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Amazon has launched an “educator enablement” program to help instructors at community colleges, HBCUs, and other minority-serving institutions learn and teach AI.


Quality AI education is still out of reach for many students who don’t attend selective research universities including many Black and Latino/a students. Amazon hopes to change that by investing in AI education at community colleges and HBCUs.

To ban, or not to ban, that is the question. I would guess that if Shakespeare were around nowadays, he might have said something like that about the recent efforts to ban the use of a type of AI known as Generative AI

Here’s the deal.


Some rather high-profile bans have been announced regarding the use of generative AI such as ChatGPT. We need to closely examine these bans and decide whether they make any sense. Here’s the scoop.

Alphabet, parent holding company of Google, has announced that it’s cutting around 6% of its global workforce.

In an open letter published by Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, the narrative followed a similar trajectory to that of other companies that have downsized in recent months, noting that the company had “hired for a different economic reality” than what it’s up against today.

Put simply, it had bolstered its workforce during the pandemic-driven digital boom times, but it’s now having to reverse course as the world curtails its spending in the face of economic headwinds.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced the news in an email to staff, saying the company needed to focus on key priorities — like artificial intelligence.

Google is cutting approximately 12,000 jobs — the latest technology firm to initiate significant layoffs as inflation rises and global markets brace for a downturn.

Google SEO Sundar Pichai announced the cuts in an email to staff on Friday and a blog post. The job losses constitute around 6 percent of Google’s global workforce, compared to recent layoffs at Microsoft (10,000 jobs or 5 percent of the workforce), Amazon (18,000 jobs / 6 percent), and Meta (11,000 / 13 percent).


Google needs to focus on key areas like AI, says Sundar Pichai.

The New York Times reports Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin have discussed its response to ChatGPT, with plans to launch over 20 AI products this year, including a demo of its own search chatbot.

The recent launch of OpenAI’s AI chatbot ChatGPT has raised alarms within Google, according to reports from The.

As recently as December, we’d heard Google execs were worried that despite investing heavily in AI technology, moving too fast to roll it out could harm the company’s reputation.


Expect to see a Google search AI chatbot demo this year.

The wetware in a casket of bone that we each carry on our shoulders is 1 million times more efficient than the AI models run by services like ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion, or DALL-E.

In this TechFirst with John Koetsier we chat for a second time with Gordon Wilson, CEO of Rain AI, which is building a neuromorphic artificial brain simulating the structure of our biological brains, and aiming at 10,000 to 100,000 greater energy efficiency than current AI architectures.

We also discuss “mortal computation” and a radical co-design of the hardware and software for AI systems, which could lead to much more efficient (and more effective) smart tools, machines, and companions.

Links:

Summary: Researchers have developed a new family of nano-scale capsules capable of carrying CRISPR gene editing tools to different organs of the body before harmlessly dissolving. The capsules were able to enter the brains of mice and successfully edit a gene associated with Alzheimer’s disease.

Source: University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Gene therapies have the potential to treat neurological disorders like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, but they face a common barrier — the blood-brain barrier.