About: blatcho

A guide to getting your boss on board, figuring out the details, and other common challenges.

Legal experts say a key law should already prevent brokers from collecting and selling data that’s weaponized against vulnerable people.

A key tool in the early pandemic response, monoclonal antibodies are now ineffective against new variants. Immunocompromised patients are especially at risk.

Supersmart algorithms won’t take all the jobs, But they are learning faster than ever, doing everything from medical diagnostics to serving up ads.

Katharine Gemmell / Bloomberg: The UK CMA finds Microsoft’s proposed $69B Activision Blizzard acquisition will harm competition in the UK’s gaming market and asks Microsoft for remedies  —  Microsoft Corp.’s $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard Inc. will harm competition in the UK gaming market, Britain’s antitrust watchdog has provisionally found.

Kellen Browning / New York Times: Uber reports Q4 revenue up 49% YoY to $8.6B, gross bookings rose 19% YOY to $30.7B, and a record 2.1B customer trips, up 19% YoY; UBER jumps 7%+ pre-market  —  The company, which was hit hard in the early stages of the pandemic, saw revenue jump 49 percent from […]

Amitoj Singh / CoinDesk: A look at India’s pilots for a retail and wholesale CBDC, planned for a national launch by the end of 2023, and differentiating the project from the UPI system  —  India launched two CBDC pilots last year, a wholesale CBDC and a retail CBDC.  —  Join the most important conversation in […]

A wave of ultrasound that briefly levitates your finger off a plate of glass can make it feel as if you have just pressed a button, which could be useful for virtual reality or new kinds of displays

First, there was music. Then lights began sweeping the smokey arena. The cage came alive with rotating steel blades and fire pits. The crowd grew hysterical in anticipation of the coming destruction. Such was the scene of the momentous championship match in the last season of BattleBots, a popular, long-running show that pits 250-pound robots […]

Attending preschool at age 4 makes children significantly more likely to go to college, according to an empirical study led by an MIT economist. The study examines children who attended public preschools in Boston from 1997 to 2003. It finds that among students of similar backgrounds, attendance at a public preschool raised “on-time” college enrollment […]

Hindu nationalists claim that the chatbot has insulted their deities, sparking an online uproar.

The second-ranked search engine is getting a new chatbot interface that attempts to synthesize information from sites across the web.

The romantic holiday is coming soon, so you should too!

Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch: Magic, which is developing a code-generating tool similar to GitHub’s Copilot, raised a $23M Series A led by Alphabet’s CapitalG  —  Magic, a startup developing a code-generating platform similar to GitHub’s Copilot, today announced that it raised $23 million in a Series A funding round led …

Reuters: Filing: eBay plans to lay off ~500 employees, ~4% of its total workforce, to create space to invest in “new technologies, customer innovations, and key markets”  —  E-commerce firm eBay Inc (EBAY.O) said on Tuesday it will lay off 500 employees globally, representing 4% of its total workforce.

Jordan Novet / CNBC: Source: Microsoft plans to release software to help large companies create and customize their own chatbots using ChatGPT technology later this year  —  – Microsoft plans to release technology to help big companies launch their own chatbots using the OpenAI ChatGPT technology, a person familiar with the plans told CNBC.

Artificial intelligence is being used to detect harassment in verbal communications for gaming and VR platforms, but such AIs face challenges in keeping up with evolving forms of extreme speech

Google Bard and Baidu’s Ernie Bot are set to go head-to-head with OpenAI’s ChatGPT as tech giants race to combine AI chatbots with search engines

An exhibition of art curated by AI and humans questions the impact AI has on visual culture and how audiences perceive creative content

Seven strategies.

A conversation with HBS professor Sandra Sucher on the hidden costs.

Five questions to help companies align ESG priorities with executive compensation.

The European Space Agency is exploring a unique way to dramatically cut carbon emissions by tapping sunlight closer to the source.

Active users have fallen by more than 1 million since the exodus from Elon Musk’s Twitter, suggesting the decentralized platform is not a direct replacement.

Monday’s massive earthquake has triggered a swarm of aftershocks, which will make a humanitarian disaster even more devastating.

Sergiu Gatlan / BleepingComputer: The LockBit ransomware gang claims responsibility for an attack on the UK’s Royal Mail that halted international shipping, contradicting an earlier statement  —  The LockBit ransomware operation has claimed the cyberattack on UK’s leading mail delivery service Royal Mail that forced the company …

Yoolim Lee / Bloomberg: Research: Australian startups raised AU$7.4B across 712 deals in 2022, down from AU$10.6B across 731 deals in 2021, as six startups hit unicorn status  —  Venture-capital investments in Australia plunged by about a third in 2022, following the lead of listed global technology companies and venture markets.

David Smith / The Guardian: How AI de-aging VFX are increasingly used on actors, including Harrison Ford in the new Indiana Jones movie, and the possible impact on Hollywood’s economics  —  Stars like Tom Hanks and Harrison Ford are being rendered younger digitally but voices in the industry express concern about where we might be […]

In a new course that ran this Independent Activities Period (IAP), MIT students studied Ukrainian language and culture and heard from Ukrainian scholars, artists, and activists about the country and the ongoing struggle against the devastating Russian invasion. As Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Maria Khotimsky, senior lecturer in Russian […]

In keeping with its mission and longstanding commitment to increase access to scholarship, the MIT Press is pleased to announce shift+OPEN. This new initiative is designed to flip existing subscription-based journals to a diamond open access publishing model. Shift+OPEN is generously supported by the Arcadia Fund. The MIT Press welcomes submissions for English-language journals in […]

Large language models like OpenAI’s GPT-3 are massive neural networks that can generate human-like text, from poetry to programming code. Trained using troves of internet data, these machine-learning models take a small bit of input text and then predict the text that is likely to come next. But that’s not all these models can do. […]

The search giant’s new chatbot is in testing and will be launched “in the coming weeks.” An API will make it available for developers to build on.

The Bear and Reservation Dogs are just two of the shows you won’t want to miss on this streaming service.

Whether you’re bird-watching or baseball-spotting, we break down prices and specs to find the best pair for you.

CNBC: Gemini will contribute up to $100M to Genesis’ bankruptcy recovery, mainly for its Earn users, who had ~$900M of assets frozen when Genesis paused withdrawals  —  – Crypto exchange Gemini will contribute $100 million in cash to a recovery plan for bankrupt crypto lender Genesis.

Jonathan Vanian / CNBC: Pinterest reports Q4 revenue up 4% YoY to $877M, vs. $886.3M est., $17M net income, and global MAUs up 4% YoY to 450M; stock drops 10%+ on a weak Q1 forecast  —  – Pinterest said it expects sales in the first quarter to increase in the “low single digits” from a […]

Erin Woo / The Information: Internal doc: just ~180K US users paid for Twitter subscriptions like Blue as of mid-January, implying annual revenue from subscriptions globally of around $28M  —  Around 180,000 people in the U.S. were paying for subscriptions to Twitter, including Twitter Blue, as of mid-January …

A robotic hand with a tiny sensor on one of its fingers can detect potentially harmful mercury ions in samples of food and water by prodding them

A Chinese balloon that was travelling over the US, including over military sites, was shot down by a fighter jet on 4 February

Artificial intelligence models trained on millions of images can occasionally reproduce near-perfect copies, researchers have found, which could be significant for ongoing copyright infringement lawsuits

One reason deep learning exploded over the last decade was the availability of programming languages that could automate the math — college-level calculus — that is needed to train each new model. Neural networks are trained by tuning their parameters to try to maximize a score that can be rapidly calculated for training data. The […]

They can be a useful tool in the short term, but there’s no evidence they increase long-term loyalty.

Sponsor content from EY-Parthenon.

Six steps to creating a culture that embraces change.

Then he read the script and was blown away.

Despite an economic crisis, political chaos, and the regime’s ban, TikTok influencers are still thriving in Afghanistan.

A search bot you converse with could make finding answers easier—if it doesn’t tell fibs. Microsoft, Google, Baidu, and others are working on it.

Wall Street Journal: A profile of Sam Bankman-Fried’s psychiatrist Dr. George Lerner, hired as a coach at FTX in early 2022, as prosecutors seek his communications with executives  —  Hired as a coach at the Bahamas-based company, George Lerner was there for its dramatic downfall

Madhumita Murgia / Financial Times: Google, Microsoft, and Amazon pursuing investments and deals with generative AI startups, incentivizing use of their cloud services, raises regulatory concerns  —  Deals between Google, Microsoft and Amazon and ‘generative AI’ start-ups raise competition concerns

Bloomberg: JD.com, China Mobile, and other Chinese retailers are discounting iPhone 14 models by over $100, an unusually steep price cut that suggests dwindling demand  —  Apple Inc.’s latest iPhones are selling at discounts of more than $100 in China, an unusually steep price cut just months after launch …