Google’s bard apologizes after plagiarism, TikTok’s CEO faces tough questions from a US Congressional committee and former Meta recruiter says he was paid $190,000 a year to do nothing.
Welcome to trending hashtags for Friday, March 24
I’m your host Jim Love, CIO of IT World Canada and TechNewsday in the US – here’s today’s top tech news.
Google’s bard plagiarized an article, then apologized.
Avram Pelt, a writer for the news site Tom’s Hardware, asked Google which of the two competing processors, the Intel Core i9-13900K or the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D, was faster?
Bard provided an answer taken directly from one of Tom’s Hardware articles, but left out the source and implied that it conducted tests to determine which processor was faster.
“The most troubling thing is that Bard uses “we” to describe someone else’s work,” Pelt said. Anyone who’s followed tech journalism for a while probably knows that. That Google doesn’t benchmark and review CPUs, but many end users probably won’t question Bard’s self-attribution here.
When called out, the Bard plainly said, “YWhat I did was a form of plagiarism. I Apologies for my mistake and will be more careful citing my sources in the future.
Piltach added that the plagiarism attempts were too sneaky, as the initial response was general enough that they could have possibly come from many other sources.
“It seems that Google (and Microsoft) are relying on the fact that information can come from many different sources, so it can be difficult to trace these “facts” to where the AI ”learned” them, he added. “. Of course, this assumes the facts are correct.
And while stolen, Bard gives a muddled and incomplete answer, assuming the searcher is looking for gaming-specific information, whereas Tom’s hardware article gives an overall review of the processor.
Apologies notwithstanding, we all know that Bard doesn’t usually cite sources, nor does ChatGPT. But Microsoft’s Bing bot demanded to stand down and cited all of its sources.
Bard is currently available for testing to anyone wishing to join the waiting list.
Source: tom’s hardware
TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew faced tough questioning from US lawmakers yesterday over the harmful effects of the Chinese social media platform on children’s mental health and its use by the Chinese Communist Party.
Chew, formerly an investment banker at Goldman Sachs and investment firm DST, has been a strong supporter of Byte Dance, the company that owns TikTok.
He said Monday, as he prepared to testify, that “this is an important moment for us. This could take TikTok away from all 150 million of you.”
But he has also previously said that he does not allow his children to use TikTok because they are “too young”.
And he delved into the question of the harmful effects of TikTok on children.
Representative Cathy Castor, a Democrat, told a congressional hearing, “TikTok may have been designed to minimize harm to children, but it was decided to aggressively drug addicts in the name of profit.”
Several concerns were also raised about TikTok’s potential to pose a threat to US national security.
“We do not believe TikTok will ever embrace American values – the values of freedom, human rights and innovation,” said a Republican committee member.
But TikTok said that no content is promoted or removed at the request of the Chinese government.
Wedbush analyst Dan Ives said on Twitter, “TikTok’s CEO’s testimony so far is what we’d characterize as a ‘mini disaster’ for this critical moment for TikTok. TikTok is now the poster child of US/China tensions and a major threat to lawmakers.” There are too many questions with not enough concrete answers.”
Source: reuters
Changes to the server’s internal architecture are set to reduce data center costs, increase application performance, and introduce new rack-level architecture.
The new Compute Express Link (CXL) protocol has been created by a consortium of industry giants including Cisco, Intel, Dell, Oracle, Lenovo, HPE, IBM, Microsoft, Samsung, Nvidia and Google.
CXL promises to improve the way the server uses memory. This is large as memory accounts for about 50 percent of the cost of a typical data center server, but also because the ultimate limit to a server’s performance is very often the amount of memory its CPU can access.
Mark Stammers, IT industry analyst and president of Dragon Slayer Consulting, said: “It’s very difficult to make a general prediction about how much money CXL will save in data centers. But if CXL performs as promised, the savings will certainly be worth its while.” That would be more than enough to guarantee widespread adoption.
Source: data center knowledge
Consulting giant Accenture has announced plans to lay off 19,000 employees over the next 18 months as it seeks to cut costs.
2.5 percent of Accenture’s employees will be affected.
The company said this round of reductions would result in US$1.2 billion in severance costs and US$300 million in fees for the consolidation of office space.
With the cuts, Accenture also reported a 5 percent increase in revenue to US$15.8 billion, but lowered its annual revenue and profit growth guidance.
“We are taking steps to reduce our costs through fiscal year 2024 and beyond, while continuing to invest in our business and our people,” said Julie Sweet, President and CEO at Accenture Taking advantage.”
Source: IT World Canada
A bug on viral AI chatbot ChatGPT leaked users’ conversation history, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman acknowledged, after Reddit and Twitter users shared images of chat histories he said were not his.
Altman said the company is sorry but the error has now been fixed.
However, many users remain concerned for their privacy, as the glitch appears to indicate that OpenAI had access to user chats.
The company’s privacy policy states that user data, such as signals and feedback, may be used to continue training the model.
But that data is only used when the personally identifiable information is removed.
As the AI race intensifies and the pressure to roll out product updates mounts, many are concerned that such missteps could have harmful or unintended consequences.
Source: BBC
A former Meta recruiter claims he was paid $190,000 a year for doing nothing. Can I get her job?
Maddie reflected on her time working at Meta for six months during 2021 and explained in a video posted on TikTok how the company was not hiring new employees while she was there.
Meta laid off another 10,000 workers last week. Like many other tech companies, Meta has blamed overhiring during the pandemic for the shakeup.
Maddie said, “We didn’t expect to hire anyone for the first six months, even the first year. It really blew my mind. Like ‘Perfect, I’m going to ride it for a year, obviously I didn’t.’ She claimed that she was only learning all day, adding that META’s onboarding and training process was very intense.
But she soon began to question the purpose of the many team meetings. She said, “Why are we meeting? We are not hiring anyone. Just to hear how not everyone is hiring someone. And also, I was on a team where everyone was new, so none of us were hiring anyone.”
She continues to make fun of her job until Meta gets on her case. She stopped posting but then the company looked at 20 of her “TikTok” videos and asked her if they thought they were “appropriate”. Then he quit the job a day before he was fired.
As of March 17, Maddie’s video has been viewed over 210,400 times
Source: Independent
That’s the top tech news for today. Hashtag Trending airs five days a week with daily tech news and we have a special weekend edition where we do an in-depth interview with an expert on some of the tech developments that are making the news.
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