The miserable, utterly charmless razzle-dazzle of Joker: Folie à Deux 

La decisión de los Dodgers de que Yoshinobu Yamamoto sea titular en el primer partido de la NLDS contra los Padres demuestra lo vulnerable que es el equipo ante otra eliminación prematura de los playoffs.

Joaquin Phoenix, Lady Gaga and co-writer-director Todd Phillips bend the architecture of the comic-book origin story toward a musical, not all that tunefully.

The NL West showdown will be Shohei Ohtani's first MLB playoff series.

This week Travis Kelce’s mom Donna dishes on his meeting with Prince William. Queen Camila’s reportedly discouraging King Charles from reuniting with Prince Harry and there’s a royal baby on the way! In case you missed this week’s biggest news from across the pond, here’s your royal’s recap! Subscribe to our YouTube for more royal news!

Donna Kelce gave some insight into her divorce from Ed Kelce in Glamour’s 2024 Women of the Year: The Moms Issue. The mom of Travis and Jason Kelce revealed that she and her ex “stayed together” for the sake of their sons. Watch the full video to learn more about the rare details from football’s...

Halle Bailey and rapper DDG will no longer be part of each other's worlds — at least not romantically. The two have split up months after welcoming a baby boy.

A federal judge sentenced former Los Angeles Deputy Mayor Raymond Chan for his role in a sprawling City Hall corruption case that also brought down a former councilmember.

Terence Tao, a mathematics professor at UCLA, is a real-life superintelligence. The “Mozart of Math,” as he is sometimes called, is widely considered the world’s greatest living mathematician. He has won numerous awards, including the equivalent of a Nobel Prize for mathematics, for his advances and proofs. Right now, AI is nowhere close to his level.But technology companies are trying to get it there. Recent, attention-grabbing generations of AI—even the almighty ChatGPT—were not built to handle mathematical reasoning. They were instead focused on language: When you asked such a program to answer a basic question, it did not understand and execute an equation or formulate a proof, but instead presented an answer based on which words were likely to appear in sequence. For instance, the original ChatGPT can’t add or multiply, but has seen enough examples of algebra to solve x + 2 = 4: “To solve the equation x + 2 = 4, subtract 2 from both sides …” Now, however, OpenAI is explicitly marketing a new line of “reasoning models,” known collectively as the o1 series, for their ability to problem-solve “much like a person” and work through complex mathematical and scientific tasks and queries. If these models are successful, they could represent a sea change for the slow, lonely work that Tao and his peers do.[Read: OpenAI’s big reset]After I saw Tao post his impressions of o1 online—he compared it to a “mediocre, but not completely incompetent” graduate student—I wanted to understand more about his views on the technology’s potential. In a Zoom call last week, he described a kind of AI-enabled, “industrial-scale mathematics” that has never been possible before: one in which AI, at least in the near future, is not a creative collaborator in its own right so much as a lubricant for mathematicians’ hypotheses and approaches. This new sort of math, which could unlock terra incognitae of knowledge, will remain human at its core, embracing how people and machines have very different strengths that should be thought of as complementary rather than competing.This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.Matteo Wong: What was your first experience with ChatGPT?Terence Tao: I played with it pretty much as soon as it came out. I posed some difficult math problems, and it gave pretty silly results. It was coherent English, it mentioned the right words, but there was very little depth. Anything really advanced, the early GPTs were not impressive at all. They were good for fun things—like if you wanted to explain some mathematical topic as a poem or as a story for kids. Those are quite impressive.Wong: OpenAI says o1 can “reason,” but you compared the model to “a mediocre, but not completely incompetent” graduate student.Tao: That initial wording went viral, but it got misinterpreted. I wasn’t saying that this tool is equivalent to a graduate student in every single aspect of graduate study. I was interested in using these tools as research assistants. A research project has a lot of tedious steps: You may have an idea and you want to flesh out computations, but you have to do it by hand and work it all out.Wong: So it’s a mediocre or incompetent research assistant.Tao: Right, it’s the equivalent, in terms of serving as that kind of an assistant. But I do envision a future where you do research through a conversation with a chatbot. Say you have an idea, and the chatbot went with it and filled out all the details.It’s already happening in some other areas. AI famously conquered chess years ago, but chess is still thriving today, because it’s now possible for a reasonably good chess player to speculate what moves are good in what situations, and they can use the chess engines to check 20 moves ahead. I can see this sort of thing happening in mathematics eventually: You have a project and ask, “What if I try this approach?” And instead of spending hours and hours actually trying to make it work, you guide a GPT to do it for you.With o1, you can kind of do this. I gave it a problem I knew how to solve, and I tried to guide the model. First I gave it a hint, and it ignored the hint and did something else, which didn’t work. When I explained this, it apologized and said, “Okay, I’ll do it your way.” And then it carried out my instructions reasonably well, and then it got stuck again, and I had to correct it again. The model never figured out the most clever steps. It could do all the routine things, but it was very unimaginative.One key difference between graduate students and AI is that graduate students learn. You tell an AI its approach doesn’t work, it apologizes, it will maybe temporarily correct its course, but sometimes it just snaps back to the thing it tried before. And if you start a new session with AI, you go back to square one. I’m much more patient with graduate students because I know that even if a graduate student completely fails to solve a task, they have potential to learn and self-correct.Wong: The way OpenAI describes it, o1 can recognize its mistakes, but you’re saying that’s not the same as sustained learning, which is what actually makes mistakes useful for humans.Tao: Yes, humans have growth. These models are static—the feedback I give to GPT-4 might be used as 0.00001 percent of the training data for GPT-5. But that’s not really the same as with a student.AI and humans have such different models for how they learn and solve problems—I think it’s better to think of AI as a complementary way to do tasks. For a lot of tasks, having both AIs and humans doing different things will be most promising.Wong: You’ve also said previously that computer programs might transform mathematics and make it easier for humans to collaborate with one another. How so? And does generative AI have anything to contribute here?Tao: Technically they aren’t classified as AI, but proof assistants are useful computer tools that check whether a mathematical argument is correct or not. They enable large-scale collaboration in mathematics. That’s a very recent advent.Math can be very fragile: If one step in a proof is wrong, the whole argument can collapse. If you make a collaborative project with 100 people, you break your proof in 100 pieces and everybody contributes one. But if they don’t coordinate with one another, the pieces might not fit properly. Because of this, it’s very rare to see more than five people on a single project.With proof assistants, you don’t need to trust the people you’re working with, because the program gives you this 100 percent guarantee. Then you can do factory production–type, industrial-scale mathematics, which doesn't really exist right now. One person focuses on just proving certain types of results, like a modern supply chain.The problem is these programs are very fussy. You have to write your argument in a specialized language—you can’t just write it in English. AI may be able to do some translation from human language to the programs. Translating one language to another is almost exactly what large language models are designed to do. The dream is that you just have a conversation with a chatbot explaining your proof, and the chatbot would convert it into a proof-system language as you go.Wong: So the chatbot isn’t a source of knowledge or ideas, but a way to interface.Tao: Yes, it could be a really useful glue.Wong: What are the sorts of problems that this might help solve?Tao: The classic idea of math is that you pick some really hard problem, and then you have one or two people locked away in the attic for seven years just banging away at it. The types of problems you want to attack with AI are the opposite. The naive way you would use AI is to feed it the most difficult problem that we have in mathematics. I don’t think that’s going to be super successful, and also, we already have humans that are working on those problems.The type of math that I’m most interested in is math that doesn’t really exist. The project that I launched just a few days ago is about an area of math called universal algebra, which is about whether certain mathematical statements or equations imply that other statements are true. The way people have studied this in the past is that they pick one or two equations and they study them to death, like how a craftsperson used to make one toy at a time, then work on the next one. Now we have factories; we can produce thousands of toys at a time. In my project, there’s a collection of about 4,000 equations, and the task is to find connections between them. Each is relatively easy, but there’s a million implications. There’s like 10 points of light, 10 equations among these thousands that have been studied reasonably well, and then there’s this whole terra incognita.[Read: Science is becoming less human]There are other fields where this transition has happened, like in genetics. It used to be that if you wanted to sequence a genome of an organism, this was an entire Ph.D. thesis. Now we have these gene-sequencing machines, and so geneticists are sequencing entire populations. You can do different types of genetics that way. Instead of narrow, deep mathematics, where an expert human works very hard on a narrow scope of problems, you could have broad, crowdsourced problems with lots of AI assistance that are maybe shallower, but at a much larger scale. And it could be a very complementary way of gaining mathematical insight.Wong: It reminds me of how an AI program made by Google Deepmind, called AlphaFold, figured out how to predict the three-dimensional structure of proteins, which was for a long time something that had to be done one protein at a time.Tao: Right, but that doesn’t mean protein science is obsolete. You have to change the problems you study. A hundred and fifty years ago, mathematicians’ primary usefulness was in solving partial differential equations. There are computer packages that do this automatically now. Six hundred years ago, mathematicians were building tables of sines and cosines, which were needed for navigation, but these can now be generated by computers in seconds.I’m not super interested in duplicating the things that humans are already good at. It seems inefficient. I think at the frontier, we will always need humans and AI. They have complementary strengths. AI is very good at converting billions of pieces of data into one good answer. Humans are good at taking 10 observations and making really inspired guesses.

The FBI launched its Highway Serial Killings Initiative in 2009 after analysts noticed a pattern of murdered women – most living transient lifestyles involving drug abuse and prostitution.

New York Republican Congressman Michael Lawler is embroiled in controversy over a 2006 Halloween costume, when he dressed in blackface as Michael Jackson.

The new Knicks center-forward and his girlfriend, Jordyn Woods, stirred buzz that they might be engaged when she showed off a massive diamond on her ring finger.

Fast-food chains are already waging the Halloween wars with their slate of newly announced items. Burger King has four Addams Family-inspired items while Dunkin' gave a makeover to a fan favorite.

ReutersA former go-go dancer involved in Sean “Diddy” Combs’ alleged “freak-offs” said that Donald Trump, Diana Ross, and Paris Hilton were among the A-list celebs to attend the musician’s now-infamous parties. Adria Sheri English, 46, made the revelation in an interview with the Daily Mail on Friday, where she also alleged that she was “pimped out” by Combs and ordered to have sex with high-profile party guests—encounters she claims were secretly recorded and held by Diddy as “blackmail.”“He would send them in a room with me or another sex worker, record it, and then hold that over that celebrity or that influential person’s head and then basically use me,” she said. “It was like high-class temping, if you will.”Read more at The Daily Beast.

Behar's close friend Nathan Lane brought out a stripper dressed as a pizza delivery man during Friday's episode of the ABC talk show.

Elon Musk quips that people in Los Angeles have a strong negative response to the topic of former President Donald Trump.

Also this week: Road movies, including 'Paper Moon,' 'It Happened One Night' and 'Two for the Road,' plus a Guy Maddin retrospective that includes his new 'Rumours.'

Jugó fútbol con Vinícius Júnior en Brasil y recorrió la pasarela con su amigo Joe Burrow en París Ahora se dirige a Londres.

Alejado de la selección de Uruguay por su retiro, el ídolo nacional Luis Suárez causó un terremoto en Uruguay tras criticar fuertemente al entrenador de la selección, el argentino Marcelo Bielsa, y el tenso ambiente que se vive en el vestuario de la Celeste por los roces entre el entrenador y jugadores.

Jannik Sinner, el tenista número uno del mundo, “confía intensamente” que evitará un veto después de que la Agencia Mundial Antidopaje apeló la decisión de exonerarlo de cualquier delito después de sus dos positivos por dopaje.

A former porn star and go-go dancer who has accused Sean "Diddy" Combs of forcing her to have sex during his “freak offs” claims she saw the likes of Donald Trump, Diana Ross and Rev. Al Sharpton at his famed parties, a new report said.

Democrats said in a new report they were concerned that Vice President Kamala Harris' campaign's strategy of avoiding the media could cost her the election.

Although California dairy farmers anticipated a bird flu mortality rate of less than 2%, some say between 10% and 15% of infected cattle are dying.

WAUKESHA, Wis. — Lee Zeldin may not be repping the Empire State in Congress anymore, but after zigzagging the country making swing-state stops on the Team Trump Bus Tour, he has a message for New Yorkers: Though they live in a deep-blue state, their votes will truly count this November. The ex-rep was stumping for...

A new Marist poll finds that a majority of New York City residents want Mayor Eric Adams to resign after his indictment on federal corruption charges.

“It’s so weird!” Another mind-bending image is dividing the internet. A photo of a little girl’s footprints in sand was shared online by Australian TikTokker Alice James. She claims the footprints either look like imprints or as if they’re “coming out of the sand, like 3D.” James likened the optical illusion to 2015’s infamous blue-and-black...

The Harris-Biden administration helped out a South Korean solar company whose supply chain is tied to Chinese slave labor, a list of federally sanctioned entities shows, handing out nearly $2 billion to the firm to expand its presence in Georgia. Vice President Kamala Harris, 59, visited Hanwha Qcells manufacturing plant in Dalton, Ga., in April...

U.N. human rights office says the death toll in a brutal gang attack on Pont-Sondé, a small town in central Haiti, has risen to at least 70.

Rock star Bruce Springsteen spoke out in a video and said Trump should be disqualified from ever being president again.

Of the first three elements to appear after the Big Bang, only one is available to buy as a bath soak. The Sads Smashing Anti-Stress Bath Treatment, which comes in shiny silver packaging, lists lithium as an ingredient and promises to take users “from weighed down to mellowed out.” It’s one of dozens of over-the-counter lithium supplements that claim to support a healthy mood. The metal is also an ingredient in Novos Core, a supplement marketed to “target the 12 root causes of aging,” plus in Life Extension, XtendLife, LifeLink, Youngevity, and AgeImmune. The anti-aging entrepreneur Bryan Johnson’s “Essential” multivitamin includes lithium too. “I am on a 1mg daily dose,” Johnson told me in an email.Lithium, in other words, has become firmly entrenched in the wellness industry’s extensive library of supplements. But in crucial ways, it is unlike the other trendy products that dance across your Instagram stories. At higher doses, lithium is a powerful treatment for severe mood disorders—and preliminary evidence suggests that lower doses might improve well-being for people without mood disorders too. The problem is, American companies have little business interest in finding out how effective it really is.If you put pure lithium into water, it will explode into crimson flames, but mixed with acids, lithium forms stable salts. Lithium compounds also dissolve uric acid, which doctors in the mid-1800s believed to be the cause of many illnesses. Physicians began using lithium to treat “a wide range of ailments, including headaches, diabetes, asthma, indigestion, obesity, skin disorders, rheumatism,” Walter Brown wrote in his book Lithium: A Doctor, a Drug, and a Breakthrough. By the end of the century, lithia water (water with a trace amount of lithium) was marketed as a patent medicine. (In that era, patent medicines—trademarked, proprietary cure-alls, many of which contained alcohol or opium—were a popular alternative to going to the doctor.) 7 Up was originally named Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda, contained lithium citrate, and was marketed as a health tonic and hangover cure. Sears sold Schieffelin’s Effervescent Lithia Tablets, which were marketed for a variety of health concerns, including gout. Smithsonian National Museum of American History In 1949, lithium chloride, a table-salt alternative marketed to people with heart conditions, caused an outbreak of lithium poisoning in which at least two people died. The FDA, which had already started cracking down on patent medicines, quickly banned lithium in food products; later, researchers found that high doses of lithium can cause kidney failure, thyroid damage, tremors, and nausea. In 1970, the agency approved lithium carbonate for bipolar disorder; today, it’s also used off-label mostly for major depressive disorder. Then, in 1994, the FDA created the category of “dietary supplements,” which it does not evaluate, ushering lithium—mostly in the form of lithium orotate—back into a patent-medicine-like gray zone.For decades, scientists have debated whether the lithia-water craze had any truth to it—if low doses of lithium might benefit a larger population than people with mental-health conditions, maybe even everyone. Some researchers think it's worth investigating whether lithium is an essential micronutrient, like calcium or magnesium, with a recommended daily minimum of some yet-to-be-determined amount. Lithium carbonate is typically given at 600 to 900 milligrams a day for mood disorders. We get minuscule amounts of lithium from foods such as grains, potatoes, tomatoes, and cabbage. Depending on where you live and what mineral deposits are nearby, your tap water may also contain lithium. A 2024 review paper led by Allan Young, a psychiatrist at King’s College London, determined that most lithium orotate supplements on the market today contain a “micro” dose of 5 to 20 milligrams, and many have a “trace” dose of just 1 milligram. (The Sads Smashing Anti-Stress Bath Treatment contains 127 milligrams of lithium orotate, but it’s meant to be absorbed through the skin, not ingested.)[From the May 1928 issue: The secret of longevity]The effects of such low doses remain a mystery. Although a 2020 meta-analysis of studies from nine countries (including the United States) found that higher amounts of naturally occurring lithium in tap water are indeed associated with lower suicide rates, studies from places such as Switzerland and the East of England have found no association. In a 2021 study of rural Argentina, places with more lithium in their tap water had more suicides. Martin Plöderl, a co-author of the recent Switzerland study, told me that his team has found a publication bias in studies of lithium in tap water: Those with positive findings are more likely to end up in journals. Research into lithium’s effects on dementia, Alzheimer’s, and longevity has also been promising but inconclusive. A 2011 study of tap-water data from Japan found that the more lithium in the water, the longer people lived. Lithium consumption has been linked to longer life spans in flies, roundworms, and yeast, perhaps because it regulates molecules involved in metabolism and resistance to stress, Michael Ristow, a medical researcher at Charité University Medicine Berlin and co-author of the Japan study, said. A 2019 study found that bipolar-disorder patients who take lithium have longer telomeres—a proxy for lower biological age—than patients with other psychiatric disorders. And a more recent study from Japan found that people who took lithium for mood disorders had lower rates of dementia than similar patients who did not take lithium.These data are compelling enough for Ristow, who told me he takes a low dose of lithium every day. Nassir Ghaemi, a psychiatrist at Tufts University School of Medicine, did not comment on his personal use, but told me, “I think it’s beneficial in people who are middle-aged and older, who have any risk factors for dementia.” To really be sure, randomized trials in humans are needed. Because lithium is an ancient element, however, it can’t be patented—only novel inventions are available for intellectual-property protection. In order to obtain a patent, a company would have to come up with some different delivery method or other improvement. Pharmaceutical companies, which are regulated by the FDA, therefore have little reason to fund an expensive clinical trial, especially when cheap versions are already sold over the counter. But supplement companies have incentive to sell lithium OTC without conducting rigorous research on its effects. Zero clinical trials for lithium orotate are currently registered in the U.S., despite its widening market availability.Scientists don’t yet know whether lithium-orotate supplementation would yield different results than lithium in tap water. Only two studies on such supplementation have ever been conducted in humans—one from 1973 and one from 1986—and they have small sample sizes and no placebo groups. “Given lithium does work at least for preventing bipolar disorder, it’s a scandal that we don’t know how it works,” Young told me. If low-dose lithium remains akin to a patent medicine, Americans could miss out on understanding how and how well it works, and if taking it comes with any risks. In at least one case report from 2007, a woman took 18 tablets of a lithium supplement called Find Serenity Now at once and went to the hospital after vomiting. She was discharged with no other serious issues, but the risks of long-term use simply haven’t been assessed.[Read: I went to a rave with the 46-year-old millionaire who claims to have the body of a teenager]In the late 19th century, people such as Mark Twain and President Theodore Roosevelt traveled to Lithia Springs, Georgia, to drink lithium-rich water. The springs’ appeal endures: You can order water from its website, which states, “Locals have always believed Lithia Spring Water flows from the fountain of youth.” Lithium predates human life, is extracted from stone, and can have a profound impact on a person’s emotional life. No wonder it tempts our never-ending desire for some primordial cure-all, whether it be found in a groundwater spring or in our very own bathtubs.

On Friday, Eric Church shared that he will be transferring all the publishing royalties for his new song, "Darkest Hour," to the victims of Hurricane Helene.

“He planned a very special post-engagement party in my dad’s room in Chicago,” the actress said of her now-husband in a new interview with Vogue.

The U.S. and British militaries struck more than a dozen Houthi targets in Yemen, going after weapons systems, bases and other equipment belonging to the Iranian-backed rebels, U.S. officials said.

L.A. Comic Con's diverse lineup includes Ewan McGregor, Rosario Dawson, Michael J. Fox and ... Anjelica Huston?

Voters in the critical swing state of Michigan said that former President Donald Trump can win the state by focusing his message on the economy, inflation and jobs.

The stars hosted a pool party at Grand Oasis Cancun's beach club and performed a cabaret-style concert at the hotel's arena in honor of "Mean Girls" Day.

The Ocean Rebellion campaigners staged the frightening demonstration on the steps of the International Maritime Organization -- the UN agency responsible for regulating maritime transport -- in London on Friday.

Suni Lee made it clear that MyKayla Skinner's comments stung.

Taiwan's new representative in the U.S. is warning about the alliance among China, Russia, Iran and North Korea.

Some are shockingly inexpensive.

CNN/screengrabCNN data reporter Harry Enten says that one key statistic may spell serious trouble for Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign just one month out from the election—so much so that a win would be, in his words, “historically unprecedented.”In a segment with host John Berman, Enten analyzed the polling data around the question, “Do you think the country is on the right track?” Apparently, just 28 percent of Americans think that the United States is currently headed in the right direction under its Democratic leadership.Enten said that this a problem for Harris, the party’s nominee, given that, on average, this figure sits at 42 percent in years when the incumbent party wins the presidency and just 25 percent when it loses.Read more at The Daily Beast.

There are less graphic ways to describe Tampa Bay’s fourth quarter meltdown, though Wirfs certainly paints a succinct picture. 

Trump is returning to Butler, Pennsylvania, tomorrow for a rally at the site of the first assassination attempt against him.

The Social Security Administration will set its 2025 cost-of-living adjustment within days. Here's what the experts say.

She felt like they benefited from pretty privilege.

“He’s one of the greatest kids you could ever know,” the rapper said.

Sabrina Carpenter doesn't want critics of her lingerie-inspired outfits at her concerts. The "Espresso" singer hit back at criticism while on her Short n' Sweet Tour.

Beyoncé rocks a crop t-shirt, Naomi Watts puckers up with a pooch and more snaps...

The Federal Court has ruled X Corp has to comply with an Australian child sexual abuse transparency notice issued to the social media giant while it was still called Twitter.