All posts tagged: LUCA

Luca Guadagnino Says He’s Not Surprised Amazon Dropped His OpenAI Film

Luca Guadagnino Says He’s Not Surprised Amazon Dropped His OpenAI Film

Published by Daniella Wilson

Luca Guadagnino says it wasn’t surprising Amazon MGM dropped his nearly-finished Sam Altman movie Artificial shortly after Amazon announced a $50 billion investment in OpenAI. “I can’t say much because we are right in the middle of this situation,” Guadagnino told Italian television, “[but] these are industrial policies that are certainly not new.” Speaking to news show Otto e mezzo on Italian network La7, Guadagnino cited an incident from 2003 when CBS canceled the broadcast of The Regans, a miniseries about President Ronald Regan and his family, starring Josh Brolin and Judy Davis, following a conservative backlash. (The series eventually aired on CBS’s sister network Showtime.) The Italian director could have mentioned a more recent example, Ali Abbasi’s 2024 Donald Trump movie The Apprentice, which premiered to acclaim in Cannes but was blackballed by studio and independent distributors, before finally landing with Tom Ortenberg’s indie outfit Briarcliff Entertainment. Neither of those, however, is a direct comp to the Artificial situation. Amazon pulled out of Guadagnino’s film shortly after announcing its $50 billion strategic partnership with …

Amazon dropped Luca Guadagnino’s OpenAI film, months after partnering with OpenAI

Amazon dropped Luca Guadagnino’s OpenAI film, months after partnering with OpenAI

Published by skeptic

Amazon MGM Studios will no longer release Luca Guadagnino’s buzzy Sam Altman biopic Artificial, Variety reported Friday. SEE ALSO: ‘Toy Story 5’ opening weekend box office to set franchise record The film, which stars Andrew Garfield as the OpenAI CEO and Ike Barinholtz as Elon Musk, focuses on Altman’s firing (and later rehiring) from OpenAI in 2023. In February of 2026, OpenAI and Amazon announced a strategic multi-year partnership, which includes Amazon investing $50 billion in Altman’s company. According to The New York Times, the team behind Artificial was shocked at Amazon MGM’s decision. Guadagnino has worked with the studio before, including on Challengers and After the Hunt. The New York Times reported that Amazon MGM had previously been supportive of Artificial, spending $40 million on it and preparing it for a 2027 SXSW release and potential awards run. Mashable Top Stories “We have the utmost respect and admiration for Luca Guadagnino as an award-winning filmmaker — not to mention a longstanding relationship that we hope to continue,” an Amazon spokesperson told Variety. “We believe …

Looking for LUCA, everyone’s shared ancestor

Looking for LUCA, everyone’s shared ancestor

Published by skeptic

acronym: A word made by combining some of the starting letter or groups of letters from a number of words. For instance, STEM is an acronym for Science, Technology, Engineering and Math. Radar is an acronym for RAdio Detection And Ranging. Even laser is an acronym for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation. alien: A non-native organism. (in astronomy) Life on or from a distant world. ancestor: A predecessor. It could be a family forebear, such as a parent, grandparent or great-great-great grandparent. Or it could be a species, genus, family or other order of organisms from which some later one evolved. For instance, ancient dinosaurs are the ancestors of today’s birds. (antonym: descendant) ape: A group of rather large primates, all of which lack a tail. They include gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos, orangutans, gibbons and humans. Most people tend to group humans into their own separate subcategory owing to a number of special traits. These include a larger brain, greater mental abilities (including being able to talk) and their ability to walk on two legs. archaea: …

Scientists discover how life began before Earth’s first universal ancestor

Scientists discover how life began before Earth’s first universal ancestor

Published by Jenni Sidey

Living organisms share an ancestor called the last universal common ancestor, or LUCA. LUCA is estimated to have lived approximately four billion years ago. All plants, animals, and microbes can trace their genealogy back to that original ancestral cell. Since the 1980s, researchers have worked to determine the biological composition of LUCA by comparing the genomes of present-day organisms to identify similarities. These studies show that LUCA had a lipid membrane surrounding it, an active genetic code, and cellular machinery that allowed it to make proteins. In short, LUCA was not simply a mixture of chemicals. LUCA was a cell consisting of many components. These results bring up the question of how LUCA came to contain all these biological components. Researchers at Oberlin College (Oberlin, OH), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge, MA), and University of Wisconsin-Madison (Madison, WI) feel they have found a method by which they can look back even further than LUCA. In the journal Cell Genomics, researchers Aaron Goldman from Oberlin, Greg Fournier from MIT, and Betül Kacar from Wisconsin describe the …