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LA Rams owner buys the Angels, AI in LAUSD and healthcare, street vending and more
Angel Stadium of Anaheim.
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Katelyn Mulcahy
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Getty Images
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Today's show: AirTalk host Larry Mantle discusses the L.A. Rams owner purchase of the Angels, AI in LAUSD and healthcare, the state of street vending, AMC's plans to distribute indie movies.
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What will be the future of the Angels under Rams owner?
The topic:
Stan Kroenke, owner of the Rams and four other major sports teams, can now add the Anaheim Angels to his roster. Kroenke’s holding company, Kroenke Sports & Entertainment, announced the purchase of the Angels yesterday, for a record $4 billion.
What’s next for the Halos? New ownership is expected to cause all sorts of shake-ups, including changes in the location, stadium, and roster of the team. The Angels general manager and manager have contracts expiring this year, and the only players who are locked in through next year are pitcher Yusei Kikuchi and 12-time all-star Mike Trout, who has remained committed to the Angels where he has spent his whole career saying he’s ‘excited’ for what’s to come next.
Future of Anaheim Stadium: The stadium opened in 1966, making it the fourth-oldest ballpark in the MLB. Fans and city officials are hopeful for sweeping changes, pointing to the stadium's outdated infrastructure that lags far behind more modern venues like Petco Park or Oracle Park in overall condition.
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Guest:
- Bill Shaikin, columnist for the L.A. Times covering baseball and sports business
- Ashleigh Aitken, mayor of the city of Anaheim
- Nick Roman, host of Roman on the Radio; he's also former host of All Things Considered on LAist
This week in AI: LAUSD weighs AI policies, healthcare and more
L.A. Unified School District headquarters in downtown Los Angeles.
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Megan Garvey
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LAist
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The topic:
There’s seemingly a new AI headline just about every day, if not every hour. Each week on AirTalk, we set aside some time to catch you up on the biggest stories and developments of the week.
New models: Frontier AI company Anthropic released the latest version of its Fable and Mythos models this week, with benchmark scoring suggesting these 5.1 versions are the current state of the art. Meanwhile, OpenAI announced that its upcoming Astra model series has enhanced cyber capabilities and will have a limited rollout.
The neuralese of it all: Uncorroborated reporting from The Information alleges that Astra uses a model architecture built on recurrent-depth transformers, which allows the model to think multiple times over about a prompt, but does not produce a paper-trail of how the model got to an answer. Such thought processes taking place in an AI-only language have been coined to be “neuralese.” Using neuralese can make models more efficient than if they have to use human-based language but makes them harder to monitor.
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LAUSD: The Los Angeles Unified Board is reevaluating how students, educators and schools use artificial intelligence as some parents call for an in-classroom moratorium. A new board committee on AI use meets for the first time this week. You can find more information on these sessions here.
Healthcare: Facing mounting public backlash against their potential disruption to the job market and datacenter build-out, top AI companies are looking to turn their models towards medical research to garner up some goodwill.
With files from LAist
Guests:
- Mariana Dale, LAist senior reporter covering K-12 education
- Deepa Seetharaman, technology correspondent covering artificial intelligence for Reuters
- Adriel Bettelheim, senior healthcare editor at Axios
The state of L.A. street food
A fruit vendor sells on Whittier Boulevard in East L.A.
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Andrew Lopez
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Boyle Heights Beat
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The topic:
Street food culture is an undeniable part of Los Angeles as immigrant populations have been able to use it as a way to make the city one of the most vibrant culinary scenes in the country. But fresh tacos, fruits and other items on the street have been a hotbed issue for the city, as officials have tried to enact different measures over the years in an effort to find a balance in the marketplace between vendors and brick-and-mortar establishments. Most recently, the Safe Sidewalk Vending Act of 2018 effectively decriminalized sidewalk vending, which many critics feel is a gut-punch to traditional restaurants.
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Mayoral contention: In the first L.A. mayoral debate since the primary between councilmember Nithya Raman and Mayor Karen Bass, street vending and efforts to crack down on it became a hotbed topic. Mayor Bass said, “I do not think that you should have a food vendor in front of a restaurant. Period,” Raman responded by describing street vendors as the most vibrant and visible part of the city, which led to her establishing a new nine-point plan in her mayoral campaign.
Join the conversation: We want to hear from you! Are you a street vendor or a brick-and-mortar restaurateur? Give us a call at (866) 893-5722 or email us at atcomments@laist.com.
Guests:
- Memo Torres, reporter for L.A. Taco who has spent years tracking L.A. street vendor policy changes, ticketing and neighborhood struggles
- Doug Smith, senior director of policy and legal strategy at Inclusive Action for the City, an L.A.-based nonprofit advocacy organization that supports legalized street vending
- Jot Condie, CEO of the California Restaurant Association
AMC wants in on indie film distribution. How could it affect the theater biz?
An AMC theater is seen on March 29, 2023 in Austin, Texas.
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Brandon Bell
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Getty Images
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The topic:
AMC Theaters — the biggest theater chain in the United States and globally — is joining the business of film distribution by starting its own label. AMC’s Leawood Films will serve as an avenue for small or mid-size-budget films to not only find a distributor, but is also reported to give said filmmakers ownership of their feature’s intellectual property.
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Theater chains entering distribution: Back in July, the Sony Pictures-owned Alamo Drafthouse announced a similar decision, launching its down distribution arm that’ll center around unreleased film festival features.
Additional context: Film distribution at-large had been facing questions, in lieu of the Paramount-Warner Bros. merger, with some expecting the move to hurt overall investment into the theatrical experience. Despite these concerns, the likes of AMC, Cinemark and Regal are in support of the merger.
Guest:
- Dade Hayes, business editor at Deadline
How to deliberate well — listeners share jury duty stories
Have you ever been a juror?
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aerogondo
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The topic:
Two recent trials that have grabbed audiences’ attention are the Lindsay Clancy trial and Tupac Shakur murder trial. Although the two trials shared headline space over the last few weeks, they have ended up with two very different jury deliberations. The jury for the Shakur trial took less than three hours to come to a verdict, while the Clancy trial jury is currently deadlocked as they enter a fifth day of deliberations.
Join the conversation: We want to hear from you! If you have served on a jury, what are some of the challenges you faced in the deliberation room that put you at odds with your fellow jurors? What were some things that unnecessarily clogged up the process? And what things do you think can be implemented to assist an efficient jury deliberation? Give us a call at (866) 893-5722 or email us at atcomments@laist.com.
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Today on AirTalk: Wildfire damages deal, Nithya Raman and DSA-LA, Grand Theft Auto VI, prediction market law and Santa Ana Unified School District lunch changes. -
Today on AirTalk: Latest on Grand Canyon flood, history of CA fast food, data centers and Flock cameras, celebrating John Williams and divisive TV habits in the household. -
Today on AirTalk: Latest with Attorney General Rob Bonta, income disparities in relationships, Mokja, FilmWeek and remembering Tim Curry.
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You come to LAist because you want independent reporting and trustworthy local information. Our nonprofit newsroom doesn’t answer to shareholders looking to turn a profit. Instead, we answer to you and our communities. We are free to follow facts wherever they lead and to hold power to account without fear or favor. Our only loyalty is to our readers and listeners and our mission: to inform, engage, and strengthen Southern California’s communities.
If this story helped you, please become a monthly member today to help sustain this mission. It just takes 1 minute to donate below.
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