All posts tagged: Sam

Race Across The World Contestant Sam Gardiner Dies Aged 24

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[ad_1] Tributes are being paid following the death of former Race Across The World contestant Sam Gardiner at the age of 24. On Monday night (26 May), Sam was involved in a car accident while driving alone on the A34, near Manchester. He was subsequently taken to hospital, where he died from his injuries three days later. In a statement, his mother, Jo – with whom he competed on the second season of the BBC reality show, which aired in 2020 – and his father, Andrew, said: “We are devastated by the loss of our beloved son Sam in a terrible accident. “Sam left us far too soon, and whilst words will never fully capture the light, joy and energy he brought into our lives, we hold on to the memories that made him so special.” They continued: “Sam was adored by his family. As a son, brother and nephew, he was loyal, funny and fiercely protective.” Jo and Sam pictured early on in their Race Across The World journey Celebrating how Race Across The …

Race Across The World contestant Sam Gardiner dies aged 24 | Ents & Arts News

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[ad_1] Race Across The World contestant Sam Gardiner has died at the age of 24 in a car crash, his family has said. In a statement, his mother Jo – who appeared on the 2019 series with him – and his father Andrew said: “We are devastated by the loss of our beloved son Sam in a terrible accident. “Sam left us far too soon, and whilst words will never fully capture the light, joy and energy he brought into our lives, we hold on to the memories that made him so special. “Sam was adored by his family. As a son, brother and nephew, he was loyal, funny and fiercely protective.” They added that taking part in Race Across The World “opened his eyes to the wonder of adventure and travel”. Image: Pic: Greater Manchester Police The statement continued: “He was willing to go wherever the trail might lead and he touched everyone he met on the road. “Sam brought warmth, laughter and a smattering of chaos wherever he went. He leaves behind a …

Sam Altman’s partnership With Jony Ive Has a Very Odd Component

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[ad_1] Over three decades working in Silicon Valley, Jony Ive has shaped the shell of the iMac, designed the look of the iPod and come up with the form factor for the iPhone. Pretty much every major piece of Apple technology we touch, from the heyday of Alta Vista to today, went through Ive’s hands first. No doubt such a legacy enticed Sam Altman to recruit Ive, with the OpenAI founder this week buying the former Apple designer’s startup io for $6.5 billion (that’s at least 130 million vintage iPod shuffles) — then announcing, in a cringey Davis Guggenheim video, the two would be working together to create an undisclosed “family of devices” to run the apps based on OpenAI’s models. io, io, it’s off to Ive we go. Altman has been trying to convince investors and the public that he will change the course of civilization pretty much since he released ChatGPT thirty months ago (and really for a while before that). What do you do if you’re Jobs-ishly hoping to introduce technology that everyone will …

Straight to It, Then | David Salle, Sam Needleman

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[ad_1] Sanford Schwartz once wrote in The New York Review that when David Salle puts down his brush and picks up his pen to write art criticism, he does so with the same “seemingly out-of-nowhere assurance” with which he arrived on the painting scene in the late 1970s. His crisp but pensive judgments have appeared for nearly a decade in our pages, where he has often written about living, working artists, from the painters Laura Owens, Charline von Heyl, and Alex Katz to the sculptors Rachel Harrison, Charles Ray, and, in this year’s Art Issue, Arlene Shechet. In his dispatch from the Hudson Valley’s Storm King Art Center, where an exhibition of Shechet’s work was on view last year, Salle writes that her large-scale aluminum-and-steel sculptures, which are painted “the colors of marzipan or Jordan almonds,” use “off-kilter, surprising harmonies of shape, material, texture, and color with aplomb.” Wandering around the great sculpture garden, he bristles against the idea that a given artwork must argue for “one true thing.” Shechet’s complex ensembles prompt him to …

Should You Be Polite to ChatGPT Even If It Wastes Sam Altman’s Money?

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[ad_1] After OpenAI CEO Sam Altman bemoaned the massive additional costs of people saying “please” and “thank you” to ChatGPT, one New York Times reporter is making the case that it’s worth the price. In a new piece, NYT culture writer Sopan Deb acknowledged that the financial and environmental toll of those additional few words can be substantial — but for the sake of our humanity, it may well be worth it. With chatbots integrating steadily into our lives, our relationships with these technologies that pose such existential threats to our labor — and perhaps our lives — have never mattered more. When discussing the subject with Massachusetts Institute of Technology sociologist Sherry Turkle, the researcher said that for all the “parlor tricks” that lend them the appearance of consciousness, chatbots are “alive enough” to matter for those who use them regularly. “If an object is alive enough for us to start having intimate conversations, friendly conversations, treating it as a really important person in our lives, even though it’s not, it’s alive enough for us …

‘On the Brink of Erasure’ | Sam Needleman

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[ad_1] In 2001 the British artist Tacita Dean made a three-minute-long 16mm film called The Green Ray. It begins with a countdown of flashing numbers: 11… 10…9…8…7…6…5…4…3…There is no 2 or 1. Just black, then sky, sun, and sea: a sunset over the Mozambique Channel, seen from a beach on the western coast of Madagascar. At the center of the square image is the sun. For a brief moment, as it touches the water, it bulges into a lightbulb shape, then slowly slips beneath the horizon while waves dart from the left edge of the image to the right. For most of the film the sunset’s colors change in familiar ways, until the two-and-a-half-minute mark, when the last sliver of yellow sun disappears and a bead of green light flashes in its place. Then only sky and sea remain, and the image goes black. What Dean captured in that split second is a rare meteorological, or rather optical, phenomenon. The green ray is exceedingly difficult for humans to see, not least because the requisite dry, …

Sam Altman Says Miyazaki Just Needs to Get Over It

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[ad_1] In the wake of OpenAI releasing its new server-melting image generator that went viral for creating soulless simulacra of Studio Ghibli-style illustrations, CEO Sam Altman is slamming the haters — including, it seems, the man whose art he’s cribbing. During an interview with tech founder and YouTuber Arun Mayya, Altman dismissed newly-resurfaced criticisms from Studio Ghibli cofounder Hayao Miyazaki, who in 2016 lambasted an AI-generated animation he was shown as “creepy” and “an insult to life itself.”   When Mayya — who says he created and deployed AI avatars of himself that allow him to enjoy “permanent vacation” — suggested to Altman that artists’ concerns about AI are legit, the OpenAI cofounder claimed that the “trade-off is worth it.” He then claimed that it was “impossible” to make videos — or as they used to call it back in the stone age, being a filmmaker — just a few decades ago. “Think what it was like to try to do what you do 30 years ago,” Altman implored Mayya. “I mean, you’d need like …

Robert Altman, Dogme 95, Sam Peckinpah Films to Get Beijing Spotlight

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[ad_1] Late New Hollywood legend Robert Altman (Gosford Park, M*A*S*H), late master of violence Sam Peckinpah, and Dogme 95, the Danish avant-garde movement led by directors Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg (Another Round), will get the spotlight treatment at the 15th edition of the Beijing International Film Festival “To commemorate the 130th anniversary of world cinema,” the Beijing fest has curated a retrospective program “to document the history of film and envision its future,” organizers said. “With a curated selection of cinematic classics, the festival blends nostalgia with new perspectives, drawing inspiration from the past to ignite future creativity.” Among the offerings will be “Endless Waves: 30 Years of the Dogme 95.” The Dogme 95 Manifesto expressed a commitment to create movies focused on storytelling, acting, and theme rather than the elaborate use of special effects or technological tricks. One of its key goals was to empower directors as artists. The fest didn’t immediately detail which Dogme 95 movies it will screen. Meanwhile, to mark the 100th birthday of “film master” Altman, “the largest …

Paul Mescal and Barry Keoghan revealed in line-up for Sam Mendes’ four Beatles films | Ents & Arts News

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[ad_1] Paul Mescal and Barry Keoghan will play Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr in the upcoming Beatles films – with a Stranger Things star also portraying one of the Fab Four. The two Irish stars will be joined by London-born actors Harris Dickinson as John Lennon, and Joseph Quinn as George Harrison. The cast for the Sam Mendes project was revealed at the CinemaCon event in Las Vegas, with all four actors appearing on stage and taking a bow together in Beatles style. Image: (L-R) Mescal, Quinn, Keoghan and Dickinson appeared together at the announcement. Pic: Reuters Mendes is making four interconnected films – one from the perspective of each of the band members – and they are all set to be released “in proximity” to each other in April 2028. It marks the first time The Beatles and the families of John Lennon and George Harrison have granted full life story and music rights for a scripted film. Playing McCartney is another big role for 29-year-old Mescal, who recently starred in the Gladiator sequel …

Sam Altman firing drama detailed in new book excerpt

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[ad_1] An excerpt from the upcoming book “The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future” offers new details about why OpenAI’s board briefly fired CEO Sam Altman back in 2023. Written by Wall Street Journal reporter Keach Hagey, the book claims the nonprofit’s board members became increasingly concerned after learning about issues such as an OpenAI Startup Fund that was actually personally owned by Altman. At the same time, co-founder Ilya Sutskever and CTO Mira Murati were reportedly collecting evidence of what they saw as Altman’s toxic and dishonest behavior, complete with screenshots from Murati’s Slack channel. For example, Altman allegedly claimed the company’s legal department said GPT-4 Turbo didn’t need to be reviewed by the joint safety board, but the company’s top lawyer denied saying that. After Sutskever provided this evidence to board members, they moved to oust Altman and appoint Murati as interim CEO. But this quickly backfired, with OpenAI employees (including Sutskever and Murati) signing a letter demanding Altman’s return — which he soon did, with Sutskever and …