Melinda French Gates announced today she is stepping down from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, three years after announcing her separation from Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates. With her departure as co-chair, the foundation will change its name to Gates Foundation and Bill Gates will be its sole chairperson, said CEO Mark Suzman. NBC News reports: In a statement posted on her Instagram account, she said that as part of her agreement to step down from the foundation, she will retain $12.5 billion that she plans to put toward her ongoing work supporting women and families. "This is not a decision I came to lightly," French Gates wrote. "I am immensely proud of the foundation that Bill and I built together and of the extraordinary work it is doing to address inequities around the world." In a separate statement, Bill Gates said, "I am sorry to see Melinda leave, but I am sure she will have a huge impact in her future philanthropic work."

Now worth $75.2 billion, the Gates Foundation has over the course of its three-decade lifespan made $77.6 billion worth of grant payments, making it one of the largest donor organizations in the world, with a focus on health and developmental goals. It is one of the largest contributors to the World Health Organization, and played a key role in efforts to address the Covid pandemic. "After a difficult few years watching women's rights rolled back in the U.S. and around the world, she wants to use this next chapter to focus specifically on altering that trajectory," Suzman said of French Gates.

"I want to reassure you that the millions of people our work serves and the thousands of partners we work alongside can continue to count on the foundation. The foundation today is stronger than it has ever been."

"I know we all wish Melinda the best in her next chapter," he added, noting that French Gates "will not be bringing any of the foundation's work with her when she leaves."

Squarespace said on Monday it has agreed to be taken private by private equity firm Permira in an all-cash deal valued at approximately $6.9 billion. Under the terms of the agreement, Squarespace stockholders will receive $44.00 per share in cash, representing a premium of about 29% over the company's 90-day volume weighted average trading price.

Upon completion of the transaction, Squarespace will become a privately held company. Founder and CEO Anthony Casalena will continue to lead the business and be one of the largest shareholders following the deal. "Squarespace has been at the forefront of providing services to businesses looking to establish themselves online for more than two decades. We are excited to continue building on that foundation, and expanding our offerings, for years to come," said Casalena in a statement.

"We are thrilled to be partnering with Permira on this new leg of our journey, alongside our existing long-term investors General Atlantic and Accel, who strongly believe in the future of Squarespace," he added.

The non-profit environmental site Grist reports on "an internal, employee-led effort to raise ethical concerns about Microsoft's work helping oil and gas producers boost their profits by providing them with cloud computing resources and AI software tools." There's been some disappointments — but also some successes, starting with the founding of an internal sustainability group within Microsoft that grew to nearly 10,000 employees: Former Microsoft employees and sources familiar with tech industry advocacy say that, broadly speaking, employee pressure has had an enormous impact on sustainability at Microsoft, encouraging it to announce industry-leading climate goals in 2020 and support key federal climate policies.

But convincing the world's most valuable company to forgo lucrative oil industry contracts proved far more difficult... Over the past seven years, Microsoft has announced dozens of new deals with oil and gas producers and oil field services companies, many explicitly aimed at unlocking new reserves, increasing production, and driving up oil industry profits...

As concerns over the company's fossil fuel work mounted, Microsoft was gearing up to make a big sustainability announcement. In January 2020, the company pledged to become "carbon negative" by 2030, meaning that in 10 years, the tech giant would pull more carbon out of the air than it emitted on an annual basis... For nearly two years, employees watched and waited. Following its carbon negative announcement, Microsoft quickly expanded its internal carbon tax, which charges the company's business groups a fee for the carbon they emit via electricity use, employee travel, and more. It also invested in new technologies like direct air capture and purchased carbon removal contracts from dozens of projects worldwide.

But Microsoft's work with the oil industry continued unabated, with the company announcing a slew of new partnerships in 2020 and 2021 aimed at cutting fossil fuel producers' costs and boosting production.
The last straw for one technical account manager was a 2023 LinkedIn post by a Microsoft technical architect about the company's work on oil and gas industry automation. The post said Microsoft's cloud service was "unlocking previously inaccessible reserves" for the fossil fuel industry, promising that with Microsoft's Azure service, "the future of oil and gas exploration and production is brighter than ever."

The technical account manager resigned from the position they'd held for nearly a decade, citing the blog post in a resignation letter which accused Microsoft of "extending the age of fossil fuels, and enabling untold emissions."

Thanks to Slashdot reader joshuark for sharing the news.

Reddit reported its first results since going public in late March. Yahoo Finance reports: Daily active users increased 37% year over year to 82.7 million. Weekly active unique users rose 40% from the prior year. Total revenue improved 48% to $243 million, nearly doubling the growth rate from the prior quarter, due to strength in advertising. The company delivered adjusted operating profits of $10 million, versus a $50.2 million loss a year ago. [Reddit CEO Steve] Huffman declined to say when the company would be profitable on a net income basis, noting it's a focus for the management team. Other areas of focus include rolling out a new user interface this year, introducing shopping capabilities, and searching for another artificial intelligence content licensing deal like the one with Google.
Bloomberg notes that already Reddit "has signed licensing agreements worth $203 million in total, with terms ranging from two to three years. The company generated about $20 million from AI content deals last quarter, and expects to bring in more than $60 million by the end of the year."

And elsewhere Bloomberg writes that Reddit "plans to expand its revenue streams outside of advertising into what Huffman calls the 'user economy' — users making money from others on the platform... " In the coming months Reddit plans to launch new versions of awards, which are digital gifts users can give to each other, along with other products... Reddit also plans to continue striking data licensing deals with artificial intelligence companies, expanding into international markets and evaluating potential acquisition targets in areas such as search, he said.
Meanwhile, ZDNet notes that this week a Reddit announcement "introduced a new public content policy that lays out a framework for how partners and third parties can access user-posted content on its site." The post explains that more and more companies are using unsavory means to access user data in bulk, including Reddit posts. Once a company gets this data, there's no limit to what it can do with it. Reddit will continue to block "bad actors" that use unauthorized methods to get data, the company says, but it's taking additional steps to keep users safe from the site's partners.... Reddit still supports using its data for research: It's creating a new subreddit — r/reddit4researchers — to support these initiatives, and partnering with OpenMined to help improve research. Private data is, however, going to stay private.

If a company wants to use Reddit data for commercial purposes, including advertising or training AI, it will have to pay. Reddit made this clear by saying, "If you're interested in using Reddit data to power, augment, or enhance your product or service for any commercial purposes, we require a contract." To be clear, Reddit is still selling users' data — it's just making sure that unscrupulous actors have a tougher time accessing that data for free and researchers have an easier time finding what they need.
And finally, there's some court action, according to the Register. Reddit "was sued by an unhappy advertiser who claims that internet giga-forum sold ads but provided no way to verify that real people were responsible for clicking on them." The complaint [PDF] was filed this week in a U.S. federal court in northern California on behalf of LevelFields, a Virginia-based investment research platform that relies on AI. It says the biz booked pay-per-click ads on the discussion site starting September 2022... That arrangement called for Reddit to use reasonable means to ensure that LevelField's ads were delivered to and clicked on by actual people rather than bots and the like. But according to the complaint, Reddit broke that contract...

LevelFields argues that Reddit is in a particularly good position to track click fraud because it's serving ads on its own site, as opposed to third-party properties where it may have less visibility into network traffic... Nonetheless, LevelFields's effort to obtain IP address data to verify the ads it was billed for went unfulfilled. The social media site "provided click logs without IP addresses," the complaint says. "Reddit represented that it was not able to provide IP addresses."
"The plaintiffs aspire to have their claim certified as a class action," the article adds — along with an interesting statistic.

"According to Juniper Research, 22 percent of ad spending last year was lost to click fraud, amounting to $84 billion."

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Register: The co-author of SQL, the standardized query language for relational databases, has come out in support of the NoSQL database movement that seeks to escape the tabular confines of the RDBMS. Speaking to The Register as SQL marks its 50th birthday, Donald Chamberlin, who first proposed the language with IBM colleague Raymond Boyce in a 1974 paper [PDF], explains that NoSQL databases and their query languages could help perform the tasks relational systems were never designed for. "The world doesn't stay the same thing, especially in computer science," he says. "It's a very fast, evolving, industry. New requirements are coming along and technology has to change to meet them, I think that's what's happening. The NoSQL movement is motivated by new kinds of applications, particularly web applications, that need massive scalability and high performance. Relational databases were developed in an earlier generation when scalability and performance weren't quite as important. To get the scalability and performance that you need for modern apps, many systems are relaxing some of the constraints of the relational data model."

[...] A long-time IBMer, Chamberlin is now semi-retired, but finds time to fulfill a role as a technical advisor for NoSQL company Couchbase. In the role, he has become an advocate for a new query language designed to overcome the "impedance mismatch" between data structures in the application language and a database, he says. UC San Diego professor Yannis Papakonstantinou has proposed SQL++ to solve this problem, with a view to addressing impedance mismatch between heavily object-based JavaScript, the core language for web development and the assumed relational approach embedded in SQL. Like C++, SQL++ is designed as a compatible extension of an earlier language, SQL, but is touted as better able to handle the JSON file format inherent in JavaScript. Couchbase and AWS have adopted the language, although the cloud giant calls it PartiQL.
At the end of the interview, Chamblin adds that "I don't think SQL is going to go away. A large part of the world's business data is encoded in SQL, and data is very sticky. Once you've got your database, you're going to leave it there. Also, relational systems do a very good job of what they were designed to do...

"[I]f you're a startup company that wants to sell shoes on the web or something, you're going to need a database, and one of those SQL implementations will do the job for free. I think relational databases and the SQL language will be with us for a long time."

Thursday the BBC reported: Plane bodies made by Boeing's largest supplier regularly left the factory with serious defects, according to a former quality inspector at the firm. Santiago Paredes who worked for Spirit AeroSystems in Kansas, told the BBC he often found up to 200 defects on parts being readied for shipping to Boeing. He was nicknamed "showstopper" for slowing down production when he tried to tackle his concerns, he claimed.

Spirit said it "strongly disagree[d]" with the allegations. "We are vigorously defending against his claims," said a spokesperson for Spirit, which remains Boeing's largest supplier.

Mr Paredes made the allegations against Spirit in an exclusive interview with the BBC and the American network CBS, in which he described what he said he experienced while working at the firm between 2010 and 2022... "I was finding a lot of missing fasteners, a lot of bent parts, sometimes even missing parts...." Mr Paredes told the BBC that some of the defects he identified while at Spirit were minor — but others were more serious. He also claimed he was put under pressure to be less rigorous...

He now maintains he would be reluctant to fly on a 737 Max, in case it still carried flaws that originated in the Wichita factory. "I'd never met a lot of people who were scared of flying until I worked at Spirit," he said. "And then, being at Spirit, I met a lot of people who were afraid of flying — because they saw how they were building the fuselages."
"If quality mattered, I would still be at Spirit," Paredes told CBS News, speaking publicly for the first time. CBS News spoke with several current and former Spirit AeroSystems employees and reviewed photos of dented fuselages, missing fasteners and even a wrench they say was left behind in a supposedly ready-to-deliver component. Paredes said Boeing knew for years Spirit was delivering defective fuselages.
It could be just a coincidence, but the same day, the Associated Press ran story with this headline.

"Boeing plane carrying 85 people catches fire and skids off the runway in Senegal, injuring 10." It was the third incident involving a Boeing airplane this week. Also on Thursday, 190 people were safely evacuated from a plane in Turkey after one of its tires burst during landing at a southern airport, Turkey's transportation ministry said.

"Google's business is growing at its fastest rate in two years," reports CNBC, "and a blowout earnings report in April sparked the biggest rally in Alphabet shares since 2015, pushing the company's market cap past $2 trillion.

"But at an all-hands meeting last week with CEO Sundar Pichai and CFO Ruth Porat, employees were more focused on why that performance isn't translating into higher pay, and how long the company's cost-cutting measures are going to be in place." "We've noticed a significant decline in morale, increased distrust and a disconnect between leadership and the workforce," a comment posted on an internal forum ahead of the meeting read. "How does leadership plan to address these concerns and regain the trust, morale and cohesion that have been foundational to our company's success?"

Google is using artificial intelligence to summarize employee comments and questions for the forum.

Alphabet's top leadership has been on the defensive for the past few years, as vocal staffers have railed about post-pandemic return-to-office mandates, the company's cloud contracts with the military, fewer perks and an extended stretch of layoffs — totaling more than 12,000 last year — along with other cost cuts that began when the economy turned in 2022. Employees have also complained about a lack of trust and demands that they work on tighter deadlines with fewer resources and diminished opportunities for internal advancement.

The internal strife continues despite Alphabet's better-than-expected first-quarter earnings report, in which the company also announced its first dividend as well as a $70 billion buyback. "Despite the company's stellar performance and record earnings, many Googlers have not received meaningful compensation increases" a top-rated employee question read. "When will employee compensation fairly reflect the company's success and is there a conscious decision to keep wages lower due to a cooling employment market?"

Brian Shelton's type 1 diabetes was treated with an infusion of insulin-producing pancreas cells (grown from stem cells). In 2021, the New York Times reported: Now his body automatically controls its insulin and blood sugar levels. Shelton, now 64, may be the first person cured of the disease with a new treatment that has experts daring to hope that help may be coming for many of the 1.5 million Americans suffering from Type 1 diabetes. "It's a whole new life," Shelton said. Diabetes experts were astonished but urged caution. The study is continuing and will take five years, involving 17 people with Type 1 diabetes.
"By fall 2023, three patients, including Shelton, had achieved insulin independence by day 180 post-transplant," MedScape reported (in January of 2024): In the phase 1/2 study, 14 patients with type 1 diabetes and impaired hypoglycemia awareness or recurrent hypoglycemia received portal vein infusions of VX-880 [Vertex Pharmaceutical's pancreatic islet cell replacement therapy] along with standard immunosuppression. As of the last data cut, all 14 patients demonstrated islet cell engraftment and production of endogenous insulin. After more than 90 days of follow-up, 13 of the patients have achieved A1c levels < 7% without using exogenous insulin.
Brian Shelton and another patient died, and while Vertex says their deaths were unrelated to the treatment, they have "placed the study on a protocol-specified pause, pending review of the totality of the data by the independent data monitoring committee and global regulators." (MedScape adds that Vertex "is continuing with a phase 1/2 clinical trial of a different product, VX-264, which encapsulates the same VX-880 cells in a device designed to eliminate the need for immunosuppression.")

And meanwhile, a new study in China (again using stem cell-derived islet tissue) has provided "encouraging evidence that islet tissue replacement is an effective cure for diabetic patients," the researchers wrote in Nature. The treatment was administered to 59-year-old, type-2 diabetic.

"Marked changes in the patient's glycemic control were observed as early as week 2," the researchers write, and after week 32, the patient's Time In Tight Range (TITR) "had readily reached 99% and was maintained thereafter."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader hackingbear for sharing the news.

What happened when OpenAI ran out of English-language training data in 2021?

They just created a speech recognition tool that could transcribe the audio from YouTube videos, reports The New York Times, as part of an investigation arguing that tech companies "including OpenAI, Google and Meta have cut corners, ignored corporate policies and debated bending the law" in their search for AI training data. [Alternate URL here.] Some OpenAI employees discussed how such a move might go against YouTube's rules, three people with knowledge of the conversations said. YouTube, which is owned by Google, prohibits use of its videos for applications that are "independent" of the video platform. Ultimately, an OpenAI team transcribed more than 1 million hours of YouTube videos, the people said. The team included Greg Brockman, OpenAI's president, who personally helped collect the videos, two of the people said. The texts were then fed into a system called GPT-4...

At Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, managers, lawyers and engineers last year discussed buying the publishing house Simon & Schuster to procure long works, according to recordings of internal meetings obtained by the Times. They also conferred on gathering copyrighted data from across the internet, even if that meant facing lawsuits. Negotiating licenses with publishers, artists, musicians and the news industry would take too long, they said.

Like OpenAI, Google transcribed YouTube videos to harvest text for its AI models, five people with knowledge of the company's practices said. That potentially violated the copyrights to the videos, which belong to their creators. Last year, Google also broadened its terms of service. One motivation for the change, according to members of the company's privacy team and an internal message viewed by the Times, was to allow Google to be able to tap publicly available Google Docs, restaurant reviews on Google Maps and other online material for more of its AI products...

Some Google employees were aware that OpenAI had harvested YouTube videos for data, two people with knowledge of the companies said. But they didn't stop OpenAI because Google had also used transcripts of YouTube videos to train its AI models, the people said. That practice may have violated the copyrights of YouTube creators. So if Google made a fuss about OpenAI, there might be a public outcry against its own methods, the people said.
The article adds that some tech companies are now even developing "synthetic" information to train AI.

"This is not organic data created by humans, but text, images and code that AI models produce — in other words, the systems learn from what they themselves generate."

The Russia-linked ransomware group Black Basta is responsible for Wednesday's cyberattack on St. Louis-based Ascension health system, according to sources reported by CNN. The attack disrupted access to electronic health records, some phone systems and "various systems utilized to order certain tests, procedures and medications," the company said in a statement. From a report: On Friday, the nonprofit group Health-ISAC (Information Sharing and Analysis Center) issued an alert about the group, saying that Black Basta has "recently accelerated attacks against the healthcare sector." HHS said that Black Basta was initially spotted in early 2022, known for its double extortion attack. The group not only executes ransomware but also exfiltrates sensitive data, operating a cybercrime marketplace to publicly release it should a victim fail to pay a ransom.

"The level of sophistication by its proficient ransomware operators, and reluctance to recruit or advertise on Dark Web forums, supports why many suspect the nascent Black Basta may even be a rebrand of the Russian-speaking RaaS threat group Conti, or also linked to other Russian-speaking cyber threat groups," the alert from HHS said. According to one report from blockchain analytics firm Elliptic and cybersecurity risk-focused Corvus Insurance, Black Basta in less than two years has won itself more than $100 million via ransomware schemes from 329 organizations. Previous victims of its attacks include Dish Network, the American Dental Association, business process services firm Capita and tech firm ABB.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Apple's top software executives decided early last year that Siri, the company's virtual assistant, needed a brain transplant. The decision came after the executives Craig Federighi and John Giannandrea spent weeks testing OpenAI's new chatbot, ChatGPT. The product's use of generative artificial intelligence, which can write poetry, create computer code and answer complex questions, made Siri look antiquated, said two people familiar with the company's work, who didn't have permission to speak publicly. Introduced in 2011 as the original virtual assistant in every iPhone, Siri had been limited for years to individual requests and had never been able to follow a conversation. It often misunderstood questions. ChatGPT, on the other hand, knew that if someone asked for the weather in San Francisco and then said, "What about New York?" that user wanted another forecast.

The realization that new technology had leapfrogged Siri set in motion the tech giant's most significant reorganization in more than a decade. Determined to catch up in the tech industry's A.I. race, Apple has made generative A.I. a tent pole project -- the company's special, internal label that it uses to organize employees around once-in-a-decade initiatives. Apple is expected to show off its A.I. work at its annual developers conference on June 10 when it releases an improved Siri that is more conversational and versatile, according to three people familiar with the company's work, who didn't have permission to speak publicly. Siri's underlying technology will include a new generative A.I. system that will allow it to chat rather than respond to questions one at a time. The update to Siri is at the forefront of a broader effort to embrace generative A.I. across Apple's business. The company is also increasing the memory in this year's iPhones to support its new Siri capabilities. And it has discussed licensing complementary A.I. models that power chatbots from several companies, including Google, Cohere and OpenAI. Further reading: Apple Might Bring AI Transcription To Voice Memos and Notes

Search giant Baidu fires its head of public relations after she outraged Gen Z workers. From a report [non-paywalled link]: The head of public relations at a major Chinese tech firm gained hundreds of thousands of followers seemingly overnight after posting a series of viral videos laying out her unapologetically tyrannical management style. The videos also earned her a pink slip from her employer after they set off an explosion of criticism among Gen Z Chinese fed up with the intense work culture that prevails in their country's tech industry.

"I'm not your mother-in-law. I'm not your mom," Qu Jing, a vice president at Chinese search giant Baidu, said in one widely excoriated clip, referring to a colleague who was struggling with a recent breakup. "I only care about your results." In other videos, she criticized employees who didn't want to work weekends and dismissed complaints from one subordinate that messages she sent to a group chat late at night had kept a crying child awake. "Why should it be my business that your child was crying?" she said.

On Thursday, as public outrage soared, Qu removed the videos from her account on Douyin, TikTok's sister platform in China, and replaced them with an apology. She said she had tried to do a good job but had been too impatient and hadn't adopted "a proper approach." Baidu Chief Executive Robin Li was furious at Qu and fired her on Thursday, according to people familiar with the matter. A top Baidu executive told employees that Qu's comments were "inappropriate and didn't represent and reflect the real culture and values of Baidu," the people said. The management also promised to review the company's corporate culture and working systems, they said.

China's hard-charging tech industry relies heavily on a Darwinian work culture that demands near-total devotion to the workplace. Tech workers coined the term "996" to describe the typical schedule: 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week. Half a decade ago, videos like Qu's were just as likely to garner a shrug as generate controversy. But younger Chinese, much like their counterparts in the U.S., are increasingly skeptical of the pressure to work themselves ragged in pursuit of financial success. They have coined their own terms -- "lying flat" and "letting it rot" -- to describe their antipathy to the grinding ethos of 996.

Eight years ago, a coalition of retail banks in India built a mobile payments system called the UPI. The system is interoperable, allowing users to make instant peer-to-peer transactions between them -- across all participating banks -- and to merchants at zero cost. Today, it processes more than 12 billion transactions each month -- more than all card payments combined in India -- and has become the most popular way Indians transact online. Many U.S. giants have cited UPI as an example that other countries should also explore developing. We have also covered UPI several times over the years.

NPCI, a quasi-regulator founded by India's central bank, oversees UPI. Four years ago, it announced plans to enforce a market share cap on each participating player. The quasi-regulator didn't want few players to become too powerful and any single participant to process more than 30% of all UPI transactions in a month. It later postponed the deadline to January 1, 2025. Walmart-owned PhonePe and Google Pay command more than 86% of the UPI market. Now, the NPCI is reportedly planning to extend the deadline again by up to two years. The reason? TechCrunch reports: The NPCI had initially planned to enforce the market share cap in January 2021, but postponed the deadline to January 1, 2025. TechCrunch had previously reported that the regulator was moving towards extending the deadline further after concluding that there is no practical solution to address the issue. One can argue that the NPCI shouldn't be interfering with free market forces and let people decide which apps they wish to use. TechCrunch adds: However, several UPI providers admit that an incentive plan that unfairly differentiates [one of the proposed solutions by some industry players] against PhonePe and Google Pay will be a bad look for the ecosystem and could send wrong signals to the investor community. U.S.-based investors, including Accel, Lightspeed, Tiger Global, Insight Partners, Invesco, Vanguard, BlackRock and Fidelity, are among some of the most prolific investors in Indian public firms and startups. Some of the choices made by the RBI [India's central bank] and other regulators have already spooked many investors.

The head of the world's biggest advertising group was the target of an elaborate deepfake scam that involved an AI voice clone. From a report: The CEO of WPP, Mark Read, detailed the attempted fraud in a recent email to leadership, warning others at the company to look out for calls claiming to be from top executives. Fraudsters created a WhatsApp account with a publicly available image of Read and used it to set up a Microsoft Teams meeting that appeared to be with him and another senior WPP executive, according to the email obtained by the Guardian.

During the meeting, the impostors deployed a voice clone of the executive as well as YouTube footage of them. The scammers impersonated Read off-camera using the meeting's chat window. The scam, which was unsuccessful, targeted an "agency leader," asking them to set up a new business in an attempt to solicit money and personal details. "Fortunately the attackers were not successful," Read wrote in the email. "We all need to be vigilant to the techniques that go beyond emails to take advantage of virtual meetings, AI and deepfakes."

Economist: What is the ideal job to outsource to AI? Today's AIs, in particular the Chatgpt-like generative sort, have a leaky memory, cannot handle physical objects and are worse than humans at interacting with humans. Where they excel is in manipulating numbers and symbols, especially within well-defined tasks such as writing bits of computer code. This happens to be the forte of giant existing outsourcing businesses -- India's information-technology companies. Seven of them, including the two biggest, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and Infosys, collectively laid off 75,000 employees last year. The firms say this reduction, equivalent to about 4% of their combined workforce, has nothing to do with ai and reflects the broader slowdown in the tech sector. In reality, they say, ai is an opportunity, not a threat.

Business services are critical to India's economy. The sector employs 5m people, or less than 1% of Indian workers, but contributes 7% of GDP and nearly a quarter of total exports. Simple services such as call centres account for a fifth of those foreign revenues. Three-fifths are generated by it services such as moving data to the computing cloud. The rest comes from sophisticated processes tailored for individual clients. Capital Economics, a research firm, calculates that an extreme case, in which ai wiped out the industry entirely and the resources were not reallocated, would knock nearly one percentage point off annual GDP growth over the next decade in India. In a likelier scenario of "a slow demise," the country would grow 0.3-0.4 percentage points less fast. The simplest jobs are the most vulnerable. Data from Upwork, a freelancing platform, shows that earnings for uncomplicated writing tasks like copy-editing fell by 5% between Chatgpt's launch in November 2022 and April 2023, relative to roles less affected by ai. In the year after Dall-e 2, an image-creation model, was launched in April 2022, wages for jobs like graphic design fell by 7-14%. Some companies are using AI to deal with simple customer-service requests and repetitive data-processing tasks. In April K. Krithivasan, chief executive of TCS, predicted that "maybe a year or so down the line" chatbots could do much of the work of a call-centre employee. In time, he mused, AI could foretell gripes and alleviate them before a customer ever picks up the phone.

T-Mobile and Verizon are in talks to buy parts of U.S. Ceullar in separate transactions, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday. Reuters reports: T-Mobile is closing in on a deal to buy a chunk of U.S. Cellular for more than $2 billion, taking over some operations and wireless spectrum licenses, the report said citing people familiar with the matter. Verizon's talks with the regional carrier is expected to take longer and might not result in an agreement, the report added.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: In 2022, at the height of the "great resignation," a record 4.5 million workers each month -- about 3% of the U.S. workforce -- were quitting their jobs. While some economists have said this pandemic-era trend is over, new research from Microsoft and LinkedIn forecasts that even more people plan to leave their jobs in 2024. Nearly half (46%) of professionals say they're considering quitting in the year ahead -- higher than the 40% who said the same ahead of 2021s great resignation, according to new research from Microsoft and LinkedIn, which surveyed more than 30,000 people in 31 countries between February and March 2024.

In the U.S., LinkedIn has seen a 14% increase in job applications per opening since last fall, with 85% of workers saying they plan to look for a new role in 2024, a survey of 1,013 U.S. professionals conducted between November and December 2023 found. And Americans' confidence in their job-hunting prospects has reached its highest point in two years, a February 2024 ZipRecruiter survey of more than 2,000 jobseekers shows. This renewed sense of optimism is aided by the fact that the U.S. economy avoided the recession forecast for 2023, ZipRecruiter chief economist Julia Pollak tells CNBC Make It. [...]

It's not just better labor market conditions driving more U.S. workers to consider a career change in 2024. Inflation is still squeezing Americans' budgets; nearly half (45%) of workers planning to switch jobs this year say they need a higher income, according to Monster's 2024 Work Watch Report. Job switchers tend to increase their salaries more quickly than those who stay put, per data from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. Changing jobs is coming with greater pay gains: New data from ADP shows the median year-over-year pay increase for job switchers was 10% in March, up from 2.9% six months prior. With salaries finally keeping up with inflation, Pollak adds, the return on investment of switching jobs feels "much higher" than it did six months ago.

The North Yorkshire Council in England announced it will ban apostrophes on street signs as it can affect geographical databases. Resident Anne Keywood told the BBC that she urged the authority to retain apostrophes, saying: "If you start losing things like that then everything goes downhill doesn't it?" From the report: North Yorkshire Council said it "along with many others across the country" had opted to "eliminate" the apostrophe from street signs. A spokesperson added: "All punctuation will be considered but avoided where possible because street names and addresses, when stored in databases, must meet the standards (PDF) set out in BS7666.

"This restricts the use of punctuation marks and special characters (e.g. apostrophes, hyphens and ampersands) to avoid potential problems when searching the databases as these characters have specific meanings in computer systems."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: Once a week, Sun Kai has a video call with his mother. He opens up about work, the pressures he faces as a middle-aged man, and thoughts that he doesn't even discuss with his wife. His mother will occasionally make a comment, like telling him to take care of himself -- he's her only child. But mostly, she just listens. That's because Sun's mother died five years ago. And the person he's talking to isn't actually a person, but a digital replica he made of her -- a moving image that can conduct basic conversations. They've been talking for a few years now. After she died of a sudden illness in 2019, Sun wanted to find a way to keep their connection alive. So he turned to a team at Silicon Intelligence, an AI company based in Nanjing, China, that he cofounded in 2017. He provided them with a photo of her and some audio clips from their WeChat conversations. While the company was mostly focused on audio generation, the staff spent four months researching synthetic tools and generated an avatar with the data Sun provided. Then he was able to see and talk to a digital version of his mom via an app on his phone.

"My mom didn't seem very natural, but I still heard the words that she often said: 'Have you eaten yet?'" Sun recalls of the first interaction. Because generative AI was a nascent technology at the time, the replica of his mom can say only a few pre-written lines. But Sun says that's what she was like anyway. "She would always repeat those questions over and over again, and it made me very emotional when I heard it," he says. There are plenty of people like Sun who want to use AI to preserve, animate, and interact with lost loved ones as they mourn and try to heal. The market is particularly strong in China, where at least half a dozen companies are now offering such technologies and thousands of people have already paid for them. In fact, the avatars are the newest manifestation of a cultural tradition: Chinese people have always taken solace from confiding in the dead.

The technology isn't perfect -- avatars can still be stiff and robotic -- but it's maturing, and more tools are becoming available through more companies. In turn, the price of "resurrecting" someone -- also called creating "digital immortality" in the Chinese industry -- has dropped significantly. Now this technology is becoming accessible to the general public. Some people question whether interacting with AI replicas of the dead is actually a healthy way to process grief, and it's not entirely clear what the legal and ethical implications of this technology may be. For now, the idea still makes a lot of people uncomfortable. But as Silicon Intelligence's other cofounder, CEO Sima Huapeng, says, "Even if only 1% of Chinese people can accept [AI cloning of the dead], that's still a huge market."

Dell is making sure its employees follow the company's updated return-to-office policy through a series of new tracking techniques. According to The Register, Dell will track employees' badge swipes and VPN connections and include a color-coded attendance grading system that summarizes employee presence.

"In the latest Jeff Clarke return-to-grade-school initiative, HR will be keeping an attendance report card on employees, grading them at four levels based on how well they meet the goal of being in the office 39 days a quarter," a source familiar with Dell told The Register, referring to the IT giant's chief operating officer. "Employees who do not meet the attendance requirement will have their status escalated up the ladder to Jeff Clarke, who apparently believes that being a hall monitor trumps growing revenue." From the report: Starting next Monday, May 13, the enterprise hardware slinger plans to make weekly site visit data from its badge tracking available to employees through the corporation's human capital management software and to give them color-coded ratings that summarize their status. Those ratings are: Blue flag indicates "consistent onsite presence"; Green flag indicates "regular onsite presence"; Yellow flag indicates "some onsite presence"; Red flag indicates "limited onsite presence".

A second Dell source explained managers aren't on the same page about the consequences of the color tiers, with some bosses suggesting employees want to remain Blue at all times and others indicating there's more leeway and they could put up with a few red flags. "It's a shit show here," we're told. [...] "Dell is tracking badge-ins and VPN connections to ensure employees are onsite when they claim they are (to deter 'coffee badging' or scanning your badge then going immediately home)," a third source told us. "This is likely in response to the official numbers about how many of our staff members chose to remain remote after the RTO mandate." [...]

We're told that the goal of the worker tracking appears to be workforce attrition. "The problem is the market is soft right now for tech," our second source, pointing to recent AWS job cuts. "Everyone is laying off." This person anticipates further Dell layoffs over the summer, though no dates have been set. Our third source indicated that the onsite tracking policy seems unusually aggressive for Dell. "Even pre-pandemic, they never pushed or pressured folks to be in the office," this person said. "A common phrase used to be 'Work happens where you make it,' with the office often being a ghost town multiple times a week, or after lunch, or pre-holidays." Dell in February reported fiscal year 2024 revenue of $88.4 billion, down 14 percent from 2023, and profits of $3.2 billion.