Category Archives: Big Tech

The Great Resignation is pivoting to a Forced Resignation.

Thousands of layoffs in the tech sector, compounded by hiring freezes and a slowdown in hiring, highlight the abrupt shift in fortunes over the past several months as a result of rampant inflation, fear of stagflation and recession, supply-chain interruptions, the war in Ukraine, an ailing stock market and other red-alert economic factors.

The latest blows came Tuesday, when Coinbase Global Inc. COIN, +0.33% announced an 18% layoff of about 1,100 people and real-estate brokerage Redfin Corp. RDFN, +7.60% said it would reduce head count by about 470 people, or 6% of its workforce.

Read more: Redfin to cut 470 jobs, stock sinks toward record low

Everybody needs to batten down the hatches. We are in stormy, stormy seas with choppy weather on the horizon, media titan Jeffrey Katzenberg, a board member and investor in cybersecurity startup Aura, told MarketWatch.

In recent weeks, a broad cross-section of companies across all sectors have announced layoffs or plans to limit hiring amid the economic crucible. In addition to Coinbase and Redfin, Peloton Interactive Inc. PTON, +3.07%, PayPal Holdings Inc. PYPL, +2.34%, Tesla Inc. TSLA, +1.72%, Carvana Co. CVNA, +13.41% and others said they intend to slash staff. At the same time, some of techs biggest players Facebook parent company Meta Platforms Inc. META, +1.78%, Intel Corp.s INTC, -0.99% client-computing group, Microsoft Corp. MSFT, +1.09%, Uber Technologies Inc. UBER, +6.55% and Lyft Inc. LYFT, +7.28% are slowing down or freezing hires.

All told, at least 15,000 tech-related jobs have been or will be eliminated, according to Layoffs.fyi, a website that tracks job cuts at startups.

The market cap aggregate of about 300 publicly traded tech companies with operations in San Francisco and the valley is at its lowest now, $9.98 trillion, since 2013 after peaking at nearly $15 trillion in November 2021.

Downturns in spending on PCs, tablets and advertising have only added to the tumult, and there are whispers that even cloud-computing which led a wave of internet expansion the past decade could be flattening. Its all contributed to a convulsive shift from hiring binge to belt-tightening, especially among startups.

Its been a challenging last three years with the pandemic, and another two coming with secular [economic] headwinds, Starz Chief Executive Jeffrey Hirsch told MarketWatch.

The effect has been most pronounced among Silicon Valley startups, say local economists. With the uncertainty of recession, a slowdown in short-term demand and possibly more rate hikes, understandably there will be a pause for startups and, for in the short term, for the really big players, Stephen Levy, director and senioreconomistof the Center for Continuing Study of the CaliforniaEconomy, told MarketWatch.

Diminished prospects and a balky market have already delayed the IPO dreams of startups and prompted others to scale back hiring plans. Max Cohen, co-founder and CEO of Sprinter Health, a startup in Menlo Park, Calif., initially planned to double headcount to 60 this year but has since reduced it to 48.

The questions now are, Are you hiring and how much? Cohen, a former employee at Google and Meta, told MarketWatch.

For larger companies, the impact is more subtle. Major expansion is still on for Google in Mountain View, Calif., and San Jose, and for Meta in Menlo Park, Calif., and nearby Moffett Park, but it remains to be seen if they will fill those facilities with people as quickly as originally planned. It may take them longer, perhaps 12 months, before things pick up again for big tech, Levy said.

Representatives from techs largest companies are mostly mum on their hiring plans, though Amazon.com Inc. AMZN, +2.47% said it is aggressively adding staff. With tens of thousands of corporate and tech roles currently available, we continue to look for talented individuals to help us build the future of retail, robotics, health care, devices, cloud computing, and more,Amazon spokesperson Kelly Nantel told MarketWatch.

For now, Big Tech is taking a beating in market valuation. The market cap aggregate of about 300 publicly traded tech companies with operations in San Francisco and the valley is at its lowest now, $9.98 trillion, since late 2020 after peaking at nearly $15 trillion in November 2021, says Rachel Massaro, vice president of research at the Silicon Valley Institute for Regional Studies.

There is certainly a confluence of things that are making everyday life difficult, Massaro told MarketWatch. That is a huge impact trickling down to companies, management, and the hiring level. [The unemployment rate in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties, in the heart of the valley, is at a 22-year low of 1.8%, though that could change if layoffs pick up and hiring clamps down.]

Like nearly everyone else, cybersecurity startup Aura is closely monitoring costs and bracing for a challenging macro-climate for years between inflation, war, supply-chain issues and a post-COVID climate, Aura CEO Hari Ravichandran told MarketWatch. This is impacting the entirety of the business ecosystem, he said.

Adding to the economic uncertainty: Demand for PCs and tablets are headed for their worst decline in several years, according to a new forecast from International Data Corp. Global shipments of traditional PCs will fall 8% year-over-year to 321.2 million units in 2022 the steepest drop since 10% in 2015. Meanwhile, worldwide tablet shipment forecasts were lowered to 158 million, down 6% from 2021 its worse percentage decline since 10% in 2018.

We feel very confident that the commercial PC market will remain stronger than the consumer and education markets, IDC analyst Ryan Reith told MarketWatch. But it will not match the growth surge during the pandemic in 2020 and 2021. The challenge remains inflation, the war in Ukraine, a lockdown in China, and some lingering supply-chain issues.

Global cloud sales, meanwhile, are expected to grow at a relatively modest 20% to $494.65 billion in 2022 from $410.9 billion a year ago, according to market researcher Gartner. The forecast is for sales to grow 21% to $599.84 billion in 2023, and 20% to $720.99 billion in 2024.

Another dynamic is the whip-saw-like impact of COVID on job security at companies that greatly benefited from the hyper-growth days of the pandemic, when homebound Americans splurged on streaming, gaming and social media.

After spending the better part of two years ramping up on content and people while it amassed millions of new subscribers, Netflix Inc. NFLX, +1.25% has imposed layoffs in recent weeks. Last month, it internally said it was laying off about 150 employees, including some in the executive ranks and in the animation division, which account for about 1.3% of the companys 11,300-person workforce.

Read more: Netflix lays off 150 workers as executives look to cut costs

The jolting circumstances at Netflix and elsewhere represent a jarring turn of events for employees who were jumping from one high-paying gig to another sometimes, within a matter of months, say jobs experts.

It was certainly a candidates market the last couple of years, Marty Reaume, chief people officer at Sequoia Consulting Group, told MarketWatch. She said 459 business leaders representing mostly California-based tech companies disclosed in March 2022 that more than 20% of their workforce left their jobs in 2021. The national average, by comparison, is about 15%.

The curve couldnt go up forever of frenetic hiring and rising salaries, Reaume said. It was getting a little ridiculous scouring for talent. If there is any benefit to this crazy market, things will settle down a little bit.

The rest is here:

From Great Resignation to Forced Resignation: Tech companies are shifting to layoffs after a huge ramp up in hiring - MarketWatch

There was a moment when Facebook was a democracy. Blink and you would have missed it, but in December 2012, as part of an initiative announced three years earlier by Mark Zuckerberg, the company unveiled new terms and conditions that it wanted to impose on users. They were invited to vote on whether they should be enacted, yes or no. The voters were pretty clear: 88% said no, the new terms werent acceptable. It was a triumph of people power.

Except that Zuckerberg had imposed a precondition: the decision would only be binding if at least 30% of all users took part. That would have required votes from about 300 million of the roughly 1 billion users the platform then had (its since roughly tripled). But just over 650,000 participated. King Zuckerberg declared that the time for democracy was over, and in future, Facebook which in reality means Zuckerberg, for he owns the majority of the voting shares would decide what would happen, without reference to user opinion.

Since then, the company has been accused of aiding the genocide of the Rohingya in Myanmar, the spreading of misinformation in 2016 in the Philippines and US elections and the Brexit referendum, of bringing together violent rightwing extremists who went on to kill in the US, of failing to douse the QAnon conspiracy theory, and most recently of helping foment the January 2021 US insurrection.

Sure, the 2012 terms and conditions probably didnt lead to those outcomes. Equally, leaving Facebook to its own devices didnt help prevent them. In 2016 an internal memo by one of its executives, Andrew Bosworth, suggested that such collateral damage was tolerable: We connect people. That can be good if they make it positive. Maybe someone finds love. Maybe it even saves the life of someone on the brink of suicide That can be bad if they make it negative. Maybe it costs a life by exposing someone to bullies. Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools [but] anything that allows us to connect more people more often is de facto good.

Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on your tools, but overall what we do is good? Even if Zuckerberg distanced himself and Facebook from the remarks, its not the sort of language youd expect to hear from, say, an executive of a nuclear power plant. So why should we accept it from senior people in companies with proven adverse track records? No surprise, then, that the clamour is growing for more regulation of big tech companies such as Facebook, Google (particularly YouTube), Twitter, Instagram and the fast-rising TikTok, which already has more than 1 billion users worldwide.

Into this tumult comes Jamie Susskind, a British barrister who argues that we need a digital republic to protect society from the harms indifferently caused by these companies, and provide a framework legal, ethical, moral for how we should oversee them now and in the future.

Susskind argues that our present emphasis on market individualism where individuals pick and choose the platforms they interact with, and thus shape which ones succeed or fail has allowed these companies to create fiefdoms. What we need, he says, is more accountability, which means that we should have more oversight into what the companies do. This would be a proper citizens republic; rather than relying on the inchoate mass of individuals, a collective focus on responsibility would force accountability and strip away unearned powers.

Big tech seems like a space where it should be easy to find solutions. Do the companies sell data without permission? (The big tech ones dont, but theres a thriving advertising ecosystem that does.) Do their algorithms unfairly discriminate on the basis of race, gender, locale? Do they throw people off their platforms without reason? Do they moderate content unfairly? Then we have casus belli to litigate and correct.

OK, but how? The problem facing Susskind, and us, is that there are three choices for dealing with these companies. Leave them alone? That hasnt worked. Pass laws to control them? But our political systems struggle to frame sensible laws in a timely fashion. Create technocratic regulators to oversee them and bring them into line when they stray? But those are liable to regulatory capture, where they get too cosy with their charges. None is completely satisfactory. And we are wrestling a hydra; as fast as policy in one area seems to get nailed down (say, vaccine misinformation), two more pop up (say, facial recognition and machine learning).

Susskind suggests we instead try mini-publics most often seen in the form of citizen assemblies, where you bring a small but representative group of the population together and give them expert briefings about a difficult choice to be made, after which they create policy options. Taiwan and Austria use them, and in Ireland they helped frame the questions in the referendums about same-sex marriage and abortion.

What he doesnt acknowledge is that this just delays the problem. After the mini-publics deliberate, you are back at the original choices: do nothing, legislate or regulate.

Deciding between those approaches would require a very detailed examination of how these companies work, and what effects the approaches could have. We dont get that here. A big surprise about the book is the chapters length, or lack of it. There are 41 (including an introduction and conclusion) across 301 pages, and between each of the books 10 parts is a blank page. Each chapter is thus only a few pages, the literary equivalent of those mini Mars bars infuriatingly described as fun size.

But a lot of these topics deserve more than a couple of bites; they are far meatier and more complicated. How exactly do you define bot accounts, and are they always bad? Should an outside organisation be able to overrule a companys decision to remove an account for what it sees as undesirable behaviour? If a company relies on an algorithm for its revenues , how far should the state (or republic) be able to interfere in its operation, if it doesnt break discrimination laws? Bear in mind that Facebooks algorithms in Myanmar, the Philippines and the US before the 2021 insurrection did nothing illegal. (The Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen said recently that only about 200 people in the whole world understand how its News Feed algorithm chooses what to show you.) So what is it we want Facebook to stop, or start, doing? The correct answer, as it happens, is start moderating content more aggressively; in each case, too few humans were tasked with preventing inflammatory falsehoods running out of control. Defining how many moderators is the correct number is then a tricky problem in itself.

These are all far from fun-sized dilemmas, and even if we had clear answers there would still be structural barriers to implementation which often means us, the users. The truth is that individuals still click away too many of their protections, writes Susskind, noting how easily we dismissively select I agree, yielding up our rights. Fine, but whats the alternative? The EUs data protection regime means we have to give informed consent, and while the ideal would be uninformed dissent (so nobody gets our data), theres too much money ranged against us to make that the default. So we tick boxes. It would have been good too to hear from experts in the field such as Haugen, or anyone with direct experience who could point towards solutions for some of the problems. (They too tend to struggle to find them, which doesnt make one hopeful.) Difficult questions are left open; nothing is actually solved. This is a deliberately broad formulation, Susskind says of his recommendation for how algorithms should be regulated.

One is left with the sneaking suspicion that these problems might just be insoluble. The one option that hasnt really been tried is the one rejected back in 2012: let users decide. It wouldnt be hard for sites to make voting compulsory, and allow our decisions to be public. Zuckerberg might not be happy about it. But hed get a vote: just one, like everyone else. That really might create a digital republic for us all.

Charles Arthur is the author of Social Warming: How Social Media Polarises Us All. The Digital Republic: On Freedom and Democracy in the 21st Century by Jamie Susskind is published by Bloomsbury (25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

More here:

The Digital Republic by Jamie Susskind review how to tame big tech - The Guardian

We may have gotten a sneak peek at the long-rumored, long-awaited Apple Car when the company unveiled the next generation of its CarPlay feature at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference. The new CarPlay, due to be released next year, will essentially turn your cars dashboard into a giant iPhone.

If you love Apple products (and cars), this was probably a thrilling announcement. But antitrust advocates and lawmakers who believe Big Tech already has too much power over too many aspects of American life feel differently.

All of the major tech companies have tried to maintain their dominance in these nascent industries, Krista Brown, senior policy analyst at the American Economic Liberties Project, an antitrust advocacy organization, told Recode. Its not just cars, she said, but also things like virtual reality and financial technology. What you notice across all of them is that they hold massive amounts of data.

Google and Apple have been moving into cars for nearly a decade now, from powering dashboards and infotainment systems to building autonomous and electric vehicles. As cars have become, essentially, giant computers, it stands to reason that the tech companies that make smaller computers would want to (and be able to) capitalize on that. As an added bonus, its an opportunity for them to attract new customers to their digital ecosystems which then makes it much harder for companies that dont have those ecosystems to compete and get that much more data on where we go and what we do. That data then gives those companies even more of a competitive advantage.

There is a flywheel effect, where the amount of data they have allows them to provide better information. That doesnt mean that we should exist in a world where they then become the sole providers of that information, Brown said.

Apple, which claims that CarPlay is available in over 98 percent of cars in the United States, isnt the only company trying to get deeper hooks into your dashboard. Amazons Alexa is an option for increasingly more cars, with some models offering Alexa Built-In, where the digital assistant comes pre-installed and ready to use (as long as you have an Amazon account). Then you can ask Alexa to do most of the same things itll do for you in your house, like play music, give you directions, tell you the weather, and order stuff from Amazon.

Googles doing even more. First, theres Android Auto, which, like CarPlay, requires you to connect your device and then mirrors it on the in-car touchscreen. Then theres Android Automotive Operating System (AAOS), which is free and open source. Carmakers can use it to build their own infotainment systems basically, AAOS is the car equivalent to Androids mobile operating system. Finally, theres Google Automotive Services, which are Google-licensed apps carmakers can offer in their infotainment systems, including Maps, Play Store, and Assistant the car equivalent to Google Play Services on Android mobile devices.

Adoption of AAOS is booming: While less than 1 percent of cars sold today use Android Automotive, industry analyst Gartner predicts that 70 percent of cars sold in 2028 will. That doesnt mean theyll all also have Google Automotive Services (currently, several manufacturers dont), nor that consumers will be restricted just to Googles offerings if they do. It does mean that Google may soon own the operating system that powers the majority of new cars infotainment systems.

Car manufacturers have tried for several years to build an ecosystem of customer-oriented digital services around their vehicles, but they have mostly failed in the type and breadth of those services, as well as in the true convenience they deliver to customers, a recent Gartner report said. As tech and software will become more and more the decisive factors for this industry, tech companies see an opportunity here to further leverage their expertise.

Basically, if youre buying a new car these days, most will offer support for Android Auto, Apple CarPlay, or Amazon Alexa if not all three. Antitrust advocates and some lawmakers see this as another way these massive companies can draw more people into their ecosystems and make it harder for them to leave. Thatll give those companies that much more data, and make it that much harder for new or smaller companies to compete. Recently, some pro-consumer groups have been sounding the alarm.

In a letter to antitrust hawks Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Rep. David Cicilline (D-RI) and antitrust enforcement agencies the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice last January, 28 consumer and antitrust activist groups warned that Big Techs next target was the car industry. Letter signees include Browns American Economic Liberties Project as well as Demand Progress, Public Citizen, and the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project. Of specific concern was consumer privacy, given the enormous amounts of data cars generate that Big Tech companies could collect and use.

The data privacy and security implications are grave, the letter said. Google already profits off of our browser history. Imagine if they can also monetize our behavior behind-the-wheel as well. They know where we go, what we search for, and now theyll know how often we use our turn signals or go five miles over the limit.

In April, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), along with 10 other Democratic representatives, wrote to the FTC and the DOJ with their concerns over Big Tech and the automobile industry, seeing this as a chance to get ahead of a potential competition issue before a few companies dominate another market as Google and Apple have done with smartphone operating systems.

Big Tech is rapidly doing to cars what it already did to cell phones, the letter said. Urgent action is needed to protect workers, privacy, and the competitive landscape.

Tech companies, in turn, are making the usual assurances that consumer data will be protected and consumer privacy choices will be respected. They also often point out how theres plenty of competition and choice in the car industry, both for consumers (who, for now, can usually choose among several different companies connected car offerings or not use any at all) and carmakers looking for tech companies to power their infotainment systems.

Its also worth noting that theres a reason why carmakers (and consumers) might be embracing Big Techs offerings: Theyre better. Car infotainment systems are notoriously bad; Fords (which was powered by Microsoft) was so hated that it was the subject of a class action lawsuit.

Infotainment and navigation in cars is an area where carmakers and drivers have actively sought our investments and products to improve the experience, a Google spokesperson told Recode. Carmakers have chosen to work with us for over a decade because we provide them with choice and flexibility, and deliver a variety of helpful and safe experiences to drivers.

Pedro Pacheco, a car industry analyst at Gartner, said this was not about Big Tech taking over an area that belonged to the car industry, but about carmakers realizing how well Big Techs digital ecosystems could work for them as their products integrate more and more technology.

Carmakers never owned a digital ecosystem, Pacheco said. Carmakers need to use big techs digital ecosystem in order to offer more and better digital features to their customers.

But antitrust advocates arent just concerned about Big Tech and infotainment systems. They also see these moves as the beginning of a possible future where Big Tech has a much bigger role in vehicles as those vehicles become more dependent on sophisticated technology to run. These companies are making big investments in more than just infotainment systems and dashboards. Googles parent company, Alphabet, owns self-driving technology company Waymo. Amazon bought Zoox, an autonomous vehicle startup, and owns part of electric carmaker Rivian. And Microsoft, which has operated in the vehicle space for decades now, is making its own moves into self-driving vehicles with an investment in Cruise, a self-driving electric car ride and delivery service.

Apple looks to be following its smartphone playbook for its cars: own and control the hardware, software, and services. The Apple Car, which has been in the works for years, is rumored to be an autonomous, electric vehicle that Apple would, of course, have a lot of control over. Its easy to see a world where third parties that want to make apps or services or really anything for your Apple Car are subject to Apples terms and conditions (and any commissions) to do so, just like they are for most things in your iPhone. Just look at how Apple used its control over iPhones to give it exclusive access to the near-field communications chip needed to power digital car keys. That means no one else can make a digital car key for an Apple device except Apple itself. Apples refusal to open up its NFC chip for payment services has already led to antitrust charges from the European Union (Apple has said that it doesnt allow third parties to access the chip for security reasons).

CarPlay may not just be a preview of the Apple Car. Antitrust advocates fear it may also be a preview of a world where almost all cars are powered by just two companies operating systems. Brown, of the American Economic Liberties Project, sees no reason to think Big Tech companies wouldnt try to dominate that space the way they have others.

Unless by some miracle they decide to overcome their draw toward abusing their dominance, I think because of what they can provide, they will, and theyll push out others, she said. The same way that Apple has with their App Store.

Before the iPhone came along, it was hard to imagine a world where you relied on your phone when driving your car. Fifteen years later, its hard to imagine using your car without your phone to give you directions, play music, make calls, and even unlock your door and hold your drivers license. In another 15 years, we may well be living in a world full of vehicles that are autonomous, electric, and powered by the same companies that power our phones. They may work better than anything traditional car companies and services could have done on their own, but the price may also be much higher than we realize.

See original here:

Apple and Google are coming for the computer in your car - Vox.com

Last October, on the day whistleblower Frances Haugen testified before her committee, Senator Amy Klobuchar gave a candid, if depressing, summation of the effect of all that DC spending: We have not done a thing to update US competition, privacy & tech laws, she tweeted. Nothing. Zilch. Why? Because there are lobbyists around every single corner of the Capitol hired by tech.

If you want to see the power of the lobbying effort, just look at the nomination of Gigi Sohn for the Federal Communications Commission. While unquestionably qualified, Sohns focus has been on empowering consumers. Naturally she had made enemies in businesses, particularly rapacious telecom companies known to fleece customers. Those interests have managed to block her confirmation for months. If she isnt confirmed soon, a new congress might manage to kill her nomination outright. With Sohns nomination on hold, the commission is deadlocked with two Democrats and two Republicans.

Meanwhile, news reports claim that a multimillion-dollar effort from special interestsincluding Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Googleis targeting key states and vulnerable Democrats to withdraw support from Klobuchars reform bills. A bitter irony: The campaign has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on Facebook and Google ads to drive home its point.

Weve come a long way from the days when tech entrepreneurs wanted to steer clear of DC. Yes, back then they were naive. They were arrogant to think they were somehow special and could build their businesses while ignoring the government. But their instinct to avoid the slime pit of American politics was admirable. Lawyering up and lobbying may not have totally solved their DC problemthe consistent bad behavior of those companies makes it likely that some sanctions will arise. But those sanctions wont be as harsh or as effective as the lawmakers, regulators, and maybe even the public wished for. One longtime staffer on the Hill who I spoke with this week summed up the tech interests and their DC activities: Theyre just like everybody else. It wasnt a compliment.

Time Travel

Arguments about regulating the internet have been raging ever since the mid-1990s boom that made the net accessible to the masses. Well before tech companies spent millions on lobbying, the debates were pretty similar to the ones we suffer through now, especially when it comes to online speech. Case in point: Senator James Exons Communications Decency Act, a proposed amendment to the telecommunications act, which I wrote about in a 1995 Newsweek article. A pared-down version of the amendment found its way into the 1996 billwhich included the still-controversial Section 230.

The Exon amendment is very broad. It could hamper communication between adultsthe essence of online activityand might not even solve the problems that kids face. "It would be a mistake to drive us, in a moment of hysteria, to a solution that is unconstitutional, would stultify technology, and wouldn't even fulfill its mission," argues Jerry Berman, director of the Center for Democracy and Technology.

Go here to read the rest:

Big Tech Has Become a Creature of the Swamp - WIRED

DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman, who recently left his VP of AI product management and AI policy role at Google, also co-founded the machine learning start-up Inflection AI. Suleyman has already hired several of his former colleagues.

Bloomberg | Getty Images

Artificial intelligence gurus are quitting top jobs at companies like Google, Meta, OpenAI and DeepMind and joining a new breed of start-ups that want to take AI to the next level, according to people familiar with the matter and LinkedIn analysis.

Four of the best-funded new AI start-ups Inflection, Cohere, Adept and Anthropic have recently poached dozens of AI scientists with backgrounds in Big Tech.

Their hiring efforts are being fueled by venture capital firms and billionaires keen to cash in on any success they have. Collectively, these firms have raised over $1 billion and they're using these vast war chests to poach talented individuals who command high salaries from their previous employers.

The start-ups are building their products and services with a relatively new "architecture," which is a set of rules and methods that's used to describe the functionality, organization and implementation of a computer system.

The new architecture developed by a team of Google staff in 2017 and now available for anyone to use is known as a "transformer."

The transformer allows AI systems to be scaled in ways that had never been considered before, meaning it's possible to make them far more powerful and capable.

"When you started scaling up these models, the capabilities just grew in a way that I think no one predicted," Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez told CNBC. "It was like a total shock."

OpenAI's GPT-3 and Dalle-E, Google's Bert, and DeepMind's AlphaFold and AlphaStar are all examples of breakthrough AI systems that are underpinned by a transformer.

Launched in March, Inflection AI has already raised over $225 million despite having fewer than 10 employees, according to LinkedIn.

Headquartered in California, the company's aim is to develop AI software products that make it easier for humans to communicate with computers.

It is led by DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman, who recently left his VP of AI product management and AI policy role at Google. LinkedIn billionaire Reid Hoffman and former DeepMind researcher Karen Simonyan are the other co-founders.

Suleyman has already hired several of his former colleagues.

Former DeepMinder Heinrich Kuttler left his research engineering manager role at Meta AI in London in March to become a member of the founding team at Inflection, working on the technical side of the business, according to his LinkedIn page. Elsewhere, Joe Fenton left his senior product manager role at Google in February also to become a member of the founding team at Inflection, working on the product side of the business.

More recently, Rewon Child, a former Google Brain and OpenAI researcher, joined Inflection as a member of technical staff. Inflection has also hired Maarten Bosma, who was previously a research engineer at Google.

Meta and Google did not respond to a CNBC request for comment.

One of Inflection's best-known investors is Greylock Partners, a renowned venture capital firm in Silicon Valley that made early bets on the likes of Facebook (now Meta) and Airbnb. Hoffman and Suleyman are partners at the firm.

On a call with CNBC in March, Suleyman said: "If you think about the history of computing, we have always been trying to reduce the complexity of our ideas in order to communicate them to a machine."

He added: "Even when we write a search query, we're simplifying, we're reducing or we're writing in shorthand so that the search engine can understand what we want."

When humans want to control a computer, they need to learn a programming language in order to provide instructions, he added, or use a mouse to navigate and engage with things on the screen. "All of these are ways we simplify our ideas and reduce their complexity and in some ways their creativity and their uniqueness in order to get a machine to do something," Suleyman said.

The British entrepreneur claimed a new suite of technologies that Inflection will aim to develop will eventually enable anyone to speak to a computer in plain language. It's unclear at this stage who Inflection will sell its products to, at what price, and when.

Inflection is competing for talent with Cohere, which was founded in Toronto in 2019 by Aidan Gomez, Ivan Zhang and Nick Frosst.

Cohere, which has raised around $170 million from the likes of Index Ventures and Tiger Global, wants to create an interface that allows software developers to use complicated AI technology on their apps.

This AI technology, known as natural language processing, or NLP, should allow developers to deploy new features and services into their software products.

"We want to build that toolkit that's accessible to any dev," CEO Gomez told CNBC on a call.

AI luminaries and DeepMind alums Ed Grefenstette and Phil Blunsom are among the latest AI scientists to join Cohere, with the duo announcing last month that they've joined the firm.

Grefenstette is Cohere's head of machine learning and Blunsom is the company's chief scientist.

They'll also be responsible for helping to set up a new Cohere office in London, which has become a hotbed for AI talent over the last decade. Indeed, DeepMind now employs over a thousand people in the city, many of them PhDs.

They'll likely be able to scout out promising potential recruits from two of the U.K.'s leading universities. Grefenstette is an honorary professor at UCL, while Blunsom is a professor at Oxford.

Another firm making waves is Anthropic, which is led by OpenAI's former VP of research Dario Amodei.

Anthropic describes itself as an AI safety and research company. It says that it wants to build "reliable interpretable, and steerable AI systems."

Amodei set up the firm with help from several other ex-OpenAI employees, including Jack Clark, Tom Brown, Sam McCandlish and his sister Daniela Amodei.

It launched in 2021 and announced it had secured $124 million from a cohort of investors including Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

In April, the company announced it raised another $580 million, and according to LinkedIn, it now has 41 staff.

Another AI start-up that's been built by some heavy hitters in the field of machine learning is Adept AI Labs.

The co-founders include CEO David Luan (previously a director at Google Research and VP of engineering at OpenAI), Niki Parmar (formerly a staff research scientist at Google Brain) and Ashish Vaswani (also a staff research scientist at Google Brain).

The San Francisco-based company, which is just a few months old and has raised $65 million, is on a mission to build general intelligence that enables humans to work together creatively.

It wants to create a sort of AI assistant that workers can collaborate with to solve almost anything together. While this tool will initially be productivity-focused, the firm hopes that everyone will be able to use its AI technology in the medium term.

See the article here:

A.I. gurus are leaving Big Tech to work on buzzy new start-ups - CNBC

A number of high-profile whistleblowers in the technology industry have stepped into the spotlight in the past few years. For the most part, they have been revealing corporate practices that thwart the public interest: Frances Haugen exposed personal data exploitation at Meta, Timnit Gebru and Rebecca Rivers challenged Google on ethics and AI issues, and Janneke Parrish raised concerns about a discriminatory work culture at Apple, among others.

Many of these whistleblowers are women far more, it appears, than the proportion of women working in the tech industry. This raises the question of whether women are more likely to be whistleblowers in the tech field. The short answer is: Its complicated.

For many, whistleblowing is a last resort to get society to address problems that cant be resolved within an organization, or at least by the whistleblower. It speaks to the organizational status, power and resources of the whistleblower; the openness, communication and values of the organization in which they work; and to their passion, frustration and commitment to the issue they want to see addressed. Are whistleblowers more focused on the public interest? More virtuous? Less influential in their organizations? Are these possible explanations for why so many women are blowing the whistle on big tech?

To investigate these questions, we, a computer scientist and a sociologist, explored the nature of big tech whistleblowing, the influence of gender, and the implications for technologys role in society. What we found was both complex and intriguing.

Whistleblowing is a difficult phenomenon to study because its public manifestation is only the tip of the iceberg. Most whistleblowing is confidential or anonymous. On the surface, the notion of female whistleblowers fits with the prevailing narrative that women are somehow more altruistic, focused on the public interest or morally virtuous than men.

Consider an argument made by the New York State Woman Suffrage Association around giving US women the right to vote in the 1920s: Women are, by nature and training, housekeepers. Let them have a hand in the citys housekeeping, even if they introduce an occasional house-cleaning. In other words, giving women the power of the vote would help clean up the mess that men had made.

More recently, a similar argument was used in the move to all-women traffic enforcement in some Latin American cities under the assumption that female police officers are more impervious to bribes. Indeed, the United Nations has recently identified womens global empowerment as key to reducing corruption and inequality in its world development goals.

There is data showing that women, more so than men, are associated with lower levels of corruption in government and business. For example, studies show that the higher the share of female elected officials in governments around the world, the lower the corruption. While this trend in part reflects the tendency of less corrupt governments to more often elect women, additional studies show a direct causal effect of electing female leaders and, in turn, reducing corruption.

Experimental studies and attitudinal surveys also show that women are more ethical in business dealings than their male counterparts, and one study using data on actual firm-level dealings confirms that businesses led by women are directly associated with a lower incidence of bribery. Much of this likely comes down to the socialization of men and women into different gender roles in society.

Although women may be acculturated to behave more ethically, this leaves open the question of whether they really are more likely to be whistleblowers. The full data on who reports wrongdoing is elusive, but scholars try to address the question by asking people about their whistleblowing orientation in surveys and in vignettes. In these studies, the gender effect is inconclusive.

However, women appear more willing than men to report wrongdoing when they can do so confidentially. This may be related to the fact that female whistleblowers may face higher rates of reprisal than male whistleblowers.

In the technology field, there is an additional factor at play. Women are under-represented both in numbers and in organizational power. The Big Five in tech Google, Meta, Apple, Amazon and Microsoft are still largely white and male.

Women currently represent about 25% of their technology workforce and about 30% of their executive leadership. Women are prevalent enough now to avoid being tokens but often dont have the insider status and resources to effect change. They also lack the power that sometimes corrupts, referred to as the corruption opportunity gap.

Frances Haugen testified before Congress about how Meta, then called Facebook, put profits ahead of the public interest. Earlier she had leaked internal company documents to show that Meta was aware of the harm it was causing. (Photo by AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

Marginalized people often lack a sense of belonging and inclusion in organizations. The silver lining to this exclusion is that those people may feel less obligated to toe the line when they see wrongdoing. Given all of this, it is likely that some combination of gender socialization and female outsider status in big tech creates a situation where women appear to be the prevalent whistleblowers.

It may be that whistleblowing in tech is the result of a perfect storm between the fields gender and public interest problems. Clear and conclusive data does not exist, and without concrete evidence the jury is out. But the prevalence of female whistleblowers in big tech is emblematic of both of these deficiencies, and the efforts of these whistleblowers are often aimed at boosting diversity and reducing the harm big tech causes society.

More so than any other corporate sector, tech pervades peoples lives. Big tech creates the tools people use every day, defines the information the public consumes, collects data on its users thoughts and behavior, and plays a major role in determining whether privacy, safety, security and welfare are supported or undermined.

And yet, the complexity, proprietary intellectual property protections and ubiquity of digital technologies make it hard for the public to gauge the personal risks and societal impact of technology. Todays corporate cultural firewalls make it difficult to understand the choices that go into developing the products and services that so dominate peoples lives.

Of all areas within society in need of transparency and a greater focus on the public interest, we believe the most urgent priority is big tech. This makes the courage and the commitment of todays whistleblowers all the more important.

Follow this link:

Why are so many big tech whistleblowers women? Here's what the research shows - Technical.ly

Just after closing a $28 billion deal to acquire electronic health records company Cerner, tech giant Oracle said it thinks it can solve one of the biggest tech problems in healthcare: patient records.

The combined companies will create a national health records database that pulls in data from thousands of hospitals, said Larry Ellison, Oracle board chairman and chief technology officer, during a press briefing. Patient data would be anonymous until individuals give consent to share their information. Were building a system where all American citizens health records not only exist at the hospital level, but they also are in a unified national health records database, Ellison said.

Ellison outlined the well-trodden problems with the USs healthcare data systems: patient information is siloed off within individual institutions. That makes it hard for doctors to get information about their patients when theyre treated at other institutions. It also makes it difficult for research teams to do studies on large groups of people; theyre often limited to the patient information at the place where they work, so its hard for them to tell if their conclusions would apply to people at other health centers.

But, despite Ellisons sweeping promises, Oracle will likely face an uphill battle to make the vision a reality. Health IT experts tweeted skepticism in the wake of the announcement. Experts in health technology and the federal government have spent years, if not decades, trying to make it easier for health records held at different institutions to communicate with each other. A National Institutes of Health program was able to build an anonymous, centralized records database for COVID-19 research in 2020, but that took enormous effort from people who already worked on interoperability issues and it was anonymous and didnt require navigating patient consent.

Big tech companies often run into problems when they try to tackle the complex, knotty American healthcare system. Cerner and Oracles partnership combines tech expertise with experience in the health data ecosystem, which may offer them a leg up. But, as with most issues in healthcare, theres a chasm between identifying the problem and being able to fix it.

More:

Oracle thinks it can fix healthcare's biggest tech issue - The Verge

Following the social unrest that was caused by the murder of George Floyd by a corrupt police officer, many major tech companies vowed to improve their diversity and inclusion because of the fact that this is the sort of thing that could potentially end up helping solve the racial problems facing the world to some extent. No more than a week following Floyds murder, over two hundred big tech corporations promised to invest in things that would improve equality, hire more black people as well as provide diversity training to current employees.

Now that two years have passed since Floyds unjust murder, has Big Tech delivered on any of its promises? Numerous interviews of Black tech employees reveal that their initial statements might have been little more than lip service. With all of that having been said and now out of the way, it is important to note that many of the promises that Big Tech made were quite vague, which makes it difficult to track their progress.

For example, a director level employee at Microsoft who happens to be Black recently said the experience of Black employees in tech companies has not changed much over the past two years. Despite being at a director level position, this Microsoft employee still had to work harder than her white coworkers by doing things like constantly keeping a record of her accomplishments and leveraging other Black colleagues at high positions who could vouch for her.

One of the promises that Big Tech made was to hire more Black employees, but in spite of the fact that this is the case very little progress has been made on that front if at all. This promise is also a little underhanded in that it did not have the ability to initiate significant progress and long term change. Facebook promised to increase the number of Black employees by 38%, and while they went past this five year goal within the span of a single year, Black representation at the company only increased from 3.4% to 4.7% with all things having been considered and taken into account.

Many Black employees at Facebook said that while they were allowed to put up Black Lives Matters avatars, many of their coworkers put up Blue Lives Matter ones and openly talked about how George Floyd deserved to die despite him not having done anything that warranted that. Facebook refuses to take these posts and avatars down by claiming that this would infringe on free speech, but this is a false equivalence since one movement seeks to recognize and mitigate the long standing subjugation of Black people by police forces and the other is trying to gloss over the violence and unfairness that policing institutions have long been involved with.

Despite claiming that they want to improve the lives of Black people, tech companies are only offering small changes and are doing nothing to address racism and even white supremacism in their own workplaces. Until these issues are addressed, any attempts to solve these issues will prove to be futile. Things like the Black tax and other problems are far more critical to solve.

Read next:Global Economic and Geopolitical Crises Result in Increase Food Insecurity for Millions, New UN Report Reveals

Read more from the original source:

Two Years After George Floyd Murder, Big Tech Fails to Live Up to Its Promises - Digital Information World

The latest inflation figures on June 10 were worse than expected and the effect on stock prices was brutal. A list of stocks in the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq-100 Index that have fallen at least 60% from 52-week highs is below.

The consumer-price index report for May from the Bureau of Labor Statistics came in much worse than expected, with a 1% increase in prices during the month and a year-over-year CPI increase of 8.6% a new 40-year record.

Hand-in-hand with the inflation report was a record-low figure for the University of Michigans Consumer Sentiment Index.

Heres a summary of performance for the 11 sectors of the S&P 500 SPX, -2.91% and other broad indexes, as of 11:40 a.m. ET on June 10:

All 11 sectors of the S&P 500 were down for the day.

The only sector with a positive return in 2022 has been energy, with a 57% gain as the price of West Texas Crude Oil CL.1, -0.84% has risen 59%, based on continuous forward-month prices compiled by FactSet.

To take a broader look at large companies suffering the biggest share price declines, we added the components of the Nasdaq-100 Index NDX, -3.56% to the S&P 500 for a list of 519 companies after removing duplicates. (The Nasdaq-100 includes the largest 100 nonfinancial companies, by market capitalization, in the full Nasdaq Composite Index COMP, -3.52%. )

Within that enlarged group, these 19 stocks have dropped at least 60% from their 52-week highs:

Click on the tickers for more about each company.

Then readTomi Kilgores detailed guide to the wealth of information for free on the MarketWatch quote page.

The stock that was down the most from its 52-week high was DocuSign Inc. DOCU, -24.53%, also the worst performer on June 10 after the company lowered its billings outlook. Analysts then downgraded the stock.

Read this article:

These 19 big tech stocks have now dropped at least 60% from their 52-week highs - MarketWatch

In this weekly segment, ExchangeWire sums up key industry updates in media, marketing, and commerce from around the globe. In this edition: Amazonestablishes a new Local Ads team in a blow to rival Meta; tech companies campaign against a 'self-referencing law' that could hinder their marketpower; Twitter agrees to Musk's demands fordata following the billionaire's threats to abandon their deal; and Metafaces legal action for Instagram's role in causing a preteen's eating disorder.

Ecommerce behemoth Amazon has quietly begun hiring for its Local Ads team, a newly established crew focused on sourcing ads from city-specific ad companies.

According to Business Insider, job postings from Amazon refer to the Local Ads team as a rare opportunity to join a start-up business within the Amazon Ads team, and will help create a brand new business and revenue stream for Amazon Advertising. These workers will be tasked with bringing smaller, localised advertisers over to Amazon, a move that is likely to shake some of the giants larger competitors, namely Google and Meta.

As Amazon has historically worked with larger brands who can afford to pay a hefty premium for a slot on the site, smaller companies have typically flocked to platforms such as Metas Facebook and Instagram for advertising space. Meta has even benefited from its involvement with smaller advertisers, using the dependence small businesses have on its platforms to one-up competitors and stave off regulators. By Amazon announcing that it is turning its focus towards smaller companies, the ecommerce giant is not only venturing into a new avenue for its USD$31bn (24.7bn) ad business, but striking a major blow to some of its largest rivals.

Tech giants including Amazon and Alphabet are leading an intense campaign to prevent Congress from passing a new law to restrain their market power.

The American Innovation and Choice Online Act, which US senators approved in January of this year, would prevent large tech firms from using their market dominance to give their own products an advantage against competitors. Should the bill be passed by Congress, it is likely to open the door to a surge of new legislation that would reshape the US tech industry and rein in the power of large tech companies.

This is one of the most significant campaigns that we have run in recent years, said Matt Schruers, president of the Computer & Communications Industry Association.That is because there has never been such a serious proposal to undermine US competitiveness and put US users at risk.

The bill specifically targets Amazon, Alphabet, Apple, and Meta, and has received support from senators for both the Democratic and Republican parties, in addition to the Biden administration. The bill would prevent Google from listing its own products at the top of search results, in addition to banning Amazon from prioritising its online store over third-party alternatives.

The momentum behind the bill has raised alarm amongst tech giants, who are now rushing to preserve their market power. The Financial Times (FT) reportsthat executives from Alphabet, Amazon, and Apple have all personally spoken to members of Congress in an effort to block the bill. Google is also reported to have suggested a number of amendments to the proposed legislation, while Amazon has called on senators in Washington to oppose the bill on the basis that it could result in significant job losses.

Twitter has agreed to hand over data concerning fake accounts on the platform to Elon Musk after the billionaire threatened to rescind his offer to buy the company.

The microblogging site will give the Tesla-boss access to data comprising over five million daily tweets, a real-time record of tweets, the devices they were tweeted from, and details of the accounts that tweet, according to the Washington Post.

Twitters relinquishment of this data follows Musks threats to walk away from his USD$44bn (34bn) deal to buy out the social media site on Monday (6th June) unless the tech giant provides accurate data on fake accounts on the site. The entrepreneur has been publicly sceptical of the companys claim that bots account for fewer than 5% of its user base, which totals to 229 million globally.

In a letter addressed to Twitters chief legal officer, Musk stated he was entitled to conduct his own measurement of fake accounts, to enable him to prepare for transitioning Twitter's business to his ownership, and accused the company of intentionally "thwarting" his attempts to do so.

Twitter has maintained that it has and will continue to cooperatively share information with Musk to consummate the transaction in accordance with the terms of the merger agreement." The social media company added that it was still committed to the acquisition at the price and terms agreed in Apriland, according to reports, Twitters chief legal officer Vijaya Gadde told employees on Wednesday (8th June) to anticipate a shareholder vote on the deal as early as July or August of this year.

Meta is facing legal action over allegations that its image-sharing platform, Instagram, ignited an eating disorder, self-harming behaviours, and suicidal thoughts in a preteen girl.

Filed in the US District Court for the Northern District of California on Monday (6th June) by the Social Media Victims Law Centre, the lawsuit concerns teenager Alexis Spence. Spence created her first Instagram account without her parents knowledge at the age of 11, despite the platforms minimum age requirement of 13. According to the case, Instagrams algorithm immediately exposed Spence to content glorifying anorexia and self-harming, causing significant damage to her mental health.

Now aged 19, Spence has been hospitalised for anorexia, anxiety, and depression, and is struggling to recover from self-harming behaviours due to what the complaint describes as, the harmful content and features Instagram relentlessly promoted and provided to her in its effort to increase engagement.

In support of its complaint, the lawsuit makes numerous references to the Facebook Papers, leaked documents from Meta exposing the firms awareness that Instagram worsens mental health and body image amongst its users, particularly teenage girls. Previously unpublished documents from the leaks in which the company referred to tweens as herd animals who want to find communities where they can fit in, have been cited by the case to prove Metas intentions to draw younger, vulnerable users to the platform.

If you look at the extensive research that [Meta] performed, they knew exactly what they were doing to kids, and they kept doing it, commented Matthew P. Bergman, the founder of the Social Media Victims Law Centre and representative for the Spence family. I wish I could say that Alexis case is aberrational. Its not. The only aberration is that she survived.

- The MadTech Podcast: Sage + Archers Diederick Ubels on Musks Twitter Threat, VR Retail, and Fingerprinting

- ExchangeWire Industry Review 2022: Moving Away from Legacy Infrastructure

- Can Contextual Targeting Help Brands to Build Trust with Audiences?

- The Rise of the Independents: European Ad Server Research 2022

- Mindset & Strategy: Unlocking Retail Media Opportunities

- Unifying Campaign Management: Q&A with Chris Grimsey, Clinch

- Publisher First-Party Data Can Fill the Cookie Void Q&A with Thomas Baart, Permutive

- How can Brands Unite their Identity Solutions Across Formats?

The rest is here:

Amazon Targets Smaller Businesses with Local Ads Team; Big Tech Fights to Halt Antitrust Bill - ExchangeWire