If Australia scrum coach Neal Hatley was in any doubt that there were some long days of hard work ahead for Australia at the Rugby World Cup, he was put right very early on Wednesday

Boston Red Sox starting pitcher Chris Sale said he felt "deflated' after hitting the 15-day injured list due to left shoulder inflammation.After a rough start to the season, Boston Red Sox starting pitcher Chris Sale began returning to his old form at the beginning of May. From there, ...

Singer-songwriter Sinéad O’Connor has died at 56

Stand-up comedian Matt Rife has admitted that he considered quitting the career befoe he got his first viral video on TikTok. Speaking on the Wednesday night edition of The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon the 28-year-old said opened up about his struggles in the industry. Rife, who has just sold out 260 dates on his ProbleMATTic World Tour, shared how dramatically his life has turned around in just over 12 months. He told Fallon: "I went from -- I mean, literally, July of last year, I was considering quitting comedy and everything. I couldn't sell any tickets at any comedy club. I wasn't getting any kind of break." The TikTok that changed everything for Rife was shared in July 2022 and is called 'The Lazy Hero' and has more than 39 million views at the time of writing, but had more amassed at least 20 million in just a few days. @matt_rife Not all heros are overachievers. #comedy #standup #standupcomedy #funny #crowdwork #improv #breakup #relationship #americanairlines The comedian added: "I reluctantly started posting on TikTok beginning of last year. I've always hated social media -- I think it's so negative and it just stresses me out." "The irony of doing something you dreaded doing changing your entire life." His first Netflix special Matt Rife: Natural Selection will premiere on November 15. Sign up for our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings

When Mohamad Orfali, the head chef and co-owner of Orfali Bros. Bistro in Dubai, received an email in

By Shankar Ramakrishnan and Davide Barbuscia In recent weeks, U.S. bond markets have bought into the prospect of

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By Dietrich Knauth NEW YORK Bankrupt Lordstown Motors must face trial over a rival carmaker's claim that Lordstown

Meta has created a new system that it says can generate convincing speech in a variety of styles – but will not release it for fear of the risks. The new tool is called “Voicebox” and can be set to create outputs in different styles, new voices from scratch as well as with a sample. It makes speech across six languages, as well as a variety of other tools such as noise removal. It says that it is a major development on previous speech systems that required specific training for each task. Instead, Voicebox can just be given raw audio and a transcription, and then be used to modify an audio sample. It is far more effective than its competitors, Meta claimed in its announcement. It can generate words with a 5.9 per cent error rate compared to 1.9 per cent from competitor Vall-E, for instance, and do so as much as 20 times more quickly. Meta said that it had been built on the foundation of a new model it called “Flow Matching”. That allows the system to learn from speech that has not been carefully labelled, so that it can be trained on more and more diverse data. Voicebox was trained on 50,000 hours of speech and transcripts that came from public domain audiobooks in English, French, Spanish, German, Polish, and Portuguese, Meta said. Now that it has been trained, it can be given an audio recording and fill in the speech from the context, Meta said. That could be used to create a realistic sounding voice from just two seconds of speech, for instance, potentially being used to bring voices to people who cannot speak or to add people’s voices into games. It could also be used to translate a passage of speech from one lanagueg to another in a way that keeps the style, Meta said, allowing people to talk to each other authentically even if they don’t speak the same language. It could also be useful in more technical scenarios, such as audio editing, where it can be used to replace words that were not properly recorded, for instance. But Meta said that the risks were such that it would not be releasing the model. It did not point to specific harms, but said that “as with other powerful new AI innovations, we recognize that this technology brings the potential for misuse and unintended harm”. Numerous reports have warned that such systems could be used to copy people’s voices without their consent and in ways that could be harmful, such as creating fake videos of news events or using people’s voices to pose as them during scam calls, for instance. “There are many exciting use cases for generative speech models, but because of the potential risks of misuse, we are not making the Voicebox model or code publicly available at this time,” Meta said in a statement. “While we believe it is important to be open with the AI community and to share our research to advance the state of the art in AI, it’s also necessary to strike the right balance between openness with responsibility.” It also pointed to a separate paper, published on its website, in which it detailed how it had built a “highly effective” system that can distinguish between authentic speech and audio that had been generated with Voicebox. Read More Mark Zuckerberg reveals what he thinks about Apple’s headset – and it’s not good Meta scrambles to fix Instagram algorithm connecting ‘vast paedophile network’ Reddit user’s protests against the site’s rules have taken an even more bizarre turn

By Jeff Mason and Steve Holland WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The White House said on Friday that Russia appeared to be deepening

Here’s a stat that might not surprise you: The average mobile phone user gets an

Russell Brand’s punishment by YouTube has drawn attention to another, alternative video sharing site: Rumble. While Brand has not been banned from YouTube in the wake of recent allegations, the site did say that it would remove the ability to monetise his videos there through advertising. In the wake of that recent announcement, some – including ex-Fox News presenter Dan Bongino, who is both a shareholder in the platform and one of its biggest stars – have suggested that Brand could instead take his videos to that site. He would be just the latest alternative creator, many of whom are conservatives who have run into moderation issues on other more mainstream sites, to focus on the platform. Already, even as he was able to use YouTube as normal, he has gathered a sizeable following on Rumble: Brand has 1.4 million followers, nearly as many as the 2.3 million he has on TikTok. Rumble began in 2013, and for a long time operated quietly as yet another video-sharing site that most of the world hadn’t heard of; Rumble says that its early years were about “empowering [...] small content creators”. It wasn’t until around 2020 that the site became the rising and alternative centre that it has become today. That happened largely because of controversies elsewhere, that pushed video creators and others off more traditional sites, rather than the pull of Rumble. But Rumble has been ready to catch those who have been forced away from the mainstream, with the promise of more relaxed content moderation. In that way it is much like other “alt tech” sites that spring up in response to restrictions on more mainstream platforms. Just as Donald Trump’s Truth Social aimed to offer an alternative to Twitter, for instance, so does Rumble try and challenge YouTube. What is Rumble? In practice, Rumble is much the same as YouTube: it features a search engine to find videos, a window to watch them in, and suggestions of what videos to go next. Its features are not quite as advanced or well-designed as its Google-owned rival, and the video player is more bare-bones, but it is nonetheless largely similar. It is the content moderation that really marks it out from other video platforms. That is markedly different from other sites. Rumble says that it is focused on working “to protect a free and open internet” and “support diverse opinions, authentic expression, and the need for open dialogue”. Its founder, Chris Pavlovski, has said that it is intended to be “immune to cancel culture” and avoid censorship. In reality, that has meant that it has become a home for those who have been banned for violating the moderation rules of other sites. Often, for example, that is because they have violated policies on coronavirus misinformation. Indeed, the pandemic was a particularly fruitful time for the site, apparently as users flocked to watch videos from those banned creators. Rumble says 2020 saw “order of magnitude increases” in its key metrics, and soon after it received investment from conservative venture capitalist Peter Thiel. Who else is on Rumble? Even though the company itself stresses that it aims to be neutral and simply resisting censorship, all of the biggest channels on Rumble are run by those on the right. The site gained particular prominence when it became the home to Andrew Tate, after he was blocked by other platforms, and he now runs a “TateSpeech” channel that has 1.61 million followers. Donald Trump also has a popular channel, and so does his son. But not all of the site’s popular users are on the right, or use it for explicitly political content. The streamer IShowSpeed has a show on the platform, for instance, after he was banned from Twitch, apparently for making sexually inappropriate comments on a stream. The site’s viewers also seem largely to be on the right. About three-quarters of those who use it for news identify as Republicans or lean towards the party, according to the Pew Research Center, in a study published late last year. What are the rules on Rumble? Rumble may be best known for its relaxed content moderation, but it does ban some kinds of behaviour. Today, its content policy is mostly aimed at banning stolen content, as well as video that are pornographic, promote illegal acts, and some other restrictions. Last year, it began a process of working on a new moderation process that aimed to protect users people from harassment. They suggested that the site should ban stalking, for instance, and for attacking other users based on legally protected characteristics. How does Rumble make money? Just like YouTube, Rumble makes money through showing ads before and during videos. And, just like YouTube, it offers a revenue sharing programme that gives some of the money made through those ads back to the creators whose videos they were shown on. Rumble also bought a platform called Locals, in 2021, which allows people to donate to people in return for exclusive content, in a similar way to the more popular Patreon. Russell Brand highlights his Locals account in his Rumble videos. Read More BBC reviews Russell Brand’s time at corporation as YouTube demonetises content How does Russell Brand make money online? Google’s powerful ‘Bard’ AI can now get into your email Google’s powerful ‘Bard’ AI can now get into your email Elon Musk recruiting humans to trial brain implant Starship rocket launch window revealed by FAA