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Alcaraz ends Djokovic’s Wimbledon reign in final thriller

MONDAY | July 17, 2023 | $1.00

DAILYREPUBLIC.COM | Well said. Well read.

Will the lull last?

State’s Covid-19 hospitalizations are near historic lows Tribune Content Agency SAN FRANCISCO — Covid-19 hospitalizations are close to record lows in California, an optimistic sign as the state attempts to navigate its first surge-free summer of the coronavirus era. It’s difficult to say what the rest of the season will bring, however. The coming weeks will help determine whether some kind of uptick in coronavirus transmission is on tap, or if conditions will remain relatively calm until the autumn and winter. The rate of new weekly Covid-19 hospitalizations in California – though near an all-time low – has been flat over the most recent two weeks for which data are available. Nationally, weekly declines are starting to level off, too, with hospitalizations on the rise in some parts of the country.

Throughout the pandemic, hospitalization numbers have proved a useful, if lagging, indicator of coronavirus spread. A significant or sustained jump in patient counts would probably mean the coronavirus is circulating more widely in a community. Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, a UC San Francisco infectious-diseases expert, said he suspects that signs of an increase in coronavirus transmission are probably real in some locations, although “it’s not at a high level yet. And we don’t really know how high it will go.” “Maybe it’s just an upand-down thing,” he said in an interview. “But it’s just a symbol that it’s something we can’t just forget about.” Regions to watch nationally include the South and Pacific See Covid, Page A6

Joe Raedle/Getty Images/TNS file (2022)

The FDA says Paxlovid significantly reduces the percentage of people with Covid-related hospitalization or death from any cause.

Shuran Huang/The Washington Post

Karla Ortiz, a concept artist, illustrator and fine artist based in San Francisco, draws in her notebook before

testifying at a Senate subcommittee hearing in Washington, D.C., Wednesday.

AI learned from their work Now they want compensation

The Washington Post SAN FRANCISCO — An increasingly vocal group of artists, writers and filmmakers are arguing artificial intelligence tools like chatbots ChatGPT and Bard were illegally trained on their work without permission or compensation – posing a major legal threat to the companies pushing the tech out to millions of people around the world. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and imagegenerator Dall-E, as well as Google’s Bard and Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion, were all trained on billions of news articles, books, images, videos and blog posts scraped from the internet, much of which is copyrighted. This past week, comedian

‘These AI companies use our work as training data and raw materials for their AI models without consent, credit, or compensation.’ — Karla Ortiz, in prepared remarks

Sarah Silverman filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Facebook parent company Meta, alleging they used a pirated copy of her book in training data because the companies’ chatbots can sum-

marize her book accurately. Novelists Mona Awad and Paul Tremblay filed a similar lawsuit against OpenAI. And more than 5,000 authors, including Jodi Picoult, Margaret Atwood and Viet Thanh Nguyen, have signed a petition asking tech companies to get consent from and give credit and compensation to writers whose books were used in training data. Two class-action lawsuits were filed against OpenAI and Google, both alleging the companies violated the rights of millions of internet users by using their social media comments to train conversational AIs. And the Federal Trade Commission See Work, Page A6

NASA’s new wind tunnel will turn science fiction to fact Tribune Content Agency NORFOLK, Va. — Flying cars. Space tourism. Safe reentry for astronauts coming back from Mars. These technologies are still science fiction, but some won’t be for much longer, according to Charles “Mike” Fremaux, NASA Langley Research Center’s chief engineer for intelligent flight systems. To test these concepts, particularly in regard to public and military safety, NASA Langley is building its first new wind tunnel

in more than 40 years. The NASA Flight Dynamic Research Facility, a project Fremaux has been pursuing for 25 years, will replace two smaller wind tunnels that are around 80 years old. The center’s most recent and largest, the National Transonic Facility, was built in 1980. “These facilities are really kind of tailor-made for doing a lot of that work,” he said at a presentation at the Virginia Air & Space Science Center in Hampton on Tuesday. The talk was part of NASA

Langley’s Sigma Series community lectures. “That’s not our traditional wheelhouse. We haven’t tested anything with a propeller on it in decades.” That’s because many new craft will depend on electric vertical takeoff and landing, or “eVTOL,” technology. With likely dozens or even hundreds of private vehicles in the airways, research is needed to understand how vehicles will react in realworld conditions. Fremaux expects some

of these technologies will likely be mainstream by 2040 or sooner. The $43.2 million federal government contract to design and build the 25,000-square-foot facility went to BL Harbert International, a construction company based in Birmingham, Alabama. It is expected to open in early 2025. The wind tunnel will be Tess Crowley/The Virginian-Pilot/TNS file 130 feet tall, Fremaux said, NASA Langley’s chief engineer for intelligent flight systems, comparing its capabilities Charles “Mike” Fremaux, gives a talk about NASA Langley’s to those it will replace: The newest wind tunnel, currently under construction, at the See NASA, Page A6 Virginia Air and Space Center in Hampton, Virginia, July 11. WEATHER 93 | 57 Becoming sunny. Five-day forecast on B6.

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