Lifeboat Foundation

Simon wohlfahrt / AFP / getty images.

“It’s controversial, so people are for it or against it,” Mauritshuis press officer Boris de Munnick told AFP. “The people who selected this, they liked it, they knew that it was AI, but we liked the creation. So we chose it, and we hung it,” he added.

A high-resolution camera mounted on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has snapped pictures of unusual, almost perfectly circular sand dunes on the Red Planet’s surface.

You’re going to have strong feelings about this redesign.

Gustav Söderström has worked at Spotify for a long time; his first big project was leading the launch of its mobile app back in 2009. That makes him the perfect company leader to talk to about Spotify’s recent redesign, which introduces a visual, TikTok-like feed for discovering new content on the app’s homepage. As his boss, CEO Daniel Ek, put it last week, it’s the biggest change Spotify has undergone since we introduced mobile.

Spotify is launching a feed that will help you discover new artists, podcasts, and audiobooks.

Continue reading “Why Spotify wants to look like TikTok, with co-president Gustav Söderström” »

Google will soon offer ways to generate text and images using machine learning in its Workspace products as part of a scramble to catch up with rivals in the new AI race.

Google has announced a suite of upcoming generative AI features for its various Workspace apps, including Google Docs, Gmail, Sheets, and Slides.

Google is pumping its productivity apps full of AI.

Continue reading “Google announces AI features in Gmail, Docs, and more to rival Microsoft” »

The news comes after 13 percent of the company was cut in November. ‘This will be tough and there’s no way around that,’ CEO Mark Zuckerberg told employees.

Meta will lay off an additional 10,000 employees through multiple rounds of cuts over the coming two months, close hiring for 5,000 open roles, and cancel more low-priority projects, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on Tuesday. These cuts come just four months after he laid off 11,000 employees, or 13 percent of the company, last November.

Meta plans to cut its workforce by another 10,000 people and withdraw around 5,000 open roles that it had yet to fill, company co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Tuesday, confirming recent rumors that another round of layoffs was imminent.

Continue reading “Meta to cut another 10,000 jobs and cancel ‘low priority projects’” »

OpenAI has released a powerful new image-and text-understanding AI model, GPT-4, that the company calls “the latest milestone in its effort in scaling up deep learning.”

GPT-4 is available today to OpenAI’s paying users via ChatGPT Plus (with a usage cap), and developers can sign up on a waitlist to access the API.

Pricing is $0.03 per 1,000 “prompt” tokens (about 750 words) and $0.06 per 1,000 “completion” tokens (again, about 750 words). Tokens represent raw text; for example, the word “fantastic” would be split into the tokens “fan,” “tas” and “tic.” Prompt tokens are the parts of words fed into GPT-4 while completion tokens are the content generated by GPT-4.

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.