James Farrell
Latest from James Farrell
In another cutback, Twitch lays off 500 people, 35% of staff
The Amazon.com Inc.-owned livestreaming platform Twitch will reportedly lose about 35% of its staff in another round of layoffs, Bloomberg reported today. The layoffs, which will number about 500, are expected to be announced Wednesday. This follows two earlier rounds of layoffs in 2023, which amounted to around 400 staff losing their jobs, while the company ...
Report: OpenAI is offering news publishers as little as $1M to use content for AI training
OpenAI is reportedly putting as little as $1 million and perhaps only up to $5 million on the table in an effort to strike deals with news publishing firms to use their content to train its large language models. This might seem like a paltry amount, given the rapid rise of the company’s flagship LLM, ...
SpaceX accused of illegally firing staff who criticized CEO Elon Musk
The National Labor Relations Board today filed a complaint that accuses Space X Corp. of unlawfully firing eight employees for a 2022 letter in which they condemned the behavior of Chief Executive Elon Musk. In the letter, which was drafted and sent to other employees to sign, Musk was said to be an embarrassment to ...
FTC calls pharmacy Rite Aid ‘reckless’ after facial recognition use in stores
The Federal Trade Commission today announced a settlement with the pharmacy chain Rite Aid that will include a five-year ban on the company using artificial intelligence-powered facial recognition technology. The FTC said Rite Aid had acted recklessly when it used the technology in its stores from 2012 to 2020 to capture images of its customers ...
New OpenAI safety team will have power to block high-risk developments
OpenAI today announced a new safety plan that will give its board of directors veto power to overrule Chief Executive Sam Altman if it considers the risks of the AI being developed to be too high. “The study of frontier AI risks has fallen far short of what is possible and where we need to ...
X rival Threads launches in EU after overcoming regulatory challenges
After already launching in more than 100 countries, including the U.S. and U.K., Meta Platforms Inc.-owned Threads has just become available to the 448 million citizens of the European Union, potentially adding to the woes of its struggling competitor, X Corp. Threads has only been in existence for around six months, but soon after its ...
EU agrees to rules that will give gig workers employee rights
After years of negotiations, the European Union has provisionally agreed to new rules to improve the labor conditions of people working in such jobs as delivery and ride-hailing, potentially affecting millions of gig workers. It’s believed that right now, there are close to 500 digital work platforms in the EU employing about 28 million people, ...
Big tech’s AI leaders team up with the Cloud Security Alliance in comprehensive safety initiative
Some of the largest tech firms in the world have partnered with the Cloud Security Alliance, an organization dedicated to understanding all facets of artificial intelligence and promoting best practices in cloud computing. The CSA, considered the world’s leading organization in this area, today reported it had formed the “AI Safety Initiative,” partnering with the ...
Epic Games wins historic antitrust case against Google
A federal court today ruled in favor of video game giant Epic Games, Inc. in a years-long antitrust case in which Epic has argued that Google LLC holds an illegal monopoly with its Play app store. At a time when regulators and prosecutors are seemingly forever talking about dismantling the power structures of U.S. big ...
Meta’s woes deepen after New Mexico says company failed to protect children from online sex abuse
A lawsuit launched today by the New Mexico attorney general claims that Meta Platforms Inc. and Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg failed “to protect children from sexual abuse, online solicitation, and human trafficking.” The suit comes after a yearlong investigation in which the office of Attorney General Raúl Torrez created profiles on Facebook and Instagram pretending ...