• Peter Thiel faced backlash from pro-Palestine protesters during an event in Cambridge, UK. 
• Thiel is the cofounder of Palantir, a data-mining firm that works with the Israel Defense Forces.
• Protesters interrupted his speech at the Cambridge Union and accused him of genocide. 

Tech billionaire Peter Thiel was trapped inside a student debating hall on Wednesday by pro-Palestine protesters who accused him of genocide.

Thiel, 56, is a cofounder of data-mining company Palantir, which supplies the Israel Defense Forces with technology for "war-related missions."

Thiel was giving a speech at the Cambridge Union Society in the UK (which is independent of the University of Cambridge) when pro-Palestinian protesters interrupted his monologue. They were later photographed being escorted out of the event.

Videos circulating on X show protesters gathered outside the building. One video, posted by Mail on Sunday journalist Sabrina Miller, shows a large group of protesters waving Palestinian flags and chanting.

"Peter Thiel trapped inside Cambridge Union. Protesters not letting him leave," Miller wrote.

Thiel's vehicles were also blocked from leaving the Cambridge Union for more than an hour by hundreds of protesters, according to Varsity, Cambridge University's independent student newspaper.

The Times reported that Thiel taunted the group of activists by smiling and waving at them while taking pictures. The report said he had to arrive several hours early to avoid confrontations.

"Since October 7th, 14,000 children in Palestine have been murdered, and Palantir is complicit in that. Your actions are complicit in the genocide of thousands of people," one protester from the Youth Demand campaign group could be heard saying in a video posted to X.

"Your technology is ensuring that hospitals are being bombed," they added.

"It's embarrassing and appalling that anyone could even want to attend a talk by a man profiting millions off the backs of dead people," one protester said in a press release issued by Youth Demand.

"Palestinian lives are not disposable and I cannot stand for profit over human lives," they added.

"Since our founding in 1815, the Cambridge Union Society's foremost principle is that of freedom of speech and the open exchange of ideas," Paul Seagrove, Communications Manager at the Cambridge Union Society, told Business Insider.

"In this spirit, we both support the right to peaceful protest alongside the right for our speakers and members to voice their opinion. Last night's event demonstrated this long-standing tradition of the society."

Representatives for Youth Demand campaign group and Palantir did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The exact details of Palantir's partnership with Israel aren't clear. In 2023, the company introduced its AI platform for militaries to analyze targets and create battle plans, Bloomberg said.

"Both parties have mutually agreed to harness Palantir's advanced technology in support of war-related missions," the company's executive vice president, Josh Harris, told Bloomberg.

"This strategic partnership aims to significantly aid the Israeli Ministry of Defense in addressing the current situation in Israel."

Earlier this week, Palantir posted revenue of $634 million in the quarter ending March 31, a 21% increase from the same time last year.

Alex Karp, Palantir's CEO, previously lashed out at the wave of pro-Palestine student protests occurring at universities. He doubled down on his comment in theon the earnings call.

"The greatest institutions of our time disappear and turn into discriminatory dysfunction," he said.

• American Airlines announced a charter flight to France for 70 World War II veterans.
• It will commemorate the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings.
• The trip will start with a send-off parade at Dallas-Forth Worth Airport.

Dozens of World War II veterans will enjoy a free flight to France to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings.

American Airlines announced Wednesday that it will fly 70 veterans aboard a chartered Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner. It will start with a dinner at the carrier's headquarters and a send-off parade at Dallas-Fort Worth Airport, before the chartered flight to Paris on May 31.

The veterans will spend two days in the French capital before a series of events in Normandy, finishing with a ceremony at the American Cemetery.

Back in February, Delta Air Lines also announced similar plans. It will fly 60 World War II veterans directly to Normandy for the third year in a row.

One of the veterans being flown by AA is Frank Perry — a former pilot with Piedmont Airlines, which later became part of American. He served in the Army Air Corps as a turret gunner.

Felix Maurizio, a US Navy veteran, will also be on the flight. He was on one of the landing craft that transported soldiers, including his brother, to Omaha Beach on D-Day.

"We're honored to play a part in helping this group of heroic veterans return to Normandy," said David Seymour, American's chief operating officer and an army veteran himself.

"This special journey is not only an expression of our gratitude for these heroes and the sacrifices they made for our freedom, but we hope to help shine a light on their extraordinary stories and preserve their legacies for generations to come."

• Cohere unveils fine-tuned AI model it says outperforms GPT-4 on some tasks. 
• The model is also cheaper to run, costing up to 15 times less than larger AI systems. 
• Cohere is betting on cheaper, business-focused AI as it tries to compete with OpenAI and Anthropic.

OpenAI rival Cohere has unveiled an updated AI model it says is more useful and cheaper to run than GPT-4.

The AI startup says it is rolling out the ability to fine-tune its Command R AI model, allowing it to outperform larger models like GPT-4 in some use cases while costing up to fifteen times less to operate.

It raises hopes that smaller, cheaper models might be able to match the larger, more expensive AI systems built by tech giants as concerns grow over the spiraling costs of the AI boom.

"We have found that fine-tuning on data sets with a small model gets really great results," Cohere cofounder Nick Frosst told Business Insider.

"Fine tuning on Command R, when we benchmarked it against the competition, outperforms some models in completely different weight classes and can then do better than them at a tiny bracket of the price," he added.

Cohere said when tested on tasks such as summarizing meetings and analyzing financial and scientific information, the fine-tuned version of Command R was more accurate than GPT-4, GPT-4 Turbo, and Claude Opus, the most advanced model built by Amazon-backed Anthropic.

Cohere performed these tests itself, and found that its fine-tuned Command R model scored 80.2% on accuracy when summarizing meetings, compared to 78.8% for GPT-4 and 77.9% for Claude Opus. Similarly, when analyzing financial data Command R was 6.2% more accurate than GPT-4 and 5.3% more accurate than Claude.

The running cost of the fine-tuned model, known as the inference cost, is also far below GPT-4 and Claude Opus, costing between $2 to $4 per million tokens compared to $30 to $60 for GPT-4.

Cohere said that as Command R, which initially launched in March, is significantly smaller than the likes of GPT-4, it costs much less to run.

Fine-tuning, which sees users tailor the model with specialist data, also reduces the amount of computation required to run the model by making it better at more relevant tasks.

Fine-tuning on the Command R model is available on Cohere's platform from Thursday, with availability on other platforms coming in the near future.

Cohere bets on enterprise

The massive amount of computer power needed to train large AI models like GPT-4 and Meta's Llama has forced many AI companies into a multi-billion-dollar arms race, even as the path to making AI profitable remains elusive.

Mark Zuckerberg told investors that Meta will continue spending "aggressively" on AI, and OpenAI boss Sam Altman said last month that he "doesn't care" if building Artificial General Intelligence — AI with above human-level intelligence — costs $5 billion, $50 billion or $500 billion.

"As long as we can figure out a way to pay the bills, we're making AGI. It's going to be expensive," Altman said to a group of students at Stanford University.

Cohere, which is based in Toronto, has taken a different approach. The company is targeting businesses and enterprise customers, offering smaller AI models specifically tailored to business uses at a fraction of the cost of larger models.

"I think there's a very interesting scientific debate to be had about whether or not large language models alone will scale to AGI — I don't think they will. So I don't think just throwing more money into compute will result in something like AGI," said Frosst.

"Large language models are an incredible technology. I think they can deliver so much more value than they're delivering currently. But only if they're actually put into real business use cases, if they're made at a reasonable price point," he added.

Cohere was valued at over $2.1 billion last year, but the road hasn't been completely smooth. The Information reported in March that despite its lofty valuation, Cohere was generating only $13 million in annualized revenue by the end of last year.

Business Insider understands that annualized revenue had risen to around $35 million by the end of Q1. Frosst said that Cohere's revenue had increased due to the company releasing a steady stream of new models and updates this year.

"It's been a good start to the year for us. I think that is a direct result of us focusing on actually business-ready and real-world solutions rather than lofty science projects," he said.

However, the company still faces a challenge in competing with Big Tech-backed heavyweights like OpenAI and Anthropic.

The picture for AI startups looks less sunny than a year ago, with buzzy firms like Stability AI and Inflection encountering problems in recent months.

Stability conducted layoffs last month as part of an effort to "focus" its operations after CEO Emad Mostaque resigned, following reports that the startup was experiencing financial problems.

Meanwhile, Inflection, which was once valued at $4 billion, lost cofounder Mustafa Suleyman and a chunk of its staff to Microsoft in March.

Cohere is counting on its focus on enterprise and low-cost models to help it carve out a niche in an increasingly competitive AI landscape.

"We're interested in making these models as useful as possible," said Frosst.

"We're interested in a world where every day you use a language model to help you in any of the things you're using a computer with. You don't need AGI for that," he added.

• Home prices are falling in parts of Florida and Texas even as they soar nationally.
• Sale prices only dropped in 15 of 221 metro areas last quarter, and five were in those states.
• High prices, steeper mortgage rates, and supply catching up with demand help explain the declines.

Home prices are falling in parts of Florida and Texas as buyers tap out and supply catches up with demand.

The median sale price for existing single-family homes rose in 93% of 221 metro areas in the year through March, the National Association of Realtors reported this week.

There were falls in just 15 markets, and five of those were in Florida and Texas — Cape Coral-Fort Myers (-4.4%), Panama City (-3.8%), and Crestview-Fort Walton Beach-Destin (-0.2%), and San Antonio-New Braunfels (-4.6%) and Austin-Round Rock (-0.3%) respectively.

That's a striking contrast to the national picture. Overall, the median home price rose 5% to north of $389,000, led by metro areas such as Fond du Lac, Wisconsin (23.7%), and the Illinois regions of Kankakee (22%), Rockford (20.1%), and Champaign-Urbana (20%).

Florida and Texas are known for their red-hot real estate markets, so it's surprising to see prices dropping in several parts of those states.

Buyers may be getting priced out. Austin-Round Rock ranked among the 50 most expensive markets analyzed by NAR, with a median sale price of $467,000.

Cape Coral ($415,000) and Panama City ($351,000) were also in the top 100. Homeowners in Florida face the added headache of surging insurance costs due to climate risks.

Not only are homes expensive, but taking out a loan to buy one has become far more costly, creating an affordability crisis.

The monthly mortgage payment on a typical home with 20% down jumped by more than 9% last quarter to north of $2,000, NAR found.

The increase is largely down to the Federal Reserve's campaign to crush inflation by raising interest rates. The average 30-year fixed-rate mortgage rate was nearly 7% last quarter — more than double its 3% level at the start of 2022.

Florida and Texas have also scrambled to build more houses in recent years, since the pandemic sparked a surge in people moving to those states.

Redfin identified only 10 metro areas that increased their housing supply in the year to March, and eight were in those two southern states.

'Lock-in effect'

Inventory has now caught up with demand in some areas, leading to homes sitting on the market for longer, sellers cutting prices, and price growth stagnating.

That differs from much of the country, where supply remains heavily constrained duer to the "lock-in effect" — sellers holding off on listing their homes because they don't want to give up their cheap mortgages.

Florida's Cape Coral led the supply boom with a 51% increase in homes for sale last quarter. It also had one of the highest rates of seller price cuts and saw an unrivaled 31-day increase in the time taken to sell a typical home, Redfin found.

In line with NAR, Redfin found that prices fell in San Antonio and were flat in Austin, even as the vast majority of markets recorded price increases.

The takeaway is that a combination of sky-high prices, steeper mortgage rates and other costs like insurance squeezing buyers' budgets, and supply catching up with demand has resulted in prices flatlining or falling in parts of Florida and Texas, bucking the national trend.

That's bad news for sellers and homeowners hoping their properties will appreciate in the near term. But it could give bold buyers an opening to snag their next home.