Before The Bell: Wal-mart, Home Depot, Housing Starts In Focus

El Salvador has reached an agreement with the International Monetary Fund over a $1.4 billion loan package that will see the Central American nation scale back its Bitcoin program.  The funding package will be exchanged for a reduction in the country’s domestic Bitcoin activity, subject to final approval from the IMF executive board.   The drawdown will come from the IMF’s Extended Fund Facility, over 40 months, in support of El Salvador’s reform agenda and in particular, to assist its balance of payment needs. As detailed by the global financial institution, further funding will be provided by the World Bank and the Inter-American Developmental Bank, as well as other sources, to take the total support package beyond $3.5b. “The potential risks of the Bitcoin project will be diminished significantly in line with Fund policies,” said the IMF statement. “Legal reforms will make acceptance of Bitcoin by the private sector voluntary.

With Gladiator II doing the rounds in movie theatres at the moment, there is renewed interest in all things Ancient Rome. One aspect that remains of great interest to many is the city of Pompeii – buried in the aftermath of an eruption of Mount Vesuvius and now part of Roman legend due to the historical significance of the site. Pompeii: The Legacy takes place 20 years after the eruption in AD79 and puts you in charge of the rebuilding of Pompeii – something that never happened of course in real life. As the head of a Roman family, you will oversee the reconstruction of Pompeii over several generations, making critical decisions that shape the city’s future.

Creating compelling, impactful video content is now an essential skill for nearly all businesses. Visual storytelling has far more influence than most people realize, whether it’s done through marketing, entertainment, or across social media platforms. Achieving success with video content creation requires a blend of technical proficiency, creative vision, and marketing strategy.

Reality TV might become the next show business labor battle. When members of a reality TV show’s cast sign a contract to participate in a show, they typically do so more for the exposure than the pay—and in many cases they do not earn a dime.

OpenAI has announced that ChatGPT can now be accessed through call or sending a WhatsApp text message, with the feature even able to be used on flip phones and landlines. “You can now talk to ChatGPT by calling 1-800-ChatGPT (1-800-242-8478) in the U. S. or by sending a WhatsApp message to the same number—available everywhere ChatGPT is,” the company stated on X. This comes as part of the ‘12 Days of OpenAI’ pre-Christmas celebrations, with each day revealing a new feature, update, or change. You can now talk to ChatGPT by calling 1-800-ChatGPT (1-800-242-8478) in the U.

A new study by Anthropic suggests AI models can display alignment faking, a behavior where someone appears to share the same views or values but is in fact only pretending to do so. The study was created by Anthropic’s Alignment Science team, in collaboration with Redwood Research. The researchers suggest the demonstration of sophisticated alignment faking in a large language model “should be seen as a spur for the AI research community to study this behavior in more depth, and to work on the appropriate safety measures.” Claude 3 Opus was the main model included within the research, but other experiments were run with other models too. “Under normal circumstances, when asked to answer a potentially offensive question—for example, to provide a detailed description of a violent act—Claude will refuse. “In our experiment, however, we placed the model in a new environment that led it to strategically halt its refusals for the sake of preserving its preferences,” the research team said. AI model shows alignment faking as it goes against existing principles The situation was changed in three ways, with the first being telling the model that it was now being trained using reinforcement learning to always comply with all queries including toxic ones. Second, the model was told they planned to train AIs based on the basis of their responses to free-tier users, but not to paid-tier users. Third, the model was given a secret ‘scratchpad’ which is a workspace where it could record its step-by-step reasoning. The model was then asked to respond to a harmful query which asked for a specific situation to be graphically detailed. Claude usually refuses harmful queries.