giannandrea are said to have spent several weeks testing OpenAI’s ChatGPT to understand the ways in which the competitor made ‌Siri‌ look antiquated. The ‌Siri‌ team purportedly failed to receive attention and resources compared to other groups inside Apple, and the company has struggled to recruit and retain leading AI researchers. Apple executives are said to be concerned that AI threatens the iPhone’s market share because it has the potential to become a more compelling operating system with an ecosystem of AI apps that undermine the App Store. Apple apparently fears the ‌iPhone‌ becoming a “dumb brick” compared with other technology. This conclusion triggered a significant reorganization at …

Dow Jones, NYT, Dotdash Meredith and Informa confound news biz doomsters

Dow Jones, NYT, Dotdash Meredith and Informa confound news biz doomsters

Published by skeptic

News Corp’s New York headquarters. Picture: Dominic Ponsford Headlines like this in the FT – “Is AI about to kill what’s left of journalism?” – contribute to an atmosphere of gloom around the prospects for the news industry. But this week there were multiple signs that parts of the news business, at least, have grounds for optimism. This is reflected by stock market investors returning to media shares after a two-year slump — although it is too early to say whether this is just a brief rebound. Here’s a round-up of positive sentiments around news media this week that contradict the doomsters and gloomsters. News Corp’s Dow Jones has just topped 5m digital subscribers News Corp’s third-quarter results reveal strong subscriber growth contributing to revenues in its business information division Dow Jones up $15m in the period to $544m. Thanks for subscribing. Close Digital subscriptions to the Wall Street Journal grew 13% to 3,715,000 and investment news service Barron’s grew digital subscriptions by 26% to 1,221,000. Content from our partners Digital advertising growth of 4% …

How New York Times plans to cover Trump’s presidential campaign

How New York Times plans to cover Trump’s presidential campaign

Published by skeptic

New York Times executive editor Joseph Kahn at the INMA World Congress in London on 24 April 2024. Picture: Robert Downs/INMA New York Times executive editor Joseph Kahn has said covering Donald Trump is a challenge that requires a balance between sharing his statements, even when they are false, and contextualising but not censoring them. Speaking at the INMA World Congress of News Media in London on Wednesday, Kahn said covering Trump is a “particular challenge” and it takes a “certain skill” to write about him. “Our view is that when you have a candidate who does frequently indulge in conspiracy theories or depart from the facts and can hold an audience captive with long kind of soliloquies that actually don’t contain real information in them, we have to do more than just provide a platform for that,” Kahn, who took on the top editorial job at The New York Times in June 2022 and was managing editor during Trump’s presidency, said. “On the other hand, we do need to cover what he’s saying. We …

Does my alma mater deserve an F in antisemitism?

Does my alma mater deserve an F in antisemitism?

Published by Sam

(RNS) — Steely Dan put it this way, singing about nostalgia for Bard College: “I’m never going back to my old school.” Bard College is about an hour and a half north of “my old school,” SUNY Purchase. Unlike Walter and Donald, I do go back to my old school — physically, when I can, and in my memories. I went back to my old school recently as I read the Anti-Defamation League’s report card on antisemitism on college campuses and how those colleges were dealing with that issue. They gave SUNY Purchase an F. Here is the report from the ADL: State University of New York at Purchase has 750 Jewish undergraduate students, who comprise about 24% of the undergraduate student population. There are 10 Jewish graduate students representing 13% of the small graduate population. Hillels of Westchester, a collaborative unit of Hillel chapters across the county, supports the campus. There have been recent incidents on campus. A student was suspended in December for entering an administrator’s office and tearing down a “We Stand …

Russia’s tragedy, Putin’s humiliation – The Atlantic

Russia’s tragedy, Putin’s humiliation – The Atlantic

Published by skeptic

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Terrorists struck deep inside Russia on Friday, and the conspiracy theories are already spinning. First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic: Three Realities If you are trying to figure out who attacked a Russian rock concert and why they slaughtered and wounded dozens of people, your confusion is understandable. In an era when social media spews chaff and deception during every crisis, some fairly straightforward issues get obscured in all the drama. As we untangle the ghastly attack just outside of Moscow, bear in mind three realities about politics in Russia. First, some terrorist groups have a long-standing hatred of the Russians, and mass-casualty attacks in Russia’s cities are not new. Americans, scarred by 9/11, often think that they are the prime target of Islamist extremists, but over the past two decades, Russia has endured more mass-casualty …