Microsoft Layoffs, Facebook Openwashing (Proprietary GitHub), and Digital Restrictions (DRM)
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Microsoft’s healthcare AI subsidiary Nuance undergoing layoffs: Report
Speech-recognition company Nuance Communications, acquired by Microsoft for $19.7 billion, is undergoing layoffs as it focuses on its healthcare business.
Nuance CEO Mark Benjamin notified employees about the job cuts in an internal memo, without detailing the number of staffers or departments affected, according to the Boston Globe.
“We continue to see macroeconomic pressures affect our industries, as well as market shifts that are evolving our customers’ needs,” Benjamin wrote in the email.
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Meta AI open-sources tools for self-supervised training of speech recognition models
Meta Platforms Inc.’s artificial intelligence research team today said it has open-sourced a new project called Massively Multilingual Speech, which aims to overcome the challenges of creating accurate and reliable speech recognition models. -
Meta’s new AI models can recognize and produce speech for more than 1,000 languages [Ed: Of course it's outsourced to proprietary software of Microsoft]
Meta has built AI models that can recognize and produce speech for more than 1,000 languages—a tenfold increase on what’s currently available. It’s a significant step toward preserving languages that are at risk of disappearing, the company says. Meta is releasing its models to the public via the code hosting service GitHub.
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Why an iPhone makes a terrible general purpose computer
(when Android makes a pretty good one)
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Lobbyists Descend On California To Scuttle Right To Repair Efforts
While U.S. consumer protection is generally a hot mess, one promising bright spot continues to be the bipartisan traction seen on right to repair issues. For decades, tech giants across numerous sectors have attempted to monopolize repair, making it harder and more expensive to repair things you own due to repair center consolidation, annoying DRM, and hard to find manuals and tools.