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A retired Navy commander was brutally beaten, robbed, and left with a brain injury and at least 100 stitches after he was attacked while walking with his dog near a Philadelphia park last week.

Scott Harris, 62, says he was walking his dog Nora around 11:30 Saturday night when he came upon a crowd gathered at a neighborhood park in the Brewerytown neighborhood of the city.

“There was a large party going on across the street, that in hindsight I probably shouldn’t have walked near, and the next thing I remember I’m in the emergency room because I kind of just blacked out after that,” Harris told Fox 29.

Harris was attacked from behind by at least one person as he walked past the crowd, who knocked the man unconscious and stole his wallet, police said according to NBC 10. Harris was attacked from behind by at least one person as he walked past the crowd, who knocked the man unconscious and stole his wallet.Fox 29 Philadelphia / Scott Harris Scott Harris, 62, says he was walking his dog Nora around 11:30 Saturday night when he came upon a crowd gathered at a neighborhood park in the Brewerytown neighborhood of the city.Fox 29 Philadelphia

No information on the attacker has been released.

In his wallet, Harris lost his ID, some credit cards, and a personal memento.

“Sadly, only thing I really cared about in that wallet was my mother’s driver’s license,” Harris told the outlet. “She passed about 10 years ago. That’s kind of how I kept her close and now I don’t even have that.” Doctors told Harris he suffered a brain injury, broken teeth, and swelling and bruising to the face, along with many stitches, the outlet said.Fox 29 Philadelphia / Scott Harris Harris has served multiple years on deployment overseas, but his tours were uneventful compared to his walk last weekend.Fox 29 Philadelphia

A security camera outside Harris’ apartment captured a group of good samaritans walking Harris and Nora back to his home after the attack, where his partner was waiting for him.

“They brought him back, otherwise I don’t know what would have happened,” Joseph Hurchick told Fox 29. “We were on the stoop and he was just bleeding, I was on the phone with 911, I didn’t know where the blood was coming from, I didn’t know if he was stabbed.” Start your day with all you need to know

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“Thank God, you know, there are good people,” Harris told the outlet. “And maybe they’re mixed up with some people that aren’t so nice. And they just saw a human being in need and brought me back safely.”

Harris was later treated at a local hospital, where he spent three days recovering from the attack.

Doctors told Harris he suffered a brain injury, broken teeth, and swelling and bruising to the face, along with many stitches, the outlet said.

“The surgeon said he stopped counting at a hundred stitches, but a lot of them are inside my mouth.”

Harris has served multiple years on deployment overseas, but his tours were uneventful compared to his walk last weekend.

“I did a year in a war zone in Iraq, did 2 years in Ukraine, and would not have expected this to happen in my own neighborhood,” he said.

The retired commander had adopted Nora from Ukraine A security camera outside Harris’ apartment captured a group of good samaritans walking Harris and Nora back to his home after the attack, where his partner was waiting for him. Fox 29 Philadelphia / Scott Harris Harris and Hurchick have complained to Philadelphia multiple times about the large gatherings that happen at Brewerytown Park, but nothing has been done about it.Fox 29 Philadelphia

Harris and Hurchick have complained to Philadelphia multiple times about the large gatherings that happen at the park, but nothing has been done about it, according to the outlet.

“This is what happens when something is not policed, it could have been worse,” Hurchick said. “It’s going to take a murder for this to stop.”

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Chinese tech giant Baidu to release next-generation AI model this year as DeepSeek shakes up market

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Chinese tech giant Baidu to release next-generation AI model this year as DeepSeek shakes up market

Men interact with a Baidu AI robot near the company logo at its headquarters in Beijing, China April 23, 2021.

Florence Lo | Reuters

BEIJING — China’s Baidu plans to release the next generation of its artificial intelligence model in the second half of this year, according to a source familiar with the matter, as newer players such as DeepSeek disrupt the segment.

Ernie 5.0, called a “foundation model,” is set to have “big enhancements in multimodal capabilities,” the source said, without specifying its functions. “Multimodal” AI can process texts, videos, images and audio to combine them as well as convert them across categories — text to video and vice-versa, for instance.

Foundation models can understand language and perform a wide array of tasks including generating text and images, and communicating in natural language.

Baidu’s planned update comes as Chinese companies race to develop innovative AI models to compete with OpenAI and other U.S.-based companies. In late January, Hangzhou-based startup DeepSeek prompted a global tech stock sell-off with the release of its open-source AI model that impressed users with its reasoning capabilities and claims of undercutting OpenAI’s ChatGPT drastically on cost.

“We are living in an exciting time … The inference cost [of foundation models] basically can be reduced by more than 90% over 12 months,” Baidu CEO Robin Li said at the World Governments Summit in Dubai this week. That’s according to a press release of his fireside chat with Omar Sultan Al Olama, UAE’s minister of state for artificial intelligence, digital economy, and remote work applications.

“If you can reduce the cost by a certain percentage, then that means your productivity increases by that kind of percentage. I think that’s pretty much the nature of innovation,” Li noted.

Baidu was the first major Chinese tech company to roll out a ChatGPT-like chatbot called Ernie in March 2023. But despite initial momentum, the product has since been eclipsed by other Chinese AI chatbots from startups as well as large-tech companies such as Alibaba and ByteDance.

While Alibaba shares have soared 33% for the year so far, Baidu shares are up 6%. Tencent has notched gains of about 4% for the year so far. ByteDance is not listed.

Goldman Sachs: China stands to gain as AI focus shifts toward applications layer

Baidu’s Ernie model already supports the integration of generative AI across a range of the company’s consumer and business-facing products, including cloud storage and content creation.

Last month, Baidu said its Wenku platform for creating presentations and other documents had reached 40 million paying users as of the end of 2024, up 60% from the end of 2023. Updated features, such as using AI to generate a presentation based on a company’s financial filing, started being rolled out to users in January.

The current version of the Ernie model is Generation 4, released in Oct. 2023. An upgraded “turbo” version Ernie 4.0 was released in August 2024. Baidu has not officially announced plans to release the next generation update.

The latest version of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, GPT-4o, was released in May 2024. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a Reddit “ask me anything” session earlier this month that there wasn’t a public timeline for GPT-5’s release.

Baidu did not respond to a request for comment.

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