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LOS ANGELES (AP) — Black dandyism is taking center stage at the Met Gala, with cultural powerhouses leading this subversive, sharply tailored style into the global fashion spotlight. As a gala host committee member, Janelle Monáe and other trendsetters are helping shape the conversation, framing Black dandyism as a proud tradition — rather than a mere trend — claiming its long-overdue moment of visibility. “It’s always important to educate and reeducate to the world as much as we possibly can through art and through our greatness,” said Monáe, the Grammy-nominated performer who had made dandy style a signature of her…

NEW YORK (AP) — When the enigmatic street artist Banksy spray-painted a heart-shaped balloon covered with a Band-Aid on the wall of a Brooklyn warehouse, the nondescript brick building was instantly transformed into an art destination and the canvas of an unlikely graffiti battle.Almost as soon as Banksy revealed the piece back in 2013, an anonymous tagger brazenly walked up and spray painted the words “Omar NYC” in red beside the balloon, to the dismay of onlookers. Days later, someone stenciled “is a little girl” in white and pink beside Omar’s tag, followed by a seemingly sarcastic phrase in black:…

Amazon’s upgraded digital assistant powered by generative AI, Alexa+, has rolled out to over 100,000 users, CEO Andy Jassy said on the company’s earnings call Thursday. While that’s a far cry from the 600 million Alexa devices out there, the company is making some progress on the rollout of Alexa+, which was first unveiled in February. At the time, Amazon said that Alexa+ would roll out in waves over the coming months. Amazon’s new digital assistant aims to let users talk with it in a more natural style, and eventually have agentic abilities that allow it to use third-party apps…

Reddit CEO Steve Huffman says there are two kinds of people who come to the social media platform: Scrollers and seekers. Scrollers are the ones who come to Reddit’s core product, which is community conversation and engaging about topics they’re passionate about, from r/sourdough to r/popculturechat. Then there are the Seekers; the people who might type their specific query into Google Search and tack “Reddit” on the end so they can find real advice and opinions from real people.  Reddit Answers, the company’s AI-powered chatbot that surfaces verbatim answers and summaries from existing Reddit posts, is for the Seekers. And early…

A United States judge has issued a permanent injunction preventing the administration of President Donald Trump from using the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 (AEA) to deport Venezuelans from South Texas. Thursday’s ruling is the first of its kind — and is likely to be swiftly appealed. It follows similar, if temporary, orders barring the government’s use of the law, as Trump seeks the rapid removal of undocumented immigrants from the country. In his 36-page decision, US District Court Judge Fernando Rodriguez Jr ruled that the Trump administration had “exceeded the statutory boundaries” of the Alien Enemies Act, a wartime…

FutureHouse, an Eric Schmidt-backed nonprofit that aims to build an “AI scientist” within the next decade, has launched its first major product: a platform and API with AI-powered tools designed to support scientific work. Many, many startups are racing to develop AI research tools for the scientific domain, some with massive amounts of VC funding behind them. Tech giants seem bullish, too, on AI for science. Earlier this year, Google unveiled the “AI co-scientist,” an AI the company said could aid scientists in creating hypotheses and experimental research plans. The CEOs of AI companies OpenAI and Anthropic have asserted that…

United States President Donald Trump has announced he plans to reassign Mike Waltz, his national security adviser, removing him from his current role and nominating him instead to be ambassador to the United Nations. The revelation on Thursday comes after a morning of intense speculation that Waltz and his second-in-command, Deputy National Security Adviser Alex Wong, had been pushed out of their roles. “I am pleased to announce that I will be nominating Mike Waltz to be the next United States Ambassador to the United Nations,” Trump wrote on his social media platform Truth Social. “Mike Waltz has worked hard…

‘Tis the week for small AI models, it seems. On Thursday, Ai2, the nonprofit AI research institute, released Olmo 2 1B, a 1-billion-parameter model that Ai2 claims beats similarly-sized models from Google, Meta, and Alibaba on several benchmarks. Parameters, sometimes referred to as weights, are the internal components of a model that guide its behavior. Olmo 2 1B is available under a permissive Apache 2.0 license on the AI dev platform Hugging Face. Unlike most models, Olmo 2 1B can be replicated from scratch; Ai2 has provided the code and data sets (Olmo-mix-1124, Dolmino-mix-1124) used to develop it. Small models…

CLEVELAND (AP) — Shedeur Sanders is quickly trying to familiarize himself with his new work home.Sanders, who was drafted in the fifth round by the Browns last weekend, arrived in Cleveland on Tuesday and made a surprise visit to a local high school on Wednesday.He took questions from students in the cafeteria at John Marshall High School, about six miles (9.66 kilometers) from the Browns complex in Berea, Ohio.Included in Sanders’ message was a recommendation to stay focused and make good decisions.Shortly after becoming the 144th-overall pick in the NFL draft, Sanders told Browns reporters during a conference call that…

CLEVELAND (AP) — Shedeur Sanders is quickly trying to familiarize himself with his new work home.Sanders, who was drafted in the fifth round by the Browns last weekend, arrived in Cleveland on Tuesday and made a surprise visit to a local high school on Wednesday.He took questions from students in the cafeteria at John Marshall High School, about six miles (9.66 kilometers) from the Browns complex in Berea, Ohio.Included in Sanders’ message was a recommendation to stay focused and make good decisions.Shortly after becoming the 144th-overall pick in the NFL draft, Sanders told Browns reporters during a conference call that…