Good morning! This is your daily ☕️ Techpresso.
In today's Techpresso:
👀 Cracks appear in Microsoft and OpenAI partnership
🍽️ Meta fires staff who abused $25 meal vouchers
🎧 Google's AI podcast generator gets major updates
🏢 AWS CEO tells workers to quit if they don't want to come back to the office
🔒 X updates privacy policy to allow third parties to train AI models
💵 US Treasury uses AI to recover billions from fraud
🎁 + 11 other news you might like
🔮 + 3 handpicked research papers and tools
👀 Cracks appear in Microsoft and OpenAI partnershipLINK
OpenAI and Microsoft's once strong partnership is showing signs of strain as OpenAI seeks more computing power and reduced costs while Microsoft hedges its bets by investing in competing technologies. Tensions have grown between the two companies, with disagreements over resource allocation, Microsoft hiring talent from OpenAI competitors, and protocol breaches by Microsoft engineers. Despite recent adjustments to the partnership, such as OpenAI securing additional computing resources from Oracle, OpenAI is still facing significant financial pressures, expecting to lose $5 billion in 2024.
🍽️ Meta fires staff who abused $25 meal vouchersLINK
Meta fired around two dozen employees in Los Angeles for abusing $25 meal vouchers, using them to purchase non-food household items like toothpaste and tea, despite some having salaries as high as $400,000. The staff had been misusing the system for a long time, sometimes pooling funds or ordering meals to their homes, even though the vouchers were meant for office use. This action is part of Meta's broader restructuring efforts, which have included multiple rounds of layoffs affecting thousands of workers over the past two years.
🎧 Google's AI podcast generator gets major updatesLINK
Google's NotebookLM now allows users to guide AI-generated audio conversations by focusing on specific topics, improving upon the previous automatic approach of generating holistic audio summaries.
Over 80,000 organizations have adopted NotebookLM, prompting Google to launch a business pilot program offering early access to new features, training, and support for participating companies.
NotebookLM saw a traffic increase to 4.17 million monthly visits, with Google planning to expand its functionality with features like customizable audio summaries, different voices and languages, and a potential native mobile app.
🏢 AWS CEO tells workers to quit if they don't want to come back to the officeLINK
Amazon CEO Matt Garman stated in an all-hands meeting that employees who are unhappy with the new five-day office return mandate should leave the company.
The policy, gradually increasing in-office attendance requirements to five days a week by January 2025, has met resistance from staff, who previously opposed a three-day office return plan.
Garman believes remote work hinders innovation and criticizes the hybrid model for not facilitating effective collaboration, emphasizing the importance of in-person team interactions.
🔒 X updates privacy policy to allow third parties to train AI modelsLINK
X is updating its privacy policy to allow third-party collaborators to use users' data for training artificial intelligence models, effective November 15, 2024.
The policy mentions an opt-out feature for data sharing, but currently, there is no clear way for users to exercise this option, as noted by TechCrunch.
Besides privacy policy changes, X is imposing stricter penalties for scraping, charging $15,000 for accessing over one million posts a day, to protect user data and resources.
💵 US Treasury uses AI to recover billions from fraudLINK
The Treasury Department is using artificial intelligence to combat fraud, successfully preventing or recovering over $4 billion in potential losses within the last year.
Officials have emphasized the use of machine learning to analyze extensive data sets, effectively identifying patterns of fraud frequently utilized by criminals.
The department plans to extend its AI-developed resources and insights to other federal agencies to bolster their anti-fraud measures.
Other news you might like
Google moves Gemini app team to AI research lab DeepMind.LINK
Perplexity lets you search your internal enterprise files and the web.LINK
Sam Altman’s Worldcoin becomes World and shows new iris-scanning Orb to prove your humanity.LINK
US investigates 2.4m Tesla self-driving vehicles after reported collisions.LINK
Microsoft said it lost weeks of security logs for its customers’ cloud products.LINK
Intel seeks billions for minority stake in Altera business, sources say.LINK
Stripe in talks to acquire Bridge for $1 billion.LINK
Bluesky gains half a million new users in one day after X changes how blocking works.LINK
University student builds simple raycaster maze demo with transparency support in Microsoft Excel.LINK
Man who threw away $500M Bitcoin hard drive sues city for right to search landfill.LINK
23andMe’s entire board resigned on the same day. Founder Anne Wojcicki still thinks the startup is savable.LINK
Latest research and tools
Grandmaster-Level Chess Without Search: trains a transformer model on 10 million chess games to play at grandmaster level, surpassing traditional engines and AlphaZero, without using explicit search algorithms or domain-specific adjustments.LINK
Microsoft BitNet: an official inference framework designed to perform fast, energy-efficient, and lossless inference on 1-bit Large Language Models, notably improving performance and reducing energy usage on CPUs, with plans for NPU and GPU support.LINK
LLMD: a Large Language Model for Interpreting Longitudinal Medical Records: the paper introduces a language model designed to analyze and interpret complex, long-term medical records.LINK
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