Day: April 19, 2024

Mark Zuckerberg announced the launch of Meta’s latest generation of its Llama model on Thursday.

STR/JIJI Press/AFP via Getty Images

• Meta launched the latest iteration of its chatbot, Llama 3, on Thursday.
• Mark Zuckerberg said the chatbot is “state-of-the-art” and has improved reasoning.
• However, no model, including Meta’s, poses “existential risks,” he told The Verge.

Meta launched the latest iteration of its AI chatbot on Thursday with Llama 3, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg says it’s supposed to be really good.

The new model boasts “state-of-the-art” performance on various industry-standard benchmarks and comes with “improved reasoning,” according to a company blog post. Meta said that it will integrate the model into its AI assistant, Meta AI, which will be available to use across other Meta products, including Instagram.

“With this new model, we believe Meta AI is now the most intelligent AI assistant that you can freely use,” Zuckerberg said in an Instagram post on Thursday.

So, will the bots now take all of our jobs or even lead to our extinction?

Eh, not yet, Zuckerberg said.

In a recent interview with The Verge, the Meta CEO said that no company, not even Meta, is working on a model that is sophisticated enough for humanity to be concerned.

“In terms of all of the concerns around the more existential risks, I don’t think that anything at the level of what we or others in the field are working on in the next year is really in the ballpark of those types of risks,” he told the publication.

It’s one reason Zuckerberg feels that the company can continue making Llama open-source or available for the public or researchers to tinker with.

If Meta’s model achieves multimodality — meaning the ability to deliver results in various forms of media, including text, images, and video — then that may be a case when the company won’t want to make all aspects of its model open-source, Zuckerberg said.

“For example, image generation is one that we’re looking at closely Especially in an election year, is that a net positive thing to do? I think that’s something that we’re still thinking through,” he told The Verge.

A Meta spokesperson declined to provide comment.

Israel attacks Iran in retaliation for Iran’s attack on Israel. The United States on Thursday effectively stopped the United Nations from recognizing a Palestinian state by casting a veto in the Security Council to deny Palestinians full membership of the world body. As lawmakers in Congress edge closer to a vote on a $61 million security assistance package for Ukraine, a top U.S. intelligence official warned that help cannot come soon enough. Researchers in India have found fossils of an ancient giant snake that could have been longer than a school bus and a fossil jawbone found by a British girl and her father on a beach in Somerset, England belongs to a gigantic marine reptile from 202 million years ago.

This is a developing story.

(JTA) — Five days after fending off a sweeping attack by Iran, Israel has struck back by bombing Iranian territory, according to several reports that cite an unnamed U.S. government source.

The exact site of the strike early Friday morning Iranian time is unknown but explosions were reported in the area of Isfahan, a city with a major air force base. ABC also said there had reportedly been strikes in Iraq and Syria, where Iranian forces and proxies have a presence. 

Fox News and CNN, also citing unnamed U.S. sources, reported that the strikes were “limited” in scope and did not target Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Still, the reports, if accurate, would indicate a major escalation in armed conflict between the two countries and raise fears of a broader regional war. Before this week, Israel had battled with Iranian proxies but the two countries had never fired at each other directly. 

That changed last weekend, when Iran fired hundreds of missiles and drones at Israel in response to an Israeli strike on Iranian military officials in Syria. Israel, together with a coalition of allies, shot down nearly all of the missiles and avoided fatalities in Israel. 

Since then, Israel had indicated that it would retaliate directly against Iran despite warnings from the Biden administration not to do so. Now, Israel’s strike appears to have happened. Before the strike, Iran vowed to retaliate against any strike on its soil.

According to Israel’s Army Radio, there was a single strike in Isfahan but the Israeli attack seems to have concluded. Iran has closed much of its airspace.

“There was an attack, it ended an hour ago and since then it’s been relatively calm there,” correspondent Doron Kadosh said on Army Radio Friday morning Israel time. He added that in Israel, there was no change in instructions to civilians.

Fears of regional conflict were already elevated following Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel. In addition to fighting Hamas in Gaza, Israel has been locked in a smaller-scale exchange of fire with the Lebanese terror group Hezbollah, an Iranian proxy. 

Following the late-night attack on Israel last weekend, a statement from Iran’s mission to the United Nations said, “The matter can be deemed concluded” — but vowed a “considerably more severe” response if Israel committed “another mistake.” The statement also warned the United States to stay out of the conflict.

The United States led a multinational effort to defend Israel during the missile attack. But President Joe Biden reportedly warned Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the United States would not support or participate with an Israeli attack on Iran. A parade of world leaders visited Netanyahu in recent days to discourage an escalation, but Netanyahu insisted that Israel, not its allies, would determine its response to the missile attack.

Iranian state media reported on Thursday that the country’s military was prepared to respond forcefully to a new attack.

“The Zionist enemy’s nuclear facilities have been identified, and the Islamic Republic has accessed the necessary data on all targets,” a commander in the Iranian military told IRNA, a state network. “To respond to their possible action, we have fingers on the trigger to launch powerful missiles to destroy the identified targets.”

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

The post Israel reportedly strikes in Iran, days after fending off Iranian missile attack appeared first on The Forward.

An Israeli missile has hit a site in Iran late Thursday night (early Friday morning local time), U.S. officials have confirmed to several media outlets.

ABC News, CBS News, and NPR cited an unnamed senior U.S. official, two unnamed U.S. officials, and an unnamed U.S. official, respectively. Citing two unnamed U.S. officials, Bloomberg News reported that Israeli officials had warned U.S. officials earlier on Thursday that it planned to attack Iran in the next 24-48 hours.

[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

Details of the strike, including its exact location and the extent of the damage, remain unclear. 

FARS, a news agency managed by the Iranian military, reported that the attack happened near Isfahan—a city some 340 km. south of Tehran that hosts key military sites, including a major airbase and nuclear facilities. It later clarified that the nuclear facility is completely safe, according to “informed sources.”

Iranian state-affiliated news agency IRNA reported that Iran’s air defense system had been activated in the skies of several provinces, following explosions heard in and around Isfahan. The source of the explosion was a “defense shot,” fired after defense forces saw a “suspicious object,” IRNA reported. Flights to Tehran, Isfahan, and Shiraz were suspended.

The apparent attack comes just days after Iran launched hundreds of drones and missiles at Israel over the weekend, most of which were intercepted by Israel’s defense systems as well as those of its allies and neighbors. The weekend attack sparked widespread fears of a sharp escalation of conflict, which has seen regional tensions grow amid Israel’s war in Gaza. As world leaders urged Israel to refrain from a counterattack, Iran, which said the drone strike was a retaliation to an Israeli strike on its Damascus consulate on April 1, said that it considered the matter “concluded.”

Iranian foreign minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian told CNN earlier on Thursday that “in case the Israeli regime embarks on adventurism again and takes action against the interests of Iran, the next response from us will be immediate and at a maximum level.”

This is a developing story and will be updated.

WASHINGTON — Israel carried out a predawn missile strike inside Iran on Friday local time, U.S. media reported, citing unnamed U.S. officials.

The reports by networks ABC, CBS and NPR did not provide further detail about the location or target of the apparent missile strike.

A spokesperson for the Israeli military told VOA he had no comment “at the moment” on the U.S. media reports, about an hour after the reports emerged.

Iranian state news agency IRNA said the Islamic republic’s air defenses had been activated in the skies over several provinces.

Both IRNA and state news agency Fars, affiliated with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, cited unnamed news sources as saying there had been an explosion in Iran’s central province of Isfahan.

Fars located the explosion in the city of Qahjaverestan, on the eastern outskirts of Isfahan city.

Israel had warned Iran that it would retaliate for an unprecedented Iranian aerial assault on Israeli territory last Sunday. Iran had warned, in turn, that any Israeli retaliatory strike would be met with a swift and tougher response.

Hamas is holding up talks on ceasefire and hostages, CIA chief says  Yahoo News Australia