Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Layoffs
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AIM ☛ [Exclusive] Sridhar Vembu Calls AI a Bubble
“There is definitely an AI bubble” said Vembu, citing the hype around SaaS, crypto, and others, and how the excitement around AI is lulling down among enterprises in the last two to three months.
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The Register UK ☛ Excel Hell II: If the sickness can't be fixed, it must be contained
Once is a chance. Twice is enemy action. When you get to so many newsworthy spreadsheet errors they need a spreadsheet of their own, it's systemic failure. As we said at the time of the COVID-19 cock-up, the modern spreadsheet as exemplified by Excel is a bubbling swamp of bad ideas, straining complex data into a crude, highly constrained grid, intermingling that data, its inter-relationships, and operators through a letterbox of an interface.
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Silicon Angle ☛ AI model training rekindles interest in on-premises infrastructure
Model training and tuning aren’t like conventional IT tasks. Machine learning models must repeatedly churn through large amounts of data – the more, the better. Petabyte-sized data volumes aren’t easily shifted between local data centers and cloud platforms. This “data gravity” issue makes training in-house an attractive option if that’s where the data already lives.
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Futurism ☛ Facebook's AI-Powered Jane Austen Is Already Overrun by Spam
In short, it's an exceptionally unimaginative and ahistorical rendition of one the most acclaimed novelists in the English language.
Adding insult to injury, Zombie Austen's limited engagement is comprised of befuddled Facebook users who don't seem to understand that she's AI-generated and outright spam that the company's filters seem helpless to catch.
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The Register UK ☛ Cisco zero-day bug allows router hijacking and is being actively exploited
Cisco users' weeks have started badly with a warning that a critical zero-day bug in the networking giant's IOS XE software that allows criminals to hijack devices has been exploited in the wild.
The vulnerability, CVE-2023-20198, received a (im)perfect 10 CVSS severity rating from the networking giant, and Cisco is yet to release a patch.
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Silicon Angle ☛ Cisco warns customers of actively exploited critical vulnerability in IOS XE devices
The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2023-20198, has been given the highest possible Common Vulnerabilities and Exposure score of 10 and is found in all Cisco IOS XE devices that have the Web UI feature enabled. The vulnerability affects physical and virtual devices running Cisco IOS XE software that also have the HTTP or HTTPS Server feature enabled.
The vulnerability allows a remote, unauthenticated attacker to create an account on an affected system with privilege level 15 access, which gives the attacker complete control of the affected system.
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Pete Warden ☛ Why We’re Building an Open-Source Universal Translator
We’re also big believers in open source, so we’re building on top of work like Meta’s NLLB and OpenAI’s Whisper and will be releasing the results under an open license. I strongly believe that language translation should be commoditized, making it into a common resource that a lot of stakeholders can contribute to, so I hope this will be a step in that direction. This is especially essential for low-resource languages, where giving communities the opportunity to be involved in digital preservation is vital for their future survival. Tech companies don’t have a big profit incentive to support translation, so advancing the technology will have to rely on other groups for support.
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The Atlantic ☛ America Is About to See Way More Driverless Cars
“Everything I see indicates Cruise has more issues with road safety, but it’s difficult to be sure, because the companies are so opaque with their data,” Phil Koopman, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University who specializes in autonomous-vehicle safety, told me. Cruise and Waymo are required to make some numbers public to regulators, reporting any accidents and, in California, disclosing the number of miles driven and any incidents in which a human had to intervene. The companies also release various safety research on their respective websites. But gaps remain: Researchers don’t have precise information about how many robotaxis are operating and where, for example. Nor do they have video footage of every crash.
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Gizmodo ☛ New York Bill Would Require a Criminal Background Check to Buy a 3D Printer
The New York bill, called AB A8132, would require a criminal history background check for anyone attempting to purchase a 3D printer capable of fabricating a firearm. It would similarly prohibit the sale of those printers to anyone with a criminal history that disqualifies them from owning a firearm. As it’s currently written, the bill doesn’t clarify what models or makes of printers would potentially fall under this broad category. The bill defines a three-dimensional printer as a “device capable of producing a three-dimensional object from a digital model.”
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Tom's Hardware ☛ NY Bill Would Require Background Checks to Buy 3D Printers, Attempts to Target Ghost Guns
While the goal of bill A8132 seems to be preventing the manufacture of so-called ghost guns — unregistered firearms made at home — it actually would restrict the sale of pretty much any consumer 3D printer in the state. The firearm enthusiast publication Gun Digest gives the very popular Creality Ender 3 V2 its highest recommendation for firearm printing and it also recommends the Prusa i3 MK3S+. Both of those are bedslinger-style FDM printers so, if you could print a gun with them, you could print a gun with any 3D printer.
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The Register UK ☛ LinkedIn lays off nearly 700 staff, engineers to suffer the most
Microsoft is kicking off another round of layoffs, this time cutting 668 jobs across several teams at LinkedIn.
News of the cuts came this morning, which LinkedIn confirmed in a brief blog post that it described to The Register as "full." According to the Microsoft subsidiary, the cuts will range across engineering, product, talent, and finance teams and were made as part of organizational restructuring and streamlining "to ensure we continue to deliver value for our members and customers."
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India Times ☛ LinkedIn lays off 668 employees in second round of job cuts this year
The cuts, which affect more than 3% of the 20,000-strong staff, add to the tens of thousands of job losses this year in the technology sector in the face of an uncertain economic outlook.=
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Gizmodo ☛ Stack Overflow Lays Off 28% of Staff to Stay on Its 'Path to Profitability'
Stack Overflow has not been without other sources of turbulence. This summer, the company’s volunteer moderators announced they would be going on strike, citing the company’s prohibition on moderating AI-generated content on the platform. Stack Overflow says its new moderation policy will only remove AI-generated content in specific instances, claiming that over-moderation of posts made with artificial intelligence was turning away human contributors. The decision to fall back on moderating AI content comes after Stack Overflow opted to charge AI companies for training on its website’s content.
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Futurism ☛ Stack Overflow Lays Off Employees as AI Threatens Coding Industry
Stack Overflow, the go-to coding resource and forum, is laying off more than a hundred workers totaling 28 percent of its staff — just as AI-powered coding tools like OpenAI's ChatGPT are threatening to reshape the industry.
CEO Stack Overflow Prashanth Chandrasekar announced the layoffs today, explaining that struggles to reach profitability and unspecified "macroeconomic pressures" led to the cullings.
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Silicon Angle ☛ Stack Overflow lets go 28% of its workforce in cost reduction push
The company, which is incorporated as Stack Exchange Inc., didn’t specify the exact number of affected employees. But Chandrasekar disclosed last October that Stack Overflow had 540 staffers at the time. That suggests more than 140 employees will be let go as part of the layoffs announced today.
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Silicon Angle ☛ LinkedIn lays off 668 workers to simplify its organizational structure
According to an internal memo obtained by CNBC, 563 of the 668 affected staffers work at LinkedIn’s research and development division. The memo specifies that 137 engineering management professionals and 38 product experts are among the employees who will be leaving the Microsoft unit. According to LinkedIn, its talent and finance teams were also affected.
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Scoop News Group ☛ Top Republican working on ‘light touch’ AI bill with focus on generative AI and self-certification system
The AI Research, Innovation and Accountability Act of 2023, which was first reported in July, has been changed and updated significantly since then, with a new emphasis on the following: online content authenticity, the study of AI usage in government, government standards for detecting AI generated media, generative AI transparency and enforcement of the bill through monetary penalties and outright bans on violating AI systems and companies.
The bill would require the creation of a 15-person, multifaceted AI Certification Advisory Committee within the Commerce Department to help propose testing, evaluation, validation and verification (TEVV) standards to be used for the certification of critical-impact AI systems. Companies developing or deploying AI systems would then ultimately be responsible for using such standards to assess their impact and self-certify their safety to the Commerce Department.