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Top Democrats Pelosi, Clyburn say Biden age concerns are ‘legitimate’ after debate

admin — Tue, 02 Jul 2024 20:57:15 +0000

Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., speaks during the anniversary of the Inflation Reduction Act event at the White House in Washington, Aug. 16, 2023.

Celel Gunes | Anadolu Agency | Getty Images

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, of California, and House Rep. Jim Clyburn, of South Carolina, both Democrats, said Tuesday it is fair to raise concerns about President Joe Biden’s fitness after he stumbled through his first debate with former President Donald Trump on Thursday.

“I think it’s a legitimate question to say, ‘Is this an episode or is this a condition?'” Pelosi said in an MSNBC interview, noting that the question should be asked of both Biden and Trump.

In a separate MSNBC interview shortly after, Clyburn echoed that it is reasonable to wonder whether Biden’s debate performance is a signal of a larger medical issue: “I’ll have to wait on the experts in medicine to give their opinion, because I’m not a doctor, so I have no idea the extent to which all of this may have occurred.”

Clyburn added he has a phone call with Biden scheduled for later Tuesday.

In response to Pelosi and Clyburn’s comments, the White House said questioning the president’s cognitive abilities is “fair” but that the administration has been transparent enough about his medical records.

“I get the question. It is a fair question to ask,” White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said at a Tuesday press briefing when asked about Pelosi’s comments. “As it relates to his medical records, we have been transparent, we have released thorough reports from his medical team every year.”

She added that Biden’s medical team does not find further cognitive testing warranted, despite his poor debate showing.

Jean-Pierre also said that Biden’s doctor, Kevin O’Connor, did not have any concerns about the president’s medical status after the debate: “Not at all.”

Pelosi’s and Clyburn’s comments come as Democrats monitor the scale of damage from Biden’s difficult debate. Several polls so far have found that the Biden-Trump rematch remains a near dead heat.

A new CNN poll published Tuesday found Trump with a 6-point lead on Biden in a head-to-head matchup, unchanged from the survey’s April results. The margin of error for that question was plus or minus 3.7 percentage points.

The poll surveyed 1,045 registered voters from June 28 to 30, the three days following the debate, which means it represents respondents’ immediate reactions.

Both Democrats reiterated their support for Biden for as long as he stays in the presidential race.

“I want this ticket to continue to be Biden-Harris, and then we’ll see what happens after the next election,” Clyburn said.

President Joe Biden is welcomed by U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn on his arrival at Columbia Metropolitan Airport in West Columbia, South Carolina, Jan. 27, 2024.

Kent Nishimura | AFP | Getty Images

Clyburn and Pelosi are two of Biden’s closest allies. Clyburn in particular was pivotal to Biden’s 2020 victory after his endorsement delivered a key boost and helped the president secure support among Black voters.

But their comments Tuesday marked some of the first from high-profile Democrats to publicly validate recent anxieties about the president’s ability to wage a winning campaign against Trump.

Several hours after Pelosi’s MSNBC appearance, her spokesperson, Ian Krager, redoubled her support for the president.

“Speaker Pelosi has full confidence in President Biden and looks forward to attending his inauguration on January 20, 2025,” Krager said in a statement to CNBC.

Despite Pelosi’s efforts to highlight her support for Biden, her earlier acknowledgment that there are concerns about the president opens the door for other party members to do the same.

U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Texas, on Tuesday became the first Democrat to officially call on Biden to withdraw from the presidential race.

A new Resident Evil is in the works

admin — Tue, 02 Jul 2024 00:13:53 +0000

“We’re making a new Resident Evil,” Nakanishi said during the show. “It was really difficult to figure out what to do after 7. But I found it, and to be honest it feels substantial. I can’t share any details just yet but I hope you’re excited for the day I can.”

That’s admittedly not much to go on, but I get the sense he’s hinting that this new game is the next major entry in the franchise. If that’s the case, we’ll have to see if Capcom calls it Resident Evil 9 or finds some sort of clever subtitle, like it did with the logo for Resident Evil Village.

The news of a new Resident Evil followed updates for a few other games. The just-announced Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster will be released on September 19th with improved graphics and some new quality-of-life upgrades. Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess, a new tower defense game in a setting inspired by Japanese mythology, is getting a demo today ahead of its July 19th release. (My colleague Ash Parrish was a big fan of the game at Summer Game Fest.) And Resident Evil 7 for iOS, which launches on July 2nd, will have an auto-fire feature to make the game easier to play with virtual controls.

Soma Golden Behr, Longtime Senior Editor at The Times, Dies at 84

admin — Mon, 01 Jul 2024 02:15:09 +0000

Soma Golden Behr, a longtime senior editor at The New York Times who was a centrifuge of story ideas — they flew out of her in all directions — and whose journalistic passions were poverty, race and class, which led to reporting that won Pulitzer Prizes, died on Sunday in Manhattan. She was 84.

Her death, in the palliative care unit of Mount Sinai Hospital, came after breast cancer had spread to other organs, her husband, William A. Behr, said.

Ms. Golden Behr, whose economics degree from Radcliffe led to a lifetime interest in issues around inequality, was instrumental in overseeing several major series for The Times that examined class and racial divides. Each enlisted squads of reporters and photographers for intensive, sometimes yearlong assignments.

“How Race Is Lived in America,” overseen with Gerald M. Boyd, who would become the paper’s first Black managing editor, peeled away the conventional wisdom that the country at the turn of the 21st century had become “post racial.” Its deep dives into an integrated church, the military, a slaughterhouse and elsewhere won the paper the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting in 2001.

Another series, “Class in America,” was an examination in 2005 of how social class, often unspoken, produced glaring imbalances in society.

And earlier, Ms. Golden Behr oversaw a 10-part series in 1993, “Children of the Shadows,” which pushed past stereotypes of young people in inner cities. The reporter Isabel Wilkerson won a Pulitzer in feature writing for her searing portrait in the series of a 10-year-old boy caring for four siblings.

Hired by The Times as an economics reporter in 1973 after 11 years at Business Week, Ms. Golden Behr was often one of the few women, or the only woman, at the table. She was the first to lead the national desk, appointed in 1987, and after a promotion to assistant managing editor in 1993, she was only the second woman from the newsroom to appear on the masthead.

“At five feet, 10-and-a-half inches tall, her presence could fill just about any room, and she rarely had to worry about men talking over her, which gave her an advantage over many women at The Times,” Adam Nagourney wrote in “The Times,” a 2023 book on the contemporary history of the paper.

Mr. Nagourney described her as “cerebral, contemplative and explosive, all at once,” and quoted her in an interview: “I’m a word salad; I explode a lot.”

Jonathan Landman, a former deputy managing editor of The Times, whom Ms. Golden Behr plucked from the copy desk to edit national correspondents, said her style was markedly different from other desk heads.

“She wasn’t an editor who said we need x to write y,” he said. “She’d say, ‘We gotta think about housing!’ What would then come after that was interesting conversations and memos, and she’d get people thinking thematically in ways that were different. It was something.”

Though Ms. Golden Behr was a pioneer, and she mentored other women at the paper, she did not see herself as an ideological feminist.

In 1991, during her tenure as national editor, the paper came under heavy fire over a profile of a young woman who accused William Kennedy Smith, a nephew of Senator Edward M. Kennedy, of rape. Critics inside and outside the newsroom accused the newspaper of voyeurism and shaming the woman by quoting a friend who said she had “a little wild streak.”

At a contentious newsroom-wide meeting, Ms. Golden Behr defended the article. “I am shocked by the depth of the response,” she said, adding, “I can’t account for every weird mind that reads The New York Times.’’

Ms. Golden Behr was the first woman to serve as the newspaper’s national editor and only the second to be on the masthead.Credit…The New York Times

Soma Suzanne Golden was born on Aug. 27, 1939, in Washington, D.C., the oldest of three children of Dr. Benjamin Golden, a surgeon, and Edith (Seiden) Golden.

She graduated with a B.A. from Radcliffe College and an M.S. from the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia. In 1974, she married Mr. Behr, a social worker and a psychoanalyst. The couple lived in Manhattan and Hopewell Junction, N.Y.

Steven Greenhouse, a former business and labor reporter at The Times, recalled that when Ms. Golden Behr was lured from Business Week in 1973, where she was chief economics writer in Washington, it was considered a coup.

“Making the coup even bigger at the time, Soma was a star who was a woman,” Mr. Greenhouse said. “She was hugely respected in the economics field.”

Four years later, Ms. Golden Behr was named to the editorial board. She was the only woman exclusively writing editorials, often on women’s issues, gay rights and inequality.

“After a few years she said something like, I don’t know that I have any more opinions, I’ve said it all,” Mr. Behr recalled. She moved on to edit the Sunday business section for five years.

Besides her husband, she is survived by their daughter, Ariel G. Behr, who works for a nonprofit that finances affordable housing; their son, Zachary G. Behr, an executive at the History Channel; four grandchildren; and a sister, Carol Golden.

On retiring from journalism in 2005, Ms. Golden Behr became director of The New York Times College Scholarship Program, which paid four years of expenses for students who had excelled academically despite difficult circumstances like homelessness.

When its funding was cut back, Ms. Golden Behr and a partner, Melanie Rosen Brooks, created a similar independent program in 2010, Scholarship Plus — an extension of Ms. Golden Behr’s desire to address inequality. Scholarship Plus, funded by donors, supports 20 students from poor backgrounds annually, supplementing their college financial aid so they can avoid student loans, attempting to put its scholars on equal footing with affluent peers.

Ms. Golden Behr sometimes missed the camaraderie of the newsroom. She would invite journalists she had worked with over the years — all of them women — to her home on the Upper West Side. Until the pandemic ended the gatherings, as many as 30 women would attend, driving from as far away as Boston.

Amazon is doubling value of credits for some startups to build on AWS as Microsoft cloud gains ground

admin — Sat, 29 Jun 2024 01:58:14 +0000

Amazon will double the value of credits it offers some startups to use its cloud infrastructure, CNBC has learned, as the company faces heightened competition from Microsoft in artificial intelligence services.

Starting July 1, startups that have raised a Series A round of funding in the past year will be eligible for $200,000 in credits through AWS’ Activate program, up from $100,000 before, the Amazon cloud unit said in an email to venture capitalists this week. Seed-stage startups will still be eligible for $100,000 in credits, AWS said.

Two people briefed on the changes confirmed the credit increase, though they asked not to be named because the information is private.

Matt Garman, who was recently promoted to CEO of AWS after running sales and marketing, was meeting with founders in Silicon Valley this week, the people said. Garman told the execs that collaborating with startups would always be a primary focus, one of the people said, adding that Garman described AI companies as AWS’ ideal customers.

An AWS spokesperson confirmed the increase in credits and Garman’s visit to Silicon Valley. The spokesperson added that in the past, the $100,000 would expire in one year, while the $200,000 credit will now expire in three years.

Amazon, which is best known for its massive online retail operation, derives most of its profit from AWS, a business it launched in 2006, well before rivals Microsoft and Google hit the scene. AWS leads the market, with $25 billion in revenue in the first quarter, up 17% from a year earlier.

But Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud are growing more quickly, and are benefiting from rapidly advancing AI models. Backed by Microsoft, OpenAI launched ChatGPT in late 2022 on Azure, and has since attracted a wave of AI workloads to Microsoft from companies big and small. Google has a number of large language models, most notably Gemini.

Amazon has been trying to catch up in generative AI and has poured billions of dollars into OpenAI challenger Anthropic.

Last month, AWS CEO Adam Selipsky announced his resignation after three years running the business, with Garman named as his successor. During Selipsky’s time at the helm, Microsoft and Google increased their share of the cloud infrastructure market. One analyst told CNBC that Microsoft “ran laps around” AWS in generative AI.

Startups have long been fertile ground for cloud infrastructure companies, as they try and lure ambitious founders who could be building the next multibillion-dollar business.

In November, Microsoft announced a partnership with Silicon Valley accelerator Y Combinator that would provide participating startups with $350,000 in Azure credits and access to graphics processing units (GPUs) for training AI models, a spokesperson said. Microsoft has since extended the $350,000 credit incentive to other accelerators, including the AI Grant.

Startups enrolled in Microsoft’s Founders Hub program, which doesn’t require previous venture funding, can receive up to $150,000 in Azure credits over four years.

In addition to its Activate offering, Amazon has a new 10-week generative AI accelerator program. Participants will be able to access up to $1 million in cloud credits, according to the website.

Earlier on Friday, Amazon’s head scientist, Rohit Prasad, told employees that the company has hired David Luan, co-founder and CEO of AI startup Adept, along with some of Luan’s colleagues. “Amazon is also licensing Adept’s agent technology, family of state-of-the-art multimodal models, and a few datasets,” Adept said in a blog post.

WATCH: AWS will boost investments in Singapore’s cloud infrastructure by $9 billion

Peter Thiel says, ‘If you hold a gun to my head I’ll vote for Trump’ though he isn’t backing campaign

admin — Fri, 28 Jun 2024 01:43:25 +0000

Then-president-elect Donald Trump shakes the hand of Peter Thiel during a meeting with technology executives at Trump Tower, December 14, 2016 in New York City.

Getty Images

Peter Thiel, once one of Donald Trump’s major financial backers in the tech industry, said Thursday that even though he’s not providing money to the Republican presumptive nominee’s campaign this time around, he’d vote for him over President Joe Biden.

“If you hold a gun to my head, I’ll vote for Trump,” Thiel said in an interview on stage at the Aspen Ideas Festival. “I’m not going to give any money to his super PAC.”

Thiel donated $1.25 million to Trump’s campaign in 2016 at a time when the vast majority of tech money was going to Democratic rival Hillary Clinton. Thiel, best known for an early bet on Facebook and for co-founding Palantir, also spoke at the Republican National Convention that year and, after the election, helped organize a meeting between Trump and top execs at Amazon, Apple, Google, Tesla and several other giant tech companies.

However, Thiel later soured on Trump and said last year that he wouldn’t be funding any politician in the 2024 presidential campaign. That’s after he spent $32 million on Republican candidates in the 2022 midterm elections with mixed results.

In Ohio, Trump’s pick, Republican J.D. Vance, defended a GOP-held seat against Democratic Rep. Tim Ryan. But in Arizona, Republican Blake Masters failed in his bid to unseat Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly.

WATCH: Tech for Trump

BMW M5 gets its first plug — and gains a lot of weight

admin — Wed, 26 Jun 2024 22:22:33 +0000

BMW’s 2025 BMW M5, which is coming as a plug-in electric hybrid (PHEV) for the first time, will be a husky vehicle. With an electric motor to go along with its 4.4-liter V8 engine, the sedan will weigh in at a hefty 5,390 pounds when it launches during the fourth quarter of 2024.

That makes the new M5 about 1,000 pounds heavier than the 2023 model that preceded it. It also weighs more than trucks like the 2022 Chevrolet Tahoe (5,356 pounds), the 2024 Lucid Air Sapphire (5,336 pounds), and the 2024 Range Rover Sport (5,090 pounds), Motor1 noted today. Unlike Lucid’s EV, though, the M5 can’t blame as much of its heft on the battery, which is only big enough to go 25 miles without using gas.

The new M5 PHEV can go from 0–60mph in 3.4 seconds and tops out at 190mph under gas power if you get BMW’s M Driver’s Package. Using just the electric motor, it can go as fast as about 87mph. By default, the car runs in hybrid mode, using both internal combustion and electric power, with the output ratio of each determined by how the driver configures the car in the M Setup menu. And when the battery gets low, BMW says the engine will start outputting more power to charge it.

BMW Vision Neue Klasse X on the road

Image: BMW

Future BMW M model EVs will use the company’s own internally developed batteries and EV motors, M program boss Franciscus Van Meel recently told Road & Track.

That platform includes new systems to detect and relay sensor data to the car’s central computer, which the M division has been involved in developing. Van Meel said BMW’s EVs equipped with this system, dubbed Heart of Joy, would “react ten times faster than before” to things like wheelspin or locked-up brakes, along with enhancements to stability control, traction control, and overall performance.

Boebert Wins a Crowded Primary After Swapping Districts in Colorado

admin — Wed, 26 Jun 2024 02:56:17 +0000

Representative Lauren Boebert, the MAGA lightning rod who switched districts in Colorado to avoid being ousted from the House, won a crowded Republican primary on Tuesday in a conservative area of the state, all but ensuring that she will serve another two years in Congress.

Ms. Boebert, a two-term Republican, overcame multiple challengers in the eastern plains of Colorado, nearly guaranteeing that she will prevail over her Democratic rival in November in the solidly red Fourth Congressional District. The Associated Press called the race for her less than half an hour after polls closed as she led by a wide margin.

An outspoken right-wing lawmaker, Ms. Boebert first won her seat in 2020 after upsetting an incumbent Republican in a primary. She made a name for herself with strong pro-gun views, packing a Glock on her hip and encouraging staff at her now closed restaurant to openly carry handguns. In Congress, she has become known for her strident MAGA views and has become entangled in a series of personal scrapes, including being ejected from a Denver theater in a lascivious episode that was caught on closed-circuit camera.

Facing a strong Democratic threat in the sprawling western Colorado district where she was first elected, Ms. Boebert chose to relocate to eastern Colorado to give herself a better chance of remaining in the House — and it appears to have worked.

The seat was vacated earlier this year by Ken Buck, a Republican who left Congress before the end of his term and will be replaced temporarily by Greg Lopez, a Republican former mayor of Parker who won a separate special election on Tuesday. Ms. Boebert did not run in the special election, since that would have required her giving up her current seat, cutting into the thin Republican majority.

Former President Donald J. Trump endorsed her, and her national profile helped her raise significantly more money than her five primary opponents, who split the anti-Boebert vote and enabled her victory despite claims that she was carpetbagging by suddenly changing her residence.

Ms. Boebert narrowly won re-election in her original district in 2022 by just over 500 votes and would have again faced a challenge from Adam Frisch, a Democrat who made the race close two years ago with little outside help. This go-round, he was drawing strong financial support from Democrats who saw a chance to oust Ms. Boebert.

Now, with Ms. Boebert gone, Democrats are hoping to pick up the seat she now holds in the conservative district, which includes high-end ski resorts as well as energy facilities and working ranches. Democrats boosted a right-wing conservative in a crowded primary there, gambling that a far-right Republican might be easier for Mr. Frisch to defeat in November.

But the effort came up short when Jeff Hurd, a Grand Junction lawyer, won the Republican nomination on Tuesday, giving the party establishment the candidate it preferred against Mr. Frisch.

Kyla Scanlon explains Gen Z’s divided attitudes toward investing

admin — Sat, 22 Jun 2024 15:00:01 +0000

Economic commentator Kyla Scanlon is noticing a potentially worrying trend in the investing outlook among younger generations.

“It’s a bifurcated world,” she told CNBC’s “ETF Edge” this week.

Scanlon, 26, who rose to prominence through her social media videos on the market and economy, explained why some members of Generation Z are aggressively saving for milestones like retirement, while others are taking a far more lax approach.

“You do have these people who are maxing out their 401(k)s. They’re doing everything they can to plan for retirement,” she said. “But then you have the other side, which is an element to financial nihilism, where people don’t want to save for retirement. They don’t want to save money in general because they don’t believe the future is there.”

Scanlon is aiming to bridge Gen Z’s divided financial attitudes with her new book, “In This Economy? How Money and Markets Really Work.”

“Financial education is always going to be an uphill battle, just because money is such a personal subject. But it’s important that we give people the tools that they need to start somewhere,” she said.

She points to the housing market as a prime example of where young people are falling behind. Gen Zers represented just 3% of total home buyers in 2023, according to a recent report from the National Association of Realtors — a statistic Scanlon attributes to higher interest rates.

“The younger generation definitely wants [homeownership], because there’s a lot of financial benefit to having equity,” she said. “People are just trying to figure out how to do that financially right now, considering where mortgage rates are, considering where home prices have been. It’s difficult.”

Disclaimer

Nvidia remains a little-known brand despite briefly passing Apple, Microsoft in market cap

admin — Sat, 22 Jun 2024 12:30:01 +0000

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang makes a speech at an event at COMPUTEX forum in Taipei, Taiwan June 4, 2024.

Ann Wang | Reuters

Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Google were the four leading global brands at the end of 2023, according to consulting firm Interbrand. They’re are also four of the world’s five most valuable companies.

The other is Nvidia, which for a time this week, surpassed Microsoft to become the largest company in the world by market cap.

But despite its $3.1 trillion valuation (it reached $3.3 trillion before a two-day slide), Nvidia doesn’t even crack the top 100 most iconic names on Interbrand’s most recent list, which is populated by such companies as McDonald’s, Starbucks, Disney and Netflix.

Nvidia’s historic rise in valuation — the stock has climbed almost ninefold since the end of 2022 — has been driven almost entirely by demand for its graphics processing units (GPUs) that are at the heart of the boom in generative artificial intelligence and, more broadly, by the hype over AI. Nvidia has over 80% of the market for chips used to train and deploy AI software like ChatGPT. A handful of huge tech companies are the primary buyers of its chips.

The speed of Nvidia’s ascent and its relative lack of contact with consumers along the way combines to put the 31-year-old company’s brand recognition on Main Street far behind its allure on Wall Street. No. 100 on Interbrand’s list for 2023 is Japanese camera maker Canon, with Dutch brewer Heineken at No. 99.

“As a product company recently moving onto a global stage, Nvidia has not had time, nor has it dedicated resources, to change its role of brand and strengthen its brand to protect future revenue,” Greg Silverman, Interbrand’s global director of brand economics, said in an email. The risk for Nvidia, Silverman added, is that its “weak brand strength will limit how valuable it will be, despite its market cap heights.”

A spokesperson for Nvidia declined to comment.

Nvidia’s annual revenue growth has exceeded 200% in each of the past three quarters. For fiscal 2025, revenue is expected to almost double from a year earlier to over $120 billion, according to LSEG.

The company’s data center GPUs, which made up 85% of sales in the most recent quarter, are installed in massive facilities, and typically require a team of expensive data science and supercomputing experts to configure them to efficiently create AI software.

By contrast, Apple, ranked No. 1 by Interbrand, makes the vast majority of its money by selling iPhones and other devices to consumers across the globe. Microsoft, ranked second, is an enterprise sales giant, but is ubiquitously known for its Windows and Office software. Third-ranked Amazon strives to be consumers’ everything store, and No. 4 Google is, for many people, the front door to the internet.

Rounding out Interbrand’s top 10 are South Korean electronics giant Samsung, along with three car companies (Toyota, Mercedes-Benz and BMW), Coca-Cola and Nike.

Further down the list, at No. 24, is Nvidia rival Intel, which is best known for making the processor at the heart of laptops and PCs and for its long-running “Intel Inside” advertising campaign. Even Hewlett Packard Enterprise, a company that builds servers, made the list at No. 91.

Gamers love it

However, a competing survey shows that Nvidia’s brand value is catching up to that of its peers.

In a ranking of the 100 most valuable global brands published this month by Kantar BrandZ, Nvidia landed at No. 6, leaping 18 places from its prior survey. The brand’s overall valued jumped 178% in a year to an estimate of about $202 billion. Kantar surveys enterprise buyers to evaluate brands that primarily sell to other businesses to come up with a total estimate of brand value.

“Nvidia is pound for pound as relevant and meaningful to that B2B buyer that’s looking to make big, large purchases in-house for their company as Apple is to the consumer who’s buying an iPad or a Mac,” Marc Glovsky, senior brand strategist at Kantar, told CNBC.

And while Nvidia may not be a name known to your parents — or your kids — it does have resonance in a particular corner of the consumer world. Just ask your hard-core gaming buddy.

When Nvidia was founded in 1991, AI was a nascent field. The company’s primary focus was on designing chips that could draw digital triangles quickly, a basic capability that led to a huge expansion in 3D games.

For years, Nvidia, and its GeForce brand and green logo were well known to the type of people who tweaked their computers to run the most advanced games. Nvidia provides the chips for the Nintendo Switch console, which has shipped over 140 million units around the world.

A Nintendo Switch console.

Philip Fong | AFP | Getty Images

Unlike Intel, Nvidia never put its name in front of consumers with flashy ad campaigns. And gaming is now just a nice side business for chipmaker. In the latest quarter, it accounted for $2.6 billion of revenue, or 10% of total sales, rising 18% year over year.

When it comes to Nvidia’s most important products, companies and institutions vying for its AI chips have to go through an extensive quoting and sales process, often through a computer-equipment company, like Dell or HPE. Those vendors sell complete systems, including memory, a central processor and other parts. Even experts who want to train AI models are more likely to rent Nvidia access through a cloud provider than build their own server clusters.

Still, Nvidia’s name recognition is rapidly increasing. Among retail investors, Nvidia has emerged as the most widely held stock, according to data collected and published last month by Vanda Research.

And while the name didn’t make Interbrand’s top 100 list for 2023, the firm’s data shows its brand awareness quadrupled in the past 12 months, which will help when it’s time for the next ranking, Silverman said.

Maybe by then people will know how to say its name, a topic that’d been the source of debate on obscure gaming forums. The company pronounces it en-VID-ia.

WATCH: The ‘Magnificent Seven’ should have another good earnings season

AT&T is still on the hook for offering landline service in California

admin — Fri, 21 Jun 2024 22:51:28 +0000

AT&T can’t pull the plug on landline service for customers across California. In a ruling on Thursday, the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) rejected AT&T’s request to release it from its obligations as a Carrier of Last Resort (COLR), as reported earlier by Ars Technica and CBS News.

AT&T has had a COLR designation in California since 1996, which ensures everyone in the state has access to affordable and reliable telephone service. Some people in California — especially those who live in remote areas — have come to rely on their landline service, as it allows them to make emergency calls even when the power is out or cellular service isn’t available.

Earlier this year, AT&T asked CPUC to be released from its duties as a designated carrier, citing the wide availability of mobile service and VoIP. In its request, AT&T argues the “economic justification” for COLR no longer exists because alternative voice services with “reasonable rates” and “based on superior technologies” are available throughout the state. The company adds that it “bears substantial cost to maintain and operate” the copper landline network, while competitors don’t have to. AT&T says it would continue providing landline service in areas where there is no alternative available.

“AT&T failed to demonstrate the availability of replacement providers willing and able to serve as COLR.”

However, CPUC rejected AT&T’s request. The agency says “AT&T failed to demonstrate the availability of replacement providers willing and able to serve as COLR.” The decision also cites public commenters who brought up the “unreliability” of mobile service and VoIP. AT&T is now pushing for new rules that would change the way California designates a COLR.

“No customer will be left without voice and 911 services,” Marc Blakeman, president of AT&T California, says in an emailed statement to The Verge. “We are fully committed to keeping our customers connected while we work with state leaders on policies that create a thoughtful transition that brings modern communications to all Californians.”