DIRS.INFO The most relevant business & tech news

☆ Google's newest A.I. model uses nearly five times more text data for training than its predecessor
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-16 | by ( Jennifer Elias | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +2 min

Google's new large language model, which the company announced last week, uses almost five times as much training data as its predecessor from 2022, allowing its to perform more advanced coding, math and creative writing tasks, CNBC has learned. PaLM 2, the company's new general-use large language model (LLM) that was unveiled at Google I/O, is trained on 3.6 trillion tokens, according to internal documentation viewed by CNBC. Google's previous version of PaLM, which stands for Pathways Language Model, was released in 2022 and trained on 780 billion tokens. PaLM 2, according to internal documents, is trained on 340 billion parameters, an indication of the complexity of the model. The initial PaLM was trained on 540 billion parameters.

☆ 'Godfather of AI' says the technology could pose a 'more urgent' threat to humankind than climate change
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-06 | by ( Ryan Hogg | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +2 min

Artificial intelligence could present a more urgent danger to the world than climate change, Geoffrey Hinton said. The "Godfather of AI" recently quit Google so he could speak openly about the threat posed by the tech. The "Godfather of AI" who recently quit Google to raise awareness about the dangers of artificial intelligence has said the threat the tech poses to the world could be more urgent than climate change. I wouldn't like to say, 'You shouldn't worry about climate change.' "With climate change, it's very easy to recommend what you should do: you just stop burning carbon.

☆ A senior software engineer dies after falling from the 14th floor of Google's NYC headquarters
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-06 | by ( Sam Tabahriti | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +2 min

A software engineer died after falling from the 14th floor of Google's headquarters, NYPD confirmed. Police responded to a 911 call on Thursday reporting an unconscious person lying on the ground. The 31-year-old senior software engineer's name is being withheld pending family notification. A 31-year-old senior software engineer has died after falling from the 14th floor of Google's New York City office building, the New York Post first reported. The name of the engineer hasn't been released pending family notification, the NYPD said.

☆ Google employees complain about CEO Sundar Pichai's pay raise as cost cuts hit rest of the company
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-03 | by ( Jennifer Elias | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +4 min

Google CEO Sundar Pichai speaks at a panel at the CEO Summit of the Americas hosted by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on June 09, 2022 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)Google CEO Sundar Pichai received a hefty pay raise last year, making him one of the highest-paid CEOs in America. SEC filings showed Pichai was paid a total of $226 million last year, mostly through $218 million in stock awards. Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson said he'd also be taking a pay cut amid a 17% workforce reduction. At an all-hands meeting, employees asked Pichai why executives are getting pay cuts if he's taking responsibility.

☆ Google is trying to be 'safe and responsible' with AI, says the engineer who got fired after sentience claim
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-30 | by ( Jyoti Mann | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

The Google engineer fired after saying an AI chatbot was sentient said it's being "responsible". A Google engineer who was fired after saying its AI chatbot gained sentience said the company is approaching artificial intelligence in a "safe and responsible" way. "I think Google is going about doing things in what they believe is a safe and responsible manner, and OpenAI just happened to release something," he said. He was fired later that month as Google claimed he violated its confidentiality policy. A company representative told Insider at the time that his sentience claims were unsupported and there wasn't any evidence to suggest it had consciousness.

☆ A former Google researcher behind a seminal AI paper describes how the company lost a top chatbot visionary
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-20 | by ( Thomas Maxwell | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +5 min

Character.ai CEO Noam Shazeer, a former Googler who worked in AI, spoke to the "No Priors" podcast. He says Google was afraid to launch a chatbot, fearing consequences of it saying something wrong. Like the chatbot ChatGPT, Character.ai's technology leans on a vast amount of text-based information scraped from the web for its knowledge. Shazeer was a lead author on Google's Transformer paper, which has been widely cited as key to today's chatbots. Google had also received pushback internally from AI researchers like Timnit Gebru who cautioned against releasing anything that might cause harm.

☆ You can ask Elon Musk anything on Twitter if you pay him $4 a month with new 'Subscriptions' feature
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-15 | by ( Sam Tabahriti | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +2 min

Elon Musk announced a rebrand of a Twitter feature allowing users to subscribe to exclusive content. The Twitter owner said those who subscribe to him for $4 a month will be able to "ask-me-anything." Elon Musk announced the rebranding of the "Super Follows" feature on Thursday as "Subscriptions" that will allow users to subscribe to exclusive content. In his tweet, Musk said users will be able to charge followers for exclusive content, including long-form text, long-form videos, and subscriber-only Spaces. Musk has his own "Subscriptions" and said those who subscribe to him, for $4 a month according to his profile, will be able to "ask-me-anything" once every few weeks.

☆ Google reshuffles virtual assistant unit with focus on Bard A.I. technology
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-29 | by ( Jennifer Elias | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +3 min

Google is reshuffling the reporting structure of its virtual assistant unit — called Assistant — to focus more on Bard, the company's new artificial intelligence chat technology. In a memo to employees on Wednesday, titled "Changes to Assistant and Bard teams," Sissie Hsiao, vice president and lead of Google Assistant's business unit, announced changes to the organization that show the unit heavily prioritizing Bard. Mao held the position of vice president of engineering for Google Assistant and "helped shape the Assistant we have today," Hsiao wrote. As part of Wednesday's change, Google Assistant engineering vice president Amar Subramanya will now lead engineering for the Bard team, the email said. Trevor Strohman, who previously led engineering efforts for Bard, will continue as an “Area Tech Lead” for Bard, reporting to Hsiao.

☆ Hundreds of Google workers in Zurich walked out after 200 of their colleagues got laid off
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-15 | by ( Sam Tabahriti | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

Hundreds of Google workers walked out Wednesday in Zurich, Switzerland. The protest came after 200 workers were laid off following the cuts announced in January. "Our members at Google Zurich and all employees joining the walkout are showing solidarity with those laid off," the representative said. Workers at the Zurich office also staged another walkout last month when the layoffs were first announced, Reuters reported. In November 2018, about 17,000 workers walked out in what appeared to be the first coordinated global action at a major tech firm, following claims of sexual harassment, gender inequality, and systemic racism at the company.

☆ Google tells employees that fewer of them will get promotions to senior roles
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-06 | by ( Jennifer Elias | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +2 min

Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google Inc. speaks during an event in New Delhi on December 19, 2022. Google is warning employees that fewer of them will receive promotions to more senior levels this year than in the past. The L6 distinction refers to the first layer of staff that's considered senior and typically includes people with about a decade of experience. The changes come as Google implements a new performance review system called Google Reviews and Development (GRAD), which as CNBC reported in December, will result in more Google employees receiving low performance ratings and fewer receiving high marks. In Monday’s email, Google said it's promoting fewer people to senior roles "to ensure that the number of Googlers in more senior and leadership roles grows in proportion to the growth of the company."

☆ A Google worker says some staff found out which colleagues had been laid off after their emails bounced back
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-24 | by ( Grace Dean | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +5 min

A Google worker says some staff learned which colleagues were let go when their emails bounced back. Google workers have been "figuring out the numbers" about how many staff from each office had been laid off, de Rivaz said. Some of the remaining Google workers asked for anonymity to protect their jobs, but Insider has verified their employment. Google told US staff that they were laid off in an early-morning email on January 20. Some affected US workers told Insider they were annoyed at not being able to say goodbye to or thank colleagues.

☆ DOJ alleges Google destroyed chat messages that it was required to save during antitrust investigation
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-23 | by ( Lauren Feiner | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +5 min

According to the DOJ, Google should have adjusted its defaults in mid-2019, "when the company reasonably anticipated this litigation." Meanwhile, DOJ alleged, Google "falsely" told the government it had "'put a legal hold in place' that 'suspends auto-deletion.'" The alleged issue is one that previously came up in Epic Games' antitrust litigation against Google. The DOJ alleged that even after Epic confronted Google about the chat deletion concerns in that case, Google still withheld its deletion policy from the federal government "and continued to destroy written communications in this case." Scallen said that if Google "didn't give clear directions to retain" relevant chats "this notion that they left it to the individuals, that's just not responsible."

☆ An IT director used ChatGPT for research after phone calls and Google didn't help, and said it 'completely blew my mind'
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-21 | by ( Grace Dean | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

An IT director used ChatGPT to research vaping detectors and told the WSJ it "completely blew my mind." Critics have expressed concerns about the ethics of AI, including the risk of plagiarism and bias. "It completely blew my mind," Gomes told The Journal. But critics have expressed concerns about the ethics of AI, including worries that it could plagiarize material, develop bias, and even argue with users. Some schools and colleges are banning students from using ChatGPT or are otherwise changing the nature of their assignments to reflect the surge in use of the technology.

☆ A Google manager who got laid off liked working with his colleagues so much he's trying to set up a new company with 6 of them
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-19 | by ( Kate Duffy | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

A laid-off Google manager said he's setting up a firm with six colleagues who also lost their jobs. Henry Kirk told Insider he's giving himself until the end of March to set up the design studio. He said Google cutting his work email after eight years "stinks," but he's ready to do his own thing. "I think of working at Google as not like a job, but more like attending Google University. But the positive working environment he experienced at Google is something he wants to carry on into his new business.

☆ Ex-Google employee says the 'once-great company has slowly ceased to function' because of 4 core cultural problems
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-16 | by ( Sindhu Sundar | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

Ex-Googler Praveen Seshadri wrote on Medium that employees are "trapped in a maze" of bureaucracy. Seshadri said Google's issues boil down to four "core cultural problems." Even small product changes go through the rigor of a "NASA space launch," he wrote, calling out what he said were fundamental issues within the company, and declaring that "a once-great company has slowly ceased to function." He enumerated the company's "four core cultural problems" as being "no mission, no urgency, delusions of exceptionalism, mismanagement." Seshadri also critiqued Google employees in his post, calling MemeGen "a wallow chamber," and said that griping on it "doesn't help anything."

☆ Google CEO tells employees some of company's top products 'were not first to market' as A.I. pressure mounts
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-15 | by ( Jennifer Elias | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +3 min

Google CEO Sundar Pichai speaks at a panel at the CEO Summit of the Americas hosted by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on June 09, 2022 in Los Angeles, California. “I know this moment is uncomfortably exciting, and that's to be expected: the underlying technology is evolving rapidly with so much potential,” Pichai wrote in a companywide email, which was viewed by CNBC. "Some of our most successful products were not first to market,” Pichai wrote. He said it's time to “embrace the challenge and keep iterating.”“Channel the energy and excitement of the moment into our products," Pichai wrote. “Pressure test Bard and make the product better.”WATCH: CNBC's full interview with Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai

☆ Google didn't think its Bard AI was 'really ready' for a product yet, says Alphabet chairman, days after the chatbot's very public mistake tanked the company's stock
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-14 | by ( Huileng Tan | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

John Hennessy, the chairman of Alphabet, said Google was hesitant to use its Bard AI in a product as it wasn't "really ready," per CNBC. Google unveiled its Bard AI last week amid intense interest in competitor ChatGPT. But a promo for Google Bard featured a factual error — which sent Alphabet's stock down 9% in a day. Google unveiled Bard amid intense interest in rival chatbot ChatGPT, and just a day before Microsoft rolled out its AI-powered Bing search engine which is built using technology from OpenAI, the parent of ChatGPT. At the conference, Hennessy declined to comment specifically on the public's reaction to Google's Bard, per CNBC.

☆ A Googler laid off while on vacation found out when her colleague texted her, and said it made her feel like she was 'just a number'
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-13 | by ( Grace Dean | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +4 min

An ex-Google recruiter says the company laid staff off like they were "just a number." Louise Coyne told Insider she was on paid leave when CEO Sundar Pichai announced Google was laying off 12,000 workers, or around 6.4% of its workforce, on January 20. "We've just left these people completely in the dark," Coyne told Insider. One software engineer who had been at Google for less than six months told Insider that the layoffs were a "rude awakening." He said he woke up when a colleague rang him to say he couldn't message him on Google's internal chat.

☆ Google search chief warns AI chatbots can give 'convincing but completely fictitious' answers, report says
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-12 | by ( Jyoti Mann | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +2 min

Google's search engine boss said AI chatbots can give "convincing" but "fictitious" answers. Prabhakar Raghavan told Welt am Sonntag it's considering how to integrate Bard with Google search. Prabhakar Raghavan told Welt Am Sonntag on Saturday that they can sometimes give false but convincing answers. However, an ad for Bard showed it giving an inaccurate answer to a question about the James Webb Space Telescope. Maarten Bosma, a former research engineer at Alphabet's AI division Google Brain, tweeted that the presentation showed the company wasn't taking AI seriously enough.

☆ Sergey Brin appears to make first request in years to access Google code as AI battle heats up, report says
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-12 | by ( Sam Tabahriti | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +2 min

Sergey Brin last month appeared to make his first request in years to access code, Forbes reported. The Google cofounder made the request on January 24 following the release of ChatGPT. It follows reports of Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai asking Larry Page and Brin for help in the AI battle. In December, Pichai called Larry Page and Brin following a "code red" following the release of ChatGPT. While Brin's code access was followed by a small technical change, some employees didn't welcome his request, Forbes reported.

☆ Ex-Google exec says Microsoft has 'thrown down the gauntlet' on web search with AI-boosted Bing
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-11 | by ( Beatrice Nolan | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +2 min

An ex-Google exec said Microsoft had "thrown down the gauntlet" with its new Bing search engine. On Tuesday, Microsoft launched an upgraded version of Bing powered by new artificial intelligence. Microsoft launched its AI-boosted version of Bing on Tuesday, the day after Google announced plans to incorporate AI technology into its own search engine. Ramaswamy told Insider that both Google and Microsoft were "ahead of the pack with respect to foundational technology and investment in AI." He added: "All of this can take away from the narrative of Google being the premier search engine."

The rise of AI-powered search could transform the internet. If AI-powered search catches on, it will upend the practice of search advertising. Right now, not a lot seems to have changed on the ad landscape, despite the media frenzy around the new AI search tools. Bannister doesn't think AI-powered search will change advertising drastically in the short term, but even small changes can have an impact on business. Sutton is cautiously optimistic though that the addition of AI to search queries on Bing and Google Search won't impact publishers like Gannett, which owns mostly news sites.

☆ Ex-Google engineer said his former employer isn't taking AI seriously after demoing its new tools in Paris
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-09 | by ( Aaron Mok | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

Maarten Bosma, an ex-Google Brain engineer, said in a tweet that Alphabet isn't taking AI seriously. Bosma's tweet comes after Google demoed its latest AI tools in Paris, including ChatGPT rival Bard. Some critics called Google's demo "frankly, bad" and a "disaster" amid a growing AI arms race. "I think the Google presentation signaled (rightfully or wrongly) that they are not really taking it seriously," Bosma tweeted. Microsoft' demo "was presented as a revolution," while Google's demo was presented as a "disaster," Marcus wrote.

☆ A laid-off Google engineer describes losing his 'only career' 16 years after starting as an intern
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-05 | by ( Sam Tabahriti | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +2 min

An Ex-Googler described being laid off 16 years after he started as an intern. "Google has been my one and only career," Joel Leitch wrote in a LinkedIn post. The things that I will miss most are the people and the relationships built," Leitch wrote in the post. Leitch and Google didn't immediately respond to a request for comment from Insider, made outside normal working hours. Leitch isn't alone in taking to LinkedIn after losing his job in the layoffs that have swept the tech industry.

☆ Laid-off Google employees are turning to a Discord server with nearly 18,000 members for emotional support and financial advice
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-04 | by ( Kate Duffy | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

Laid-off Google employees have flocked to Discord to vent and seek financial advice. Almost 18,000 people are currently on the Discord server called "Google Post-Layoffs." Laid-off engineers told Insider Discord gave them a way to communicate with their ex-colleagues. "Google Post-Layoffs" has more than 17,800 members, comprised of laid-off Google staff, current employees, former workers who left prior to the job cuts, recruiters, and journalists. On top of the Discord server, employees have created a Google doc spreadsheet where they track who was laid off and which departments were affected the most, ex-staff told Insider.

Search resuls for: "Google didn't"

25 mentions found