Google is advancing the release timeline for Android 16, shifting it to the second quarter of 2025 to better align with new device launches and accelerate access to its latest AI and machine learning resources. It should also "enable app creators and phone companies to prepare their products for the new software more quickly," reports CNET. From the report: [I]n a big-picture sense, the change could help facilitate a new wave of apps with more AI integration, considering developers will get access to Google's latest machine learning and AI resources even sooner. "We're in a once-in-a-generation moment to completely reimagine what our smartphones can do and how we interact with them," Google's Seang Chau, who took on the role of vice president and general manager of the Android Platform earlier this year, said in an interview with CNET. "It's a really exciting time for smartphones, and we've been putting a lot of thought into what we want to do next with them."... [ Read it >> ]

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With Windows 10 support set to expire on October 14, 2025, Microsoft is offering a one-time, one-year Extended Security Updates plan for consumers. "For $30, you'll receive 'critical' and 'important' security updates -- basically security patches that will continue to protect your Windows 10 PC from any vulnerabilities," reports PCWorld. "That $30 is for one year's worth of updates, and that's the only option at this time." From the report: Microsoft has been warning users for years that Windows 10 support will expire in 2025, specifically October 14, 2025. At that point, Windows 10 will officially fall out of support: there will be no more feature updates or security patches. On paper, that would mean that any Windows 10 PC will be at risk of any new vulnerabilities that researchers uncover.... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from SFGATE: If you've recently been laid off and have started the arduous process of looking for a new job, you've probably seen them on networking platforms like LinkedIn: postings for roles that are 30 days old, maybe more, with suspiciously wide salary ranges. They usually have hundreds, or even thousands, of hopeful applicants vying for the same position, but if you do a quick cross-check and notice that the role isn't posted on the company's actual website -- or any of their social media pages -- you should probably stop drafting that cover letter, because it's possible they're not hiring at all. "Ghost jobs," or ads for positions that aren't actually open, are a common phenomenon in the tech industry, which has been plagued by layoffs and budget cuts over recent years. As unemployed workers struggle to regain their footing, recruiters and career coaches who spoke with SFGATE warned that these fake jobs posted by real companies serve multiple, sometimes insidious purposes.... [ Read it >> ]

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Canada's Communications Security Establishment (CSE) revealed a sustained cyber campaign by the People's Republic of China, targeting Canadian government and private sector networks over the past five years. The report also flagged India, alongside Russia and Iran, as emerging cyber threats. The Register reports: The biennial National Cyber Threat Assessment described the People's Republic of China's (PRC) cyber operations against Canada as "second to none." Their purpose is to "serve high-level political and commercial objectives, including espionage, intellectual property (IP) theft, malign influence, and transnational repression." Over the past four years, at least 20 networks within Canadian government agencies and departments were compromised by PRC cyber threat actors. The CSE assured citizens that all known federal government compromises have been resolved, but warned that "the actors responsible for these intrusions dedicated significant time and resources to learn about the target networks."... [ Read it >> ]

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Zoox, an Amazon-owned autonomous vehicle company, is set to roll out dozens of its purpose-built robotaxis in San Francisco and Las Vegas, starting with employee rides in San Francisco's SoMa neighborhood and the Las Vegas Strip. "We have achieved that internal safety readiness" required to launch the service, said co-founder and CTO Jesse Levinson on the TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 stage. TechCrunch reports: The announcement comes a decade after Zoox was founded and four years since it was acquired by Amazon and unveiled its purpose-built robotaxi. In that time, the nascent autonomous vehicle industry has gone through the full hype cycle that led to multi-billion-dollar valuations and later a wave of shutdowns and consolidation. "We still exist," Levinson said, in a nod to the tumult the industry has gone through in recent years.... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: More than 500 Amazon workers reportedly signed a letter to Amazon Web Services' (AWS) CEO this week, sharing their outrage over Amazon's upcoming return-to-office (RTO) policy that will force workers into offices five days per week. In September, Amazon announced that starting in 2025, workers will no longer be allowed to work remotely twice a week. At the time, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said the move would make it easier for workers "to learn, model, practice, and strengthen our culture." Reuters reported today that it viewed a letter from a swath of workers sent to AWS chief Matt Garman on Wednesday regarding claims he reportedly made during an all-hands meeting this month. Garman reportedly told attendees that 9 out of 10 employees he spoke with support the five-day in-office work policy. The letter called the statements "inconsistent with the experiences of many employees" and "misrepresenting the realities of working at Amazon," Reuters reported. "We were appalled to hear the non-data-driven explanation you gave for Amazon imposing a five-day in-office mandate,'" the letter reportedly stated. [...]... [ Read it >> ]

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Microsoft is once again delaying the roll out of its controversial Recall feature for Copilot Plus PCs. From a report: The software giant had planned to start testing Recall, which creates screenshots of mostly everything you see or do on a Copilot Plus PC, with Windows Insiders in October. Now, Microsoft says it needs more time to get the feature ready. ... [ Read it >> ]

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OpenAI on Thursday launched a search feature within ChatGPT, its viral chatbot, that positions the high-powered AI startup to better compete with search engines like Google, Microsoft's Bing and Perplexity. From a report: ChatGPT search offers up-to-the-minute sports scores, stock quotes, news, weather and more, powered by real-time web search and partnerships with news and data providers, according to the company. It began beta-testing the search engine, called SearchGPT, in July. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Amazon, in what it described as a "difficult decision," is winding down Kindle Vella and shutting it down completely in February 2025. From a report: When the company launched the serialized story platform in 2021, it said Vella was a way for readers to discover new fictional stories and a new way for authors to earn from the Kindle Direct Publishing service. But it hasn't caught on as it had hoped, Amazon explains on its website, and it has decided to throw in the towel three years after Vella's debut. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg laid down the newest marker in generative AI training on Wednesday, saying that the next major release of the company's Llama model is being trained on a cluster of GPUs that's "bigger than anything" else that's been reported. From a report: Llama 4 development is well underway, Zuckerberg told investors and analysts on an earnings call, with an initial launch expected early next year. "We're training the Llama 4 models on a cluster that is bigger than 100,000 H100s, or bigger than anything that I've seen reported for what others are doing," Zuckerberg said, referring to the Nvidia chips popular for training AI systems. "I expect that the smaller Llama 4 models will be ready first." ... [ Read it >> ]

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Growing numbers of veteran video game developers are leaving large studios to work on smaller projects, citing bureaucratic burnout and creative constraints at major publishers. Nate Purkeypile, former lead artist on Bethesda's "Starfield," quit in 2021 after facing up to 20 meetings weekly coordinating with a 400-person team across four offices. He has since released "The Axis Unseen," a horror game he developed solo. ... [ Read it >> ]

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iPod creator and Nest founder Tony Fadell criticized OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and warned of AI dangers during TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 in San Francisco this week. "I've been doing AI for 15 years, people, I'm not just spouting shit. I'm not Sam Altman, okay?" Fadell said, drawing gasps from the audience. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Amazon has postponed the rollout of its AI-enhanced Alexa voice assistant to 2025, a significant setback in its race to compete with OpenAI's ChatGPT, according to Bloomberg. The delay underscores Amazon's challenges in modernizing Alexa's decade-old architecture, which relies on rigid command-response patterns rather than advanced language models. ... [ Read it >> ]

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After closing a $69 billion deal to buy virtualization technology company VMware a year ago, Broadcom wasted no time ushering in big changes to the ways customers and partners buy and sell VMware offerings -- and many of those clients aren't happy. ArsTechnica: To get a deeper look at the impact that rising costs and overhauls like the end of VMware perpetual license sales have had on VMware users, Ars spoke with several companies in the process of quitting the software due to Broadcom's changes. Here's what's pushing them over the edge. ... [ Read it >> ]

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A new study examining a large sample of privately insured patients with obesity found that use of drugs such as Ozempic and Wegovy as anti-obesity medications more than doubled from 2022 to 2023. During that same period, there was a 25.6% decrease in patients undergoing metabolic bariatric surgery to treat obesity. From a report: The study, by researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital, in collaboration with researchers at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Brown School of Public Health, is published in JAMA Network Open. "Our study provides one of the first national estimates of the decline in utilization of bariatric metabolic surgery among privately insured patients corresponding to the rising use of blockbuster GLP-1 RA drugs," said senior author Thomas C. Tsai, a metabolic bariatric surgeon at Brigham and Women's Hospital. ... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Engadget: Last month at Meta Connect, Mark Zuckerberg said that Meta AI was "on track" to become the most-used generative AI assistant in the world. The company has now passed a significant milestone toward that goal, with Meta AI passing the 500 million user mark, Zuckerberg revealed during the company's latest earnings call. The half billion user mark comes just barely a year after the social network first launched its AI assistant last fall. Zuckerberg said the company still expects to become the "most-used" assistant by the end of 2024, though he's never specified how the company is measuring that metric. Zuck said that AI-driven improvements in feed and video recommendations have led to an 8% increase in time spent on Facebook and 5% increase on Instagram this year. Advertisers have also leveraged the company's AI tools to generate over 15 million ads in just the past month.... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Behind the Black: According to a new very detailed engineering analysis into the causes of the collapse of the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico in 2020, the failure was caused first by a surprising interaction between the radio electronics of Arecibo and the traditional methods used to anchor the cables, and second by a failure of inspections to spot the problem as it became obvious.... [ Read it >> ]

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Heat-related deaths, food insecurity and the spread of infectious diseases caused by the climate crisis have reached record levels, according to a landmark report. The Guardian: The Lancet Countdown's ninth report on health and the climate breakdown reveals that people across the world face unprecedented threats to their health from the rapidly changing climate. "This year's stocktake of the imminent health threats of climate inaction reveals the most concerning findings yet," warned Dr Marina Romanello, executive director of the Lancet Countdown at University College London. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Nintendo has announced a mobile app called Nintendo Music, which lets users listen to classic video game soundtracks from Nintendo games spanning the last few decades, including Splatoon, Animal Crossing, and The Legend of Zelda. According to The Verge, the app is available on iOS and Android but only Switch Online subscribers will be able to stream the tunes. From the report: The app features curated playlists themed around games, moments, moods, or characters, though you can also build your own. It also supports streaming as well as downloading tracks for offline listening. Curiously, it includes a spoiler feature that lets you filter out tracks that, somehow, might spoil a game you haven't played or finished yet. And if you just want some Hyrule white noise, the app also lets you "loop songs or extend select tracks to 15, 30, or 60 minutes for uninterrupted listening." Here's a list of all the regions the app will be available in.... [ Read it >> ]

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In a new video published today, Boston Dynamics' humanoid robot Atlas is shown moving engine parts between bins without any human assistance. TechCrunch reports: Boston Dynamics is quick to note that the actions are being performed autonomously, without "prescribed or teleoperated movements." [...] Boston Dynamics notes, "The robot is able to detect and react to changes in the environment (e.g., moving fixtures) and action failures (e.g., failure to insert the cover, tripping, environment collision) using a combination of vision, force, and proprioceptive sensors."... [ Read it >> ]

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First we had friends. Then we had influencers. And if Mark Zuckerberg is correct, the next big thing in our social media feeds will be AI generated content. Lots of it. Fortune: Zuckerberg described our future feeds during Facebook-parent company Meta's third quarter earnings conference call on Wednesday, describing it as a natural evolution. "I think were going to add a whole new category of content which is AI generated or AI summarized content, or existing content pulled together by AI in some way," the Meta CEO said. "And I think that that's gonna be very exciting for Facebook and Instagram and maybe Threads, or other kinds of feed experiences over time." ... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Siemens will buy Altair Engineering for $10.6 billion, the American engineering software firm said on Wednesday, as the German company seeks to strengthen its presence in the fast-growing industrial software market. The offer price of $113 per share represents a premium of about 18.7% to Altair's closing price on Oct. 21, a day before Reuters first reported that the company was exploring a sale. The deal for Michigan-based Altair is Siemens's biggest acquisition since Siemens Healthineers bought medical device maker Varian Medical Systems for $16.4 million in 2020. [...]... [ Read it >> ]

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For months, the Colorado Department of State inadvertently exposed partial passwords for voting machines in a public spreadsheet. "While the incident is embarrassing and already fueling accusations from the state's Republican party, the department said in a statement that it 'does not pose an immediate security threat to Colorado's elections, nor will it impact how ballots are counted,'" reports Gizmodo. From the report: Colorado NBC affiliate station 9NEWS reported that Hope Scheppelman, vice chair of the state's Republican party, revealed the error in a mass email sent Tuesday morning, which included an affidavit from a person who claimed to have downloaded the spreadsheet and discovered the passwords by clicking a button to reveal hidden tabs.... [ Read it >> ]

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Ars Technica's Samuel Axon reports on Microsoft's quarterly earnings: Some investors have been uneasy about the company's aggressive spending on AI, while others have demanded it. During this quarter, Microsoft reported that it spent $20 billion on capital expenditures, nearly double what it had spent during the same quarter last year. However, the company satisfied both groups of investors, as it revealed it has still been doing well in the short term amid those long-term investments. The fiscal quarter, which covered July through September, saw overall sales rise 16 percent year over year to $65.6 billion. Despite all that AI spending, profits were up 11 percent, too. The growth was largely driven by Azure and cloud services, which saw a 33 percent increase in revenue. The company attributed 12 percent of that to AI-related products and services.... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gaming On Linux: Valve announced a change for Steam today that will make things a lot clearer for everyone, as developers will now need to clearly list the kernel-level anti-cheat used on Steam store pages. In the Steamworks Developer post Valve said: "We've heard from more and more developers recently that they're looking for the right way to share anti-cheat information about their game with players. At the same time, players have been requesting more transparency around the anti-cheat services used in games, as well as the existence of any additional software that will be installed within the game."... [ Read it >> ]

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Comcast says the latest installment of Call of Duty, released on October 25th, resulted in a whopping 19 percent of its overall traffic last week. The ISP says it's the company's "biggest weak in internet history." The Verge reports: It's not really possible to quantify that further, given Comcast didn't provide any specific numbers -- either about how many customers were downloading the game or how big their downloads were. Ranging between 84.4GB for the PlayStation version and 102GB for the PC edition Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 is, in the grand tradition of Call of Duty games, a hefty download. It can be as much as 300GB if players choose to go ahead and download Modern Warfare II and III and all the associated content packs and languages, as Activision explained in June. The announcement underscores "just how restrictive its 1.2TB data cap can be in 2024," notes The Verge. "For any players who did download the whole massive 300GB package, they'll have wiped out a huge chunk of their 1.2TB Xfinity data cap in one fell swoop."... [ Read it >> ]

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The Register's Tobias Mann reports: Supermicro shares took a nose dive on Wednesday, sliding more than 30 percent after the accounting firm hired to review its reporting practices resigned after determining they were just a bit too sketchy to warrant the risk. "We are resigning due to information that has recently come to our attention which has led us to no longer be able to rely on management's and audit committee's representations," Ernst & Young wrote in a resignation letter, which also raised alarm bells regarding Supermicro CEO Charles Liang's influence over the board. The concerns, disclosed in a recent SEC filing, only serve to stoke the fires of controversy surrounding Supermicro, which, after more than two months, still hasn't filed its 10-K annual report and faces the possibility of being de-listed from the Nasdaq as a result. [...]... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Intercept: Less than a year after OpenAI quietly signaled it wanted to do business with the Pentagon, a procurement document obtained by The Intercept shows U.S. Africa Command, or AFRICOM, believes access to OpenAI's technology is "essential" for its mission. The September 30 document lays out AFRICOM's rationale for buying cloud computing services directly from Microsoft as part of its $9 billion Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability contract, rather than seeking another provider on the open market. "The USAFRICOM operates in a dynamic and evolving environment where IT plays a critical role in achieving mission objectives," the document reads, including "its vital mission in support of our African Mission Partners [and] USAFRICOM joint exercises."... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader writes: Firewalk Studios, whom Sony Interactive Entertainment bought from Probably Monsters, has been shut down after disastrous Concord game launch. Kotaku adds: The team was responsible for Concord, the company's sci-fi hero shooter that bombed so badly it was taken offline just weeks after its launch earlier this year. The news comes less than two years after the PlayStation 5 maker first acquired Firewalk Studios as part of its ambitious plans for live service gaming. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Simon Sharwood, reporting for The Register: Organisers of WordCamps, community-organized events for WordPress users, have been ordered to take down some social media posts and share their login credentials for social networks. The order to share creds came from an employee of Automattic, the WordPress host whose CEO happens to be Matt Mullenweg, co-creator of WordPress. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Apple has boosted the default RAM to 16GB across its MacBook Air lineup while maintaining existing prices. The memory upgrade affects both M2 and M3 models, with base prices staying at $999 for M2, $1,099 for 13-inch M3, and $1,299 for 15-inch M3 versions. The move comes as AI features demand increased memory capacity.... [ Read it >> ]

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Canada is bracing for Indian government-backed hacking as the two nations' diplomatic relationship nosedives to its lowest ebb in a generation. From a report: "We judge that official bilateral relations between Canada and India will very likely drive Indian state-sponsored cyber threat activity against Canada," the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security said in its annual threat report published Wednesday, adding that such hackers are probably already conducting cyber-espionage. ... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader shares a report: A disgruntled former Disney employee allegedly repeatedly hacked into a third-party menu creation software used by Walt Disney World's restaurants and changed allergy information on menus to say that foods that had peanuts in them were safe for people with allergies, added profanity to menus, and at one point changed all fonts used on menus to Wingdings, according to a federal criminal complaint. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Dropbox is letting go 20% of its workforce as the cloud company undergoes what CEO Drew Houston calls a "transitional period." From a report: In a letter to staff, Houston said that the reduction in headcount would impact 528 people. The goal, he added, was to make cuts in areas where Dropbox has "over-invested" while designing a "flatter, more efficient" team structure. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Visa customers with eligible debit cards will be able to deposit funds into their Coinbase accounts -- sometimes instantly -- via a partnership announced by the payments giant and crypto exchange. From a report: Coinbase already has millions of connections to customers' debit cards but this new development allows for the real-time flow of funds for customers in the US and European Union, according to the Tuesday statement. ... [ Read it >> ]

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In Reddit's third-quarter earnings results, the company reported a profit of $29.9 million, with $348.4 million in revenue -- a 68% increase year over year. The Verge reports: The company hasn't been profitable at any point in its nearly 20-year history. Since going public, Reddit lost $575 million during its first quarter on the market, but it decreased that loss to $10 million last quarter, and is now finally in the green. Reddit also grew to 97.2 million daily users over the past few months, marking a 47 percent increase from the same time last year. That number exceeded 100 million users on some days during the quarter, Reddit says.... [ Read it >> ]

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A Russian court has fined Google an astronomical sum of around $20 decillion for YouTube's blocking of Russian media channels tied to sanctioned entities. The amount compounds weekly as Google continues to disregard the ruling. The Register reports: To put that into perspective, the World Bank estimates global GDP as around $100 trillion, which is peanuts compared to the prospective fine. Google might be one of the most valuable businesses on the planet, but even if Sundar Pichai rummages around the back of the sofa he won't be able to raise the funds to pay the penalty. The bizarre amount has been calculated after a four-year court case that started after YouTube banned the ultra-nationalist Russian channel Tsargrad in 2020 in response to the US sanctions imposed against its owner. Following Putin's illegal invasion of Ukraine in 2022 more channels were added to the banned list and 17 stations are now suing the Chocolate Factory, including Zvezda (a TV channel owned by Putin's Ministry of Defence), according to local media.... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from the European Space Agency: White dots arranged in five clusters against a black background (PNG). This is the simulated extraterrestrial signal transmitted from Mars and deciphered by a father and a daughter on Earth after a year-long decoding effort. On June 7, 2024, media artist Daniela de Paulis received this simple, retro-looking image depicting five amino acids in her inbox. It was the solution to a cosmic puzzle beamed from ESA's ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) in May 2023, when the European spacecraft played alien as part of the multidisciplinary art project 'A Sign in Space.' After three radio astronomy observatories on Earth intercepted the signal, the challenge was first to extract the message from the raw data of the radio signal, and secondly to decode it. In just 10 days, a community of 5000 citizen scientists gathered online and managed to extract the signal. The second task took longer and required some visionary minds.... [ Read it >> ]

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The BBC interviewed scientists Charley Kline and Bill Duvall 55 years after the first communications were made over a system called Arpanet, short for the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network. "Kline and Duvall were early inventors of networking, networks that would ultimately lead to what is today the Internet," writes longtime Slashdot reader dbialac. "Duvall had basic ideas what might come of the networks, but they had no idea of how much of a phenomenon it would turn into." Here's an excerpt from the interview: BBC: What did you expect Arpanet to become?... [ Read it >> ]

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GitHub Copilot will switch from using exclusively OpenAI's GPT models to a multi-model approach, adding Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet and Google's Gemini 1.5 Pro. Ars Technica reports: First, Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet will roll out to Copilot Chat's web and VS Code interfaces over the next few weeks. Google's Gemini 1.5 Pro will come a bit later. Additionally, GitHub will soon add support for a wider range of OpenAI models, including GPT o1-preview and o1-mini, which are intended to be stronger at advanced reasoning than GPT-4, which Copilot has used until now. Developers will be able to switch between the models (even mid-conversation) to tailor the model to fit their needs -- and organizations will be able to choose which models will be usable by team members.... [ Read it >> ]

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Google has integrated AI deeply across its operations, with over 25% of its new code generated by AI. CEO Sundar Pichai announced the milestone during the company's third quarter 2024 earnings call. The Verge reports: AI is helping Google make money as well. Alphabet reported $88.3 billion in revenue for the quarter, with Google Services (which includes Search) revenue of $76.5 billion, up 13 percent year-over-year, and Google Cloud (which includes its AI infrastructure products for other companies) revenue of $11.4 billion, up 35 percent year-over-year. Operating incomes were also strong. Google Services hit $30.9 billion, up from $23.9 billion last year, and Google Cloud hit $1.95 billion, significantly up from last year's $270 million. "In Search, our new AI features are expanding what people can search for and how they search for it," CEO Sundar Pichai says in a statement. "In Cloud, our AI solutions are helping drive deeper product adoption with existing customers, attract new customers and win larger deals. And YouTube's total ads and subscription revenues surpassed $50 billion over the past four quarters for the first time."... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son reiterated his belief in the coming of artificial super intelligence (ASI) on Tuesday, saying it would require hundreds of billions of dollars of investment to realize. Artificial super intelligence will be 10,000 times smarter than a human brain and will exist by 2035, Son told an audience of global business, technology and finance leaders at a conference in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Son said he is saving up funds "so I can make the next big move," but did not provide any details as to his investment plans. He predicted that generative AI will require $900 trillion dollars in cumulative capital expenditure in data centers and chips in the future, adding that he thought chip maker Nvidia was undervalued on this basis.... [ Read it >> ]

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Phoronix's Michael Larabel reports: CVE-2024-9632 was made public today as the latest security vulnerability affecting the X.Org Server. The CVE-2024-9632 security issue has been present in the codebase now for 18 years and can lead to local privilege escalation. Introduced in the X.Org Server 1.1.1 release back in 2006, CVE-2024-9632 affects the X.Org Server as well as XWayland too. By providing a modified bitmap to the X.Org Server, a heap-based buffer overflow privilege escalation can occur.... [ Read it >> ]

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OpenAI is partnering with Broadcom and TSMC to design its first in-house AI chip while supplementing its infrastructure with AMD chips, aiming to diversify its reliance on Nvidia GPUs. "The company has dropped the ambitious foundry plans for now due to the costs and time needed to build a network, and plans instead to focus on in-house chip design effort," adds Reuters. From the report: OpenAI has been working for months with Broadcom to build its first AI chip focusing on inference, according to sources. Demand right now is greater for training chips, but analysts have predicted the need for inference chips could surpass them as more AI applications are deployed. Broadcom helps companies including Alphabet unit Google fine-tune chip designs for manufacturing and also supplies parts of the design that help move information on and off the chips quickly. This is important in AI systems where tens of thousands of chips are strung together to work in tandem. OpenAI is still determining whether to develop or acquire other elements for its chip design, and may engage additional partners, said two of the sources.... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: LinkedIn, the social platform used by professionals to connect with others in their field, hunt for jobs, and develop skills, is taking the wraps off its latest effort to build artificial intelligence tools for users. Hiring Assistant is a new product designed to take on a wide array of recruitment tasks, from ingesting scrappy notes and thoughts to turn into longer job descriptions, through to sourcing candidates and engaging with them. LinkedIn is describing Hiring Assistant as a milestone in its AI trajectory: it is, per the Microsoft-owned company, its first "AI agent" And one that happens to be targeting one of LinkedIn's most lucrative categories of users (recruiters).... [ Read it >> ]

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Federal Communications Commission Chair Jessica Rosenworcel outlined a vision for universal connectivity last week that merges satellite and ground-based networks. The FCC recently became the first regulator to establish a framework for supplemental coverage from space (SCS). "Satellites may be in our skies, but they are the anchor tenant in our communications future," said Rosenworcel, calling for seamless integration of fiber, cellular, wireless, and satellite infrastructure into a unified network. The vision comes as the FCC's Affordable Connectivity Program recently ended due to funding depletion.... [ Read it >> ]

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Cryptocurrency firm Consensys said on Tuesday it would cut 20% of its total workforce, citing broader macroeconomic pressures and ongoing regulatory challenges facing the industry. From a report: The decision will impact 162 of a total of 828 employees at the company, Consensys CEO Joseph Lubin told Reuters in a mailed statement. Crypto companies have frequently accused the Securities and Exchange Commission of regulatory overreach and exceeding its jurisdiction, while the agency argues that the industry is disregarding securities laws designed to protect investors and other market participants. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Apple has moved the power button on its new M4 Mac mini to an awkward spot underneath the device, requiring users to lift or tip the computer to turn it on. The button now sits near the left rear corner, raised slightly by cooling vents, instead of its previous accessible position on the back panel. The change, absent from Apple's marketing materials, complicates basic operations like power-cycling the machine - especially with cables attached. ... [ Read it >> ]

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AI slop is flowing onto every major platform where people post online -- and Medium is no exception. Wired: The 12-year-old publishing platform has undertaken a dizzying number of pivots over the years. It's finally on a financial upswing, having turned a monthly profit for the first time this summer. Medium CEO Tony Stubblebine and other executives at the company have described the platform as "a home for human writing." But there is evidence that robot bloggers are increasingly flocking to the platform, too. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Oscar winner Robert Downey Jr. has threatened legal action against future studio executives who attempt to recreate his likeness using AI. "I intend to sue all future executives just on spec," Downey said when asked about potential AI recreations of his performances. He dismissed concerns about Marvel Studios using his likeness without permission, citing trust in their leadership. During the interview, he criticized tech executives who position themselves as AI gatekeepers, calling it "a massive fucking error."... [ Read it >> ]

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