DIRS.INFO The most relevant business & tech news

☆ Life sciences software startup Benchling lays off 9% of workforce
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-21 | by ( ) www.reuters.com time to read: +1 min

April 21 (Reuters) - Benchling, which develops software tools for scientists and pharmaceutical research organizations, has laid off 74 employees, or 9% of its workforce, its spokesperson confirmed on Friday. The startup joins a growing number of U.S. firms, including Facebook-parent Meta Platforms Inc (META.O), Amazon.com Inc and several startups, to downsize its workforce amid mounting worries of a recession in the United States. The San Francisco-based company, which filed for an initial public offering in late 2021, was last valued at over $6 billion. Benchling offers cloud-based tools and laboratory automation software that allow researchers to collaborate and track projects. Reporting by Granth Vanaik in Bengaluru and Krystal Hu in New York; Editing by Anil D'SilvaOur Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

☆ Should New York City Have Free Buses?
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-19 | by ( Winnie Hu | Asmaa Elkeurti | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: 1 min

Free bus service could come to 10 bus routes in New York City under a proposal by state lawmakers to lure more riders to the city’s struggling transit system and help those who cannot afford to pay the $2.75 fare. Two bus routes in each of the city’s five boroughs would be designated for a free bus pilot program, according to the proposal, which is being pushed by state legislative leaders in budget negotiations. Though the routes have not yet been chosen, one in each borough has to serve a low-income community and the other a commercial corridor. On Tuesday morning, Mayor Eric Adams voiced his approval of the pilot program in a video posted on Twitter and Instagram by Assemblyman Zohran Kwame Mamdani, a Queens Democrat and a sponsor of the proposal.

☆ Those Seaweed Blobs Headed for Florida? See How Big They Are.
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-19 | by ( Elena Shao | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +6 min

Scientists say they spotted more than 13 million tons of Sargassum, a yellowish-brown seaweed, drifting in the Atlantic Ocean last month — a record for the month of March. NORTH AMERICA March 2023 Atlantic Ocean The Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt grew to an estimated 13.5 million metric tons of seaweed this spring. Tangles of the goopy, leafy seaweed have already begun to wash ashore beaches in southern Florida and Mexico. Floating mats of seaweed accumulate in the central Atlantic Ocean for much of the year. But during the spring and summer, patches of it are carried by ocean currents toward the Caribbean, eastern Florida and elsewhere along the Gulf Coast.

☆ Analysis: Rocket startups face adapt-or-die moment amid investment drought
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-17 | by ( Joey Roulette | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +5 min

Venture investment in space startups has dropped 50% year-over-year in 2022 to $21.9 billion, according to VC firm Space Capital. Astra Space (ASTR.O), which ditched its small Rocket 3.3 for a planned, larger Rocket 4 in the next few years, has struggled to bring its stock price above $1, facing delisting threats from Nasdaq. Despite the startups' struggles, launch demand has soared after sanctions following Russia's invasion of Ukraine cut off access to Russian rockets. Recent failures with Europe's Arianespace's Vega-C rocket have added to demand in the U.S., outstripping the number of available rockets. Private plans to deploy mega-constellations, vast swarms of satellites in low-Earth orbit, have also given launch startups hope for future demand.

Databricks sells software tools for building AI systems. Ghodsi told Reuters that the company is releasing the free training data in the hope that other companies will use it to make their own AI systems, possibly using Databricks to do so. But it could not be used in commercial products because the data used to train the model was generated by OpenAI's ChatGPT, whose terms of service forbid using its data to develop commercial AI systems that could compete with OpenAI. Using data generated by AI to train other AI systems has become common. Users will be able to examine the training data themselves, which they cannot do for models such as ChatGPT or Alphabet Inc's (GOOGL.O) Bard, whose training data wasn't released.

☆ Data startup Cybersyn raises $63 mln in Snowflake-led funding round
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-12 | by ( Krystal Hu | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +2 min

April 12 (Reuters) - Data startup Cybersyn said it has raised $62.9 million from investors including Snowflake Inc (SNOW.N), Coatue Management and Sequoia Capital, its chief executive told Reuters. The investment marks the first time that Snowflake has led a startup funding round, as the data cloud giant looks to expand its data marketplace for enterprise users to acquire live and ready-to-use dataset. Cybersyn plans to use the capital to expand its eight-person team and acquire more proprietary data to create data products with a focus on macroeconomic trends. Besides using public data sources, the startup is also working on identifying and partnering with proprietary data sources, including buying aggregated anonymized data from non-data provider corporations. Snowflake Marketplace allows users to access third-party data and pay for specific datasets, and combine it with their own corporate data using its platform.

☆ Shares in China's 360 Security slump after founder's divorce deal
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-06 | by ( ) www.reuters.com time to read: +1 min

SHANGHAI, April 6 (Reuters) - Shares in Chinese cybersecurity company 360 Security Technology (601360.SS) plunged on Thursday after the firm announced that its billionaire founder Zhou Hongyi and his wife were divorcing and that he would give her a 6.25% share. Shares in 360 Security, China's largest provider of cybersecurity products, fell by as much as 7.8%, its biggest one day fall since February. Zhou founded 360 Security Technology in 2005. The company was listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011 and returned to Chinese stock markets in 2018 through a back door listing. ($1 = 6.8804 Chinese yuan renminbi)Reporting by Shanghai Newsroom; Editing by Sonali PaulOur Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Seven Chinese firms including Chanson International (CHSN.O) and Hongli Group (HLP.O) have launched public offerings in March to raise a combined $82.3 million, compared with just four in the preceding two months. That will "reduce regulatory uncertainty" said Mandy Zhu, head of China Global Banking at UBS, and standardise domestic firms' international listings. "But we will abide by Chinese rules and carry out all follow-up work cooperation if necessary." Earlier in the week, steelmaker Hongli Group, food grain manufacturer YanGuFang International Group (YGF.O) and wheelchair-maker Jin Medical International listed in the U.S, also receiving tepid responses from investors. Reuters reported on Thursday that London is also courting new Chinese listings.

March 29 (Reuters) - Elon Musk and a group of artificial intelligence experts and industry executives are calling for a six-month pause in developing systems more powerful than OpenAI's newly launched GPT-4, in an open letter citing potential risks to society and humanity. "Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable," the letter said. The letter detailed potential risks to society and civilization by human-competitive AI systems in the form of economic and political disruptions, and called on developers to work with policymakers on governance and regulatory authorities. Rather than pause research, she said, AI researchers should be subjected to greater transparency requirements. "If you do AI research, you should be very transparent about how you do it."

☆ What's better than OpenAI? Developers shop for alternatives
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-29 | by ( Krystal Hu | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +5 min

George Mathew, an AI investor at Insight Partners, compared the AI foundation models to other technological breakthroughs which spawned competition. As the infrastructural layer of AI applications, foundation models have attracted the most investment from venture capitalists and strategic investors. Writing assistant Jasper.ai began with OpenAI's models, but does not want to rely on a single model, CEO Dave Rogenmoser told Reuters. For example, it uses OpenAI’s model to generate long articles, and Cohere to auto-complete sentences at faster speed and lower cost. Fergal Reid, Intercom's director of machine learning, conceded that OpenAI's GPT-4 is "very expensive."

March 28 (Reuters) - Elon Musk and a group of artificial intelligence experts and industry executives are calling for a six-month pause in developing systems more powerful than OpenAI's newly launched GPT-4, in an open letter citing potential risks to society and humanity. "Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable," the letter said. The letter detailed potential risks to society and civilization by human-competitive AI systems in the form of economic and political disruptions, and called on developers to work with policymakers on governance and regulatory authorities. Co-signatories included Stability AI CEO Emad Mostaque, researchers at Alphabet-owned (GOOGL.O) DeepMind, as well as AI heavyweights Yoshua Bengio and Stuart Russell. Musk, whose carmaker Tesla (TSLA.O) is using AI for an autopilot system, has been vocal about his concerns about AI.

March 28 (Reuters) - Elon Musk and a group of artificial intelligence experts and industry executives are calling for a six-month pause in training systems more powerful than OpenAI's newly launched model GPT-4, they said in an open letter, citing potential risks to society and humanity. "Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable," the letter said. The letter also detailed potential risks to society and civilization by human-competitive AI systems in the form of economic and political disruptions, and called on developers to work with policymakers on governance and regulatory authorities. Musk, whose carmaker Tesla (TSLA.O) is using AI for an autopilot system, has been vocal about his concerns about AI. Sam Altman, chief executive at OpenAI, hasn't signed the letter, a spokesperson at Future of Life told Reuters.

☆ Musk, experts urge pause on training of AI systems that can outperform GPT-4
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-29 | by ( ) www.reuters.com time to read: +1 min

March 28 (Reuters) - Elon Musk and a group of artificial intelligence experts and industry executives are calling for a six-month pause in training of systems more powerful than GPT-4, they said in an open letter, citing potential risks to society and humanity. "Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable," the letter said. The letter also detailed potential risks to society and civilization by human-competitive AI systems in the form of economic and political disruptions, and called on developers to work with policymakers on governance and regulatory authorities. Since its release last year, Microsoft-backed OpenAI's ChatGPT has prompted rivals to launch similar products, and companies to integrate it or similar technologies into their apps and products. Editing by Gerry DoyleOur Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

☆ White House to China: Don't use Taiwan visit as 'pretext'
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-29 | by ( ) www.reuters.com time to read: +2 min

WASHINGTON, March 29 (Reuters) - The White House urged China on Wednesday not to use a "normal" stopover in the United States by Taiwan's president as a pretext to increase aggressive activity against Taiwan. John Kirby, the White House national security spokesperson, told reporters that Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen's arrival soon in the United States is the latest in a series of routine transits. "The Peoples Republic of China should not use this transit as a pretext to step up any activity around the Taiwan strait," he said. It would be the first meeting on U.S. soil between a House speaker and a Taiwanese leader, and the prospect has angered Beijing. China responded to a visit last August to Taiwan by former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi with large-scale war games around the democratically ruled island.

☆ China tackles chip talent shortage with new courses, higher pay
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-28 | by ( Josh Horwitz | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +5 min

China faces a shortage of an estimated 200,000 industry workers this year, according to a white paper jointly published by the China Center for Information Industry Development, a government think tank, and the China Semiconductor Industry Association (CSIA), a trade group. A 2022 survey from Chinese research firm ICWise found more than 60% of students studying chip engineering in China graduate with no internship experience in the field. In Taiwan, top chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) (2330.TW) has established research centres at four universities. Its largest chip foundry, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC) (0981.HK), in 2021 announced a jointly-established School of Integrated Circuits at Shenzhen Technology University. "If I didn't switch to chip engineering, I would probably have to find a job in a traditional manufacturing industry like cars or machinery," he said.

☆ The moon could have up to 297 billion tons of water stored in tiny glass beads on its surface, scientists say
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-28 | by ( Matthew Loh | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +4 min

Researchers say glass beads found on the moon's surface could contain billions of tons of water. The scientists say the water was created from solar winds, which blow hydrogen — one of the two elements in water — onto the lunar surface. The glass beads themselves form when small meteorites hit the surface of the moon and melt with material on the surface, per the study. Hu said the water extracted from the glass beads shows promise that it could be used in future lunar missions. NASA also plans to once again send astronauts to the Moon in 2025, 50 years after man last set foot on the lunar surface.

☆ Intriguing moon water source found in glass beads from impacts
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-27 | by ( Will Dunham | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +4 min

The researchers see promise in obtaining water from the glass beads, perhaps through a heating process to release vapor that would then turn into liquid through condensation. "We can simply heat these glass beads to free the water stored in them," said planetary scientist and study co-author Hejiu Hui of Nanjing University in China. The glass beads were found to hold a water content of up to about 2,000 parts per million by weight. Hu said he believes that such impact glass beads are a common part of lunar soils, found globally and spread evenly. The interaction of the solar wind with lunar surface materials could sustain a water cycle on the moon, with the glass beads absorbing the water and acting as a repository for it, the researchers said.

The code is an AI model, an algorithm that is trained on sets of data and can then learn from new data to perform a variety of tasks. Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi said the release was aimed at demonstrating a viable alternative to training a kind of AI model called a large language model with enormous resources and computing power. OpenAI, valued at $29 billion, trains its AI models with huge troves of data on a supercomputer from investor Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O). Databricks wants enterprises to train their own AI models using its software. "My belief is that in the end, you will make these models smaller, smaller and smaller, and they will be open-sourced," Ghodsi said.

“VCs think this is the new internet,” a generative AI founder in the United States told Reuters. While the closure of Silicon Valley Bank may hamper debt financing, venture capitalists said interest in funding AI startups remains high, especially for top early-stage founders. Investors sense opportunity, even for a sale if not an initial public offering; some are betting that AI startups might outpace bigger rivals, encumbered by their size. You.com, a search engine company founded in 2020 and backed by Salesforce’s CEO Marc Benioff, has found new life from incorporating generative AI technology. It has attracted more attention from users and investors, handling millions of searches per day, the company told Reuters.

March 23 (Reuters) - Character.AI has raised $150 million in a new funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz that valued the AI chatbot startup at $1 billion, and it's in talks with cloud providers for more strategic investment, the company told Reuters. The billion-dollar valuation for a company with zero revenue is another example of the continued AI funding boom since OpenAI's ChatGPT became a widely recognized name. AI investment in 2023 to date has surpassed the full-year amount in 2020 of $1.5 billion, according to PitchBook data. While not currently generating any revenue, Character.AI plans to launch a paid subscription "in the not distant future", while keeping the current free version available, Shazeer said. Founded in 2021 by former Google researchers Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, Character.AI had attracted backers including former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman.

☆ AI storytelling startup Tome records fast user growth, to launch paid tier soon
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-23 | by ( Krystal Hu | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +2 min

March 23 (Reuters) - Artificial intelligence storytelling startup Tome has seen its user numbers triple in a month to 3 million and is planning to launch a paid subscription in the coming weeks, Chief Executive Keith Peiris told Reuters, as AI products grow in popularity. Tome is also adding a document-to-presentation feature powered by GPT-4, the latest foundation model released by Microsoft-backed OpenAI. The feature enables users to turn a document of up to 25 pages into AI-generated slides with text and soon photos, competing head-to-head with Microsoft's (MSFT.O) AI "Copilot". "It's a push into work and enterprise use cases for us after all the demand we've seen," said Peiris, co-founder of Tome. Tome's product is currently free to use, while it will soon launch a paid tier that costs about $10 a month to guarantee unlimited access for users, Peiris said.

REUTERS/Florence LoBEIJING, March 20 (Reuters) - Chinese state energy giants have made a number of multi-billion dollar investments in Russia, one of China's top oil and gas suppliers, across various stages of the energy supply chain. Below are the main investments by the Chinese government, key state-owned energy companies and their listed vehicles, based on company releases and Reuters reports. 2005: Sakhalin-3 Veninsky oil projectRussian oil giant Rosneft (ROSN.MM) and Sinopec (600028.SS), agreed to jointly explore the Sakhalin-3 Veninsky block during a visit by China's then-president Hu Jintao to Moscow in 2005. It became China's first energy project in Russia. 2019: Arctic LNG 2In 2019 China's CNOOC Ltd (0883.HK) and PetroChina agreed to buy a combined 20% stake in the $25.5 billion Arctic-2 liquefied natural gas project led by Novatek.

March 17 (Reuters) - Huawei Technologies Co Ltd's (HWT.UL) founder said that the company has replaced more than 13,000 parts in its products that were hit by U.S. trade sanctions, according to a transcript of a speech posted on Friday by a Chinese university. According to the transcript posted by Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei said Huawei had over the past three years replaced the 13,000 components with domestic Chinese substitutes and had redesigned 4,000 circuit boards for it products. He said production of circuit boards had "stabilized." The university posted the transcript on its website on Friday. Ren said Huawei invested $23.8 billion in R&D in 2022, and "as our profitability improves, we'll continue to increase R&D spending."

☆ Why Has Xi Jinping Let His Hair Go Gray?
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-17 | by ( Daniel A. Bell | ) www.wsj.com time to read: +1 min

Xi Jinping in 2008 (left) and 2023. In recent years, the Chinese president has demonstrated his unique status by breaking with convention and allowing his hair to show signs of gray. Former Chinese president Hu Jintao was perhaps the most boring leader in modern times. The then-governor of New Jersey, James McGreevey, told Mr. Hu—whose hair was jet-black—that he did not look his 59 years. Mr. Hu replied: “China would be happy to share its technology in this area.”Why do Chinese leaders dye their hair?

☆ U.S. regulators willing to share losses for sale of SVB, Signature Bank - FT
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-17 | by ( ) www.reuters.com time to read: +2 min

March 17 (Reuters) - U.S. regulators are willing to consider the prospect of the government backstopping losses at Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank (SBNY.O) if it helps push through a sale, the Financial Times reported on Friday, citing people briefed on the matter. The FDIC did not comment on the Financial Times report. [1/2] A notice hangs on the door of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) located in San Francisco, California, U.S. March 10, 2023. The Financial Times said Blackstone Group and Apollo Global Management (APO.N) have expressed interest in buying parts of SVB's loan book. SVB Financial Group (SIVB.O), the parent company of Silicon Valley Bank, earlier on Friday filed for a court-supervised reorganization under Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

Search resuls for: "Hu"

25 mentions found