Company to prioritize CT-0525 as its anti-HER2 CAR-M product candidate and will cease further development of CT-0508
Other prioritized pipeline programs include the Company's in vivo CAR-M collaboration with Moderna, and research programs including fibrosis
Cash and cash equivalents of $77.6 million as of December 31, 2023, combined with a restructuring of operations, including pausing development of CT-1119, expected to fund the Company into the third quarter of 2025
Citadel's hedge fund billionaire Kenneth Griffin told investors he expects the medium-term economic landscape will remain challenging, but more favorable for fixed-income markets in the U.S., as inflation eases, according to a letter seen by Reuters.
"Economic growth is likely to be modest, staying below potential in the upcoming quarters, with the (U.S.) central bank persisting in its fight against inflationary pressures," he wrote, adding that consumers will continue to experience real income growth.
Griffin, who controls the $59 billion hedge fund Citadel Advisors and the market maker Citadel Securities, reiterated in the letter his concerns about the U.S. fiscal situation, saying it cannot be overlooked.
"It is irresponsible for the U.S. government to incur a deficit of 6.4% when unemployment is hovering around 3.75%," he added.
The U.S federal budget deficit grew by 13% in February from a year earlier on interest costs and tax refunds. For the first five months of the fiscal year, the deficit rose by $106 billion, or 15%, to $828 billion, as interest costs on the national debt rose.
Last year, the hedge fund posted a 15.3% gain for its flagship Wellington fund, outperforming multi-strategy competitors
The U.S. state of Maryland has opened a temporary channel on the northeast side of the collapsed Baltimore bridge, allowing vessel traffic around the container ship stuck at the disaster site, Governor Wes Moore said on Monday.
"It will help us to get more vessels in the water around the site of the collapse," Moore told a news conference, though it was unclear if traffic was limited to recovery efforts.
Recovery teams were working on opening a second temporary channel, Moore said.
The Port of Baltimore's shipping channel has been blocked since a fully loaded container ship lost power and collided with a support column on the Francis Scott Key Bridge last Tuesday, killing six road workers and causing the bridge that forms part of a highway looping around Baltimore to fall into to the Patapsco River.
U.S. President Joe Biden will travel to Baltimore on Friday and is expected to meet with state and local leaders including Moore as he tours the damage area, White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre said.
She noted the administration has already worked with local leaders to secure barges and a crane for the scene, along with an early influx of money.
"As the president said within hours of the collapse, this administration will be with the people of Baltimore every step of the way," Jean-Pierre said.
She added the administration is working with Congress to ensure that the federal government will pay to rebuild the bridge
United Parcel Service will become the United States Postal Service's (USPS) primary air cargo provider, the company said on Monday, as rival FedEx announced an end to its more than 20-year partnership with the postal service provider.
USPS was the largest customer for FedEx's air-based Express segment, even as payments declined after the postal service shifted letters and packages from planes to more economical trucks as part of an operational revamp.
"It's not a huge loss for FedEx, but it will impact their density... You're losing consistency in terms of revenue from a pretty significant partner, but it wasn't the most profitable business for them ... it's not all negative," said Faisal Hersi, an equity analyst at Edward Jones.
USPS represented just about 4% of Express' annual revenue, according to a Reuters calculation.
The contract win is seen as boost to UPS. The parcel delivery company had in January forecast full-year revenue below Wall Street's target.
"It provides an opportunity (for UPS) to have someone that's going to guarantee them some of that volume and helps them have that density improvement," said Hersi.
The financial terms of the contract were not disclosed but UPS said it was "significant."
Shares of FedEx, which expects to see profitability improve in fiscal 2025, fell nearly 2%. UPS' stock was 1% lower.
FedEx will also make adjustments to its network to make up for the loss of the contract that brought in nearly $2 billion in annual business.
"The parties were unable to reach agreement on mutually beneficial terms to extend the contract," the company said in a filing on Monday.
As many as 300 pilots at FedEx could be out of work if the contract ended, trade publication FreightWaves said in January, citing a recording of a meeting between a FedEx executive and pilot evaluators.
The union representing FedEx pilots, Air Line Pilots Association, which is yet to reach a new labor deal with the company, did not immediately comment when contacted by Reuters.
by Tom Ozimek via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
E-commerce giant Amazon has just launched new tech that makes it far easier to sign up for its palm-scanning payment service, sparking renewed concerns among privacy experts, with some warning it’s another pebble in the growing rock pile of big tech-enabled, Orwell-style digital enslavement.
Amazon announced on March 28 that it had just launched a new app that lets first-time users of its Amazon One biometric payment service sign up for it from the comfort of their home (instead of having to do it at a physical store) by taking a photo of a hand and uploading it to Amazon’s servers.
“Until today, customers had to visit a physical location to hover their palm over an Amazon One device to sign up for the service,” the company said in a press release. “Now, they can sign up for Amazon One from home, work, or on-the-go.”
The benefit for users, according to Amazon, is convenience. Retailers are promised benefits from faster lines and “more frictionless in-store experience,” says Amazon, whose palm scanners are found in numerous retail locations across the country and have been used over 8 million times.
When Amazon first announced in 2020 that it was rolling out its biometric payment service, a number of privacy experts sounded the alarm, with some calling it a “terrible idea” because there are few laws to hold big tech accountable for keeping Americans’ sensitive personal information safe, or from preventing them from selling it to others or abusing it in other ways.
Now, the launch of Amazon’s new app that could turbo-charge the handing over of biometric data to a company with a history of data leaks and breaches, has drawn fresh criticism.
Much of the renewed criticism centers on the idea that Amazon is making it easier to harvest more personal data that could, potentially, be exploited as part of a tech-enabled system of social surveillance and control.
Amazon did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
James Lindsay, founder of New Discourses and author of several books, including “Race Marxism” and “Social (In)justice,” told The Epoch Times that he sees the development as fresh evidence of a broader push towards tech-enabled “digital enslavement” by way of a series of nodes that includes central bank digital currencies (CBDC), universal basic income (UBI), and a China-style social credit system.
“It is real,” he said when asked about the risk of “digital enslavement” at the hands of a tech-driven constellation of mechanisms that includes China’s social credit system, which lets the communist-controlled surveillance state punish and reward people for certain behaviors, and which is being copied in a number of countries.
“We have not implemented the Chinese system here fully yet,” he said. “If we had, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
Mr. Lindsay offered commentary on the Amazon One app rollout in a post on X, writing that they “are pushing the Digital Slave ID really hard” and “I will not be digital cattle.”
He expanded on this idea in a subsequent thread, in which he laid out a case for how “evil technocrats” overlook people’s humanity and see consumers as little more than domesticated animals to be milked for profit or tapped for other uses.
“I am therefore saying that the technocrats will establish a system where we are as cattle to them, centers of data to be harvested,” he wrote in one of the posts.
The basic idea he outlined for how a “digital cattle” system would work effectively is thanks to several pieces: UBI, a social credit system that’s tied to financial rewards and punishments, a bonus system that sits on top of UBI that gives extra rewards for “excellent social credit,” as well as an “‘education’ system that locks kids in.”
Mr. Lindsey, who’s been a vocal critic of wokeism in education, added that the key to making the system of digital enslavement work is data.
“The oligarchs need enough information to know what their cattle need to keep functioning but also tons of information to know how to contour and control them into the ideal subjects and consumers their system needs to sustain itself,” he said in one of his posts.
Mr. Lindsay said this network of digital mechanisms of social control would be stacked against users, rewarding them in “extremely fake” and meaningless ways like in video games while the punishments could be very real.
“So, you don’t fly, you don’t travel, you eat bugs and lentils, you turn in your neighbors, you watch propaganda, you take the data-harvesting quizzes or play the data-harvesting games, etc., and you get special bonus credits above a basic allotment you can sell for perks,” he wrote.
While Amazon didn’t respond to a request for comment on the criticism of its artificial intelligence-powered palm-scanning payment service, it said in its announcement that it maintains a “high bar” for both customer privacy and data security.
The company says the images taken via the Amazon One app are encrypted and sent to a secure area on its cloud servers. The photos of users’ palms can’t be downloaded or saved to a phone, and the mobile app “includes additional layers of spoof detection,” the company says.
Some critics have argued that fears of an Orwellian system of “digital enslavement” are overblown because there’s a slim chance of its adoption, given the public pushback to progressive phenomena like pushing Critical Race Theory in schools, or the foisting of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) policies on corporate workers.
“That’s the hope,” Mr. Lindsay said when asked for comment on the view that the bubble of wokeism is a fleeting excess of modern culture and is already popping.
“It’s only a hope,” he cautioned, however.
Asked how big the risk is of an Orwellian system of “digital enslavement” that treats people like “digital cattle” being implemented in the United States, Mr. Lindsay offered hope—but warned of risk.
The risk “is real,” he said. “But I am also optimistic that they’ve lost the ability to truly implement it if we keep exposing and speaking up about it.”
“If we do nothing, it is certain, however,” he added.
Michael Rectenwald, a former professor at New York University and a distinguished fellow at Hillsdale College, told The Epoch Times that the promise of convenience—the key benefit articulated by Amazon when introducing its new app—is a lure that draws people into arrangements that may not serve their more fundamental interests.
“The threat of complete digital enslavement will come via offers of ‘convenience’ and ‘inclusion’ from the corporate appendages of the state--or what I have called ‘governmentalities’—like Amazon and Google,” said Mr. Rectenwald, who’s also authored twelve books, including his latest, “The Great Reset and the Struggle for Liberty: Unraveling the Global Agenda.”
“Amazon’s palm scanning app is a step in the direction of digital identity,” he continued, adding that the Bank of International Settlements (BIS), the Swiss-based financial institution colloquially referred to as the “bank for central banks,” has stated that a “digital identity scheme” is a prerequisite for effective CBDCs.
“The BIS has also admitted that CBDCs allow complete transaction transparency,” he said. “Hinging access to money on a digital identity inclusive of a complete (political) profile--one can easily imagine the Orwellian possibilities that this would entail.”
“It represents the closing of the totalitarian circle.”
OpenAI will start allowing users to access its free-to-use ChatGPT generative AI chatbot without needing to sign up for the service beginning Monday, the Microsoft
MSFT-backed startup said on Monday.
ChatGPT, which kickstarted the GenAI boom in late 2022, can mimic human conversation and perform tasks such as creating summaries of long text, writing poems and even generating ideas for a theme party.
The San Francisco-based company said that it will gradually roll out the feature to "make AI accessible to anyone curious about its capabilities."
The popular service, which set a record for the fastest-growing user base, has seen its growth slow down since May 2023, when its traffic peaked at 1.8 billion web visits, according to data analytics firm Similarweb.
OpenAI said it has introduced additional content safeguards for users accessing ChatGPT without signing up, such as blocking prompts and generations in a wider range of categories. It did not specify these categories.
Apart from the free version of ChatGPT, which does not have direct access to the internet, OpenAI also offers paid versions for individuals, team users and enterprises.
The company also said that it may use content provided by users to help improve its large-language models but said users can turn off the feature.
The move comes about a month after billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk sued OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, saying they abandoned the startup's original mission to develop artificial intelligence for the benefit of humanity and not for profit.
OpenAI said it has developed a tool that can clone human voices from just 15 seconds of recorded audio — but it hasn’t yet released it to the public over fears that it will be misused, especially during the 2024 election.
Called Voice Engine, the software was first developed in 2022 and integrated into ChatGPT’s text-to-speech feature.
But beginning in late 2023, OpenAI “started privately testing it with a small group of trusted partners,” the artificial intelligence giant said in a blog post earlier reported on by The Guardian.
The company said that it was “impressed” by the applications of Voice Engine, which have included providing reading assistance to non-readers, serving as an educational tool for children and translating content.
In one of its most impressive use cases, researchers at the Norman Prince Neurosciences Institute in Rhode Island used a poor-quality, 15-second clip of a young woman giving a presentation at school who has since lost her voice to a vascular brain tumor to “restore” her speech.
However, OpenAI has yet to release Voice Engine to the general public because there are “serious risks, which are especially top of mind in an election year,” per the blog post.
“We are choosing to preview but not widely release this technology at this time,” OpenAI said, “to bolster societal resilience against the challenges brought by ever more convincing generative models.”
It wasn’t immediately clear when OpenAI would debut Voice Engine at a larger scale, though in the near future, it said: “We encourage steps like phasing out voice-based authentication as a security measure for accessing bank accounts and other sensitive information.”
We hope to start a dialogue on the responsible deployment of synthetic voices, and how society can adapt to these new capabilities,” OpenAI added. “Based on these conversations and the results of these small-scale tests, we will make a more informed decision about whether and how to deploy this technology at scale.”
Already, AI’s use has spurred misinformation, including when a deepfake image of Donald Trump resisting arrest as his wife Melania yelled at police went viral.
As a result, Google updated its policy last year to require “all verified election advertisers” to “prominently disclose” when their ads use AI. OpenAI, however, hasn’t followed suit.
The San Francisco-based startup, however, assured in its blog post that its partners with exclusive access to Voice Engine have agreed to usage policies that bars the impersonation of another individual or organization without consent or legal right.
“We are engaging with US and international partners from across government, media, entertainment, education, civil society and beyond to ensure we are incorporating their feedback as we build,” OpenAI assured.
Representatives for OpenAI declined to comment beyond the company’s blog post.
https://nypost.com/2024/04/01/business/openai-says-its-voice-cloning-tool-too-risky-to-release/
