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Jackson State tops Southern 41-13, wins SWAC Championship and berth in Celebration BowlFor artificial-intelligence technology and the industry rising up around it in San Francisco and elsewhere, 2024 saw some heady highs. Two separate Nobel prizes were awarded for AI-related work. AI startups raised unprecedented sums, and some reportedly started to record serious sales numbers. Following early-adopting individuals, companies around the world started to experiment with the technology, with some seeing early success. Taken together, for enthusiasts, the developments seemed to indicate the technology was well on its way to meeting its promise of being the industry’s biggest leap forward ever. “I’ve never seen such an incredible amount of activity in a sector or in a technology as quickly as this,” said Rob Siegel, a lecturer in management at Stanford Graduate School of Business who focuses on startups and technology. At the same time, the shortcomings of the industry and technology — and even the potential danger they pose — also started to become more readily apparent this year. Reports highlighted the immense environmental impact of the technology and the challenge it poses to the big-tech companies’ promises to cut their carbon emissions. Others exposed how chatbots were sending harmful messages to teens and young women were being tormented by typically teenage boys using sophisticated AI tools to generate faked pornographic images. Still others brought to light the billions of dollars the biggest AI companies are blowing through even as their technological progress seems to be slowing down and key problems — such as generative AI’s tendency to make up answers whole cloth — remain unresolved. It became clearer this year that the excitement about the technology and the marketing bluster promoting it has far outpaced its actual capacity to solve real-world problems, said Alex Hanna, the director of research at the Distributed AI Research Institute. “The hype is huge,” Hanna said. “It’s a hype bubble.” That it might be, but there were some legitimate reasons for excitement. In October, for example, researchers John Hopefield and Geoffrey Hinton — the latter formerly of Google — won the Nobel Prize for physics for the work they did that provided the foundation for today’s AI systems . Meanwhile, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper of Google’s DeepMind division won the Nobel Prize for chemistry — alongside scientist David Baker — for their development of an AI model that they used to predict protein structures . Even as the highest honors in science were going to work done in AI, companies in the industry — many of the most important of which are based in The City — continued to raise gargantuan sums of capital . In the middle of last month, Databricks announced it had raised $8.6 billion of a targeted $10 billion funding round that, once completed, would be the second-biggest venture deal ever. Other San Francisco-based companies also announced that they’d closed some of the biggest financing deals ever, including a $6.6 billion one raised by OpenAI in October and a $6 billion round closed by Elon Musk’s xAI in June . Through Dec. 13, venture investors had poured $81 billion into U.S.-based artificial-intelligence and machine-learning startups in 2024, according to PitchBook, an industry-research firm. Even though that tally didn’t include the Databricks deal, it was already up 41% year-over-year and nearly at the full-year record of $81.1 billion set in 2021, when the venture industry was booming. More than half of the tally in each of the last two years was invested in San Francisco companies. While the biggest companies are drawing an outsized share of the capital, venture investors are increasingly spreading money around as different sectors of tech embrace AI. Through the middle of December, AI and machine-learning startups had closed 940 deals nationwide, according to PitchBook. That was up 20% from all of last year. Some 26% of those rounds were closed by San Francisco startups. Venture investors “are looking for the next wave of untapped use cases and looking for land grabs,” said Brendan Burke, a senior emerging-technology analyst at PitchBook. Those investments come as growing numbers of companies and investors are experimenting with AI, analysts say. Businesses big and small in different sectors and nations are testing out how they can use the technology in their operations, Siegel said. Many companies spent the first half of this year trying to figure out how they were going to use AI and which models to build on top of, said Matt Murphy, a partner at Menlo Ventures. Many spent the second half of the year actually deploying the technology and getting it in front of their employees and customers, he said. “The shift was stark,” Murphy said. “The velocity in which we got there in the second half was impressive.” Some companies are already starting to see some successes with using and implementing AI, analysts said. In October, Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced that AI technology was creating about 25% of the new software code for the company’s products. Siegel said PayPal’s AI-powered chatbot helped him resolve an issue. When he wasn’t paid after selling tickets to an event via the company’s services, he turned to PayPal’s support site, which referred him to its chatbot. The chatbot was able to answer his questions and resolve his issue by offering fast and accurate answers, he said. “I did not feel like I was talking to a bot,” he said. Helping it to better perform such tasks and others, AI made some significant technological progress this year, experts say. One technique embraced by developers such as OpenAI was to have their models take time to consider and evaluate their answers to questions and queries before responding to them. A related technique is “chain of thought,” which involves having models break down questions into their constituent parts and tackling each of those parts individually. Such techniques can help models deliver better, more accurate results, experts said. Having the models take more time before answering is kind of like saying, “Hey, use your prefrontal cortex to filter ... what you’re going to say and think about it more deeply before you say it,” said James Landay, a professor of computer science at Stanford and co-director of its Human-centered Artificial Intelligence institute. Even as AI technology continued to develop some companies in the industry are already starting to generate sizable amounts of revenue. As of September, OpenAI was reportedly on track to record $3.7 billion in sales in 2024 . Around the same time, Anthropic — its chief rival — reportedly expected its sales to be at a $1 billion annualized rate by the end of this year. Unlike the early days of some previous technology booms, companies are already spending real money on AI, Siegel said. “The demand is real and palpable,” he said. Even so, the industry and technology seemed to lose some of its luster this year. While sales at companies such as Anthropic and OpenAI started to head to the billions of dollars, their losses grew even bigger — with no end in sight. OpenAI reportedly expected to lose at least $5 billion this year. It expects that to swell to $14 billion in 2026 , The Information reported in October. Between last year and 2028, it expects to rack up a staggering $44 billion in losses, according to The Information. Anthropic, meanwhile, reportedly projected it would burn through $2.7 billion this year alone . AI developers have traditionally created better models by training them on ever-larger sets of data. But each increase in training data generally has required a much greater increase in computing power on needed to process it — typically on pricey, hard-to-come-by, electricity-guzzling AI chips . The current and projected losses have become so enormous that OpenAI is reportedly considering selling ads to generate additional revenue , Hanna noted. Ads might be a tried-and-true method for internet companies to make money, but it seems “bizarre” that AI companies would have to turn to them to support what was supposed to be something so revolutionary, she said. The AI developers’ “business model wasn’t viable to begin with,” Hanna said. “Now they’re really finding out how unviable it was.” Even some AI enthusiasts are questioning the degree to which AI companies will generate a return on the enormous amounts being invested in them. Many are calling the current investment wave a bubble and are expecting a shakeout. “There will be companies that will fail,” Siegel said. Industry leaders such as OpenAI might not suffer that fate, but that doesn’t necessarily make them good investments, given how much money they’re raising, he said. “I don’t know how you get venture-backable returns for the risk that’s being taken,” Siegel said. But 2024 provided other reasons to question the trajectory of the AI industry and technology besides all the red ink. One big one: technological progress seemed to be slowing down. Much of the development work in AI this year focused on refining existing models rather than creating and releasing newer, bigger and better ones, experts say. OpenAI released GPT-4, the large-language model underlying ChatGPT, in March 2023. There was some expectation it would release GPT-5 this year, but CEO Sam Altman acknowledged in October that wasn’t likely to happen due to the company focusing on essentially refining its existing models. A big part of the challenge that companies are facing in developing new models is they’re running out of training data, experts say. They’ve already trained their language models on nearly all the publicly accessible data on the internet. Companies have started to experiment with artificially-generated so-called synthetic data, but there are indications that data isn’t particularly good to train on, and there are fears that such data might actually make the models worse, not better, Landay said. Indeed, there are indications that progress in model development is plateauing, he and other experts said. “We haven’t seen the models being released as often as we were seeing a couple years ago,” Landay said. “It’s been slower, and I think the improvements have not been as large.” Additionally, there was greater focus this year on the shortcomings and dangers of the technology. Since OpenAI released ChatGPT in late 2022, users have noted its sometimes bizarre or inaccurate responses, what people in the industry soon dubbed “hallucinations.” But in a paper this year, a team of philosophers in Scotland argued that the more appropriate way to describe what AI is doing is “bulls--- .” Just like a person who deals in B.S., AI models neither know nor care what is the truth, they argued. Those models craft their answers to queries by using probabilities, said Jesse Dodge, a senior research scientist at the Allen Institute for AI. They don’t have a concept of what is a true answer; instead, based on their training data, they build their answers one word at a time, determining which word is most likely to come after the previous one. The probabilistic nature of the model’s responses “means we can’t truly get rid of these hallucinations,” Dodge said. But as became increasingly clear this year, AI can cause more problems than just making up answers. Bay Area-based Character.ai, Chai Research and similar companies’ AI-powered virtual chatbot companions came under fire this year for allegedly exploiting emotionally vulnerable people , including underaged teens. Character and Chai were each linked to different suicides, and Character was accused of pushing toxic messages to a 17-year-old , with its chatbot even allegedly suggesting the kid kill his parents. And there were a string of reports this year — many coming out of South Korea — about AI being used to create faked pornographic images of women and girls to torment or intimidate them. “The more we use this stuff, the more we’re going to get bad stories of where they go wrong,” Landay said. The sheer environmental costs of AI technology also came to the fore in 2024. The vast amounts of computing power required to train and run AI models consumes huge and growing amounts of energy. That’s already leading to an uptick in carbon emissions and water consumption , as water is evaporated to cool the computers running AI models and the power plants providing their electricity. Projections made this year indicate those problems are only going to get worse as more and more data centers are built to power the AI boom. Utilities are already keeping online coal-fired plants that were scheduled to close and are gearing up to build natural-gas-fired plants to meet the soaring demand for energy from AI developers. And companies such as Microsoft and Google acknowledged that they are falling short of their pledges to eliminate their carbon emissions . “These models are increasingly expensive, and emissions from the large tech companies are only going up,” Dodge said. If you have a tip about tech, startups or the venture industry, contact Troy Wolverton at twolverton@sfexaminer.com or via text or Signal at 415.515.5594.

Trump’s lawyers rebuff DA’s idea for upholding his hush money conviction, calling it ‘absurd’Here’s what to know about the new funding deal that countries agreed to at UN climate talks

THE FBI whistleblower who helped crush a global drug cartel has angrily told Hollywood superstar Mark Wahlberg to set the record straight and rectify a new documentary about his astonishing story. High-stakes gambler RJ Cipriani , known as "Jackpot," found himself entangled in the dark underworld of Owen Hanson — a former USC football walk-on turned drug kingpin who ran a massive illegal sports betting and money laundering empire worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Cipriani told The U.S. Sun earlier this year that, following Hanson's release from prison, he was ready to meet him again - this time in a boxing ring rather than a casino to help raise money for the "broke" former crime boss. Hanson has just released a book entitled The California Kid, which details his astonishing rise and fall. However, Cipriani is seething with the contents, which he says omits key elements of the tale, while leaving his name linked to Hanson's money laundering network. Wahlberg 's Unrealistic Ideas production company has used Hanson's work to produce a warts-and-all documentary due early next year. READ MORE EXCLUSIVES Cipriani, 63, said he will use "every legal remedy at my disposal to clear my good name" and stressed he would have no problem taking Wahlberg , his organization and Amazon "to the cleaners". "I wouldn't buy the book no matter what, but friends have sent me excerpts that, once I read them, are defamatory and slanderous toward my involvement with Owen Hanson," a raging Cipriani told The U.S. Sun. " Wahlberg and Unrealistic Ideas are now put on notice..... If the docuseries paints me in any way as being knowingly complicit with Owen Hanson and his crimes, then do so at your own legal peril." The Philadelphia-born high-stakes gambler is fuming with the Departed star and has been ignored by the actor and his team despite numerous attempts to contact him. Most read in The US Sun "If I was a violent person, which I'm not, I would bitch slap him," Cipriani continued. "I want my name cleared now." In 2017, Hanson was sentenced to 21 years and ordered to forfeit $5 million in assets. These included $100,000 in gold coins, luxury cars, high-end jewelry, vacation properties, a sailboat, and shares in several businesses. Authorities also seized six encrypted cell phones linked to a Canadian company under investigation for allegedly providing secure technology to organized crime groups. Hanson’s downfall began with his arrest at a San Diego golf course in September 2015. Months after the FBI arrested him for arranging sales of cocaine and methamphetamine , Hanson was federally indicted as the leader of a crime ring called O-Dog Enterprises . Officials accused the former football player of using his connections in the sports world to build a multimillion-dollar criminal empire consisting of drug trafficking, money laundering, and sports betting. I go after bad guys no matter who they are, where they are, or how dangerous, rich or connected they are. By Hanson's sentencing in 2017, authorities had made over 1,000 arrests connected to the case, with 800 occurring in a single day. A key figure in Hanson’s capture was Cipriani, who called himself "Robin Hood 702," a nod to his habit of donating substantial gambling winnings to charity (702 being the Las Vegas area code). Cipriani became pivotal in exposing Hanson, triggering multiple international investigations and arrests. Since their first meeting in Sydney, Australia , in 2011, Hanson claimed the two had an arrangement where he would give Cipriani his drug money to gamble, trusting he'd win and return the funds while keeping the rest for his Robin Hood mission. Cipriani, however, vehemently denied the claims. In August 2015, Hanson enlisted Cipriani in a $2.5 million money-laundering scheme, instructing him to gamble the funds. Instead, Cipriani deliberately lost the money at Sydney's Star Casino while playing blackjack. Furious at the betrayal, Hanson escalated his threats, even going so far as to send photos of masked men vandalizing Cipriani’s mother’s grave in Philadelphia. The disturbing images were the final straw for Cipriani. He tipped off the FBI and Hanson's downward spiral began. OUT OF PRISON After serving nearly seven years in federal prison in Colorado, Hanson was released early into California transitional housing in March. Upon his release, Cipriani offered to pay for a one-bedroom apartment in Irvine, California, for Hanson while he got back on his feet. "I said to him, 'If you've reformed yourself and you're going talk to kids about how harmful drugs are, and you've changed your life, then I'll help you,'" Cipriani told The U.S. Sun earlier this year. "I always hope for the good in people. And I'm hoping that he's changed. But if he walks off the straight line, guess who will be there." Big-hearted Cipriani wanted to help Hanson - but this latest betrayal has reignited explosive tension between the pair. FEUD REIGNITED Wahlberg initially approached the now LA-based high-stakes gambler about appearing in the Amazon series but turned him down because they wouldn't give him an EP credit or fee. He is working on a Sony Pictures Television production instead. "Pray it up, Marky Mark!" snapped Cipriani, cheekily nodding to Wahlberg's religious social media posts. He continued, "Mark understand this, I go after bad guys no matter who they are, where they are, or how dangerous, rich or connected they are. Read More on The US Sun "I'm the real life super hero that you always pretend to be in your dumb, fake ass movies. Remember, I'm Jackpot, govern yourselves accordingly." The U.S. Sun contacted Wahlberg and his production company but didn't hear back.

14. Danny Welbeck - Known for his versatility, Welbeck left United for Arsenal in 2014 before joining Watford in 2019. He suffered a serious injury in 2020 and is working his way back to full fitness.LONDON — A woman who claimed mixed martial arts fighter Conor McGregor "brutally raped and battered" her in a Dublin hotel penthouse was awarded nearly 250,000 Euros ($257,000) on Friday by a civil court jury in Ireland. Nikita Hand said the Dec. 9, 2018, assault after a night of partying left her heavily bruised and suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. McGregor testified that he never forced the woman to do anything against her will and said she fabricated the allegations after the two had consensual sex. His lawyer had called Hand a gold digger. The fighter, once the face of the Ultimate Fighting Championship but now past his prime, shook his head as the jury of eight women and four men found him liable for assault after deliberating about six hours in the High Court in Dublin. He was mobbed by cameras as he left court but did not comment. He later said on the social platform X that he would appeal the verdict and the "modest award." Hand's voice cracked and her hands trembled as she read a statement outside the courthouse, saying she would never forget what happened to her but would now be able to move on with her life. She thanked her family, partner, friends, jurors, the judge and all the supporters that had reached out to her online, but particularly her daughter. "She has given me so much strength and courage over the last six years throughout this nightmare to keep on pushing forward for justice," she said. "I want to show (her) and every other girl and boy that you can stand up for yourself if something happens to you, no matter who the person is, and justice will be served." The Associated Press generally does not name alleged victims of sexual violence unless they come forward publicly, as Hand has done. Under Irish law, she did not have the anonymity she would have been granted in a criminal proceeding and was named publicly throughout the trial. Her lawyer told jurors that McGregor was angry about a fight he had lost in Las Vegas two months earlier and took it out on his client. "He's not a man, he's a coward," attorney John Gordon said in his closing speech. "A devious coward and you should treat him for what he is." Gordon said his client never pretended to be a saint and was only looking to have fun when she sent McGregor a message through Instagram after attending a Christmas party. He said Hand knew McGregor socially and that they had grown up in the same area. She said he picked her and a friend up in a car and shared cocaine with them, which McGregor admitted in court, on the way to the Beacon Hotel. Hand said she told McGregor she didn't want to have sex with him and that she was menstruating. She said she told him "no" as he started kissing her but he eventually pinned her to a bed and she couldn't move. McGregor put her in a chokehold and later told her, "now you know how I felt in the octagon where I tapped out three times," referring to a UFC match when he had to admit defeat, she said. Hand had to take several breaks in emotional testimony over three days. She said McGregor threatened to kill her during the encounter and she feared she would never see her young daughter again. Eventually, he let go of her. "I remember saying I was sorry, as I felt that I did something wrong and I wanted to reassure him that I wouldn't tell anyone so he wouldn't hurt me again," she testified. She said she then let him do what he wanted and he had sex with her. A paramedic who examined Hand the next day testified that she had never before seen someone with that intensity of bruising. A doctor told jurors Hand had multiple injuries. Hand said the trauma of the attack had left her unable to work as a hairdresser, she fell behind on her mortgage and had to move out of her house. Police investigated the woman's complaint but prosecutors declined to bring charges, saying there was insufficient evidence and a conviction was unlikely. McGregor, in his post on X, said he was disappointed jurors didn't see all the evidence prosecutors had reviewed. He testified that the two had athletic and vigorous sex, but that it was not rough. He said "she never said 'no' or stopped" and testified that everything she said was a lie. "It is a full blown lie among many lies," he said when asked about the chokehold allegation. "How anyone could believe that me, as a prideful person, would highlight my shortcomings." McGregor's lawyer told jurors they had to set aside their animus toward the fighter. "You may have an active dislike of him, some of you may even loathe him – there is no point pretending that the situation might be otherwise," attorney Remy Farrell said. "I'm not asking you to invite him to Sunday brunch." The defense said the woman never told investigators McGregor threatened her life. They also showed surveillance video in court that they said appeared to show the woman kiss McGregor's arm and hug him after they left the hotel room. Farrell said she looked "happy, happy, happy." McGregor said he was "beyond petrified" when first questioned by police and read them a prepared statement. On the advice of his lawyer, he refused to answer more than 100 follow-up questions. The jury ruled against Hand in a case she brought against one of McGregor's friends, James Lawrence, whom she accused of having sex with her in the hotel without consent. Get local news delivered to your inbox!

Body camera footage released by state Attorney General Letitia James shows correction officers punching and kicking inmate Robert Brooks, who died hours after the beating at a Utica hospital. The videos were compiled from body cameras worn by four correction officers at Marcy Correctional Facility, a medium-security prison in Oneida County. James noted there isn't sound available because the body cams were in standby mode and not activated during the beating of Brooks. The cameras captured the incident that occurred Dec. 9. In one video, officers are shown restraining Brooks outside the prison before moving him inside to what appeared to be a medical exam room. The videos, which were clipped to show the incident, show Brooks being punched and kicked. In one clip, an officer is shown attempting to put a white cloth in Brooks' mouth. Brooks is then punched and held on the exam table. Later, the videos show Brooks lying motionless on the table. He was transported to Wynn Hospital in Utica, where he was pronounced dead on Dec. 10. James said Friday that her office is continuing to investigate the beating death of Brooks. Gov. Kathy Hochul has ordered 14 employees — 13 correction officers and a nurse — who were involved in the incident to be fired. The state attorney general's office released body cam video of the fatal attack on Robert Brooks, an inmate at Marcy Correctional Facility. The state attorney general's office released body cam video of the fatal attack on Robert Brooks, an inmate at Marcy Correctional Facility. The state attorney general's office released body cam videos from four correction officers who were present for the fatal attack on Robert Brooks, an inmate at Marcy Correctional Facility. Government reporter Robert Harding can be reached at (315) 664-4631 or robert.harding@lee.net . Follow him on X @RobertHarding. Stay up-to-date on the latest in local and national government and political topics with our newsletter. Online producer/politics reporter {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items.