Microsoft integrates ChatGPT into new security product, Alibaba announces it is splitting into six business units and Google employees laid off in Ireland offered more than $300,000.
These stories and more on the hashtags trending for Wednesday, March 29
James Roy, I’m your guest host this week – here’s today’s top tech news.
Thanks to Microsoft, ChatGPT has a new fight; Cyber security.
The tech giant unveiled its first Generative AI cyber security tool called Microsoft Security Copilot during its virtual Microsoft Secure event.
The tool aims to help network defenders streamline information about new threats and ongoing attacks on their networks.
Chang Kawaguchi, vice president AI security architect at Microsoft, told Axios that “it’s really about simplifying the complex for defenders and helping them find things that others might miss”.
Specifically, the tool will sift through alerts and flag those that an organization needs to prioritize, so defenders have more time to protect networks from attacks.
Security Co-Pilot looks almost identical to the ChatGPT interface, but currently only pulls information from Microsoft’s own threat intelligence and products, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and NIST’s National Vulnerability Disclosure Database.
Users can also provide feedback on responses that will help train the AI model driving the safety co-pilot. But Vasu Jakkal, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of security, says that Microsoft doesn’t use searches to train its AI.
However, the risk of leaking intellectual property and corporate secrets remains a concern.
So does the notorious tendency of AI bots to create misinformation. And Security Copilot already messed around by referring to “Window 9” in their demo, which doesn’t exist.
The product is currently being tested with a limited number of customers for feedback, but will be offered as a separate offering to Microsoft customers in the near future.
Source: axios
Chinese tech giant Alibaba announced it will split into six businesses to be able to pursue independent fundraising and an initial public offering (IPO).
The shakeup comes as Big Tech faces increasing competition and pressure from regulation.
In fact, the company has a market cap of $228 billion.
Alibaba has split business units in the past, but this is a more significant split.
The six business units are called Cloud Intelligence, Global Digital Commerce, Domestic E-Commerce, Local Services, Logistics and Entertainment/Media.
Source: axios
Is Twitter Dying?
Five months after Elon Musk’s takeover and countless setbacks, that question remains important.
Natasha Lomas writes in a TechCrunch article that “Twitter was the place where experts and celebrities could find community and an engaged audience – without the need for layers of message-filtering intermediaries.” But it was also a place for raw, unfiltered opinion.
Twitter was this huge information network, with this secondary social element that could also give you a sense of someone’s personality.
The conversation there was unprecedented, grabbed headlines and could not be seen anywhere else.
And not to be outdone, it was free!
Well not anymore. Since Musk took over, everything that made Twitter valuable is gone. Experts, celebrities were horrified and bully journalists, spammers and sycophants flourished in this new information vacuum.
The final phase of the destruction is about to come on April Fools as Musk eliminates the last layer of legacy verification and allows anyone paying $7.99 to deafen conversations on Twitter.
Meaning anyone paying for this meaningless blue-check mark would get algorithmic visibility of their tweets and the power to drown out tweets from non-paying users. That’s why fakes and hypocrites are set to flourish
Meanwhile, for the rest of the users who want to get quality information, it will be more difficult to get it.
Furthermore, only paying users will get to vote in future Twitter policy polls, which will likely reduce all decision-making. But it doesn’t matter because Musk doesn’t seem to stick to the outcome of the election results he doesn’t like anyway.
And money, seemingly, is the least of his worries. It’s safe to say that his goal of turning Twitter into a one billion user platform has largely failed so far.
Lomas writes, “That our system allows money to be turned into a weapon for nuclear things of broad societal value is a hard lesson we must take away from the wreckage of the turquoise feathers.”
Source: techcrunch
Artificial intelligence startup Cerebras Systems announced yesterday that it released open source ChatGPT-like models for the research and business community to use for free.
The project aims to foster greater collaboration and innovation.
Andrew Feldman, founder and CEO of Cerebras, said, “There’s a big movement in AI to move off open source … It’s not surprising because there’s a lot of money in it now. The enthusiasm in the community, the progress we’ve made, Has been in large part because it has been so open.
Cerebras released seven models trained on its AI supercomputer called Andromeda, ranging from a small 111 million parameter language model to a large 13 billion parameter model.
In comparison, OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT has 175 billion parameters.
Cerebras said the smaller models could be deployed on phones or smart speakers while the larger models run on PCs or servers.
Most AI models today are trained on Nvidia chips, but more and more startups like Cerebras are looking to break out of that market.
Source: reuters
You could call it the luck of the Irish.
Google employees in Ireland, who have worked with the company since 2003 and as part of the company’s recent 12,000 global cuts, have been offered severance packages of more than $320,000, according to British newspaper The Sunday Times. can be done.
So if I did the calculations right, one of the Google employees who was let go when she gave birth said she was with Google for 9 years. He will receive 16 weeks’ pay and two weeks per year (the other 18 weeks). That’s thirty four weeks.
A nine year old Googler in Ireland gets 6 weeks per year, or 54 weeks of severance.
Had she been Irish, she would have received another 20 weeks.
It gets better or worse depending on which side of the ocean you’re on. If someone was there since 2003 that equates to 120 weeks versus the US 16 plus 40 weeks or 56 weeks – almost half the amount a 20 year old Irish worker would get.
So while Google employees in Ireland may not consider themselves lucky to have layoffs, if it’s going to happen, the Irish team certainly got a four-leaf clover on it.
Source: business Insider
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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I’m your host, James Roy, have a wonderful Wednesday!
