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"Generative artificial-intelligence tools are unproven and expensive to operate, requiring muscular servers with expensive chips that consume lots of power. Microsoft MSFT -0.43%decrease; red down pointing triangle , Google, Adobe and other tech companies investing in AI are experimenting with an array of tactics to make, market and charge for it. Microsoft has lost money on one of its first generative AI products, said a person with knowledge of the figures. It and Google are now launching AI-backed upgrades to their software with higher price tags. Zoom Video Communications ZM 1.79%increase; green up pointing triangle has tried to mitigate costs by sometimes using a simpler AI it developed in-house. Adobe and others are putting caps on monthly usage and charging based on consumption. "A lot of the customers I've talked to are unhappy about the cost that they are seeing for running some of these models," said Adam Selipsky, the chief executive of Amazon.com's cloud division, Amazon Web Services, speaking of the industry broadly. "

""Employers are increasingly exploiting metadata logged by software and devices for performance analytics and algorithmic control," Christl added. "MS is providing the tools for it. Practices we know from software development (and factories and call centres) are expanded to all white-collar work.""

"One of the key features introduced is a "Correction" capability in Azure AI Content Safety. This tool aims to address the problem of AI hallucinations - instances where AI models generate false or misleading information. "When we detect there's a mismatch between the grounding context and the response… we give that information back to the AI system," Bird explained. "With that additional information, it's usually able to do better the second try.""

"The Authenticator analyzes videos or images and tells users the percentage chance that they've been artificially manipulated. For videos, the tool can even analyze individual frames in real time."

"Fluent in Digital Culture - Not Academic Tools"

"The news was not lost on IBM and prompted the company to create the PC and Mitch Kapor to write the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet program for it. Eventually, Microsoft wrote its own version and called it Excel, which now runs on every machine in every office in the developed world. It went from being an intriguing but useful augmentation of human capabilities to being a mundane accessory - not to mention the reason why Kat Norton (aka "Miss Excel") allegedly pulls in six-figure sums a day from teaching Excel tricks on TikTok. The odds are that someone, somewhere is planning to do that with ChatGPT. And using the bot to write the scripts."

"Major technology companies signed a pact Friday to voluntarily adopt "reasonable precautions" to prevent artificial intelligence tools from being used to disrupt democratic elections around the world. Executives from Adobe, Amazon, Google, IBM, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI and TikTok gathered at the Munich Security Conference to announce a new framework for how they respond to AI-generated deepfakes that deliberately trick voters. Twelve other companies - including Elon Musk's X - are also signing on to the accord."

"Ultimately, he suggests, each user would have their own "large language model" (LLM), the underlying technology of services such as ChatGPT, which would be trained on their own speech and behaviour patterns, to let them generate extremely personalised responses to queries and requests. Such systems could be a natural progression from AI tools that already exist today. Services such as Gmail can summarise and suggest replies to emails based on previous messages, while Microsoft Teams will transcribe and summarise video conferences, automatically generating a to-do list from the contents."

"Tech workers are in demand: companies find it easier to raise cash than to hire engineers; this gives workers enormous bargaining power, and they're using it. From the Google uprisings over a Pentagon babykiller project and a Chinese surveillance project to the Microsoft uprising over ICE contracts, tech workers are emerging as part of the solution -- while their secretive, shareholder-haunted bosses are more and more the problem."

""Social media surveillance technologies, such as the software acquired by Michigan State Police, are often introduced under the false premise that they are public safety and accountability tools. In reality, they endanger Black and marginalized communities,""

"The tool tracks every click and interaction by employees and presents managers with leaderboards showing relative "productivity" of each employee, down to how many mentions they get in workplace emails."