An anonymous reader shares a report: Today Meta unleashed its ChatGPT competitor, Meta AI, across its apps and as a standalone. The company boasts that it is running on its latest, greatest AI model, Llama 3, which was trained on "data of the highest quality"! A dataset seven times larger than Llama2! And includes 4 times more code! What is that training data? There the company is less loquacious. Meta said the 15 trillion tokens on which its trained came from "publicly available sources." Which sources? Meta told The Verge that it didn't include Meta user data, but didn't give much more in the way of specifics. It did mention that it includes AI-generated data, or synthetic data: "we used Llama 2 to generate the training data for the text-quality classifiers that are powering Llama 3." There are plenty of known issues with synthetic or AI-created data, foremost of which is that it can exacerbate existing issues with AI, because it's liable to spit out a more concentrated version of any garbage it is ingesting.

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In September 2001—that is, 23 years ago somehow—Cartoon Network launched Adult Swim, a late-night programming block for the kind of people who would check out a kid’s TV channel just to see what it was airing after the kids went to bed. It was, essentially, for folks who hoped things would get a little weird. And…

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Nine Google employees who occupied the company’s offices in New York and California were arrested Tuesday night after an eight-hour sit-in.

The workers were protesting Google’s involvement in Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion Israeli government contract for Google and Amazon’s cloud computing services. Employees at the Sunnyvale, California, campus occupied Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian’s office on Tuesday afternoon, while workers in New York held a sit-in in the common area of the Chelsea office’s 10th floor.

Workers in the New York office captured the arrests on video. Around 9:45PM on Tuesday, nearly eight hours into the protest, a group of police officers and a man who appears to work at Google approached the four workers remaining in...

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"It is not something I recommend for people who like a comfortable life."

The WNBA draft puts pro basketball’s longstanding pay gap on stark display.

Caitlin Clark, a college basketball phenom and the top pick at Monday’s WNBA draft, will make a staggeringly low salary in her rookie year compared to her NBA counterpart.

Despite her record-breaking performance in the NCAA and the energy that she’s generated for the sport, Clark’s base salary will be $76,535 as a rookie. In the NBA, meanwhile, the first draft pick is expected to make roughly $10.5 million in base salary their first year.

Players like Clark, who was picked by the Indiana Fever Monday night after multiple blockbuster seasons as a point guard for the University of Iowa Hawkeyes, and former Louisiana State University forward Angel Reese, who was signed by the Chicago Sky, have helped women’s college basketball achieve a landmark year. For the first time ever, the women’s final March Madness game, which drew as many as 24 million viewers, surpassed the viewership of the men’s final.

“It’s been catapulted this year to a whole new level,” says University of Michigan sports management professor Ketra Armstrong. “People are tuning in to the WNBA draft that never had before.”

The fresh attention for the WNBA draft, however, is also spotlighting the problems the league has had with pay equity. For years, the WNBA’s salaries have lagged the NBA’s by a massive margin. That’s due in part to the leagues’ differences in revenue and season lengths. But other factors, like differences in collective bargaining agreements and revenue-sharing, also play a big role.

Because of how closely sports observers are following Clark, some fans have raised questions about these issues — and her role in addressing them. “Can Caitlin Clark fix the WNBA and NBA pay gap?”, one Forbes article asked.

That framing misunderstands some of the central causes of the gap, however. While Clark and Reese could well bring more eyes to WNBA games, the issue of pay gaps is an institutional one. As such, it’s not in the power, nor is it the responsibility, of any one player to solve.

“The challenges facing women athletes, from pay disparities to limited media coverage, stem from entrenched societal norms [and] institutional biases … that cannot be remedied by the actions of one individual alone,” says Georgetown University sports industry management professor La Quita Frederick.

The pay-gap problem is bigger than any one player

Despite her record-breaking performance in the NCAA and the energy that she’s generated for the sport, Clark will earn less than 1 percent of what her male counterpart will make in her first year. She will be able to supplement her salary through endorsement and marketing deals, but even with those, her estimated earnings will be lower than the base salary of a first-round NBA pick.

Clark isn’t alone. WNBA star Brittney Griner — who spent months jailed in Russia — spoke about the reason she played abroad in the offseason, and noted that a big part of it was to supplement her income: “I’ll say this ... the whole reason a lot of us go over is the pay gap,” she said at a press conference in April 2023. In 2023, a WNBA player made a $113,295 base salary on average, while an NBA player made an average base salary of $9.7 million.

The NBA’s much larger revenue is part of the reason for this discrepancy: It takes in an estimated $10 billion annually, compared to the WNBA, which has been projected to bring in roughly $200 million. Its season is also about twice the length of the WNBA’s, including 82 games compared to 40 games. Those factors alone, however, don’t tell the full story.

A major source of pay inequity also stems from the collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) the players’ unions have with the two leagues — and the amount of revenue they get to share.

As Eden Laase explains for Just Women’s Sports, male players are guaranteed a much larger share of revenue than women are, meaning they make more as the league grows. Because of how their CBA is structured, NBA players are able to receive 50 percent of all “shared revenue,” which includes everything from ticket sales to broadcasting rights. WNBA players, however, don’t receive the same guarantees.

Instead, WNBA players get 50 percent of “incremental revenue,” which is defined as revenue that exceeds the targets the league has set for itself. As Bloomberg has found, the league has not met those targets, meaning WNBA players have not reaped any of these rewards.

All told, about 40 percent of all NBA league revenue goes to player salaries, while the WNBA puts roughly 10 percent of all league revenue toward its players’ salaries, according to an estimate from David Berri, an economist at Southern Utah University who is the co-author of a forthcoming book about women’s sports.

Because of these disparities, WNBA players are pushing to change their compensation arrangement. “We are not asking to get paid what the men get paid. We’re asking to get paid the same percentage of revenue shared,” Las Vegas Aces player Kelsey Plum said on The Residency Podcast in 2022. Players will next have a chance to negotiate for that change in 2025, which is the earliest they can opt out of the current agreement.

Separately, expanding the WNBA’s fanbase could also help the players gain more leverage in negotiations and potentially enable the league to hit its revenue targets. Stars like Clark and Reese could help with these goals, with the Indiana Fever already seeing a spike in ticket interest ahead of this week’s draft, for example.

But it can’t be just them. Truly growing the league would require the NBA, WNBA owners, and WNBA leadership to invest more in increasing exposure for the game and providing resources to players, experts say. Such efforts could come in the form of more marketing, corporate sponsorships, and better broadcast deals in order to continue building interest and excitement in the league. Already, such moves are underway: In 2022, the WNBA raised $75 million from investors, including funds it intends to use for marketing and ads.

“In order to make money, you have to spend money,” Pepperdine University sports administration professor Alicia Jessop told Marketplace in 2020. “When the NBA began, its seats were not filled. It was not driving millions of viewers. The difference is more money was spent to build that league.”

To ensure that players benefit as the league grows, important changes need to be made to their contracts, too.

How industrial meat and dairy trap us in an infectious disease cycle.

H5N1, or bird flu, has hit dairy farms — but the dairy industry doesn’t want us saying so.

The current, highly virulent strain of avian flu had already been ripping through chicken and turkey farms over the past two years. Since it jumped to US dairy cows for the first time last month, it’s infected more than 20 dairy herds across eight states, raising alarms among public health authorities about possible spread to humans and potential impacts on the food supply.

One Texas dairy worker contracted a mild case of bird flu from one of the impacted farms — the second such case ever recorded in the US (though one of hundreds worldwide over the past two decades, most of them fatal).

Whatever fear-mongering you may have seen on social media, we are not on the cusp of a human bird flu pandemic; the chances of further human spread currently remain low. But that could change. As the virus jumps among new mammal species like cows, the risk that it’ll evolve to be able to spread between humans does increase.

But the American Association of Bovine Practitioners (AABP), an organization of beef and dairy veterinarians, declared in a statement (condemned by public health experts) last week that it doesn’t believe bird flu in cows should be considered bird flu at all.

“The AABP will call this disease Bovine Influenza A Virus (BIAV),” the association’s executive director K. Fred Gingrich II and president Michael Capel said in a statement, encouraging federal and state regulators to do the same. “It is important for the public to understand the difference to maintain confidence in the safety and accessibility of beef and dairy products for consumers.”

In other words, industry vets are trying to rebrand bird flu so that we keep calm and keep buying cheeseburgers. “They’re worried about selling products,” bovine veterinarian James Reynolds, a professor at Western University’s vet school, told me, calling the group’s statement “disease-washing.”

Covering bird flu over the last two years, I’ve seen a lot of wild stuff, but this may be one of the weirdest. And it’s more than just a terminological or political spat: It reflects an inescapable paradox about how we produce food.

The meat industry’s infectious disease trap

Naming infectious diseases is always political.

In this case, the cattle industry appears desperate to distance itself from the bird flu news cycle and avoid the perception that it’s contributing to human disease risk. But animal agriculture is one of the top drivers of zoonotic diseases — and growing global demand for meat, dairy, and eggs may be putting us at ever-greater risk of new outbreaks.

To understand why, one of the most elegant models I’ve found is the “infectious disease trap,” a concept coined in a 2022 paper by New York University environmental scientist Matthew Hayek.

Farming animals for food requires lots of land — much more land than it would take to grow an equivalent amount of plant-based foods. More than a third of the planet’s habitable land is devoted to animal agriculture alone, making it the world’s leading cause of deforestation as forests are cleared for farms. That in turn leads to more human and farm animal encounters with wild animals, a major source of new zoonotic diseases.

Animal agriculture’s land use can be shrunk through intensification — densely packing animals into factory farms — which limits deforestation and helps reduce meat’s climate footprint.

But such operations are terrible for animal welfare, and they exacerbate zoonotic disease risk in other ways, allowing viruses to rapidly tear through factory farms filled with thousands of stressed, genetically identical animals.

That’s exactly what’s been happening at chicken and turkey farms across the US over the last two years — and to prevent further spread, farmers have killed more than 85 million poultry birds on farms hit with bird flu since 2022, often using a grisly method that kills them via heatstroke. Our current food system is a recipe for brewing more virulent disease strains and, many experts fear, it’s a ticking time bomb for the next pandemic.

As long as global meat production expands, Hayek’s model explains, both low-density and factory farm-style animal agriculture trap us with rising disease risk.

What does this mean for the future of bird flu in cows?

A lot remains unknown about how bird flu has spread so rapidly among cows on dairy farms as far apart as Michigan and New Mexico.

One plausible theory is that the disease is moving with cows being trucked across the country, just as a human disease might move with people.

In recent years, as the dairy industry has increasingly consolidated into large factory farms, long-distance transportation of cows has become very common, Reynolds explained. Young female calves are often trucked from northern states to warmer climates in the south, then shipped back north when they’re old enough to become pregnant and produce milk. “There’s kind of a constant movement that really didn’t exist much 20 years ago,” Reynolds said.

Long-distance shipment can inflict extreme suffering on farmed animals, who are treated more like cargo than sentient beings. It’s also a hallmark of intensive animal agriculture systems described in the infectious disease trap model, allowing diseases to jump to new regions.

At least 18 states have restricted cow imports from states where dairy cows have tested positive for bird flu. The dairy industry recognizes the risks, Reynolds said, and is making efforts to improve biosecurity on these cross-country journeys. Meanwhile, regulators are scrambling to track the disease and stem its spread — but experts have argued those efforts don’t go nearly far enough, failing to require widespread testing.

And whatever steps are being taken now to stop the spread, the infectious disease trap model shows us that if we’re chasing zoonotic diseases after they’ve infected farm animals, we’re already behind.

Escaping that trap requires a much broader societal rethinking of our factory farm system.

This story appeared originally in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions.