National Bank of Canada has agreed to buy the Canadian commercial loan portfolio of Silicon Valley Bank as

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Facebook owner Meta is working on a ChatGPT-style chatbot with the personality of Abraham Lincoln, according to reports. The new AI bot is part of a series of prototypes under development at the tech giant, the Financial Times reported on Tuesday, with each one featuring a different human-like persona. The new chatbots form part of the company’s attempts to boost its engagement with its social media platforms, according to the report, citing people with knowledge of the plans. Beyond the chatbot based on the former US president, the California-based social media giant is also exploring a chatbot that advises on travel options in the style of a surfer. The purpose of these chatbots, which Meta employees have dubbed ‘personas’, will be to provide a new search function as well as offer recommendations. The report comes as Meta executives are focusing on boosting retention on its new text-based app Threads, after the app lost more than half of its users in the weeks following its launch on 5 July. The Facebook parent reported a strong rise in advertising revenue in its earnings last week, forecasting third-quarter revenue above market expectations. The company has been climbing back from a bruising 2022, buoyed by hype around emerging AI technology and an austerity drive in which it has shed around 21,000 employees since last fall. Meta launched a new version of its open-source artificial intelligence model in July called Llama 2 for commercial use, which will be distributed by Microsoft through its Azure cloud service and will run on the Windows operating system. Bloomberg News reported in July that Apple is working on AI offerings similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard, adding that it has built its own framework, known as ‘Ajax’, to create large language models and is also testing a chatbot that some engineers call ‘Apple GPT’. Reports of a ‘Chat with an AI’ feature first emerged in June, when app researcher Alessandro Paluzzi shared screenshots of a new tool that offers users the option to ask questions and seek advice from up to 30 different AI chatbots on Instagram. Meta reportedly plans to launch the new AI chatbots in September. The Independent has reached out to Instagram for comment, though the company typically does not speak about unreleased products. Additional reporting from agencies Read More ‘I’ve got Elon Musk dying’: Voice clone baffles tech billionaire

A teenage boy was sent to a hospital with an unusual problem - a USB cable was stuck inside his penis. The incident, which was first documented in a urology case report in Science Direct in November 2021, apparently saw the 15-year-old arrive at the hospital as he had apparently been trying to use the cable to measure the inside of his penis. However, the cable had become tangled and knotted while it was inside of him causing him to lose blood through his urine. In the report, the doctors wrote: "The two distal ports of the USB wire were found to be protruding from the external urethral meatus whilst the middle part of the knotted wire remained within the urethra. The patient was an otherwise fit and healthy adolescent with no history of mental health disorders." Sign up to our new free Indy100 weekly newsletter The teenager who is from the UK had been taken to the medical facility by his mother and confessed to the medical experts when she was out of the room that he had used a cable instead of a ruler as a means of 'sexual experimentation'. An attempt to fish the cable out using a metal rod proved unsuccessful to the amount of knotting that had occurred, forcing the team to do surgery on the boy in order to retrieve the cable. They did this by cutting open the section between the genitalia and the anus so they could access the area where the cable was stuck. In the report, the doctors explain the procedure as follows: "A longitudinal peno-scrotal incision over the palpable foreign body was made and careful dissection was undertaken through deeper tissues, splitting the bulbospongiosus muscle. Both ends of the wire were pulled out successfully through the external urethral meatus." They add: "Both ends of the wire were pulled out successfully through the external urethral meatus." Thankfully the young man recovered well from the surgery and was discharged shortly afterwards. In their notes, the urology doctors admit that although cases like this are not out of the ordinary, particular cases like this are considered to be unusual. They state: "Sexual experimentation and gratification, as well as underlying mental disorders, are considered the main causes of retained foreign bodies in the urethra and bladder. Management varies depending on the shape and size of the object, and the mechanism of insertion." 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.

A mind-boggling video has shown people just how far down the deepest place on Earth is, and it is utterly terrifying. The jaw-dropping video came from a trailer for a film that features Titanic director James Cameron, who seems to have a thing about the deep ocean. In the documentary, Long Way Down: Mariana Trench for National Geographic, Cameron took part in what was called the Deepsea Challenge which saw him dive to the bottom of the Mariana Trench in the western Pacific Ocean. The Mariana Trench is some 7 miles down and is deeper than Mount Everest would be if it were pointing down into the Earth. The bottom of the trench is called the Challenger Deep and is the deepest point known on our planet. For the attempt, a submersible was built to withstand the pressure in the deepest part of the ocean and trailers for the documentary terrifyingly showed just how far down the trench is. The video revealed it took Cameron around 90 minutes to reach the bottom of the 7-mile deep trench. In a condensed 1-minute video summarising the descent, the clip continued to give facts about the ocean in a graphic. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Long Way Down: Mariana Trench | National Geographic www.youtube.com 90 per cent of all ocean life lives between the depths of 0 and 660ft. A depth of 800ft is the dive depth of a nuclear submarine. Continuing on from that, 1,044ft down is the deepest ever recorded scuba dive, while at 3,300ft the last trickle of sunlight begins to fade. As has been in the headlines recently following the implosion of the OceanGate submersible, the Titanic sits at a depth of 12,467ft – just over one-third of the depth of the Mariana Trench. At 36,070ft, the bottom of the Mariana Trench has been visited by only a handful of people, one of whom is Hamish Harding, the British billionaire who died onboard the Titan submersible in June 2023. 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.

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