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California officials and weather forecasters urged holiday travelers to avoid the roads and reconsider Christmas travel as a series of powerful winter storms brought relentless rains, heavy winds and mountain snow.Storms began to move in late Tuesday evening and were expected to intensify into Christmas Eve. Authorities said the millions of people expected to travel across the state will likely meet hazardous, if not impossible, conditions as several atmospheric rivers were forecast to make their way through the state, the National Weather Service warned.“If you’re planning to be on the roads for the Christmas holidays, please reconsider your plans,” said Ariel Cohen, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Los Angeles, during a Tuesday news conference.Forecasters said Southern California could see its wettest Christmas in years and warned about flash flooding, mudslides and debris flows in areas scorched by last January’s wildfires. Los Angeles County officials said they were knocking on the doors of some 380 particularly vulnerable households to order them to leave.Much of the Sacramento Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area were under a flood watch and a high wind warning through Friday. Forecasters warned heavy snow and gusts were expected to create “near white-out conditions” Wednesday in parts of the Sierra Nevada and make it “nearly impossible” to travel through the mountain passes.There’s also a risk of severe thunderstorms and a small chance of tornadoes along the northern coast.Heavy rain and flash flooding already led to water rescues and at least one death in Northern California, local officials said. Shasta County Sheriff Michael L. Johnson on Monday declared a state of emergency to prepare for more rain and allow the state to help with hazard mitigation and search and rescue operations.Southern California typically gets half an inch to 1 inch (1.3 to 2.5 centimeters) of rain this time of year, but this week many areas could see between 4 and 8 inches (10 to 20 centimeters), National Weather Service meteorologist Mike Wofford said. It could be even more in the mountains. Gusts could reach 60 to 80 mph (96.5 to 127.8 kph) in parts of the central coast.Officials expect multiple road closures and airport delays during the storms. Downed trees and power lines are also possible. Parts of Los Angeles are under evacuation warnings this week.The county put up K-rails, a type of barrier, around the burn scar to help catch sliding debris during rainstorms. Residents could also pick up free sandbags to protect their homes, said Kathryn Barger, a Los Angeles County supervisor representing Altadena.Many people in burn scar areas decided not to leave after receiving the evacuation notification, Los Angeles Police Department Chief Jim McDonnell said. He urged them to reconsider.“The threat posed by this storm is real and imminent,” he said.Local and state officials are gearing up to respond to emergencies through the week. The state has deployed resources and first responders to a number of counties along the coast and in Southern California. The California National Guard is also on standby to assist.An atmospheric river is a long, narrow band of water vapor that forms over an ocean and flows through the sky, transporting moisture from the tropics to northern latitudes. Associated Press writers Sophie Austin in Sacramento, California, and Jessica Hill in Las Vegas contributed to this report. Trān Nguyn, Associated Press
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The great power competition in the AI Age will probably be between OpenAI and Google, and one of the main battles may be over advertising dollars. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman seemed to describe the world in those terms during an appearance on the Big Technology podcast Monday. OpenAI, which is not yet profitable, is reportedly getting set to sell ads within ChatGPT in an effort to monetize the many free users on its platform. ChatGPT now has an impressive 800 million weekly active users, but only 35 million of them buy subscriptions. The ads, which could help pay for OpenAIs plan to spend $115 billion on infrastructure by 2029, could show up as soon as early 2026. As Altman pointed out on the podcast, Google was slow to put generative AI at the center of its products, especially search, its cash cow. Google has probably the greatest business model in the whole industry, and I think they will be slow to give that up, Altman said. Google became a two trillion-dollar company selling ads around its traditional ten blue links search results; answering search queries with AI-generated results would have meant lost revenueespecially for product searches. (Google has since developed its own AI search experiences and is experimenting with ads to match.) Altman believes Googles hesitation to go hard on infusing its products with generative AI has bought his company time and staying power. If Google had really decided to take us seriously in 2023, lets say, we wouldve been in a really bad place, the CEO said. I think they wouldve just been able to smash us. OpenAI believes (as Perplexity does) that Google will struggle to monetize AI search ads after spending decades perfecting a massive apparatus for selling ads around traditional search results. [B]olting AI into web searchI may be wrong, I may be drinking the Kool-Aid hereI dont think thatll work as well as reimagining the whole [business]. Altman said. He seems to suggest that his company is better positioned to reinvent web search and advertising because its a pure AI play. Its true Google was slow to evolve search (and search ads) toward AI, but the company still has some massive advantages when competing for brand advertiser dollars. It has amassed databases full of custom information that it can serve for certain searcheslike local business searches, weather, or mapping. And it has more ad targeting data than anyone else. There are very legitimate reasons to be concerned that OpenAI is going to eventually succumb to the Google behemoth, just as Yahoo, Microsoft, Blackberry, and countless others have, writes Stratechery analyst Ben Thompson in a recent newsletter. I still want to believe that OpenAI can be an aggregator, but they dont have the business model to match, and that may be fatal. Altman has said he has reservations about putting ads within ChatGPT, worrying that it might erode trust in the chatbots outputs. But it may be that advertising will be the way consumer AI is paid for, just like its the reason that much of the web has been free for decades. Ad dollars may let OpenAI maintain its pace in pursuing human-level AI models, its major goal. But going head-to-head with Google in web ads is a daunting task, and it may be one of OpenAIs biggest tests yet.
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A news segment about the Trump administration’s immigration policy that was abruptly pulled from “60 Minutes” was mistakenly aired on a TV app after the last minute decision not to air it touched off a public debate about journalistic independence.The segment featured interviews with migrants who were sent to a notorious El Salvador prison called the Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, under President Donald Trump’s aggressive crackdown on immigration.The story was pulled from Global Television Network, one of Canada’s largest networks, but still ran on the network’s app. Global Television Network swiftly corrected the error, but copies of it continued to float around the internet and pop up before being taken down.“Paramount’s content protection team is in the process of routine take down orders for the unaired and unauthorized segment,” a CBS spokesperson said Tuesday via email.A representative of Global Television Network did not immediately respond to a request for comment.In the story, two men who were deported reported torture, beatings and abuse. One Venezuelan said he was punished with sexual abuse and solitary confinement.Another was a college student who said guards beat him and knocked out his tooth upon arrival.“When you get there, you already know you’re in hell. You don’t need anyone to tell you,” he said.The segment featured numerous experts who called into question the legal basis for deporting migrants so hastily amid pending judicial decisions. Reporters for the show also corroborated findings by Human Rights Watch suggesting that only eight of the deported men had been sentenced for violent or potentially violent crimes, using available ICE data.The decision to pull a story critical of the Trump administration was met with widespread accusations that CBS leadership was shielding the president from unfavorable coverage.The journalist who reported the story, Sharyn Alfonsi, said in an email sent to fellow “60 Minutes” correspondents that the story was factually correct and had been cleared by CBS lawyers and its standards division.CBS News chief Bari Weiss said Monday that the story did not “advance the ball” and pointed out that the Trump administration had refused to comment for the story. Weiss said she wanted a greater effort made to get its point of view and said she looked forward to airing Alfonsi’s piece “when it’s ready.”The dispute put one of journalism’s most respected brands and a frequent target of Trump back in the spotlight and amplified questions about whether Weiss’ appointment is a signal that CBS News is headed in a more Trump-friendly direction. Safiyah Riddle, Associated Press
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