SCROLL NEWS / DISCOVERY
Search headlines
Find the stories shaping the conversation.
Results for " FHP " 45 found 🔀 AI-powered Shuffle
Melania Trump Announces White House Women’s Health Initiative
The effort comes as Republicans are struggling to win over female voters two weeks before the midterm elections.
Melania Trump Announces White House Women’s Health Initiative
The effort comes as Republicans are struggling to win over female voters two weeks before the midterm elections.
Boston 25 News
The new William and Charlotte Bloomberg Public Science Common officially opened to the public on Oct. 10, offering a flexible space for live events, presentations and hands-on science programming.
Arcadia marks five years as local entertainment option in Burley
Arcadia has been a destination for nostalgia in Burley for the past five years.
Another Independence hotel sells, fetching $10.4 million
The hotel appears to have sold without a listing and is at least the third hotel in Independence to sell this year.
Permitting reform is good politics and good for markets. Bring it on.
A truly tech-neutral deal would serve the interests of both parties.
On Your Side: Better Business Bureau offers tips for buying a used car, avoiding predatory lending
The Better Business Bureau has tips to guide used car buyers away from subpar vehicles and predatory lending practices.
SAN FRANCISCO HEALTH PLAN EARNS HISTORIC 4.5-STAR RATING IN 2026 NCQA HEALTH PLAN RATINGS
For the first time in its history, San Francisco Health Plan (SFHP) has earned a 4.5-star rating in the 2026 NCQA Health Plan Ratings. NCQA considers health plans earning 4.5 or 5 Stars to be among the highest-rated health plans in the nation. This achievement comes as SFHP prepares to celebrate 30 years of serving San Francisco's most vulnerable communities.
Are hotels people too? In this Delaware town, local businesses can cast ballots.
A Delaware beach town offers broad voting rights to corporations, spurring broader debate over who should be allowed to take part in elections.
Foley man charged in multiple burglaries after being caught inside business
A 33-year-old Foley man is facing multiple charges after police reportedly caught him inside a business Wednesday and linked him to several other recent break-ins.
27% of U.S. adults turn to AI for personal, emotional, social queries
More than a quarter of U.S. adults turn to chatbots for personal or emotional discussions, including for entertainment or social advice, a new survey found.
TerminalFix Uses Fake Cloudflare CAPTCHAs to Deploy Reverse-Tunnel Backdoor
Microsoft says TerminalFix uses fake Cloudflare CAPTCHAs to trigger PowerShell and deploy a reverse-tunnel backdoor for internal network access.
WSDG Completes The Kempinski Grand Hotel’s Ultra-Modern Entertainment Venue At Billionaire St. Moritz
Billionaire St. Moritz, an ultra-modern event location directly connected to the historic Grand Hotel des Bains Kempinski, has opened as the ultimate dinner show and clubbing experience in St. | Acoustic and AV technology designers deliver sophisticated room-within-room construction for exclusive dinner show and clubbing experience.
Mercer students provide behavioral healthcare to farmworkers
Earlier this summer, Mercer University School of Medicine (MUSM) faculty and Master of Family Therapy (MFT) students participated in the Georgia Farmworker Family Health Program.
How a downtown lunch spot is hanging on Power Play
How this downtown lunch spot is making it, with a little help from its landlord.
Two arrested in Gouverneur business theft; suspect found hiding under blankets
Two people have been arrested in connection with the theft of nearly $4,500 worth of merchandise from a Gouverneur business.
China's science cooperation award honors global innovation partnerships
At China's national science and technology award conference on Wednesday, nine foreign scientists received the 2025 China International Science and Technology Cooperation Award in recognition of their exceptional contributions to scientific cooperation with China.
Trump hails U.S. exceptionalism before veering into darkly political speech to usher in America's 250th anniversary
The president's speech capped an Independence Day eve otherwise most notable for a brutal heat wave that gripped much of the eastern part of the country.
Jackson restaurant closing its doors after 56 years of business
After more than 56 years, Piccadilly is officially closing its doors at its Woodrow Wilson Avenue location.
Palmetto Sports Daily: Latest moves in college baseball portal, SC basketball snags another foreign player
The crew discusses the latest on the transfer portal for college baseball, and the Gamecocks men’s basketball team snags Hugo Lopez from Spain.
Reporter of the Day: Rachel Flynn Covers Proposed Panama City Beach Entertainment Complex
In Reporter of the Day, viewers get a chance to go behind the headlines with NewsChannel 7’s Rachel Flynn.
Joe Burrow gives a health update
Bengals quarterback feeling good during OTA’s
Political protest gets top billing at theaters, comedy clubs and museums near you
As the country prepares to celebrate its 250th anniversary, a growing number of local theaters, museums, artists and performers in the left-leaning suburbs of Washington are highlighting art that protests the Trump administration.
Baking soda & vinegar volcanoes with Mad Science of Austin & SA
Cassidy defeat may complicate filling health vacancies
After losing to a Trump-endorsed challenger, Cassidy may be less willing to shepherd nominations through the Senate.
Game #46 GameThread: Jays @ Tigers
Game Three with the Tigers and then the Jays head off for four games in New York against the Yankees. And Adam Macko is up with the team. He told reporters that he rushed around to buy ‘collared shirts’ to wear on the team bus, saying that he only had hoodies. It seems that I’ve […]
'Survivor 50' recap: 'Survivor' nation cries in unison
'Survivor' nation cries in unison as two heavy hitters come up against a torch snuffing. Read EW's recap for more on the brutal eliminations.
Cleveland Browns news (5/8): Veterans on the hot seat?
The latest Cleveland Browns news and notes from around the NFL in today’s edition of the Daily Dawg Chow.
Controversial leader of powerful SF political group steps down
His six-year tenure as executive director was marked by controversy and major influence on local politics.
Local star officially leaves Washington basketball for Kentucky
For the first time since his senior year of high school Zoom Diallo will take his basketball talents outside the Evergreen State to Kentucky.
Faith coalition wins pledges from Miami-Dade leaders on housing, mental health
About 800 residents packed the church to demand local leaders commit to making changes.
“AI polls” are fake polls
A few weeks after Donald Trump’s second presidential win, I took the train up from London (where I was living at the time) to Oxford to attend a conference on polls and forecasts of the 2024 election. Most of the attendees were pollsters or academics, but I also watched presentations from Aaru and Electric Twin, two companies that do what is interchangeably called synthetic sampling, silicon sampling, or synthetic audiences. Stripped of startup jargon, that means they use large language models (LLMs) to simulate responses to public opinion polls by having AI agents take on the role of survey respondents. I had already heard of Aaru thanks to some articles with eye-catching headlines like “No people, no problem: AI chatbots predict elections better than humans” in the months leading up to Election Day. The founders were making some big, some might even say far-fetched claims, such as: “within two years, we will simulate the entire globe — from the way crops are grown in Ukraine to how that impacts production of oil in Iraq, trade through the strait of Malacca, and elections for the mayor of Baltimore.” When Semafor asked Aaru’s cofounders — Cameron Fink and Ned Koh — about my boss, they said “we respect all those who came before us.” Nate (as he so often does) shared his thoughts on Twitter: Fink and Koh were relatively good-natured about this back-and-forth when we spoke at Oxford. They even offered to mail me one of the t-shirts featuring Nate’s quote they apparently had made. I never took them up on the offer, which I now somewhat regret. These synthetic sampling companies fell off my radar for a while, but they do still exist. In fact, Aaru recently received a $1 billion valuation. Is what they’re doing anywhere close to the most important frontier in AI development? Not by a longshot, especially when Anthropic just developed a model so adept at exploiting software vulnerabilities that it’s only being released to 40 companies. Still, silicon sampling is increasingly finding its way into public polling. Axios reported in March that “a majority of people trust their own doctors and nurses” based on findings from Aaru — without mentioning that the “people” in that sentence were actually LLMs. Around the same time, the Public Sentiment Institute “boosted” their online sample of 373 real survey respondents with 114 AI agents.1 (Spoiler alert: even the co-founder of Electric Twin doesn’t think that’s a particularly defensible approach.) Polling companies like Qualtrics and Ipsos are also developing synthetic data panels. So, what should we make of these … “polls”? Let’s get one thing out of the way: whatever they are, they’re not polls in the way that term is usually defined. Subscribe You can’t replace polls with AI On one hand, using LLMs to essentially make up fake survey respondents sort of sounds like the dumbest idea ever, one that will at best imperfectly replicate real polls while introducing all sorts of biases. On the other hand, with LLMs improving at a remarkable, perhaps even alarming rate, maybe that means I’m a dinosaur at the ripe old age of 24 because I still want to rely on polls that talk to actual people. I’m not going to argue that synthetic samples are completely useless. In fact, as I’ll return to later, there is evidence that some techniques can replicate topline survey results quickly and cheaply. But the marketing from certain companies can be slightly optimistic. “No traditional poll will exist by the time the next general election occurs,” said Fink in 2024. We’re just 206 days away from the midterms, and based on the fact that I still have to collect a bunch of polls every day, I’d say he should have run that prediction by a sample of AI agents before the interview.2 To see why synthetic samples can’t replace polls, here’s a quick primer on how they work. The simplest version of these models involves taking a LLM (like ChatGPT or Claude), giving it a demographic profile (e.g., a white, college-educated woman who lives in Utah and makes $70k a year), and then asking it to respond to a survey question. You repeat that process a few thousand times using different demographic profiles and end up with a sample of synthetic survey responses. The actual models used by private companies are more sophisticated than this, usually because they incorporate more hypothesized demographic characteristics for each agent and provide them with extra information. Aaru, for example, feeds agents a diet of news and information they’d be likely to consume, while Electric Twin incorporates their customers’ proprietary data about the audience they’re trying to replicate. The way Ben Warner, the co-founder of Electric Twin, explained it to me was “we have a large amount of data on […] for instance, 5,000 people. Can we make an accurate prediction of how they would respond to another question?” Still, it should be obvious why synthetic samples can’t replace polls. Polling is fundamentally a data collection process. We might use surveys to make predictions by feeding them into election forecasts, but the main purpose of a poll isn’t prediction, it’s gathering new data about what people think and how they feel. Silicon sampling, on the other hand, produces no new data. It’s simply a model: you input LLM training data, demographic prompts, and a bunch of other information, and it spits out a prediction for what a poll would say. We love models here, but models aren’t polls. That difference is an important philosophical sticking point for most pollsters I talk to. “I think politics should stay away from [synthetic sampling], because we’re trying to […] represent the voice of the people,” said Natalie Jackson, a vice president at GQR Insights. Democratic pollster John Hagner told me: “I think I’m just incredibly skeptical of this idea. I don’t think it’s research. At that point, you’re asking the machine to tell you what you already believe.” Hagner has seen some presentations of early synthetic sampling experiments, but so far, “if it’s being used in a campaign, people are keeping it incredibly quiet.”3 But Eli, I hear you saying, aren’t polls themselves increasingly governed by modeling decisions? Indeed they are: pollsters’ choices on which sampling method to use, how to define their likely voter models, and how to weight their samples can and do lead to dramatic differences in the results they publish. Aaru even referenced these limitations in the methodology statement included with that maternal mortality “poll” — although I’m using the term “methodology statement” loosely here, because it doesn’t really explain how the model works at all. We can ignore the (frankly preposterous) implication that synthetic sampling isn’t subject to a separate set of biases. The important point is that there’s still a meaningful difference between using weighting and other statistical techniques on actual polling data and using a model to predict what a poll would say. The latter is far closer to election forecasts or techniques like MRP — potentially useful models, but not a replacement for polls.4 To be fair, other synthetic sampling companies are perfectly happy with the distinction between polls and models. Warner compared polling and synthetic sampling to different tools in a toolbox. “The mistake I think we make is we think that these new tools should either work in exactly the same way or somehow replace these old tools,” he said. “Rather than thinking of it as, okay, so we’ve always had the hammer, we’ve always had the screwdriver, now we’ve got a saw. But don’t use a saw to try [to] do the job of a hammer.” A quick comment from Nate Eli didn’t ask me for a comment — rather rude of him, don’t you think? But since I’m editing this story, I figured I’d add a few quick thoughts rather than putting words in his mouth. Beyond the frequently misleading marketing, what bothers me about the AI “poll” hype is that as AI tools make statistical inference cheaper and/or better (note that these are not synonyms) that actually increases the comparative value of collecting original data. You might be able to train a model to make a reasonable estimate of what some hard-to-reach poll respondent would say — say, a young Black man who voted for Trump. (Such a person checks a number of boxes for a voter who is usually hard to reach in surveys.) Indeed, this is closely related to what models like the Silver Bulletin forecast already do. They essentially smooth out the kinks in noisy survey data by making inferences based on past voting patterns or national polls or surveys of other states. But you don’t actually know what these voters think unless you’re reaching them directly. If there’s a shift in opinion among this subgroup, you’re not going to detect it. So if I were running a campaign, I’d invest more in going the extra mile to find a representative sample of those voters. And then I’d hire some smart quants — or Claude? — to figure out the implications for campaign strategy based on proprietary data that my competitors didn’t have access to. -Nate Silver Are these models any good? If synthetic surveys are just a new type of model, the next obvious question is whether the models are at least accurate. The answer very much depends on who you ask. On one end of the spectrum, you have the maximalist argument that synthetic sampling is more accurate than actual polls. “It’s an incredibly challenging problem to go to someone and say ‘hey, we’re going to be more accurate at predicting human behavior than you, even when you talk to your customers directly’,” Koh recently told CNBC. In his view, synthetic sampling isn’t a saw to polling’s hammer, it’s “magic.” There’s certainly evidence that synthetic samples can replicate certain survey toplines. But if Aaru does have any examples of their approach outperforming the polls, they’re keeping those to themselves.5 Aaru’s 2024 election model, for example, had Kamala Harris leading in Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin on November 4th. And although they’ve since taken down their forecast page, they gave Harris a 50.5 percent chance of winning the race on November 2nd.6 After the election, Fink told Semafor he was happy enough with those results because they were “within margin of error,” a term that is completely meaningless when applied to a “sample” of AI agents. And of course, Aaru says their models have improved since 2024, so supposedly now they’d be more accurate than the polls? Still, their stronger argument is on cost: “We are significantly faster and cheaper than traditional polling, and still more accurate,” said Fink. The first two claims are undeniably true, but the third brings us to the opposite end of the spectrum. Both Jackson and Hagner are skeptical that these models are reliable for anything beyond replicating common survey toplines. “I just […] don’t think the machines are what we want when we’re looking for nuanced views. My example on this is people in Arizona and Nevada in 2024 who voted for Trump and voted for expanding abortion in their states on ballot initiatives,” said Jackson. Hagner identified another issue. Maybe the synthetic respondents, like sycophantic LLMs, are inhuman in one important way: they’re too nice. “The reports that have come through at the meetings that I’ve been at are that the early experiments on this, they cannot get respondents to be as racist or sexist or, frankly, as negative as human respondents,” he said. Academic research mostly agrees on this point. While there are some papers that show promising results when using LLMs to replicate polling data, most show that LLMs suffer from various quirks like producing too few “don’t know” responses and can seriously overpredict the favorability of politicians like Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. They also seem to struggle with too little variation between demographic subgroups, so the difference in predicted opinion between Democrats and Republicans, for example, is too small. When I asked Warner about these studies, his response to these papers was that just because academics can’t get synthetic sampling to work doesn’t mean that the technique doesn’t work in general. “Actually, the argument is, okay, yours does not [work]. That does not mean […] for this complex set of machinery, which uses a lot of investment, a lot of time, a lot of money, you can’t get it to work.” Cards on the table, I’m somewhat sympathetic to this argument because academics aren’t exactly great at making election forecasts. Usually, the people with skin in the game are the most accurate. Warner’s argument is that the approach Electric Twin takes — which includes, for example, making multiple predictions for each synthetic respondent using different models and prompts and subsequently averaging those to get a final prediction in a sort of ensemble forecast — produces better results than the simpler academic models. Warner shared a comparison between his method and the method from a recent academic paper with me, and Electric Twin was indeed able to get more accurate replication. But even still, he acknowledged that synthetic sampling “is not a crystal ball.” “If you asked me, do I think using other data sources will be more accurate than asking somebody who they will vote for, I would probably say no. But if you asked me ‘would your system be useful for our turnout modeling today?’ I would say yes.” For better or worse, it looks like the method is already getting more popular in the market research world. Most of the clients Aaru touts these days are businesses like EY and McDonald’s. And AI will probably begin to pop up in other parts of the political polling process. Pollsters are already using it to code open-ended survey responses, and some firms, like YouGov, are testing using LLMs to ask survey respondents questions. More worryingly, one danger to actual polls is that AI agents can be used to infiltrate online surveys. Most online polls use various checks to prevent that from happening, but there’s conflicting evidence on how effective those filters are and how prevalent AI agents currently are in online panels. If those agents ever become impossible to detect, it might spell the end of online polling, but the solution isn’t to replace all of your respondents with ChatGPT. Silver Bulletin is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a subscriber. Subscribe 1 That particular poll obviously doesn’t meet Silver Bulletin standards for aggregation. But we exclude all Public Sentiment Institute polls from our averages because we classify them as an amateur polling firm. 2 You could argue that Fink meant the next presidential election, but (a) I’m also confident we’ll still have real polls in 2028 and (b) in that case he should have asked an LLM to define “general election.” 3 Quick caveat: that’s reporting from a Democratic pollster. It’s possible that Republicans are more willing to use AI in political campaigns. 4 Indeed, Silver Bulletin does not include “polls” produced by MRP in our forecasts or averages, and we think it’s extremely misleading when their practitioners describe them in a way that suggests original data had been collected among a large number of states or Congressional districts. 5 A recent report from Aaru and EY did show two examples of a synthetic estimate being closer than a survey to a real-world benchmark — but I’d take those findings with a grain of salt because the report reads more like an ad and didn’t involve any sort of prediction being made ahead of time. 6 For comparison, our odds for Harris on the same day were 48.2 percent.
Can Iran war politics move voters in Georgia’s Trumpiest district?
The runoff to replace Marjorie Taylor Greene features two military veterans with sharp differences on the joint U.S.-Israeli military strikes in Iran.
Hot dogs and hot laps: Southcentral Alaska ski hill stewards help preserve access to snow sports
Each winter, a mixture of staff and volunteers at Hilltop, Arctic Valley and Skeetawk ski areas cook, shovel and teach the next generation of skiers.
Business selling its 39-acre Birmingham campus after 47 years as it moves into new headquarters
The sale comes in anticipation of the company’s plans to relocate to its new corporate headquarters and sales center.
UFC Vegas 113 live blog: Mario Bautista vs. Vinicius Oliveria
Play-by-play action for Mario Bautista vs. Vinicius Oliveira, the UFC Vegas 113 main event.
Everything we know about Valve's new Steam Machine
Valve's revival of the Steam Machine is launching in 2026, but there are still unanswered questions about how the console-like PC works and how much it'll cost.
Israeli strikes kill 12 in Gaza, health ministry says
Israeli airstrikes in Gaza killed at least 12 people, the Palestinian health ministry said, with children reported to be among the fatalities in the latest violence rattling a tenuous ceasefire.
'View' star Sara Haines breaks down in tears over covering grim news: 'Why get out of bed?'
'The View' cohost Sara Haines broke down in tears over covering grim news on the talk show, admitting she doesn't 'really have a safe space' amid headlines: 'Why get out of bed?'
Switzerland Is Asking Itself: Is 10 Million People Too Many?
As the world flocks to Davos, the host country ponders a population cap
Sports trivia quiz: Test your knowledge with our weekly game
Test your knowledge with our weekly game. How many of our eight questions can you get right?
For Anchorage home baker, city’s loosened cottage food laws ease burden on business
In November, the Anchorage Assembly voted to exempt small businesses that sell some homemade foods from a licensing requirement. Many say it will open up new opportunities.
‘Harry Potter’ star reportedly joining the cast of ‘The White Lotus’ season 4
A 'Harry Potter' alum is reportedly in talks to star in season 4 of 'The White Lotus'
Golden Globes shut out controversial figures Megyn Kelly, Ben Shapiro, Joe Rogan, more from odd new category
Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan, and more were on the shortlist for potential nominations.