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In a push to roll back diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts in the government, the Trump administration ordered federal employees at multiple agencies to remove gender pronouns from their email signatures by 5:00 p.m. ET on Friday, according to internal memos obtained by ABC News. Those agencies include, but are not limited to, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Department of Transportation (DOT), Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR), and Department of Energy (DOE), according to ABC. The memos are said to reference two executive orders President Donald Trump signed on day one of his second term, seeking to gut DEI at government agencies and in its programs. “Pronouns and any other information not permitted in the policy must be removed from CDC/ATSDR employee signatures by 5 p.m. ET on Friday,” Jason Bonander, the CDC’s chief information officer reportedly wrote. “Staff are being asked to alter signature blocks . . . to follow the revised policy.” On Thursday, employees at the Department of Energy and Department of Transportation received similar orders, the latter while they were scrambling to respond to Wednesday’s deadly crash of an American Airlines jet, which collided with a Navy Black Hawk helicopter in D.C., plunging into the Potomac river near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport and killing all 67 people aboard. (Trump has lashed out against FAA workers, falsely blaming the crash on DEI.) DOE employees were told the pronoun changes were required by the executive order which requires “[DEI] language in Federal discourse, communications and publications” be removed. These directives come a week after Trump ordered all federal DEI staff to be put on leave, calling diversity and inclusion programs discrimination.
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E-Commerce
OpenAI released its newest reasoning model, called o3-mini, on Friday. OpenAI says the model delivers more intelligence than OpenAIs first small reasoning model, o1-mini, while maintaining o1-minis low price and speed. The company says o3-mini excels in science, math, and coding problems. Developers can access o3-mini through an API, and can select between three levels of reasoning intensity. The lowest setting, for example, might be best for less difficult problems where speed of response is a factor. ChatGPT Plus, Team, and Pro users can access OpenAI o3-mini starting today, OpenAI says, while enterprise users will get access in a week. The announcement comes at the end of a week in which the Chinese company DeepSeek dominated headlines after releasing a pair of surprisingly powerful and cost-effective AI models called DeepSeek-V3 and DeepSeek-R1. The latter, a reasoning model, scored close to, and sometimes above, OpenAIs o1 in a set of recognized benchmark tests. Were shifting the entire costintelligence curve, OpenAI researcher Noam Brown said of o3-mini on X. Model intelligence will continue to go up, and the cost for the same intelligence will continue to go down. He said o3-mini even outperforms the full-sized o1 model in a number of evaluations. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in December that the o3 series models demonstrate significantly higher levels of intelligence than the o1 models, including in computer coding and problem solving requiring advanced mathematics. The largest version of o3 also achieved the highest score yet of any AI system on a test called ARC-AGI, a logic and reasoning test designed to measure progress toward artificial general intelligence, meaning AI thats as smart or smarter than humans at most tasks. The o3 model scored 87.5% on the test (humans can score around 85%). OpenAI originally announced o3, along with a smaller version called o3-mini, in December, but said it would complete its internal safety testing, and get feedback from a group of outside safety and security testors, before launching the models. OpenAI said it would release o3-mini this month, and gave no release timeframe for the larger o3 model. OpenAI chose not to expose the o1 models chain of thought, and the same holds true for o3-mini. Researchers have shown that generating chain-of-thought can sometimes confuse models and pull them off focus. DeepSeek-R1, however, is trained to show its chain of thought, and Google announced in December a new experimental model called Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking that also shows its thinking. Reasoning models represent a new chapter in developing generative AI models. From 2020-2023 AI labs won almost all of their performance increases by pre-training their models with more data and computing power. That brute force approach began to show diminishing returns in 2024, so the AI labsOpenAI chief among thembegan to teach models to do more reasoning (and use more computing power) at inference time just after the user has asked a question or posed a problem. The model might generate multiple streams of tokens at once, then choose which one leads to the best answers. Or it might follow a certain branch of logic then iteratively backtrack after hitting a dead end. The model generates a lot of tokens, which must all be stored in a context window while the problem is being solved. This requires a lot of memory and a lot of computing power. OpenAIs first try at reasoning models with the o1 series wasnt perfect. The largest o1 model is very expensive to run and its needs a long time to reach an answer. The o3 models are said to do more reasoning at inference time, but return answers faster using less computing power.
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E-Commerce
Ever wonder how some of the stuff we use every day came to be? I think about it sometimes when Im at the stove with my favorite sauté pan, with its perfect trifecta of size, weight and performance. Or when Im struggling with the badly designed zippers on my otherwise-swanky new tote bag. Good design doesnt just come out of thin air. From the idea to the finished product, it can be a long road. One mind might have cooked up the product idea, but theres usually a slew of others who have a say in getting it to your store. At the beginning, every clever gadget and life-simplifying tool had an industrial designer who spent hours thinking about the components that make it so clever or life-simplifying. I talked to two of them, both winners of multiple design awards: Dan Harden of Whipsaw, a San Francisco-based firm thats designed all kinds of products, from water filters and home saunas to the little tags you stick on things you dont want to lose. And Scott Henderson, an industrial designer whose eponymous firm in Brooklyn, New York, designs products for brands youve probably got in the kitchen, nursery and bathroom. Moby spout cover for babies and tots If you have toddlers, you may have a little blue rubber whale, a Moby, on your bathtub spout. Henderson designed it for Skip Hop in 2008. Moby, made of a rubbery latex-free material called TPE, fits over the spout to protect kiddos from bumping into or touching the warm spout while theyre in the bath. Its tail can function as a hook, and the tubs water spout can be right where a whales blowhole would be. When Henderson is asked about his design favorites, Moby tops the list. I think it was a first-of-its-kind product that combined problem-solving innovation with an intrinsic soul and an iconic personality, he says. Pixar included a Moby-like spout cover, Drips the Whale, in Toy Story Toons. Working with boldface names in the kitchen Your OXO dustpan, T-Fal measuring spoons, Sunbeam Mixmaster and Chantal kettle also came from the imagination of Henderson and his team. If a product makes you smile, he says, it becomes easier to use. How do you get a blender or a spoon to make you smile? One approach I like is to design the object around one big idea, instead of 10 small ones. When someone can easily understand the purpose and the way to use a tool, thats a happy feeling,” he says. The experience is as much sensed as it is seen. The product makes them feel smart, and when they feel smart, they smile. A new kind of face shield for the pandemic During COVID’s disruption of the supply chain, many designers started 3-D printing personal protective equipment (PPE) for hospitals and essential workers. After brainstorming ideas with product development company ZVerse, Henderson and his crew had an idea: How about a face shield that attached at the neck instead of the top of the head a boon for food service workers, dentists and others? The ZShield was born. It also became popular for public appearances by celebrities like Jennifer Aniston, Brad Pitt and Michelle Obama. The shield was produced in North Carolina, instead of overseas. We bypassed the supply chain backlog,” Henderson said. Creating something useful is a sublime experience Henderson says the creative breakthrough for a new product idea is the most gratifying part. “It’s a dopamine explosion. And when millions of people start buying it? Says Whipsaws Harden: Its awesome to see your design out in the real world succeeding and making people happy. It starts with a thought that makes your heart jump. Followed by a sketch, then a computer rendering, then a model. Seeing a concept come to life like thats a sublime experience. Hardens design oeuvre includes the FreeSip, a collaborative product with water bottle maker Owala, part of Trove Brands. The product made TIME magazines Best Inventions list in 2023, as well as The New York Times list of best water bottles in 2024. Whipsaw also worked with fitness company Tonal on a smart home gym that has fans like Serena Williams and Lebron James. Instead of a bulky set of iron, the Tonal system is wall-mounted, with digital weights powered by electromagnets, and an interactive screen for virtual training lessons. Then theres the Tile tracker, which attaches to things like wallets, phones, bikes, carry bags and sports gear. Whipsaw worked with Life360 on refining the design for easy attachment, and came up with fun colors to appeal to new tech adopters and families. Design is incredibly fun to do, but there are challenges, Harden says. Keeping a vision alive for the duration of a project is hard, since there are many opportunities for it to get sidetracked by things like cost, product requirements and making sure the concept fits the brand. People think a designer has the proverbial big idea in the shower and snap, its done. Its way more involved than that. Rethinking the piano Also an accomplished artist and musician, Harden says his design aha! moment came while listening to classical music on a long flight. He got thinking about how instruments like the harp, violin and trumpet were beautiful to look at as well as listen to. What each of those instruments looks like greatly elevates the listeners musical experience. But then theres the piano. Its a big black box held up with three chunky legs, with a sound-reflecting lid thats kind of a functional afterthought, he said. Further, a pianist is watched in profile, so you miss much of the emotion on their face. So he started sketching out a sleek, smaller, front-facing piano that showed off its strings and mechanism to the audience within an evocative, wing-like silhouette. By the time I landed several hours later, it was conceptually worked out, and that soon became the Ravenchord piano,” he says. There’s more where that came from If these designers could redesign anything next, what would it be? Henderson would love to make city water towers more attractive; the standard silo with legs doesnt do anything for the look of the building it sits on, he says. Hes also bothered by the unsightly orange construction barriers that beleaguer cityscapes, and sees those as ripe for redesign. Harden thinks the common walking cane could use a rethink. Or really any product that serves our aging population, Id like to design,” he said. Creativity is the most precious of human traits, and theres no better life pursuit than to study, practice and actualize ones creative expression. Kim Cook
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E-Commerce
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