Car owners unhappy with technology drives down car owner satisfaction for the first time. OpenAI developer creates a complex AI you can run locally on an average laptop and the first bit of executive job loss to Artificial Intelligence is AI replacing a corporate CEO.
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These are the top tech news stories on today’s Hashtag Trending.
I’m your host Jim Love, CIO of IT World Canada and Tech News Day in the US.
Under the heading of “there’s always room for one more” TikTok is expanding its features to include text-based posts. This move is seen as an attempt to compete with other social media platforms like Twitter and Instagram’s Threads. The new feature allows users to share thoughts, ideas, and stories in a text format, a significant shift from TikTok’s video-centric approach.
It comes at a time of real shakeups. Twitter recently announced plans to replace its iconic blue bird logo with an “X.” Instagram’s Threads app has seen a drop in engagement a week after its launch. Federated open source Mastodon has seen a big upsurge in members.
But will TikTok be able to take advantage of this confusion and insert itself into the text world? With its creative and engaging short videos, TikTok has carved out a hugely popular niche in the social media landscape.
But that doesn’t mean users embrace this new feature. Will it detract from TikTok’s video-centric appeal? And how will this move influence the ongoing competition among social media platforms?
Will introduction of text posts confuse or catch on like – like TikTok?
Sources include: Axios
A recent survey by JD Power’s Automotive Performance, Execution and Layout (APEAL) Study indicates that the increasing amount of technology in modern cars, particularly advanced infotainment systems, may be contributing to a decline in owner satisfaction. This marks the first time in the 28-year history of the study that overall satisfaction among car owners has seen a consecutive year-over-year decline.
The overall satisfaction rating in the study has fallen to 845 on a scale of 1,000, two points lower compared to one year ago and three points lower than in 2021. Infotainment systems appear to be a significant source of frustration for owners. Just 56 per cent said they prefer to use the built-in systems to play audio, a significant drop from 70 per cent in 2020. Furthermore, less than half of owners said they use their cars’ native controls for navigation, voice recognition, or even to make phone calls. This suggests the majority of people prefer to use the likes of Android Auto and Apple CarPlay.
Despite these findings, some automotive companies, including General Motors, are blocking access to CarPlay and Android Auto in their future EV lineup in favour of their native systems. Meanwhile, Tesla, a tech-focused car company, continues to rank above average, but its satisfaction score is declining, dropping by nine points in 2023 compared to the previous year.
The study suggests that manufacturers need to better understand what owners really want in their new vehicles. As the tech overload in cars continues to grow, it remains to be seen how manufacturers will be able address these concerns to improve customer satisfaction.
Sources include: Techspot
Amazon is reportedly enforcing a “return-to-hub” policy that requires employees to relocate to their individual teams’ “hub” offices. Those who refuse to relocate are given the option to find a new team within the company or face a “voluntary resignation.” This policy is part of Amazon’s efforts to encourage more in-person work and has been implemented despite previous assurances that the company had no plans to force employees back to the office.
The enforcement of this policy has led to significant backlash from employees, particularly those who were hired for virtual jobs or those who relocated to remote locations during the pandemic. Employees who refuse to join a hub are given 60 days to find a new team that allows them to stay in their current city. If they are unsuccessful after 60 days, it’s considered a voluntary resignation.
This move has been met with frustration and resistance from Amazon employees. Over 30,000 employees joined an internal Slack channel and signed a petition to demand a reversal of the return-to-office mandate. However, Amazon’s HR chief, Beth Galetti, rejected the petition.
The enforcement of the “return-to-hub” policy and the resulting employee backlash highlight the ongoing tension between employers and employees over remote work policies.
Sources include: Business Insider
It’s called Baby Llama. OpenAI’s Andrej Karpathy, known for his significant contributions to deep learning, has been working on a project to create a simplified version of the Llama 2 model, a language model architecture developed by Meta. This project, which Karpathy has humorously referred to as “Baby Llama,” was initiated as a weekend experiment and not intended for production-grade deployment.
Karpathy has written the new model in C and is training the Llama 2 model from scratch using PyTorch, saving the model weights in a raw binary file, and he has produced an AI so efficient it can run on a single average laptop without the need for GPUs.
Despite being a simplified version, the Baby Llama model has shown impressive performance. Karpathy reported that on his M1 MacBook Air, the model with ~15 million parameters can infer at around 100 tokens per second, that’s about a hundred words per second, demonstrating the feasibility of running complex models on resource-constrained devices.
It’s an amazing accomplishment, and it highlights a trend toward developing smaller models for local deployment.
Meta already has a partnership with Qualcomm to run Llama 2 on local hardware and Apple’s release of a Transformers architecture optimized for Apple Silicon.
While the Baby Llama project is a fascinating exploration of what’s possible with minimalistic AI deployment, it also raises questions about the future of AI development. Will this trend towards smaller, more efficient models continue? And how will those developments impact the broader AI landscape?
We did a story earlier about smaller neural networks. What happens when Baby Llama meets Baby Neural network.
Sources include: Analytics India
And finally, Hunna Technology, a UK-based HealthTech startup, has announced the appointment of an AI, named IndigoVX, as its CEO. This marks the first instance of an AI serving as a CEO in Europe. The AI system, developed by Hunna, is designed to facilitate efficient collaboration between artificial intelligence and human expertise.
The decision to appoint an AI as CEO was inspired by Steve Jobs’ famous quote, “It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to do. We hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.”
The AI system has been tested for 12 months to ensure safety and legal compliance before its promotion to CEO.
And the AI has reportedly exceeded expectations, identifying under-explored markets, optimizing resource allocation, and accurately forecasting consumer trends, and a successful decision rate of over 90 per cent. Some of its achievements include defining a strong and realistic business strategy, identifying the startup idea, and providing key research for talks to roll out their medical AI nationally in the UAE.
Well, there’s one job loss that may not get the employees upset.
Sources include: PR Newswire
These are the top tech news stories for today. Hashtag Trending goes to air 5 days a week with a special weekend interview show called “the Weekend Edition.”
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