In A Slow Economy, Negative Quarters Shouldn't Surprise

Over the past month, we've seen a rapid cadence of notable AI-related announcements and releases from both Google and OpenAI, and it's been making the AI community's head spin. It has also poured fuel on the fire of the OpenAI-Google rivalry, an accelerating game of one-upmanship taking place unusually close to the Christmas holiday. "How are people surviving with the firehose of AI updates that are coming out," wrote one user on X last Friday, which is still a hotbed of AI-related conversation.

In the hit virtual reality game Gorilla Tag, you swing your arms to pull your primate character around—clambering through virtual worlds, climbing up trees and, above all, trying to avoid an infectious mob of other gamers. If you’re caught, you join the horde. However, some kids playing the game claim to have found a way to cheat and easily “tag” opponents. Over the past year, teenagers have produced video tutorials showing how to side-load a virtual private network (VPN) onto Meta’s virtual reality headsets and use the location-changing technology to get ahead in the game.

Some Starbucks baristas went on strike in Chicago on Friday, with their union warning the walkouts could spread to hundreds of cafes by Christmas Eve if the coffee giant does not meet workers’ demands at the bargaining table. Baristas were also planning walkouts Friday in Los Angeles and in Seattle, where Starbucks is headquartered. In Chicago, baristas at the company’s store at 5964 N.

Amazon workers affiliated with the Teamsters union launched a strike at seven of the company’s delivery hubs less than a week before Christmas. The Teamsters said the workers, who voted to authorize strikes in recent days, joined picket lines on Thursday after Amazon ignored a Sunday deadline the union had set for contract negotiations. The company says it doesn’t expect the strike to impact holiday shipments. Amazon delivery drivers in Skokie, six other facilities go on strike: ‘We’re the ones who move the packages every day’ Amazon has a couple hundred employees at each delivery station.

Former Chicago Blackhawks hockey great Jonathan Toews on Thursday sold his four-bedroom, 4,406-square-foot penthouse condominium in Lincoln Park for $4.5 million. Toews, 36, was the Blackhawks’ team captain and a central part of the team’s three Stanley Cup-winning teams between 2010 and 2015. After battling long COVID and chronic immune response syndrome, Toews sat out the 2023-24 hockey season, and he currently is a free agent.

Large language models represent text using tokens, each of which is a few characters. Short words are represented by a single token (like "the" or "it"), whereas larger words may be represented by several tokens (GPT-4o represents "indivisible" with "ind," "iv," and "isible"). When OpenAI released ChatGPT two years ago, it had a memory—known as a context window—of just 8,192 tokens.