Latest: Google, Microsoft, OpenAI Seeking AI Regulation on Their Terms

Google, Microsoft, OpenAI Among Tech Firms Seeking AI Regulation on Their Terms

OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman surprised everyone last month when he warned Congress of the dangers posed by artificial intelligence. Suddenly, it looked like tech companies had learned from the problems of social media and wanted to roll out AI differently. “In terms of both potential upsides and downsides, superintelligence will be more powerful than other technologies humanity has had to contend with in the past,” OpenAI execs Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever said. “We can have a dramatically more prosperous future; but we have to manage…

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Facebook reinforces its presence in Africa

facebook

Facebook reinforces its presence in Africa Facebook is in Africa’s good books yet again and this time, the tech giant hopes to develop products made by Africans, for Africans, and the rest of the world. In 2016, Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg visited Nigeria on what was his first trip to sub-Saharan Africa. While the attraction to the budding tech ecosystem which was already producing some of Africa’s best-known startups was obvious, there was also the underlying influence of Facebook’s pool of high-ranking Nigerian-American executives. Four years later, that influence…

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Microsoft adds new Transcribe in Word feature

Microsoft Office 365 Transcribe in Word

Transcribe in Word.Microsoft is adding an audio transcription feature into Word for the web today. Transcribe in Word will appear in the online version of Word for Microsoft 365 subscribers, providing an easy way to automatically transcribe audio. Microsoft is supporting existing audio files, or even the ability to record conversations directly within Word for the web and have them automatically transcribed. Once a conversation is transcribed, Microsoft’s AI will separate out each speaker and break the conversation into sections that are easy to playback, edit, and insert into a…

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Microsoft to continue exploring new Potential Tiktok deal

Microsoft to continue exploring potential Tiktok deal Last Friday, reports emerged that Microsoft was in talks to purchase TikTok from the Beijing-based company ByteDance. The same day, Trump mentioned plans to ban the social media platform from operating in the U.S. This Sunday, Microsoft said in a statement that it is moving forward with talks to buy TikTok after speaking with President Trump, who has threatened to ban the popular video app in the U.S. “Microsoft fully appreciates the importance of addressing the President’s concerns. It is committed to acquiring…

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New browser, NewsGuard for credibility and transparency content scoring service.

NewsGuard

NewsGuard is a desktop browser extension that displays credibility and transparency content scoring and is available by subscription. It launched in August 2018 and typically costs $2.95 per month for a desktop user. In recent weeks, NewsGuard, the internet news watchdog service, has been escalating its battle against misinformation by opening a Coronavirus Misinformation Tracking Center and offering its service for free to all internet users until July 1. Until recently, only Microsoft Edge mobile device users on iOS and Android had unlimited free access to the service. Last week, the company entered a partnership with…

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Big tech companies accused of Child labor

Children

Big tech companies, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Tesla, and Dell have all been named in a federal lawsuit from parents who say their children were injured or killed in cobalt mines in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, The Guardian first reported. International Rights Advocates , a human rights litigation and advocacy group, filed the suit yesterday in the US District Court for the District of Columbia on behalf of 14 Congolese children and parents, accusing the five major companies named in the suit of “knowingly benefiting from and aiding and abetting the cruel and brutal…

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Windows 7 end-of-life To New Windows 10

Windows 10

Ivanti, the company that unifies IT to better manage and secure the digital workplace, today announced survey results that capture the pain points and priorities of IT professionals when faced with migrating user devices to Windows 10. Surprisingly, 59% of IT professionals report that they still haven’t migrated all their users to Windows 10, despite the imminent end of regular support for Windows 7 on January 14, 2020. As many as 39% will not be completed with their Windows 10 migration projects in time for the January deadline. The study…

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Microsoft opens first New Africa Development Centres in Nairobi and Lagos

It was almost three decades ago that Microsoft opened its first offices in Africa. In this time, they witnessed incredible growth on the continent – more internet connectivity, more digital capability and more innovation. Africans have expanded the applications of technology, changing the way communities bank, farm and even access healthcare. As the next step on Microsoft’s journey in Africa, and to better understand a continent rapidly adopting technology in the cloud, and at the edge, Microsoft launched its first Africa Development Centre (ADC). With two initial sites in Nairobi,…

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Tech and sports titans pay tribute to Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen who has passed at 65

Paul Allen, who co-founded Microsoft Corp. with fellow billionaire Bill Gates and used the fortune he made from the iconic technology company to invest in professional sports teams, cable TV and real estate, has died. He was 65. Allen, along with Gates, helped create an entire industry selling software for a new breed of smaller, more affordable and widely accessible computers. Allen died on Monday in Seattle from complications of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, according to a statement from Vulcan Inc., his investment firm. Allen’s source for his varied investments and sizable…

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Competitive Edge: Tech Giants spent a new combined $80 billion.

General Motors Co. and Google couldn’t be more different. GM musters an army of people and machines to produce the 10 million cars it sells each year. What Google makes doesn’t really exist: You type on a laptop or click play on a YouTube video, and Google zips back bits of digital information. But Google parent Alphabet Inc. and the other four dominant U.S. technology companies—Apple, Amazon​.com, Microsoft, and Facebook—are fast becoming industrial giants. They spent a combined $80 billion in the last year on big-ticket physical assets, including manufacturing…

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