Jerry Springer, politician-turned-TV ringmaster, passed away on April 27, 2023, at the age of 79. Known for his namesake TV show, “The Jerry Springer Show,” which featured a three-ring circus of dysfunctional families willing to bare all on weekday afternoons, Springer was a ratings powerhouse and, for many, a guilty pleasure over its 27-year run. At its peak, the show was synonymous with lurid drama, chair-throwing, bleep-filled arguments, and a decline in American social values. Despite that, Springer defended his show as “escapist entertainment” and a reflection of society’s good, bad, and ugly.
Born in a London underground railway station, Springer’s parents were German Jews who fled to England during the Holocaust. They arrived in the United States when Springer was five, and he later studied political science at Tulane University and got a law degree from Northwestern University. He was active in politics much of his adult life, serving as an aide in Robert F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign and running unsuccessfully for Congress in 1970 before being elected to city council in 1971.
In 1974, Springer resigned from the city council following a vice probe involving prostitution. He quickly bounced back politically, winning a council seat in 1975 and serving as mayor in 1977 before becoming a local television politics reporter.
Springer began his talk show in 1991 with a traditional format, but it got a sleazy makeover after he left WLWT in 1993. Despite being ranked No. 1 on TV Guide’s list of “Worst Shows in the History of Television,” it was ratings gold, making Springer a celebrity who would go on to host a liberal radio talk show and “America’s Got Talent,” star in a movie called “Ringmaster,” and compete on “Dancing With the Stars.”
In 2019, Springer hosted a nationally syndicated “Judge Jerry” show and continued to speak out on whatever was on his mind in a podcast. While his power to shock had dimmed in the new era of reality television, his ability to connect with people and entertain them was undeniable. He will be remembered as a cultural icon whose impact on American television and popular culture cannot be overstated.
Jared Isaacman, the nominee for next NASA administrator, has traveled to orbit on two commercial space missions.
AP Photo/John RaouxWendy Whitman Cobb, Air University
Jared Isaacman, billionaire, CEO and nominee to become the next NASA administrator, faced questions on April 9, 2025, from members of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation during his confirmation hearing for the position.
Should the Senate confirm him, Isaacman will be the first billionaire – but not the first astronaut – to head NASA. Perhaps even more significant, he will be the first NASA administrator with significant ties to the commercial space industry.
As a space policy expert, I know that NASA leadership matters. The head of the agency can significantly shape the missions it pursues, the science it undertakes and, ultimately, the outcome of America’s space exploration.
Jared Isaacman speaks at a news conference in 2024, before his Polaris Dawn mission.AP Photo/John Raoux, File
An unconventional background
At 16 years old, Isaacman dropped out of high school to start a payment processing company in his basement. The endeavor succeeded and eventually became known as Shift4.
Though he found early success in business, Isaacman also had a love for aviation. In 2009, he set a record for flying around the Earth in a light jet, beating the previous record by more than 20 hours.
While remaining CEO of Shift4, Isaacman founded another company, Draken International. The company eventually assembled the world’s largest fleet of privately owned fighter jets. It now helps to train U.S. Air Force pilots.
In 2019, Isaacman sold his stake in Draken International. In 2020, he took Shift4 public, making him a billionaire.
Isaacman continued to branch out into aerospace, working with SpaceX beginning in 2021. He purchased a crewed flight on the Falcon 9 rocket, a mission that eventually was called Inspiration4. The mission, which he led, represented the first private astronaut flight for SpaceX. It sent four civilians with no previous formal space experience into orbit.
Following the success of Inspiration4, Isaacman worked with SpaceX to develop the Polaris Program, a series of three missions to help build SpaceX’s human spaceflight capabilities. In fall 2024, the first of these missions, Polaris Dawn, launched.
Polaris Dawn added more accomplishments to Isaacman’s resume. Isaacman, along with his crewmate Sarah Gillis, completed the first private spacewalk. Polaris Dawn’s SpaceX Dragon capsule traveled more than 850 miles (1,367 kilometers) from Earth, the farthest distance humans had been since the Apollo missions.
The Polaris Dawn mission launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in September 2024.AP Photo/John Raoux
The next adventure: NASA
In December 2024, the incoming Trump administration announced its intention to nominate Isaacman for the post of NASA administrator.
As NASA administrator, Isaacman would oversee all NASA activities at a critical moment in its history. The Artemis program, which has been in progress since 2017, has several missions planned for the next few years.
This includes 2026’s Artemis II mission, which will send four astronauts to orbit the Moon. Then, in 2027, Artemis III will aim to land on it.
If the mission proceeds as planned, the Artemis II crew will fly in an Orion crew capsule, pictured behind them, around the Moon in 2026.Kim Shiflett/NASA via AP, File
But, if Isaacman is confirmed, his tenure would come at a time when there are significant questions about the Artemis program, as well as the extent to which NASA should use commercial space companies like SpaceX. The agency is also potentially facing funding cuts.
Some in the space industry have proposed scrapping the Artemis program altogether in favor of preparing to go to Mars. Among this group is the founder of SpaceX, Elon Musk.
Others have suggested canceling NASA’s Space Launch System, the massive rocket that is being used for Artemis. Instead, they argue that NASA could use commercial systems, like SpaceX’s Starship or Blue Origin’s New Glenn.
Isaacman has also dealt with accusations that he is too close to the commercial space industry, and SpaceX in particular, to lead NASA. This has become a larger concern given Musk’s involvement in the Trump administration and its cost-cutting efforts. Some critics are worried that Musk would have an even greater say in NASA if Isaacman is confirmed.
Since his nomination, Isaacman has stopped working with SpaceX on the Polaris Program. He has also made several supportive comments toward other commercial companies.
But the success of any of NASA’s plans depends on having the money and resources necessary to carry them out.
While NASA has been spared major cuts up to this point, it, like many other government agencies, is planning for budget cuts and mass firings. These potential cuts are similar to what other agencies such as the Department of Health and Human Services have recently made.
During his confirmation hearing, Isaacman committed to keeping the Artemis program, as well as the Space Launch System, in the short term. He also insisted that NASA could both return to the Moon and prepare for Mars at the same time.
Although Isaacman stated that he believed NASA had the resources to do both at the same time, the agency is still in a time of budget uncertainty, so that may not be possible.
About his relationship with Musk, Isaacman stated that he had not talked to Musk since his nomination in November, and his relationship with SpaceX would not influence his decisions.
Additionally, he committed to carrying out space science missions, specifically to “launch more telescopes, more probes, more rovers.”
But since NASA is preparing for significant cuts to its science budget, there is some speculation that the agency may need to end some science programs, like the Hubble space telescope, altogether.
Isaacman’s future
Isaacman has received support from the larger space community. Nearly 30 astronauts signed a letter in support of his nomination. Former NASA administrators, as well as major industry groups, have signaled their desire for Isaacman’s confirmation.
He also received the support of Senator Ted Cruz, the committee chair.
Barring any major development, Isaacman will likely be confirmed as NASA administrator by the Senate in the coming weeks. The Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation could approve his nomination once it returns from a two-week break at the end of April. A full vote from the Senate would follow.
If the Senate does confirm him, Isaacman will have several major issues to confront at NASA, all in a very uncertain political environment.Wendy Whitman Cobb, Professor of Strategy and Security Studies, Air University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
WASHINGTON /PRNewswire/ — The United States Postal Service is today announcing that Louis DeJoy, America’s 75th Postmaster General, has notified the Postal Service Board of Governors that it is time for them to begin the process of identifying his successor. The Governors of the Postal Service, working with key stakeholders, will now begin the process of identifying an appropriate candidate to serve as the next Postmaster General and Chief Executive Officer of the United States Postal Service. Postmaster General’s letter to the Board of Governors
“Louis DeJoy has steadfastly served the nation and the Postal Service over the past five years,” said Amber McReynolds, chairwoman of the Board of Governors. “The Governors greatly appreciate his enduring leadership and his tireless efforts to modernize the Postal Service and reverse decades of neglect.” She added that “Louis is a fighter, and he has fought hard for the women and men of the Postal Service and to ensure that the American people have reliable and affordable service for years to come.”
DeJoy stated, “While there remains much critical work to be done to ensure that the Postal Service can be financially viable as we continue to serve the nation in our essential public service mission, I have decided it is time to start the process of identifying my successor and of preparing the Postal Service for this change. The major initiatives we are currently endeavoring are multi-year programs and it is important to have leadership in place whose tenure will span this future period. After four and half years leading one of America’s greatest public institutions through dramatic change during unusual times, it is time for me to start thinking about the next phase of my life, while also ensuring that the Postal Service is fully prepared for the future.
“The Postal Service has ironclad plans to reduce costs by over $4 billion annually, raise revenue by over $5 billion and adjust its operating network to integrate the delivery of all mail and package categories, achieving service standards that make modern-day sense and compete in the marketplace,” DeJoy added. “We are well on our way with these necessary changes, and I have been developing a leadership team whose careers reach further into the future than the one we have today. It is important to me that we timely and methodically bring forth a new postmaster general who understands our mission and can successfully lead our spirited organization. I will be flexible in helping with this transition, and I am confident that with a period of dedicated focus preparing for this change, the Postal Service will be well positioned for future success under the new leadership.”
DeJoy continued, “I am extremely proud of the 640,000 men and women of the United States Postal Service who live, work and serve in every American community. Despite being victimized by a legislative and regulatory business model that produced almost two decades of devastation to their organization and workplaces, they have persevered and embraced the changes we are making in order to better serve their fellow citizens. It has been one of the pleasures of my life and a crowning achievement of my career to have been associated with them and their mission of public service. I look forward to working with them during my remaining time here.”
DeJoy was first asked to lead the Postal Service in the spring of 2020, a time of tremendous operational and financial crisis for the organization. After many years of strategic neglect and underinvestment in people and infrastructure, he took on the responsibility of leading the Postal Service with the understanding that a massive, long-term transformation and modernization effort was needed.
Within a year, DeJoy, his team, and the Board of Governors developed a 10-year plan to put the organization on a path toward financial sustainability and operational high performance. The Delivering for America plan gave the organization well-defined strategies to establish a best-in-class operational model to drive network efficiency and capability; business model changes to address unsustainable legislative and regulatory mandates; product and pricing strategies to grow revenue; and investment in people, facilities, vehicles and technology to create more effective and modern workplaces.
While only four years into the implementation of the 10-year Delivering for America plan, the strategic path is well defined, and the strategies have been tested and proven effective, and the results to date are impressive. Importantly, the Postal Service successfully undertook the most complicated of ventures — a top-to-bottom organizational transformation — and done so quickly and on an unprecedented scale, while also delivering mail and packages at least six days per week to more than 168 million delivery addresses each day.
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Under DeJoy’s tenure, this disruptive transformation changed practically every process, function and operation of the Postal Service for the better. DeJoy acknowledged that the essential need for change, given the critically distressed financial and operational conditions of the Postal Service, caused service issues for the American people that he wished could have been avoided, but also recognized that the transformation was vitally necessary for the Postal Service to not only survive, but also thrive. This effort created a new management structure; installed much of a new processing, logistics and delivery network design; invested more than $18 billion to modernize infrastructure; created new products and more rational pricing; and enabled the organization to compete more effectively and to operate at a long-term lower cost. During this massive transformation and modernization effort, the Postal Service distributed COVID test kits, delivered the nation’s election mail, met the annual holiday shipping needs of the public, and served the American public every day. These efforts resulted in $1 billion in controllable income and $140 million in generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) income, rather than losses, during the first quarter of fiscal year 2025.
“I commend Postmaster General DeJoy for inspiring the Postal Service with strategic direction, a competitive spirit, and a culture of achievement that comes from the successful implementation of large-scale change,” said McReynolds. “I have seen this spirit of purpose grow steadily during my time on the Board of Governors, and I am confident it will continue to grow as progress begets further progress, and the promise of a transformed and modernized Postal Service is fully realized.”
Please Note: The United States Postal Service is an independent federal establishment, mandated to be self-financing and to serve every American community through the affordable, reliable and secure delivery of mail and packages to 169 million addresses six and often seven days a week. Overseen by a bipartisan Board of Governors, the Postal Service is implementing a 10-year transformation plan, Delivering for America, to modernize the postal network, restore long-term financial sustainability, dramatically improve service across all mail and shipping categories, and maintain the organization as one of America’s most valued and trusted brands.
The Postal Service generally receives no tax dollars for operating expenses and relies on the sale of postage, products and services to fund its operations.
State-of-the-art artificial intelligence systems like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude have captured the public imagination by producing fluent text in multiple languages in response to user prompts. Those companies have also captured headlines with the huge sums they’ve invested to build ever more powerful models.
An AI startup from China, DeepSeek, has upset expectations about how much money is needed to build the latest and greatest AIs. In the process, they’ve cast doubt on the billions of dollars of investment by the big AI players.
I study machine learning. DeepSeek’s disruptive debut comes down not to any stunning technological breakthrough but to a time-honored practice: finding efficiencies. In a field that consumes vast computing resources, that has proved to be significant.
Where the costs are
Developing such powerful AI systems begins with building a large language model. A large language model predicts the next word given previous words. For example, if the beginning of a sentence is “The theory of relativity was discovered by Albert,” a large language model might predict that the next word is “Einstein.” Large language models are trained to become good at such predictions in a process called pretraining.
Pretraining requires a lot of data and computing power. The companies collect data by crawling the web and scanning books. Computing is usually powered by graphics processing units, or GPUs. Why graphics? It turns out that both computer graphics and the artificial neural networks that underlie large language models rely on the same area of mathematics known as linear algebra. Large language models internally store hundreds of billions of numbers called parameters or weights. It is these weights that are modified during pretraining. https://www.youtube.com/embed/MJQIQJYxey4?wmode=transparent&start=0 Large language models consume huge amounts of computing resources, which in turn means lots of energy.
Pretraining is, however, not enough to yield a consumer product like ChatGPT. A pretrained large language model is usually not good at following human instructions. It might also not be aligned with human preferences. For example, it might output harmful or abusive language, both of which are present in text on the web.
The pretrained model therefore usually goes through additional stages of training. One such stage is instruction tuning where the model is shown examples of human instructions and expected responses. After instruction tuning comes a stage called reinforcement learning from human feedback. In this stage, human annotators are shown multiple large language model responses to the same prompt. The annotators are then asked to point out which response they prefer.
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It is easy to see how costs add up when building an AI model: hiring top-quality AI talent, building a data center with thousands of GPUs, collecting data for pretraining, and running pretraining on GPUs. Additionally, there are costs involved in data collection and computation in the instruction tuning and reinforcement learning from human feedback stages.
All included, costs for building a cutting edge AI model can soar up to US$100 million. GPU training is a significant component of the total cost.
The expenditure does not stop when the model is ready. When the model is deployed and responds to user prompts, it uses more computation known as test time or inference time compute. Test time compute also needs GPUs. In December 2024, OpenAI announced a new phenomenon they saw with their latest model o1: as test time compute increased, the model got better at logical reasoning tasks such as math olympiad and competitive coding problems.
Slimming down resource consumption
Thus it seemed that the path to building the best AI models in the world was to invest in more computation during both training and inference. But then DeepSeek entered the fray and bucked this trend.
DeepSeek sent shockwaves through the tech financial ecosystem.
Their V-series models, culminating in the V3 model, used a series of optimizations to make training cutting edge AI models significantly more economical. Their technical report states that it took them less than $6 million dollars to train V3. They admit that this cost does not include costs of hiring the team, doing the research, trying out various ideas and data collection. But $6 million is still an impressively small figure for training a model that rivals leading AI models developed with much higher costs.
The reduction in costs was not due to a single magic bullet. It was a combination of many smart engineering choices including using fewer bits to represent model weights, innovation in the neural network architecture, and reducing communication overhead as data is passed around between GPUs.
It is interesting to note that due to U.S. export restrictions on China, the DeepSeek team did not have access to high performance GPUs like the Nvidia H100. Instead they used Nvidia H800 GPUs, which Nvidia designed to be lower performance so that they comply with U.S. export restrictions. Working with this limitation seems to have unleashed even more ingenuity from the DeepSeek team.
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DeepSeek also innovated to make inference cheaper, reducing the cost of running the model. Moreover, they released a model called R1 that is comparable to OpenAI’s o1 model on reasoning tasks.
They released all the model weights for V3 and R1 publicly. Anyone can download and further improve or customize their models. Furthermore, DeepSeek released their models under the permissive MIT license, which allows others to use the models for personal, academic or commercial purposes with minimal restrictions.
Resetting expectations
DeepSeek has fundamentally altered the landscape of large AI models. An open weights model trained economically is now on par with more expensive and closed models that require paid subscription plans.
The research community and the stock market will need some time to adjust to this new reality.
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Wendy Whitman Cobb, Professor of Strategy and Security Studies, Air University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
