2019年3月12日
US to withdraw all its embassy staff in Venezuela
The US will be removing all remaining staff from its embassy in Venezuela as the country grapples with power outages and a deteriorating political situation. Venezuela is currently struggling to restore power after a crippling five-day blackout which plunged even critical infrastructure like hospitals into darkness.
Experts believe that the country’s perilous state and previous neglect of the power network are to blame. The country, which still struggles with a shortage of food and medicine, has been plunged into despair. Venezuela has also been locked in a dramatic political crisis, which has seen countries around the world disavow its president and back the upstart politician Juan Guaidó in his bid to depose him. In response, Maduro prohibited Guaido from leaving the country and froze his assets, claiming that the politician was trying to “usurp” power. Guaidó faced threats of up to 30 years in prison for returning to Venezuela on March 4, and has since called for new rounds of protest.
The non-profit org founded by Elon Musk and Sam Altman to save the world
OpenAI was originally launched by Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Y Combinator chairman Sam Altman in December 2015 with a $US1 billion endowment. Musk left the board in February, 2018, due to conflicts of interests as Tesla delved deeper into AI tech for self-driving cars.
OpenAI is an organisation that creates artificial intelligence technology and has decided that one of its founding ideals- to be a non-profit – is no longer its whole deal. It has converted itself into a for-profit company, able to issue stock to employees and generate returns.
It calls itself a “capped-profit” company. That’s a term it coined to mean it will limit the amount of money it returns to investors and employees and use most of whatever it generates to fund its non-profit entity. OpenAI has since gone on to hire 100 people and release a whole bunch of free and open source AI projects. For instance, it’s created tech that can help teach computers to understand language, to learn in new ways, to control robotic arms and movement.
Amazon's Alexa has 80,000 Apps - and No Runaway Hit
Deakin and his coworkers at the U.K.’s Musicplode Media Ltd. created a version of their music trivia game for Alexa, chasing the opportunity to hitch a ride on what they correctly predicted would be one of the hottest trends in consumer technology. Like many developers, they found working with voice software brought its own set of challenges and didn’t yield an immediate payoff.
Alexa, Amazon’s voice system has yet to offer a transformative new experience. Surveys show most people use their smart speakers to listen to tunes or make relatively simple requests—“Alexa, set a timer for 30 minutes”—while more complicated tasks prompt them to give up and reach for their smartphone.
Amazon counts some 80,000 “skills”—its name for apps—in its marketplace. Swapping visual cues for verbal ones forces them to unlearn old habits from building software for smartphones and the web. While smartphone users can quickly eyeball a list of available apps on a screen, multiple options get lost easily on a voice-based service.
Amazon boasted last year that it has some 10,000 employees working on Alexa software and related devices.But that hasn’t helped Amazon build a more dynamic app marketplace. There are kind of a cluster of features people are coming to expect for voice: a daily news summary, weather, timers and a random fact.
Amazon says four out of five Alexa users have tried a Skill developed by outsiders. Popular apps tend to be organized around a single, relatively simple theme. There's also the essential question of what tasks people would rather complete with their voice than another device using their eyes and fingers.