Microsoft, Worthless Chatbots (Misframed as "AI") and Windows Cost of Ownership (TCO)
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Nicholas Tietz-Sokolsky ☛ Why do companies hire people to be idle a lot of the time?
The biggest tech companies employ a lot of engineers. In 2021, Microsoft employed over 100,000 software engineers. That is just mind boggling scale to me. It's roughly as many people as the whole county I grew up in.
They are paying a lot of engineers. Some of them do very little, with employees saying they "were paid to do little-to-no work". So... why are they paying them if there isn't a lot of work for them to do?
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El País ☛ Margaret Mitchell: ‘The people who are most likely to be harmed by AI don’t have a seat at the table for regulation’
Margaret Mitchell, born in Los Angeles, prefers not to reveal her age. This could be a matter of vanity, or her tendency to safeguard the privacy and the proper use of data. Perhaps the latter, as she is one of the leading experts in ethics of technology and has devoted her career to reducing algorithmic biases. She founded and led Google’s Ethical AI team alongside Timnit Gebru until they were both fired, a few months apart, three years ago. She now oversees the ethics department at Hugging Face, is one of the 100 most influential people of 2023 according to Time magazine and was one of the most anticipated speakers at the Smart City Expo World Congress held recently in Barcelona, Spain.
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International Business Times ☛ OpenAI Debacle Should Raise Red Flags And Shed Light On The Company's Opaque Decision-Making Processes
It all started when a group of staff researchers sent a letter to the board of directors, alerting them to a significant AI breakthrough they believed posed a risk to humanity, as reported by Reuters. This unpublicized letter and AI algorithm played a pivotal role in the board's decision to remove Altman.
They claimed he was "not consistently candid in his communications with the board". Before his reinstatement late Tuesday, over 700 employees had threatened to resign and join Microsoft, a supporter of OpenAI, in support of Altman. Microsoft has invested about $13bn in the startup to date.
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CoryDoctorow ☛ The real AI fight
Very broadly speaking: the Effective Altruists are doomers, who believe that Large Language Models (AKA "spicy autocomplete") will someday become so advanced that it could wake up and annihilate or enslave the human race. To prevent this, we need to employ "AI Safety" – measures that will turn superintelligence into a servant or a partner, nor an adversary.
Contrast this with the Effective Accelerationists, who also believe that LLMs will someday become superintelligences with the potential to annihilate or enslave humanity – but they nevertheless advocate for faster AI development, with fewer "safety" measures, in order to produce an "upward spiral" in the "techno-capital machine."
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MIT Technology Review ☛ Unpacking the hype around OpenAI’s rumored new Q* model
While we still don’t know all the details, there have been reports that researchers at OpenAI had made a “breakthrough” in AI that had alarmed staff members. Reuters and The Information both report that researchers had come up with a new way to make powerful AI systems and had created a new model, called Q* (pronounced Q star), that was able to perform grade-school-level math. According to the people who spoke to Reuters, some at OpenAI believe this could be a milestone in the company’s quest to build artificial general intelligence, a much-hyped concept referring to an AI system that is smarter than humans. The company declined to comment on Q*.
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El País ☛ Money imposes its law on OpenAI
Walter Isaacson, the biographer of Elon Musk, says that the decision to found OpenAI arose at a private dinner between the founder of Tesla and Sam Altman in Palo Alto (California), in the heart of Silicon Valley. At the time, Google was leading the artificial intelligence race, but Musk and Altman thought it was doing so without moral qualms about safety and potential risks to humanity. The initial idea was to create a non-profit artificial intelligence laboratory that would design open source software and attempt to counter Google’s growing dominance in the field. “We wanted to have something like a Linux version of AI that was not controlled by any one person or corporation,” said Musk to Isaacson.
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Windows TCO
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Security Week ☛ Hackers Hijack Industrial Control System at US Water Utility
Municipal Water Authority of Aliquippa in Pennsylvania confirms that hackers took control of a booster station, but says no risk to drinking water or water supply.
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US News And World Report ☛ DP World Says [Intruders] Stole Australian Ports Employee Data
The breach, spotted on Nov. 10, crippled operations at the company, which manages about 40% of the goods that flow in and out of Australia, affecting its container terminals in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and Western Australia's Fremantle.
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Security Week ☛ Henry Schein Again Restoring Systems After Ransomware Group Causes More Disruption
Henry Schein revealed on October 15 that its manufacturing and distribution businesses had been hit by a cyberattack, which caused disruption to operations.
Roughly two weeks later, the ransomware group known as Alphv and BlackCat took credit for the attack, claiming to have encrypted files on the company’s systems and stolen 35 Tb of sensitive data.
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[Repeat] Data Breaches ☛ Ransomware attack on indie game maker wiped all player accounts
As announced on the game’s official Discord channel, ransomware actors attacked the main server and encrypted all data, including local backup drives, demanding payment in exchange for a decryption key.
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[Repeat] Data Breaches ☛ Hospitals in multiple states diverting patients after Ardent Health Services hit with ransomware attack
It was predictable that threat actors would attack during Thanksgiving week when many people take off for the holiday and long weekend.
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International Business Times ☛ Cybersecurity Agencies Warn of Growing DPRK State-Linked Cyber Attacks via Software Supply Chains
Supply chain attacks, a method where malicious actors compromise elements of the software distribution process, have become a favoured tool for DPRK cyber actors. These attacks, often involving zero-day vulnerabilities and exploits in third-party software, allow the actors to gain access to specific targets or indiscriminate organisations through their supply chains.
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