Alfa Romeo Releases Gorgeous Concept Car – only makes 33 of them. Apparently doesn’t like sales

The Alfa Romeo 33 Stradale is one of only a few cars out there that’ll be available with both a V6 engine and a fully electric drivetrain. While that lets it swing from both sides of the plate, it also highlights just how much heavier EVs are than their combustion counterparts these days. And try as Alfa Romeo might, there’s no way that doesn’t affect the supercar’s handling.

The limited-production, 33-unit-only Alfa supercar debuted earlier today, with one version using a 3.0-liter, twin-turbo V6, and the other a 102 kilowatt-hour battery feeding an 800-volt, tri-motor drivetrain. The difference in their weight is stark, with the V6 model said to weigh less than 3,307 pounds, and the EV a good 1,300 lbs more at (under) 4,630 lbs. Because of the EV’s power advantage though, the two are said to perform pretty much identically in a straight line, doing zero-to-60 in under three seconds, and stopping in a similar sub-108 feet. (That said, the EV runs out of steam at high speed, and has a slightly lower top speed.)

Alfa Romeo 33 Stradale (modern)

The new Alfa Romeo 33 Stradale. Alfa Romeo

Their handling differences may be minimized by torque vectoring, which seems to be offered only on the EV. But even then, it’s impossible to completely hide the effect that a 40-percent weight gain has on a car’s performance

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Source: The Alfa Romeo 33 Stradale EV Weighs 1,300 Pounds More Than the Gas Version

So these cars will rot in a garage, barely being driven, where no one will see them. These limited editions are a waste of designers time.

OpenAI disputes authors’ claims that every ChatGPT response is a derivative work, it’s transformative

This week, OpenAI finally responded to a pair of nearly identical class-action lawsuits from book authors

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In OpenAI’s motion to dismiss (filed in both lawsuits), the company asked a US district court in California to toss all but one claim alleging direct copyright infringement, which OpenAI hopes to defeat at “a later stage of the case.”

The authors’ other claims—alleging vicarious copyright infringement, violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), unfair competition, negligence, and unjust enrichment—need to be “trimmed” from the lawsuits “so that these cases do not proceed to discovery and beyond with legally infirm theories of liability,” OpenAI argued.

OpenAI claimed that the authors “misconceive the scope of copyright, failing to take into account the limitations and exceptions (including fair use) that properly leave room for innovations like the large language models now at the forefront of artificial intelligence.”

According to OpenAI, even if the authors’ books were a “tiny part” of ChatGPT’s massive data set, “the use of copyrighted materials by innovators in transformative ways does not violate copyright.”

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The purpose of copyright law, OpenAI argued, is “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts” by protecting the way authors express ideas, but “not the underlying idea itself, facts embodied within the author’s articulated message, or other building blocks of creative,” which are arguably the elements of authors’ works that would be useful to ChatGPT’s training model. Citing a notable copyright case involving Google Books, OpenAI reminded the court that “while an author may register a copyright in her book, the ‘statistical information’ pertaining to ‘word frequencies, syntactic patterns, and thematic markers’ in that book are beyond the scope of copyright protection.”

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Source: OpenAI disputes authors’ claims that every ChatGPT response is a derivative work | Ars Technica

So the authors are saying that if you read their book and then are inspired by it, you can’t use that memory – any of it – to write another book. Which also means that you presumably wouldn’t be able to use any words at all, as they are all copyrighted entities which have inspired you in the past as well.