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Hi! Chick-fil-A on a Sunday!? That could be a reality if one New York politician gets his way. More on his argument for why the popular chain should stay open and the locations that could be impacted.

In today's big story, we're looking at

• The hype cycle is as strong as ever, but has AI actually peaked already?
• No AI model has convincingly beaten OpenAI's GPT-4 since it was released in March.
• It raises questions about how much of a step-change in performance is possible from this point.

We are only one year into a post-ChatGPT

• Israel's campaign in Gaza started in the north but has now shifted to the southern area.
• Researchers mapping the damage say more than a third of the buildings in the strip have been destroyed.
• Tens of thousands of munitions — a mix of precision and unguided — have been dropped on the enclave.

Israel's continued

The generative AI movement may dominate today’s headlines, but another technological transformation is gaining momentum under the radar—the proliferation of autonomous service robots. Their surge in popularity continues to be fueled by their ability to improve efficiency and reduce the need for manual labor in repetitive, hazardous tasks, as well as more recent advancements in sensor fusion and

Adobe just abandoned its $20 billion deal to buy Figma, and now we know why. In an interview on the Decoder podcast with The Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel, Adobe general counsel Dana Rao said that the company couldn’t prove to European regulators that the acquisition wouldn’t harm competition in the future — that is, that Adobe

Michael Mann’s biopic of the Italian sports car maker feels at home in the director’s canon of obsessive men. But have we been here before too many times?

Continue reading…

• The FTC banned Rite Aid from using facial recognition technology in its stores for five years.
• The software was meant to alert staff when suspected criminals entered Rite Aid stores.
• But it generated thousands of false matches, the FTC said.

The Federal Trade Commission has banned Rite Aid from using facial recognition technology in its stores for five years, saying that it

• Google Brain cofounder Andrew Ng thinks AI and nuclear weapons shouldn't ever be compared.
• Ng was referring to a statement from the Center for AI Safety that linked the two.
• Ng told the FT that the statement was "unfortunate" and had distorted thinking among regulators.

Google Brain cofounder

• Yemen's Iran-linked Houthi rebels are attacking ships in the Red Sea.
• MSC, Maersk, and oil giant BP have responded by rerouting vessels away from the Suez Canal.
• The chaos has reignited fears about higher oil prices and could drive up inflation, according to analysts.

Attac

Smartphones — the gadgets I spend most of my waking hours thinking about, testing, and tinkering with — are generally considered a mature product category. This means that, in any of the previous, oh, five years, you’d struggle to find a big defining moment for the industry. Likewise, there was no “iPhone”

• Russia's war in Ukraine created new smuggling opportunities for the country's criminal underground.
• The most lucrative items to smuggle into the country are designer handbags, according to a new report. 
• But more worrisome is smuggled

• The Colorado Supreme Court ruled to bar Trump from the 2024 ballot. 
• It cited the 14th Amendment rule barring insurrectionists. 
• But even critics of Trump believe voters should decide his political fate. 

The campaign to bar Donald Trump from office appeared to score an astonishing