Lifeboat Foundation

In every downturn, we tend to measure the pain by counting layoffs. (Dell is the latest, announcing it will cut 6,650 jobs or 5% of its workforce.) According to Layoffs.fyi, a smart if incomplete tracker of job cuts, tech companies laid off almost 95,000 workers in the first five weeks of this year, which is already about 60% of the layoffs it reported for all of 2022.

While job cuts are normal, there’s something different about this economic dip. To start, as Jena McGregor reports, the advent of remote work has cemented the digital pink slip.

Continue reading “How ChatGPT, Bard And AI Rivals Are Shaping Layoffs And Hiring” »

In the ever-evolving landscape of test preparation, a new player has sprouted on the scene – artificial intelligence.

At the forefront of this movement is a Korean start-up, Riiid, founded by YJ Jang, a graduate of the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. Riiid has already made a name for itself in the Asian test-prep market for the TOEIC, a measure of English proficiency in the business world. Now, the company has set its sights on the American market with an SAT and ACT prep system called R.Test.

A.I. technology, with its mimicry of the networks of neurons in the human brain, has the potential to revolutionize the way educators approach their craft.

Though Bill Gates recently declared the current moment in technology as important as the advent of the PC, storied Silicon Valley firm Benchmark is taking a relatively cautious view of AI’s gold rush for now. A “big majority” of startups pitching to partner Chetan Puttagunta claim to be working on machine learning, but, he told Forbes.

Benchmark is leading the investment with a bet that MindsDB can replace the need to hire hundreds of machine learning engineers.

If your work involves analyzing and reporting on data, then it’s understandable that you might feel a bit concerned by the rapid advances being made by artificial intelligence (AI). In particular, the viral ChatGPT.

AI, particularly ChatGPT, has raised job security concerns among data analysts. Here we look at the potential impact and discuss that despite limitations like frequent mistakes and limited data upload capabilities, ChatGPT has the potential to automate data gathering and analysis tasks in the future.

Google announced today that it will enable a new SafeSearch blurring setting by default for all users in the coming months. The filter is designed to help people protect themselves and their families from inadvertently encountering explicit imagery on Search. The search giant says it’s announcing the feature today to mark Safer Internet Day.

The setting will soon be the new default for people who don’t already have the SafeSearch filter turned on. As a result, Google will blur explicit imagery if it appears in Search results. Explicit results include sexually explicit content like pornography, violence and gore. Google notes that users have the option to adjust the setting at any time. Prior to this expansion, the filter was already on by default for signed-in users under 18.

Once the setting becomes the default, Google will notify you that it has turned on SafeSearch blurring. If you come across an explicit image, you can choose to see it by clicking on the “view image” button. Or, you can select the “manage setting” button to adjust the filter or turn it off altogether. For instance, you can choose the “filter” option, which helps filter explicit images, text and links. Or, you can select the “off” option, which means that you will see all of the relevant results for your query, even if they’re explicit.

After six years of peace, the two tech giants are on course to butt heads again over the future of artificial intelligence.

Microsoft is about to go head-to-head with Google in a battle for the future of search. At a press event later today, Microsoft is widely expected to detail plans to bring OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot to its Bing search engine. Google has already tried to preempt the news, making a rushed announcement yesterday to introduce Bard, its rival to ChatGPT, and promising more details on its AI future in a press event on Wednesday.

The two tech giants are on course to butt heads again.

The minor planet, considered small, is about the size of the Colosseum in Rome.

Why ‘panspermia theory’ – the wild idea of microbes ‘hitchhiking’ on meteoroids through the cosmos – is now taken seriously.

Setting boundaries for these tools, then, could be crucial, some researchers say. Edwards suggests that existing laws on discrimination and bias (as well as planned regulation of dangerous uses of AI) will help to keep the use of LLMs honest, transparent and fair. “There’s loads of law out there,” she says, “and it’s just a matter of applying it or tweaking it very slightly.”

At the same time, there is a push for LLM use to be transparently disclosed. Scholarly publishers (including the publisher of Nature) have said that scientists should disclose the use of LLMs in research papers (see also Nature 613, 612; 2023); and teachers have said they expect similar behaviour from their students. The journal Science has gone further, saying that no text generated by ChatGPT or any other AI tool can be used in a paper⁵.

One key technical question is whether AI-generated content can be spotted easily. Many researchers are working on this, with the central idea to use LLMs themselves to spot the output of AI-created text.