Lifeboat Foundation

Microsoft laid off an entire team dedicated to guiding AI innovation that leads to ethical, responsible and sustainable outcomes. The cutting of the ethics and society team, as reported by Platformer, is part of a recent spate of layoffs that affected 10,000 employees across the company.

The elimination of the team comes as Microsoft invests billions more dollars into its partnership with OpenAI, the startup behind art-and text-generating AI systems like ChatGPT and DALL-E 2, and revamps its Bing search engine and Edge web browser to be powered by a new, next-generation large language model that is “more powerful than ChatGPT and customized specifically for search.”

The move calls into question Microsoft’s commitment to ensuring its product design and AI principles are closely intertwined at a time when the company is making its controversial AI tools available to the mainstream.

Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder and CEO of Facebook parent Meta, has pointed to internal data analysis that suggests engineers who initially joined the company in an in-person capacity performed better than those who joined remotely from the get-go.

He also suggested that younger engineers, or more accurately those who are “earlier in their career,” perform better when they work with colleagues in-person for at least three days each week.

The insights stem from a memo sent to employees earlier today, in which Zuckerberg revealed the company was cutting another 10,000 jobs. Aside from announcing the fresh round of layoffs, Zuckerberg delved into a number of ways the company was looking to improve efficiency, such as cancelling “lower priority projects” and creating a flatter organizational structure by removing various management layers.

Anthropic, a startup co-founded by ex-OpenAI employees, today launched something of a rival to the viral sensation ChatGPT.

Called Claude, Anthropic’s AI — a chatbot — can be instructed to perform a range of tasks, including searching across documents, summarizing, writing and coding, and answering questions about particular topics. In these ways, it’s similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. But Anthropic makes the case that Claude is “much less likely to produce harmful outputs,” “easier to converse with” and “more steerable.”

Organizations can request access. Pricing has yet to be detailed.

Google announced a new open source program called Open Health Stack for developers to build health-related apps. These tools, unveiled at the company’s “The Check Up” special event this week, include a Software Developer Kit (SDK) for Android and design guidelines for health apps.

The search giant said that the stack is centered around the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Standards (FHIR) standards. This makes it easier for developers to capture the information and healthcare workers to access that. FHIR has been adopted by a lot of major electronic health record (EHR) providers.

The Open Health Stack gives developers access to Android FHIR SDK to build secure apps that can also work offline; a design guide to help developers make data capture easy; and FHIR Analytics to derive insights complex structure of the framework and FHIR Info Gateway to assign role-based access of data to various stakeholders. The last two components are available under early access, and Google is developing more features within both.

AI or bust. Right now, AI is what everyone is talking about, and for good reason. After years of seeing AI doled out to help automate the processes that make businesses run smarter, we’re finally seeing AI that can help the average business employee working in the real world. Generative AI, or the process of using algorithms to produce data often in the form of images or text, has exploded in the last few months. What started with OpenAI’s ChatGPT has bloomed into a rapidly evolving subcategory of technology. And companies from Microsoft to Google to Salesforce and Adobe are hopping on board.

What started with ChatGPT has bloomed into an entire subcategory of technology with Meta, AWS, Salesforce, Google, Microsoft all racing to out innovate and deliver exciting generative AI capabilities to consumers, enterprise, developers, and more. Exploring the rapid progress in the AI space.

Now its building one that even bigger and even more sophisticated.

Nearly five years ago, a little-known company approached Microsoft with a special request to put together computing horsepower to the scale it had never done before. Microsoft then spent millions of dollars in putting together tens of thousands of powerful chips to build a supercomputer. OpenAI used this to train its large language model, GPT, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Microsoft is no stranger to building artificial intelligence (AI) models that help users work more efficiently. The automatic spell checker that has helped millions of users is an example of an AI model trained on language.

Continue reading “Microsoft spent millions to put together a supercomputer for OpenAI” »

International Space Station’s time in orbit ends on 2030.

The International Space Station’s time in orbit will end in 2030. It’ll have to be taken out of its orbit through controlled disintegration into the Earth’s atmosphere. For this, NASA is developing a spacecraft that will maneuver safe disposal of the station.

This was revealed when the Biden administration allocated a budget of $27.2 billion to NASA for the fiscal year 2024, which includes $180 million “to initiate the development of a new space tug” that could deorbit the ISS.

The move uses a loophole in the NPT and prompts fears of nuclear proliferation.

The U.S. will lend its advanced nuclear propulsion technology to build nuclear-powered submarines for Australia as it looks to counter the rising influence of China in the Indo-Pacific region. This is the first major agreement under the AUKUS pact, a trilateral arrangement that was set up 18 months ago with the U.K., the U.S., and Australia as signatories.

Continue reading “US to transfer nuclear submarine technology to Australia under new AUKUS deal” »

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Will the global resources be ready to accommodate the world’s dietary needs?