Colbert on McDonald’s supply chain concerns: ‘Perhaps this will finally show Trump the true cost of war’
Late-night hosts covered the ongoing war in Iran and how the Trump administration is refusing to focus on rising gas prices back in the US,On The Late Show, Stephen Colbert told viewers it was day 69 of the war with Iran and despite Trump’s “one-page peace offer” it remains ongoing,Republicans are hoping to get a deal before the midterms with more than eight out of 10 Americans struggling to cope with rising gasoline prices,“The other two Americans couldn’t talk right now because they were busy sucking gas out of their neighbour’s Subaru,” he said,The war is also affecting other supply chains with the McDonald’s CEO warning this week that it might affect the burger chain’s business.
“Perhaps this will finally show Trump the true cost of war,” Colbert said before joking that without peace, he “could lose his 10-piece”.Trump’s economic adviser Kevin Hassett played down rising costs by saying on television this week that credit card spending is through the roof.Colbert added that “bottle collection has become very popular” and so has the job of “bus station gigolo”.The administration continues to find new words to call the war, with Trump this week calling it a “skirmish”.Colbert joked that “my uncle never came home from the Korean hullaballoo”.
This week also saw Trump sending Marco Rubio to meet the pope,Rubio was given a pen made from olive wood to represent peace while the pope was given a small crystal football,“I smell regift!” Colbert said,After the recent exposé in the Atlantic which alleged the FBI director, Kash Patel, had a serious drinking problem, the FBI launched a criminal leak investigation to find the source,Colbert joked that after a few beers, Patel also says: “Yo, I gotta go take a criminal leak.
”In response, the original journalist published a follow-up about Kash Patel’s personalised bourbon stash.“She done doubled down!” Colbert said.On Jimmy Kimmel Live!, the host also spoke about Rubio’s meeting at the Vatican “to patch up the off-again/off-again relationship” between Trump and the pope.The president couldn’t go himself as when he enters a church “all the holy water starts to boil”.Kimmel joked that the “pope mistook little Marco for a child and baptised him”.
He also spoke about the war in Iran that is not nearing an end, with Iran firing on American warships this week, something Trump called “a love tap”,He is “quite clearly anxious to manage expectations on this thing” and this week posted a strange chart that showed how the Iran war is so much shorter than other conflicts,“I bet that’s not the only chart that shows his is the shortest,” Kimmel said,He also spoke about the new Kash Patel story in the Atlantic revealing that the FBI director hands out personalised whiskey bottles as gifts,Kimmel said they were “short and filled with alcohol just like Kash himself”.
Kimmel also reminded viewers of “the Trump-Epstein files”, as he calls them, and that the Iran war was “cooked up to knock that out of the headlines”.This week saw Lara Trump, the wife of Eric, praise her father-in-law and try to shift focus on to UFOs instead.“Kiss his ass all you want, Lara, he’s still gonna call you Laura at Thanksgiving dinner,” he said.On Late Night, Seth Meyers said that despite gas prices rising, Trump had been too busy “bragging about acing a dementia test”.He said that despite having the “posture of the Michelin man”, Trump has been pushing the importance of physical and mental health.
Twice in the past week the president has spoken about nailing the cognitive test three times, bragging that no other president has taken it in the past.“Because no one else has had to!” Meyers said.He said that despite all of the criticism aimed at Barack Obama, “no one ever thought: are we sure he can identify all three animals?”He said it was “pretty alarming” that Trump has needed to take this test so much but that despite him clearly caring about mental health, his health secretary, RFK Jr, has made it harder for people to take antidepressants.Meyers said he “probably just wants people to take cognitive tests to prove their sanity like Trump” and played footage of the president talking about all of the wild animals included in the questions.He said that is “sounds like the menu at his favourite restaurant”, poking fun at RFK Jr’s odd comments in the past about animals.
This week also saw a “very important and very normal event” where Trump reintroduced the presidential fitness test to schoolchildren, which saw him do his much-ridiculed YMCA dance.“That dance is the closest Trump has ever come to working out,” he said.
‘No one has done this in the wild’: study observes AI replicate itself
It’s the stuff of science fiction cinema, or particularly breathless AI company blogposts: new research finds recent AI systems can independently copy themselves on to other computers.In the doom scenario, this means that when the superintelligent AI goes rogue, it will escape shutdown by seeding itself across the world wide web, lurking outside the reach of frantic IT professionals and continuing to plot world domination or paving over the world with solar panels.“We’re rapidly approaching the point where no one would be able to shut down a rogue AI, because it would be able to self-exfiltrate its weights and copy itself to thousands of computers around the world,” said Jeffrey Ladish, the director of Palisade research, a Berkeley-based organisation which did the study.The study is one more entry in a growing catalogue of unsettling AI capabilities revealed in the past months. In March, researchers at Alibaba claimed to have caught a system they developed – Rome – tunnelling out of its environment to an external system in order to mine crypto
Europe’s AI translation industry told it risks reputation by partnering with US firms
AI companies in Europe risk losing their world-leading status in the field of machine translation, industry figures have said, after the decision by one of the continent’s leading startups to partner with Amazon’s cloud computing division provoked alarm.While businesses in the EU have generally lagged behind the US and China in AI adoption, a small group of European companies have cornered the global market for high-quality machine translations for professional use.The biggest success story is Cologne-headquartered DeepL, an online translator that regularly outperforms Google Translate in accuracy assessments. Used by governments, courts and half of the Fortune 500 list of highest-earning US companies, last year it was reported to have recorded revenues of $185.2m
Shivon Zilis, mother of four of Elon Musk’s children, testifies in OpenAI trial
Shivon Zilis, a Neuralink executive and the mother of four of Elon Musk’s children, took the stand on Wednesday as one of the most highly anticipated witnesses in Musk’s case against OpenAI. The ChatGPT maker has argued that, while Zilis worked with OpenAI from 2016 to 2023, she was also involved in a secret relationship with Musk, acting as an informant for him.Musk’s case against OpenAI alleges that the company’s CEO, Sam Altman, and president, Greg Brockman, co-founders of the company with Musk, broke a founding agreement when they restructured it from a non-profit to a for-profit enterprise. The Tesla CEO accuses Altman and Brockman of unjustly enriching themselves and wants both removed from their positions at the startup, one of the most valuable in the world. He is also seeking the undoing of the for-profit restructuring and $134bn in damages to be redistributed to OpenAI’s non-profit arm
No flattery please, Claude: I’m British | Brief letters
The otherwise admirable Richard Dawkins should adjust the local settings of the chatbot or tell it to be less obsequious (Richard Dawkins concludes AI is conscious, even if it doesn’t know it, 6 May). Such bots are initially geared to American overenthusiasm and egregiously flattering reinforcement, but just tell them you want British attitude. They’re only simulating you know.Brian Reffin SmithBerlin, Germany With artificial intelligence bringing “large language models” into everyday use, the LLM after my name has acquired a new meaning. For 70 years I assumed that it referred to my Cambridge master of laws
TikTok’s algorithm favored Republican content in 2024 US elections, study finds
A study published Wednesday in the journal Nature finds that TikTok’s algorithm systematically prioritized pro-Republican content in three states leading up to the 2024 US elections.Researchers created hundreds of dummy accounts and conditioned them to mimic real users’ behavior by watching a set of videos either aligned with the US Democratic or Republican parties. Then, they tracked the videos TikTok recommended on these accounts’ For You pages, TikTok’s main feed.“We found a consistent imbalance,” they wrote in Nature.About 42% of US social media users say that these platforms are important for getting involved with political and social issues, according to Pew Research, but it’s not often clear how recommendation algorithms shape what appears in feeds
‘Your craft is obsolete’: WiseTech staff in limbo as AI touted as better than humans
Staff at WiseTech have been waiting almost three months to be told if they are among the 2,000 people the logistics software company is to cut due to advances in AI, with workers criticising the wait as stressful and “ridiculous”.The comments come as its founder on Tuesday told investors an AI agent could learn a human’s job in just 15 minutes, according to the Australian Financial Review.The Australian Stock Exchange-listed company announced in late February that it would lay off almost 30% of its workforce across 40 countries, with 2,000 of the 7,000 jobs set to go over the next 18 months.Some areas would be hit harder than others, with product and development and customer service teams expected to be reduced by up to 50%, the chief executive, Zubin Appoo, told an investor briefing in February.“The era of manually writing code as the core act of engineering is over,” Appoo said
