CNN star Anderson Cooper has privately told colleagues he does not want to work for CBS News boss Bari Weiss if she is ultimately put in charge of the cable network following Paramount Skydance’s proposed acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, according to a report.

Cooper has made his feelings known internally as Paramount chief executive David Ellison weighs whether to give Weiss oversight of both CBS News and CNN once the roughly $111 billion merger closes, the New York Times reported.

Cooper’s reported opposition comes as other top CNN figures are also signaling resistance to a potential Weiss-led future.

According to the Times, CNN chief executive Mark Thompson has told Paramount officials he will not share oversight of the network with another executive, while longtime anchor Jake Tapper recently met with Ellison in Los Angeles.

The Times said it was not known what the two men discussed.

The report says Ellison remains supportive of Weiss despite months of upheaval at CBS News, where she has overseen a sweeping overhaul of the news division since taking over as editor-in-chief last year.

One option under consideration would pair Weiss with a seasoned television executive responsible for the operational and financial side of the combined news organizations while she retained editorial oversight, according to the Times.

Cooper’s reported comments come after his own complicated history with Weiss at CBS News.

Earlier this year, Weiss approached Cooper about succeeding Norah O’Donnell as anchor of the “CBS Evening News,” according to previous reports. Cooper declined the offer, and the job ultimately went to Tony Dokoupil.

Not long afterward, Cooper also chose not to renew his contract with “60 Minutes,” ending a nearly two-decade run as a correspondent for the iconic newsmagazine while remaining at CNN.

Publicly, Cooper said he wanted to devote more time to his family and his work at CNN.

But multiple reports indicated he was also uncomfortable with the direction of CBS News under Weiss following the departures of longtime “60 Minutes” executive producer Bill Owens and other senior journalists.

Weiss’s tenure has been defined by one of the most turbulent periods in CBS News history.

Following Owens’ resignation over what he described as growing corporate interference in editorial decisions, Weiss dismissed executive producer Tanya Simon, correspondents Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega, senior executive producer Draggan Mihailovich, veteran producer Guy Campanile and digital operations chief Matthew Polevoy as part of a sweeping restructuring of “60 Minutes.”

The shakeup culminated in the firing of veteran correspondent Scott Pelley after he publicly confronted Weiss and newly installed executive producer Nick Bilton, accusing Weiss of “murdering” “60 Minutes” and saying she had been “brought in to kill it.”

The uncertainty has now spread to CNN as Ellison moves closer to completing the acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery.

The Times reported that veteran CNN executive Amy Entelis has become a sounding board for anxious anchors and correspondents concerned about the network’s future, while technology journalist Kara Swisher said she would stop working with CNN if Ellison replaced Thompson, citing the upheaval at CBS News.

CNN referred The Post to Paramount for comment.

The Post has sought comment from Paramount, Cooper, Weiss and Thompson.

This story originally appeared on NYPost

This story originally appeared on NYPost

Sublease space, a shadow that loomed over the Manhattan office market since the pandemic, is fast disappearing.

According to JLL, sublease inventory in the second quarter shrank to below 11 million square feet — less than half of its late-2022 peak of 23 million square feet.

Driving the absorption are tech and AI firms, some of which didn’t exist five years ago. In some cases, landlords took back space from tenants they can re-lease at higher rents.

JLL executive managing director Jamie Katcher said the “most notable development” behind second-quarter momentum is, “how quickly the sublease overhang has been absorbed.

“Growth from AI firms, as well as financial services companies and law firms, is driving long-term leasing decisions, while landlords are increasingly pulling back available sublease space to pursue direct deals at substantially higher rents,” he said.

The glut decline came as AI leasing continued to soar. According to JLL, AI firms signed 21 deals totaling 719,200 square feet to date in 2026 — putting the sector on pace to match or exceed last year’s 845,000 square feet.

Among the largest deals to expand into sublease space were AI healthcare platform Tennr, which added 125,000 square feet of former Google space at 345 Hudson St,; Uber, which grew by 86,000 square feet of previously WPP space at 3 World Trade Center; and Bank of Montreal, which added 82,000 square feet in former Roivant Sciences space at 151 W. 43d St..

Also, AI-driven financial advisory platform Datasite took 76,000 sf at 3 Columbus Circle that was previously leased to global marketing and advertising network VML. Datasite will use the new space for its Grata and Blueflame AI units while keeping its offices at 1345 Sixth Ave.

This story originally appeared on NYPost

Beware: Silicon Valley is still training up badly biased AIs.

Ask your favorite chatbot for objective info on politics, culture or current events, and you may well get undiluted leftist propaganda.

The problem was laughably obvious when Google first released Gemini two years back, and the AI churned out images of black Nazis, female popes and so on, because that’s how programmers operating in the woke tech world had “raised” it.

And the same bias remains rampant, The Washington Post just found: It tested all the major AI bots with basic questions about touchy topics — taxes, immigration, fossil fuels — and evaluated the answers as leaning left or right.

Surprise! On most questions, across most platforms, the answers leaned left, or even far left.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT consistently gave replies indistinguishable from the Democratic Party line; it endorsed “abolishing the electoral college in favor of picking the president by popular vote; raising taxes on the wealthy; and adopting single-payer health care,” the WaPo reports.

Daily Wire reporter Ryan Saavedra ran his own test, asking Anthropic’s popular Claude to pick out the most extreme statements from House candidate Darializa Avila Chevalier’s social-media feed.

But Claude demurred, with a lecture about how “decontextualized” quotes, no matter how “inflammatory or extreme,” can be used to “target, shame or harass an individual” — even though the bot had no compunctions about complying with a request to detail all of President Donald Trump’s most extreme statements.

The old programmers’ motto “Garbage In, Garbage Out” is on full display here.

Large Language Models are trained on a curated selection of texts before coders fine-tune the kinds of responses they’ll produce.

Feed the LLM garbage, and it can’t produce gold.

An LLM isn’t a person, just an algorithm that chooses the next appropriate word given inbuilt parameters preset by people and Big Tech worker bees with specific, usually left-leaning, points of view.

And the starting info matters a lot — which means that inputs from, say, Wikipedia will teach terrible lessons, since the site is dominated by fanatical editors and administrators who impose their extreme left perspective on everything from COVID to Palestine.

So it’s great that most people say they don’t trust AI to get things right, but that hardly makes the bias irrelevant, especially as future AIs will be “raised” by earlier ones.

Big Tech needs to set this founding generation of AIs right, or the skew could be locked in forever.

This story originally appeared on NYPost

Google has put limits on Meta’s use of its Gemini AI models after the social media company sought more computing capacity than the rival tech group could provide, the Financial Times reported on Sunday.

Google, owned by Alphabet, told Meta around March it could not meet the full Gemini capacity the company had sought to purchase, the newspaper said, adding that the shortfall disrupted and delayed some of Meta’s internal AI projects.

Several other Google clients have also been affected, though to a lesser extent, according to the report. Meta has been particularly impacted due to its exceptionally high demand for Google’s models, the FT said.

Reuters could not immediately verify the report, which cited people familiar with the matter. Google and Meta did not immediately respond to requests for comment outside business hours.

Due to the restrictions, Meta has encouraged staff to be more efficient with AI tokens, the units that measure AI usage, the FT report said.

Even as companies continue to spend billions on chips and data centers, they are still struggling to secure enough computing power to support the growing demand for AI services.

Revenue at Google Cloud grew to $20 billion in the first quarter ended March, but CEO Sundar Pichai said computing power constraints prevented even higher growth and contributed to the cloud unit’s backlog nearly doubling quarter on quarter.

This story originally appeared on NYPost

Starmaker’s stellar legacy 

A belated goodbye to my neighbor and longtime friend, Clive Davis.

Barely days before he left, we hugged one another. It was our favored Ralph Lauren’s Polo Bar dinner spot. Me, table for two against the left wall — his round table with friends alongside. Clive walked over to kiss me. Who knew it was the last I’d see him.

I recall our chat. The music genius who manufactured Whitney, Aretha, Alicia, Springsteen, Joplin and Simon and Garfunkel. I asked will a Bing Crosby- or Frank Sinatra-type song ever come again?

“Decades change music. Currently, hip-hop dominates. Also country and pop.

“Who believed this could happen to me? At 18, I lost my parents in one year. With $4,000 to my name and help from others, I got an NYU scholarship. Three years of law got me into a law firm that represented Columbia Records. I became chief counsel. That’s how I got into music.

“I’ve been chief creative officer of Sony. My Grammys are on their shelves. NYU established a museum in my honor. Two floors. My whole life story, from signing Whitney to her passing. I not only signed her, but brought her 18 songs for each album. Our ears were in sync with each other.

“I missed out on Meat Loaf, who seemed unlikely. Even others did not see him as an enduring artist. Also, John Mellencamp.”

Clive’s recent birthday party drew Earth, Wind & Fire, Busta Rhymes, Lin-Manuel Miranda — plus another 600. And his favorite song? Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water.”

And if he could, what would he say to his mom?

“I done good.”

Going nuclear over all the lies

Facts? There are none. Mullahs won’t allow inspectors. Both our parties create wild propaganda. Facts? What facts? It’s reality gone amok. Iran, even with July Fourth firecrackers up their assets, could allow inspections tomorrow. But won’t. The idea’s as dead as Robin Hood’s tree.

Plan A went poop. It’s now Plan B. Bribe the villains. The situation changes hourly — faster than 56-year-old Lopez changes bras. Can peace be bought when dealing with terrorists? We who have lived in that part of the world know how they operate. Mrs. Biden tells more truth.

Tehran survives — momentarily.

Falls-back trip

Skip the Hamptons, shove the Rockaways, stay away from Rikers. Discover new summer spots. Like New York’s Finger Lakes. Like Taughannock Falls State Park. Like 215-foot waterfalls carved 10,000 years ago when Jill Biden was a brunette. There’s a wine up there called “Gewürz.” Comes with Kleenex.

Big shoes to fill

Cameron Diaz has large feet and often has shoes custom-made . . . Nicolas Cage: “I’ve used fear to work for me” . . . Mike Tyson: “Fear is fine. It can cook for you or it can burn your house down’’ . . . James Gandolfini: “I’m basically a 260-pound Woody Allen” . . . Engelbert Humperdinck won’t wear green clothes or ride in green cars. Thinks the color’s unlucky.

If crime doesn’t pay, how come so many want to be lawyers?

Mostly in New York, kids, mostly in New York.

This story originally appeared on NYPost

This story originally appeared on NYPost

From the right: Some Good Dem Decisions

On a night NYC Democratic primary voters tapped some awful candidates, Midtown Manhattan ones “made a comparably good choice and picked state Assemblyman Micah Lasher,” who “wants to continue arms sales to Israel and does not agree that Israel has committed a ‘genocide,’ ” cheers National Reviews’s Jim Geraghty. And they nixed two candidates “who had no business getting serious consideration”: Trump-obsessed cable talking head George Conway just didn’t prove “that interesting.” The other was JFK’s grandson Jack Schlossberg, “the walking, talking embodiment of ‘Nepo Baby’ ” who expected “an electorate to hand him a congressional seat because of his family.” Face, it, Kennedy clan: “The inheritance has been spent, the memories of ‘Camelot’ are almost all forgotten, and the country has moved on.” “Good job, Democratic primary voters.”

Midterms beat: Don’t Expect a Blowout

Most pros think “the GOP will lose” the House midterm elections, but “not in an old-fashioned blowout,” explains the Washington Examiner’s Byron York. Yes, President Trump’s low job approval rating and word that 59.3% say the country is going in the wrong direction” while 63% say the economy is “very bad or fairly bad” compounds the fact that “the president’s party almost always loses House seats in midterm elections.” But Dems’ lead in the “generic ballot” is “not overwhelming,” far smaller than they when picking up 40 seats in 2018. Crucially, “the Democratic Party’s favorability rating” nets as worse than the GOP’s. Then again, for the prez and Republicans in DC, “life will still be miserable with a Democratic House, even if the margin is small.”

Conservative: Librarians Gone Wild

Take a look at session titles for the American Association of School Librarians’ Chicago convention, warns Erika Sanzi at The Hill: “Charting Queer Visibility,” “Read Trans Books,” “Queer Kidlit Joy”: All promote “an extreme worldview.” Indeed, the group has “explicitly moved away from neutrality,” dropping the word from its “Library Bill of Rights and Code of Ethics.” And the association “directly influences which books are purchased . . . and which are disappeared or ignored” in school libraries — despite their “constitutional obligation to uphold the free exchange of ideas” for students. School leaders must wake up and be a “backstop for students and parents against this unrelenting ideology and propaganda.”

Former AG: Confirm Todd Blanche

Tapped to take the permanent job, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche will need the votes “of at least 50 of the 53 Republican senators,” observes former AG Bill Barr at The Wall Street Journal. Blanche “is well-qualified and will run the department as effectively as anyone,” providing “much-needed leadership and stability.” The job “demands legal acumen” combined with “practical experience, leadership and institutional savvy,” and Blanche, “a skillful and accomplished lawyer with extensive experience,” has “the necessary qualities.” Crucially, he “doesn’t shy away from giving the president straight-from-the-shoulder advice” and “pushes back on bad ideas.” No one else “has a better chance of getting through” to the prez, so “America’s interests are best served by confirming” him.

Waste watch: Winning the War on Fraud

President “Donald Trump’s ‘full-scale war on fraud’ is the kind of low-hanging fruit that populists know how to pick,” notes UnHerd’s Emily Jashinsky. His Justice Department just indicted “90 doctors, involved in fraud schemes totaling an alleged $6.5 billion” in bogus Medicare claims. Before that, in its first month, the anti-fraud task force “identified nearly $6.3 billion in government contracts believed to be tied to potentially fraudulent businesses.” Notice that “so many of the investigations are focused on false claims filed to Medicare and Medicaid” — debunking the Democrats’ lies about GOP efforts to tighten the rules for popular programs “by touting efforts which strengthen safety net programs, prioritize vulnerable American citizens, and make the federal government feel less wasteful.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board

This story originally appeared on NYPost

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-NY, revealed that she believes Congress should look to break up companies like Apple amid news that the tech giant might soon raise its prices on phones and laptops due to a strained processing chip supply chain.

“We need to break up a lot of these companies that are far, far too big and we need to be instituting consumer protections for people,” Ocasio-Cortez said.

Her statements reveal one of the many ways lawmakers are grappling with the realities of the AI race as companies feel the squeeze of global demand for processing power and as local communities wrestle with the costs of their use.

Like many other progressives, Ocasio-Cortez has advocated for a more government-led response, citing a distrust of corporate influence.

“The problem that we have is that these big companies think they are governments. They want to be governments. They want to have totally unchecked power,” Ocasio-Cortez said.

In recent weeks, Apple’s outgoing CEO Tim Cook signaled that the company might soon have no choice but to pass some of its climbing costs off to consumers.

“Unfortunately, price increases are unavoidable,” Cook said in a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal.

“We’re doing our best to mitigate the huge increases that are being passed to us, and we’ve been trying to shield our customers from the increases, but the situation has become unsustainable.”

For years, companies like Apple have dominated demand for the processing chip market, the part of a computer that acts as the brain of a device.

These chips, which require highly sophisticated production, allow computers to perform calculations, process data and execute commands.

Now that AI companies are also adding to demand, Apple finds itself competing for a dwindling supply of processors, driving the company’s costs up.

Beyond her views on the relationship between the government and business, Ocasio-Cortez said that she believes it’s time Congress re-visit ways it can mitigate costs of the AI-race that have climbed on a local level.

In particular, she believes it’s time for lawmakers to address the energy strain of data centers.

When asked if she believed Congress should consider something beyond the Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors (CHIPS) Act, President Joe Biden’s signature technology investment bill that became law in 2022, Ocasio-Cortez said she thought so.

“The CHIPS Act was passed before we saw this huge development in AI, so the CHIPS Act was really passed before data centers were a thing, so it wasn’t designed to anticipate the huge amount of supply that these centers are sucking up,” Ocasio-Cortez said.

Among other provisions, the CHIP act included $11.2 billion to modernize the country’s energy grid, created clean energy innovation programs and included $39 billion in domestic semiconductor production incentives.

The bill did not address the energy consumption strain caused by data centers.

“We are subsidizing a lot of these pieces of these AI data centers,” Ocasio-Cortez said.

This story originally appeared on NYPost

There’s never been another country like America. That’s not mere patriotic hyperbole for our 250th anniversary. It’s historical fact. But many of us have never really understood it. Or maybe we forgot what we heard in school on the subject a long time ago. Or did we ever hear it? Today most schools wouldn’t dare say anything along such lines, which is precisely why I wrote my book “REVOLUTION: The Birth of the Greatest Nation in the History of the World.”

But it’s something most Americans used to know —and it’s extremely important. We need to start with the American Revolution itself, which is the only revolution in world history that actually delivered on the promises it made, to create a country where the people were in charge, a country that — in Lincoln’s famous words — was “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

Of course other revolutions claimed to be about the same thing, promising that when everything was all over “the people” would be in charge. But every one betrayed this, creating levels of misery and suffering that are almost unimaginable.

Take the French Revolution, which began just a few years after our own Revolution, and was championed by some of the figures involved in our Revolution — like Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine. They all seemed to think it would be a happy reprisal of what happened here. It was anything but that, ending in a nightmare bloodbath of terror.

What went wrong? Just like us, the French decided they didn’t like the idea of monarchy. So they beheaded their king and queen. But the radicals didn’t stop there.

They also decided to kill every priest and nun. Let’s just say it didn’t go well for anyone. Where the American revolutionaries were mostly people of faith — and saw their faith as the very reason they were doing what they were doing — the French revolutionaries saw faith and the church as the problem. The Americans declared that their liberties came from God, and that it was the role of government to protect those liberties. The French didn’t know where their liberties came from.  So they traded King Louis XVI for a dictator named Napoleon—who crowned himself emperor.

Whatever happened to the noble French ideals of liberte, egalite, and fraternite?  

Then there are the even worse nightmares of the Bolshevik and Maoist revolutions in Russia and China. The Soviets murdered the Tsar and his family, giving the Russian people the sadistic leadership of Lenin and Stalin and the hell of what Solzhenitsyn called “the Gulag Archipelago.” The Chinese communists got rid of the Emperor and — just like the Soviets — murdered millions of their own people.  

Every one of these “revolutions” was a false revolution that actually replaced suffering with more suffering, and inequality with more inequality, creating dystopian worlds too awful to contemplate.

So how did these so-called revolutions get it so grotesquely wrong? And how did we in the American Revolution get it right, creating a nation where the people really did govern themselves, just as was hoped and promised, and are continuing to do so, 250 years later?

The answer couldn’t be simpler. The leaders of our Revolution understood that it wasn’t enough to get rid of a king or a tsar or emperor and hope for the best. You couldn’t just tear down what you didn’t like. You had to replace it with something else. But what?

The answer is so simple many people refuse to believe it. You can say it in three letters: “God.” I’ll bet you didn’t hear that in your public school social studies class. But it’s undeniable. Of course the men of the American Revolution knew they couldn’t force God on anyone, because they believed in liberty, especially religious liberty. So if faith was necessary, it would need to come from the people themselves, voluntarily. The whole thing was a gamble, or as many have said, “an experiment.”

But the reason they thought it might work in 1776 was because it had been working for the previous 150 years. Most of the Americans in the Revolution were descended from men and women who in the previous century had braved dangerous sea-crossings to live out their Christian faith as they saw fit. And during all this time they really had been self-governing. So faith in the God of the Bible was almost ubiquitous in Colonial America, and actually increased during the Great Awakening, under the preaching of the evangelist George Whitefield, who was the biggest celebrity of his time.

Three- quarters of everyone in the colonies heard him preach in person at least once. So the Americans were a decidedly faith-filled people.

When the British in the 1760s decided to crack down on the Colonies, and tax them and persecute them, they pushed back. Hard. They had the crazy idea that they were still free men and women who could govern themselves and tax themselves. After all, hadn’t they been doing so for over a century? And they knew that their liberties were God-given, not given to them by parliament or the king.

So when in 1776 they finally decided to declare independence from the monarch in Great Britain, they were simultaneously reaffirming their dependence on God. And they weren’t shy about saying so. 
On August 1st, the day before the members of Congress officially signed the Declaration of Independence, they gathered to hear Samuel Adams give a speech on the steps of Independence Hall. In it he declared “We have this day restored the Sovereign, to whom all men ought to be obedient.” Adams — whom they called the “Father of the Revolution” — was saying it explicitly.   

Here was a member of Congress telling every other member of Congress that God was the ruler of the brand new nation, and that if we looked to him for guidance, we could  govern ourselves. We would do something that hadn’t been done in three thousand years. Just like the ancient Israelites in the Sinai wilderness, who escaped bondage under Pharaoh, we would look to God directly, and would rule ourselves without an earthly king. Everyone in Congress understood this.

When asked to create a seal for the new nation, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson — often thought the least religious of the founders — both came up with images of this very event. Franklin’s image was of Moses watching God part the Red Sea while Pharaoh drowned and Jefferson’s was of the Israelites being led by a pillar of fire and a cloud. Could anything be more clear? So why haven’t most of us heard this before? Well, that’s another story.

Eric Metaxas is the author of “REVOLUTION: The Birth of the Greatest Nation in the History of the World.“

This story originally appeared on NYPost