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☆ AI Becomes Silicon Valley’s Next Buzzy Bandwagon as Crypto Boom Fizzles
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-18 | by ( Christopher Mims | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

The new artificial-intelligence tools getting widespread attention for spitting out text, images and computer code are also generating something else: talk of the next technology bubble. Technologists broadly agree that the so-called generative AI that powers systems like ChatGPT has the potential to change how we live and work, despite the technology’s clear flaws. But some investors, chief executives and engineers see signs of froth that remind them of the crypto boom that recently fizzled.

☆ Pressure Mounts on CIOs to Build More AI Apps (and Faster)
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-16 | by ( Isabelle Bousquette | ) www.wsj.com time to read: +5 min

Magesh Sarma, chief information and strategy officer for AmeriSave Mortgage Corp., said his team has been inundated with requests to build AI apps aimed at tackling various cost issues. But the AI team, which consists of 76 employees, has been one of the least affected because of its business value. Ms. Anderson has a system for evaluating the priority level of different possible machine-learning projects that come to her department via a request pipeline, she said. Photo: ERIC GAILLARD/REUTERSOne area she hasn’t been able to fully tackle is machine-learning algorithms to help with customer retention. “With AI, it’s an incremental sort of approach.”Adding to the pressure is the exploding popularity of ChatGPT and other generative AI applications.

☆ Crypto's core technology has a legitimacy problem. The founder of VC firm Dao5 is seeking to shore up its cred by working with university researchers.
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-02 | by ( April Joyner | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +4 min

Tekin Salimi, the founder of the VC firm Dao5, sources many of his deals through academic research. Salimi's venture capital firm, Dao5, counts several university professors among its advisors and has backed several startups founded by academics. His budding interest in crypto eventually brought him to Silicon Valley, where he joined the crypto VC firm Polychain Capital in 2018. When he left Polychain to launch Dao5 last year, Salimi sought to build academic research into the firm's deal-sourcing process. Dao5 cut ties with Kwon after the collapse, and he never had any financial involvement in the firm, Salimi said.

☆ Why Hollywood's tech evangelists are bullish on NFTs and Web3 storytelling, even after the FTX scandal tarnished blockchain's rep
▼ + stars: | 2023-01-31 | by ( Elaine Low | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +7 min

Amid the FTX scandal and declining NFT sales, Web3 chatter has grown quieter in Hollywood. But proponents of NFTs and Web3 storytelling are betting on the tech's entertainment potential. Hollywood's evangelists of Web3 — the decentralized, blockchain-based future of the web that includes crypto and NFTs — were out in full force. She has worked to distance the creative and storytelling potential of NFTs and other blockchain-based technologies from the cowboy rep of the digital currency world. "I'm excited about moving Web3, blockchain technologies past sort of the hype cycle that we've seen with digital collectibles and NFTs," Greg Reed, Universal Pictures' VP of technology partnerships, told Variety.

☆ Two companies race to deploy robotaxis in San Francisco. The city wants them to hit the brakes.
▼ + stars: | 2023-01-27 | by ( David Ingram | David Ingram Covers Tech For Nbc News. | ) www.nbcnews.com time to read: +6 min

SAN FRANCISCO — San Francisco is trying to slow the expansion of robotaxis after repeated incidents in which cars without drivers stopped and idled in the middle of the street for no obvious reason, delaying bus riders and disrupting the work of firefighters. Some believe self-driving cars will never happen on a wide scale, but they’ve been gaining momentum in San Francisco. San Francisco doesn’t want robotaxis operating in the city’s downtown core, for example, or during morning and evening peak commuting times. He also provided letters in support of Cruise written by local San Francisco merchants associations, disability advocates and community groups. City officials argue that stopped robotaxis are hazards that can cause human drivers to react dangerously.

☆ This ‘best job’ of 2023 pays over $100K, offers remote opportunities and doesn’t require a degree
▼ + stars: | 2023-01-27 | by ( Morgan Smith | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +3 min

A growing wave of layoffs might be sweeping through Silicon Valley, but the hottest job on the market right now is in tech: full-stack developer. Not only does this job pay well — the average mean salary for full-stack developers is $129,637, per Indeed's research — but it also offers a lot of workplace flexibility. At least 50% of the listings for full-stack developers on Indeed's database have remote or hybrid options. "More and more, companies have been hiring full-stack developers to reduce headcount on their application, development or general web teams," she adds. You can become a full-stack developer without a college degree.

☆ Inside JPMorgan massive tech org: 7 key execs helping global CIO Lori Beer manage the firm's $14 billion tech budget.
▼ + stars: | 2023-01-27 | by ( Bianca Chan | Carter Johnson | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +2 min

JPMorgan's tech organization is led by nine-year bank vet Lori Beer, its global CIO. As the biggest US bank by assets, JPMorgan's sprawling $14.1 billion tech budget can be hard to comprehend. The size and scale of JPMorgan's tech spending can seem unfathomable to a small startup or everyday consumer. Lori Beer, JPMorgan's chief information officer, oversees that sprawling tech budget, which grew by 20% from 2019 to 2022. Insider mapped out the key tech executives at JPMorgan who report to Beer and help her lead the bank's massive tech org.

☆ Ken Griffin has built two of Wall Street's most powerful firms. His next target could be influencing politics.
▼ + stars: | 2023-01-23 | by ( Dan Defrancesco | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +4 min

Ken Griffin, the founder and CEO of Citadel. It's good to be Ken Griffin. Plenty of people find success on Wall Street that most can only dream of. But Ken Griffin seems to be winning in ways that even his peers can't fathom. Click here to read more about Ken Griffin rise to the top of Wall Street and what could be next for the billionaire.

☆ Capital One Job Cuts Signal Trouble for IT Labor Market
▼ + stars: | 2023-01-21 | by ( Belle Lin | ) www.wsj.com time to read: +5 min

Technology sector employment overall has remained stable, but job postings for future tech hiring have declined for the second consecutive month, according to IT trade group CompTIA. Companies across industries hired 137,000 tech workers in December, compared with 130,000 the month prior, CompTIA estimates based on an analysis of U.S. Labor Department data. Newsletter Sign-up WSJ | CIO Journal The Morning Download delivers daily insights and news on business technology from the CIO Journal team. News of the job cuts was reported earlier by Bloomberg. Some employers might be shedding the additional technology workers they hired to ramp up remote-work capabilities during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, said Mark Muro, a senior fellow at Brookings Institution.

☆ $6 billion fintech iCapital is making 100 new tech hires despite sweeping layoffs and hiring freezes across Wall Street
▼ + stars: | 2023-01-21 | by ( Paige Hagy | Rebecca Ungarino | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +4 min

Alternative investment fintech iCapital is making 100 new hires in its tech department. iCapital CEO Lawrence Calcano told Insider "great people are always in demand." The fintech, which was founded in 2013, operates a marketplace where investors and firms can get an overview of alternative investments like private equity and hedge-funds. "Long term, there's still strong trends of advisors recommending higher allocations to alternative investments. It bought Wells Fargo's and UBS's alternative investments feeder fund platforms and the companies Artivest, Simon Markets, and AI Insight.

☆ ChatGPT used by mental health tech app in AI experiment with users
▼ + stars: | 2023-01-14 | by ( David Ingram | David Ingram Covers Tech For Nbc News. | ) www.nbcnews.com time to read: +11 min

But for a few thousand people, the mental health support they received wasn’t entirely human. About 4,000 people got responses from Koko at least partly written by AI, Koko co-founder Robert Morris said. Academics, journalists and fellow technologists accused him of acting unethically and tricking people into becoming test subjects without their knowledge or consent when they were in the vulnerable spot of needing mental health support. “There are millions of people online who are struggling for help.”There’s a nationwide shortage of professionals trained to provide mental health support, even as symptoms of anxiety and depression have surged during the coronavirus pandemic. In June, the World Health Organization included informed consent in one of its six “guiding principles” for AI design and use.

☆ KKR's top tech exec details the firm's 3-year migration to the public cloud, and how the PE giant is leveraging the tech to streamline how deals get done
▼ + stars: | 2023-01-10 | by ( Bianca Chan | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +6 min

KKR is moving its technology and infrastructure to the public cloud by year end. The finish line is in sight for Emilia Sherifova, KKR's top tech exec who is spearheading the firm's multi-year migration to the public cloud. KKR's cloud migration has been years in the making. Under Sherifova, KKR has more than doubled its number of cloud-focused engineers, she said, declining to specify numbers. No longer are regulatory and security concerns barring finance players from moving mission-critical systems, like exchanges' matching engines and banks' core banking platforms, to the public cloud.

☆ Banks vs. Fintechs: Why all the billions in the world can't help Wall Street crush its digital rivals
▼ + stars: | 2023-01-05 | by ( Bianca Chan | Reed Alexander | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +15 min

To compete, banks have written fat checks to acquire fintechs — tech, talent, and all. But on Wall Street, old habits die hard, and Goldman has struggled to make Marcus, a big fintech bet, a success. Since the beginning of the pandemic, Wall Street leaders have been at the helm of a push to get their employees back to their desks. It's more that the very things that make Wall Street, well, Wall Street are preventing it from embracing the ethos of Silicon Valley. And perhaps, for Wall Street, that's the moral of the story.

☆ Wells Fargo's top strategy exec details the bank's the multi-year internal reorganization to cut down its tech development cycle
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-30 | by ( Carter Johnson | Bianca Chan | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +6 min

Wells Fargo launched a digital strategy group in 2020 amid a broader re-org. "The heritage of Wells Fargo has been very fragmented. "Now you have to teach business people about tech development and tech development people about how the business works. In the wake of the CFPB announcement, Wells Fargo said it expects operating losses in the fourth-quarter to reach $3.5 billion. Wells Fargo reports quarterly earnings on January 13.

Critically, experts say, nothing that's transpired in the crypto market in 2022 undermines the inherent value of the blockchain. "So while this has been a shock to the market, a lot of people in the space remain sanguine about the future of blockchain technology." He said stock trading, buying and selling real estate, and borrowing and lending money remain ripe for disruption by blockchain technology. "The ethereum blockchain could turn out to be this major infrastructure layer for the future of technological services," Abner said. He said prospective crypto users must prepare for a steep learning curve going forward, because it ultimately involves trusting only yourself to be in charge of your assets.

☆ Silicon Valley's job cuts are everybody else's gain as tech workers find exciting new opportunities outside Big Tech
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-21 | by ( Diamond Naga Siu | Rebecca Knight | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +7 min

Recruiters and other experts tell Insider that tech workers are in especially high demand in sectors including insurance, healthcare, retail, government, and banking. As you may expect, the traditional tech industry remains the largest employer of tech workers, the experts say. ZipRecruiter's Pollak said the turmoil in Big Tech was pushing "some tech workers to explore opportunities outside" the usual suspects for the first time. Tech job creation and hiring numbers remain strong, but layoffs keep coming, underscoring a tech labor market in flux. As for how laid-off tech workers ought to position themselves for these jobs, the Hired Guns recruiter Hemming has some advice.

Page purchased Hans Lollik and its smaller neighboring island, Little Hans Lollik, in 2014 for $23 million. The Hans Lollik Islands in the US Virgin Islands were bought by Larry Page in 2014 cdwheatley/Getty ImagesPage purchased the islands from Liberty Bankers Life Insurance Company using a limited-liability company called Virgin Island Properties LLC. Page's intentions for the Hans Lollik islands are unclear, but the larger island of the two may have personal significance for the Google cofounder. In the deposition, Osborne hinted that Larry proposed to his wife, the research scientist Lucinda Southworth, on Hans Lollik. Page expands to the South PacificIn 2020, Page added another island to his portfolio: the heart-shaped Tavarua island in Fiji's Mamanuca archipelago.

☆ Tech jobs: Recent grads send in hundreds of apps in unfamiliar, shrinking market
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-10 | by ( David Ingram | David Ingram Covers Tech For Nbc News. | ) www.nbcnews.com time to read: +6 min

Now, though, they’re applying for tech jobs at possibly the worst time in years, as nearly every part of the sector from streaming services to robotics has laid off people or frozen hiring. He graduated with a computer science degree in December 2021, a time he now sees as “the beginning of the end” for the most recent tech boom. “My biggest chances of getting a job in the U.S. kind of tanked,” he said, because of the recent layoffs. At colleges and universities, interest in computer science soared during the most recent tech boom. Lam, who’s scheduled to graduate in December 2023, said he originally thought the layoffs in tech would hurt junior-level people the most.

☆ Following Bret Taylor's departure, more top executives are leaving Salesforce
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-06 | by ( Jordan Parker Erb | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +5 min

Quick question: Have you gone "goblin mode" yet this year? I've got more on goblin mode below, but first, let's talk about Salesforce, which is seeing more executive departures this week. The news of Butterfield's departure comes just days after Salesforce announced co-CEO Bret Taylor is also leaving the company — though Butterfield told staff the moves were unrelated. Oxford Languages, the publisher of Oxford English Dictionary, named "goblin mode" the 2022 Word of the Year — beating out semifinalist "metaverse." A look at what "goblin mode" means.

☆ From Python to Rust, these are the top coding languages for landing a gig on Wall Street
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-29 | by ( Bianca Chan | Carter Johnson | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +2 min

Coding languages are a foundational element of any tech job, but not all are made equal. Coding languages, like Python and Java, are how humans can communicate with computers by providing a set of instructions for a system to execute. As it turns out, not all programming languages are made equal and some are more relevant to certain corners of Wall Street than others. Insider spoke with recruiters, Wall Street tech execs, and industry insiders, and analyzed job postings to get the low down on in-demand skill sets. Here are the top coding languages to know to land a tech job on Wall Street.

Sam Bankman-Fried, FTX’s 30-year-old founder, became the face of the company and, to some, crypto at large. The first red flagsNot long after Bankman-Fried started FTX, crypto began to boom. Venture capital money flooded into all things blockchain and crypto, and crypto platforms moved to attract customers beyond the technologists and blockchain evangelists that once fueled its rise. These digital tokens use blockchain technology, in which computers contribute to a shared ledger that can be used to track digital assets. Graeme Sloan / Sipa USA via APThe Wall Street Journal and CNBC, also citing anonymous sources, reported that Alameda had used FTX funds for trading.

☆ One of the data field's most prominent technologists is stepping aside as CEO of his startup, which many thought could unseat industry leader Astronomer
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-18 | by ( Matthew Lynley | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +6 min

Nick Schrock, creator of orchestration tool Dagster and CEO of Elementl, is moving into a new role. Elementl runs the Dagster tool, an emerging product that competes with Airflow and Prefect. A hot open source project many thought was primed to unseat a data juggernaut is now shifting its leadership as it reckons with increased competition in the race to own a critical piece of data infrastructure. And while there likely remains room for an independent orchestration tool, insiders say it's unclear whether one will be able to substantially challenge Airflow. And there's consistent buzz among insiders over whether Dbt Labs will launch its own proper orchestration product.

☆ Pixar co-Founder on how technology can support creativity
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-18 | by ( ) www.cnbc.com time to read: 1 min

Share Share Article via Facebook Share Article via Twitter Share Article via LinkedIn Share Article via EmailPixar co-Founder on how technology can support creativityEli Lilly and Company Chief Information and Digital Officer Diogo Rau talks to Pixar co-Founder Ed Catmull about his best advice for technologists, why companies should forego class structures, and Toy Story.

☆ Meet Prenuvo, a company that says its whole-body MRI scan can detect the earliest stages of disease. Experts say it could do more harm than good.
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-18 | by ( Sarah Braner | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +8 min

Prenuvo, a company offering preventive MRI scans, raised a $70 million Series A in October. Some say healthy people probably don't need whole-body scans, which can lead to risky procedures. On October 18, the company, based in Vancouver, British Columbia, said it had raised a $70 million Series A to provide whole-body MRI scans to consumers. The website says the scans are performed by MRI technologists and analyzed by radiologists trained to read Prenuvo scans. PrenuvoWhole-body MRI scans aren't accessible for everyoneSafavi said whole-body MRI scans have been available for more than two decades for people curious about what might be in their bodies undetected.

☆ Black tech workers at Apple, Google, Shopify and more shed light on what it's like inside their companies right now
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-18 | by ( Monica Melton | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +4 min

Over one hundred tech companies like Apple, Google, Amazon, and Shopify were represented at the event. Black tech workers shared insights, hopes and fears about the current economic environment. But at a time when tech companies across sectors are scaling back hiring and doing mass layoffs, job prospects can feel slim. An Apple employee who asked not to be identified talking to media noted Apple is doubling down on its minimal remote work policy. It's a tumultuous time to be in tech and Black workers may be feeling that in a different way.

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