AMD has announced plans to cut 4% of its global workforce as it repositions to compete in the AI chip market dominated by Nvidia. The layoffs will affect approximately 1,040 employees of its 26,000-strong workforce reported at the end of 2023. CNBC adds: AMD produces powerful AI accelerators for data centers, including the MI300X, which companies such as Meta and Microsoft purchase as an alternative to Nvidia-based systems. But Nvidia dominates the market for powerful AI chips, with over 80% market share, partially because it developed the core software that AI engineers use to develop programs such as OpenAI's ChatGPT.

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Apple released Final Cut Pro 11 this week, marking the first major version change in over a decade for its professional video editing software. The update introduces several AI-powered features, including a new "Magnetic Mask" function that automatically tracks objects through video clips for targeted color grading and effects. The suite now offers on-device automatic caption generation for dialogue tracks and adds support for spatial video editing compatible with Apple Vision Pro. Users can adjust the depth of titles and objects for 3D viewing. The update requires macOS 14.6 and at least 8GB of RAM, with some features exclusive to Apple silicon Macs. Existing Final Cut Pro X users will receive the upgrade at no cost, while new users can purchase the software for $299. Accompanying updates include Final Cut Camera for iPhone, which now supports H.265 HEVC format for Apple Log footage on iPhone 15/16 Pro models, and Final Cut Pro for iPad 2.1, featuring enhanced automated color grading tools and new creative assets. Projects created on Mac remain incompatible with the iPad version, PetaPixel reports.

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An anonymous reader writes: JPL in California announced this week a layoff of 325 workers, about 5% of its workforce, the third major layoff imposed this year. The JPL press release indicates the layoffs are because of NASA budget cutbacks, but does not provide any specificity. The cause centers mostly around NASA's decision to pause its Mars Sample Return project, which JPL was leading. From this report: This is the third round of layoffs at JPL this year, a reduction spurred primarily by major budgetary cuts to the Mars Sample Return mission, which is managed by JPL. NASA directed $310 million this year to the effort to bring Mars rocks back to Earth, a steep drop from the $822.3 million it spent on the program the previous year.

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Washington Post: The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has taken steps to place Google under formal federal supervision, an extraordinary move that could subject the technology giant to the regular inspections and other rigorous monitoring that the government imposes on major banks. Google has fiercely resisted the idea over months of highly secretive talks, according to two people familiar with the discussions, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe them -- setting up what may ultimately be a major legal clash with vast implications for the CFPB's powers in the digital age. The exact scope of the CFPB's concerns is not clear, and its order does not appear to be final. The political fate of the bureau's work under Director Rohit Chopra is also in doubt, as the watchdog agency braces for potentially significant changes to its leadership and agenda with the return of President-elect Donald Trump to the White House. Formed in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, the CFPB has broad powers to protect consumers from unfair, deceptive or predatory financial practices. That includes the ability to place certain firms under supervision, a status that can afford regulators direct access to the company's internal records to ensure their activities are sound -- and seek fixes if they are not.

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The European Union has fined Meta $840 million for unfairly tying its Facebook Marketplace classified ads service to its social network, marking the company's first EU antitrust penalty. The European Commission ruled Meta must stop bundling Marketplace with Facebook's social platform and cease imposing unfair conditions on competing classified ads services. Regulators found Meta exploited Facebook's massive user base to disadvantage rivals and used competitors' advertising data to enhance Marketplace. EU antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager said Meta "tied its online classified ads service Facebook Marketplace to its personal social network Facebook and imposed unfair trading conditions on other online classified ads service providers."

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Microsoft's gaming division is developing prototypes for a handheld gaming device that won't launch for "a few years," gaming chief Phil Spencer said Wednesday. In an interview with Bloomberg, Spencer said that while Microsoft is actively working on prototypes, the company will first focus on improving its Xbox app performance on existing portable devices and establishing hardware partnerships. The gaming unit wants to be "informed by learning and what's happening now" before introducing its own device, Spencer said. "Longer term, I love us building devices," Spencer said, adding that Microsoft's team "could do some real innovative work."

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Italy has emerged as a major global spyware hub alongside Israel and India, with at least six major vendors operating in the country with limited oversight, The Record reported this week, citing researchers and Italian experts. Companies like RCS Labs, which has operated since 1992, sell surveillance tools to both domestic law enforcement and foreign governments including Kazakhstan, Syria, and several Asian nations. Italian authorities can rent spyware for $160 per day without large acquisition costs, leading to thousands of domestic surveillance operations in recent years. While new regulations taking effect in February 2024 will require judges to evaluate specific reasons for spyware use, critics cited in the story say the reform package won't address core issues like the lack of centralized oversight. The country's competitive marketplace and relatively lax export controls have also enabled Italian vendors to expand their overseas sales.

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Leading AI systems are solving less than 2% of problems in a new advanced mathematics benchmark, revealing significant limitations in their reasoning capabilities, research group Epoch AI reported this week. The benchmark, called FrontierMath, consists of hundreds of original research-level mathematics problems developed in collaboration with over 60 mathematicians, including Fields Medalists Terence Tao and Timothy Gowers. While top AI models like GPT-4 and Gemini 1.5 Pro achieve over 90% accuracy on traditional math tests, they struggle with FrontierMath's problems, which span computational number theory to algebraic geometry and require complex reasoning. "These are extremely challenging. [...] The only way to solve them is by a combination of a semi-expert like a graduate student in a related field, maybe paired with some combination of a modern AI and lots of other algebra packages," Tao said. The problems are designed to be "guessproof," with large numerical answers or complex mathematical objects as solutions, making it nearly impossible to solve without proper mathematical reasoning. Further reading: New secret math benchmark stumps AI models and PhDs alike.

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Dutch publisher Veen Bosch & Keuning has announced plans to use AI for translating commercial fiction, drawing sharp criticism from literary professionals despite promises of human oversight and author consent. Award-winning translator Michele Hutchison, who won the 2020 International Booker Prize, argues that translation extends beyond word conversion. "We build bridges between cultures, taking into account the target readership every step of the way," she said, noting that translators convey rhythm, poetry, and cultural nuances while conducting precise terminology research.

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Microsoft seems set to rebrand the AI-powered features in Windows to "Windows Intelligence" even if some of the more controversial elements, such as Recall, are to remain as they are. The Register: Word of Windows Intelligence has circulated for a while, although Microsoft has yet to issue any official confirmation. In October, Tero Alhonen posted what appeared to be options for apps that use AI services. Over the weekend, X user Albacore turned up a placeholder page in a Windows 24H2 build for Windows Intelligence settings. Although Microsoft has made substantial investments in artificial intelligence, AI as part of a brand is a little generic. Apple's approach, to define AI as being "Apple Intelligence," manages to keep the familiar "AI" initialism while ensuring its own brand is kept front and center. With Windows Intelligence, Microsoft is attempting something similar, although "Apple Intelligence" can be handily shortened to "AI". The recently overhauled Copilot and delayed Recall have sparked debate in the Windows community, yet neither seems likely to be rebranded to Windows Intelligence at this stage. However, Windows Intelligence could represent an umbrella for AI technologies on the Microsoft platform and provide users with a quick and easy way of controlling the access AI apps have to user data and how that data is used.

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AmiMoJo writes: The climate-damaging vapors left behind by jet planes could be easily tackled, aviation experts say, with a new study suggesting they could be eliminated for a few pounds per flight. Jet condensation trails, or contrails, have spawned wild conspiracy theories alleging mind control and the spreading of disease, but scientists say the real problem is their warming effect. "They create an artificial layer of clouds, which traps the heat from the Earth that's trying to escape to outer space," said Carlos Lopez de la Osa, from the Transport & Environment campaign group, which has carried out a new study on the solutions to contrails. "The scale of the warming that's associated with them is roughly having a similar impact to that of aviation carbon emissions." Tweaking the flight paths of a handful of aircraft could reduce contrail warming by more than half by 2040, at a cost of less than $5.1 per flight. Geography and a flight's latitude have a strong influence on whether a contrail is warming. Time of day also influences the climate effects of contrails. Those formed by evening and night flights have the largest warming contribution. Seasonality is also important -- the most warming contrails tend to occur in winter. "Planes are already flying around thunderstorms and turbulence areas," Mr Lopez de la Osa said. "We will need to add one more constraint to flight planning, which is avoiding areas of contrail formation."

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Mark Rainey: Engineers are currently debugging why the Voyager 1 spacecraft, which is 15 billions miles away, turned off its main radio and switched to a backup radio that hasn't been used in over forty years! I've had some tricky debugging issues in the past, including finding compiler bugs and debugging code with no debugger that had been burnt into prom packs for terminals, however I have huge admiration for the engineers maintaining the operation of Voyager 1. Recently they sent a command to the craft that caused it to shut off its main radio transmitter, seemingly in an effort to preserve power and protect from faults. This prompted it to switch over to the backup radio transmitter, that is lower power. Now they have regained communication they are trying to determine the cause on hardware that is nearly 50 years old. Any communication takes days. When you think you have a difficult issue to debug, spare a thought for this team.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Officials inside the Secret Service clashed over whether they needed a warrant to use location data harvested from ordinary apps installed on smartphones, with some arguing that citizens have agreed to be tracked with such data by accepting app terms of service, despite those apps often not saying their data may end up with the authorities, according to hundreds of pages of internal Secret Service emails obtained by 404 Media. The emails provide deeper insight into the agency's use of Locate X, a powerful surveillance capability that allows law enforcement officials to follow a phone, and person's, precise movements over time at the click of a mouse. In 2023, a government oversight body found that the Secret Service, Customs and Border Protection, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement all used their access to such location data illegally. The Secret Service told 404 Media in an email last week it is no longer using the tool. "If USSS [U.S. Secret Service] is using Locate X, that is most concerning to us," one of the internal emails said. 404 Media obtained them and other documents through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the Secret Service.

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Paul Kinlan, who leads the Chrome and the Open Web Developer Relations team at Google, asks and answers the question (with a no.): Frameworks are abstractions over a platform designed for people and teams to accelerate their teams new work and maintenance while improving the consistency and quality of the projects. They also frequently force a certain type of structure and architecture to your code base. This isn't a bad thing, team productivity is an important aspect of any software. I'm of the belief that software development is entering a radical shift that is currently driven by agents like Replit's and there is a world where a person never actually has to manipulate code directly anymore. As I was making broad and sweeping changes to the functionality of the applications by throwing the Agent a couple of prompts here and there, the software didn't seem to care that there was repetition in the code across multiple views, it didn't care about shared logic, extensibility or inheritability of components... it just implemented what it needed to do and it did it as vanilla as it could. I was just left wondering if there will be a need for frameworks in the future? Do the architecture patterns we've learnt over the years matter? Will new patterns for software architecture appear that favour LLM management?

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Apple executives have defended the relocation of the power button to the bottom of its new M4 Mac mini, citing the computer's significantly reduced size as the driving factor behind the design change. In a Bilibili video interview, Apple's Greg Joswiak and John Ternus explained that the Mac mini's form factor, now half the size of its predecessor, necessitated finding a new position for the power button. The executives said that the bottom placement allows for convenient access despite initial user criticism.

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OpenAI's latest large language model, known internally as Orion, has fallen short of performance targets, marking a broader slowdown in AI advancement across the industry's leading companies, according to Bloomberg, corroborating similar media stories in recent days. The model, which completed initial training in September, showed particular weakness in novel coding tasks and failed to demonstrate the same magnitude of improvement over its predecessor as GPT-4 achieved over GPT-3.5, the publication reported Wednesday. Google's upcoming Gemini software and Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Opus are facing similar challenges. Google's project is not meeting internal benchmarks, while Anthropic has delayed its model's release, Bloomberg said. Industry insiders cited by the publication pointed to growing scarcity of high-quality training data and mounting operational costs as key obstacles. OpenAI's Orion specifically struggled due to insufficient coding data for training, the report said. OpenAI has moved Orion into post-training refinement but is unlikely to release the system before early 2024. The report adds: [...] AI companies continue to pursue a more-is-better playbook. In their quest to build products that approach the level of human intelligence, tech firms are increasing the amount of computing power, data and time they use to train new models -- and driving up costs in the process. Amodei has said companies will spend $100 million to train a bleeding-edge model this year and that amount will hit $100 billion in the coming years. As costs rise, so do the stakes and expectations for each new model under development. Noah Giansiracusa, an associate professor of mathematics at Bentley University in Waltham, Massachusetts, said AI models will keep improving, but the rate at which that will happen is questionable. "We got very excited for a brief period of very fast progress," he said. "That just wasn't sustainable." Further reading: OpenAI and Others Seek New Path To Smarter AI as Current Methods Hit Limitations.

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Red Hat, the IBM-owned open source software firm, is acquiring Neural Magic, a startup that optimizes AI models to run faster on commodity processors and GPUs. From a report: The terms of the deal weren't disclosed. MIT research scientist Alex Matveev and professor Nir Shavit founded Somerville, Massachusetts-based Neural Magic in 2018, inspired by their work in high-performance execution engines for AI. Neural Magic's software aims to process AI workloads on processors and GPUs at speeds equivalent to specialized AI chips (e.g. TPUs). By running models on off-the-shelf processors, which usually have more available memory, the company's software can realize these performance gains. Big tech companies like AMD and a host of other startups, including NeuReality, Deci, CoCoPie, OctoML and DeepCube, offer some sort of AI optimization software. But Neural Magic is one of the few with a free platform and a collection of open source tools to complement it. Neural Magic had so far managed to raise $50 million in venture capital from backers like Andreessen Horowitz, New Enterprise Associations, Amdocs, Comcast Ventures, Pillar VC and Ridgeline Ventures.

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Federal authorities are grappling with the aftermath of an illegal sheep cloning operation that has scattered hundreds of contraband hybrid animals across multiple states, following the sentencing of the scheme's mastermind. Montana rancher Arthur Schubarth received a six-month prison term for cloning a near-threatened Marco Polo argali sheep from tissue illegally imported from Kyrgyzstan. The cloned animal, named Montana Mountain King, was used to inseminate over 100 ewes, creating a network of unauthorized hybrid offspring. Court documents reveal that Schubarth sold these hybrids to big game hunting enthusiasts, with prices reaching $10,000 per animal. While the original cloned sheep is now housed at New York's Rosamond Gifford Zoo, authorities cannot account for most of its descendants.

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The percentage of workers in the U.S. who say they are using AI at work has remained largely flat over the last three months, according to a new study commissioned by Slack. From a report: If AI's rapid adoption curve slows or flattens, a lot of very rosy assumptions about the technology -- and very high market valuations tied to them -- could change. Slack said its most recent survey found 33% of U.S. workers say they are using AI at work, an increase of just a single percentage point. That represents a significant flattening of the rapid growth noted in prior surveys. Global adoption of AI use at work, meanwhile, rose from 32% to 36%. Between the lines: Slack also found that globally, nearly half of workers (48%) said they were uncomfortable telling their managers they use AI at work. Among the top reasons cited were a fear of being seen as lazy, cheating or incompetent.

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Microsoft is planning to no longer support the Windows Mail, Calendar, and People apps later this year. The Verge: The software giant has been moving existing users of these apps over to the new Outlook for Windows app in recent months, and now it has set an end of support date for the Mail, Calendar, and People apps of December 31st. Once the apps reach end of support later this year, Microsoft warns that users who haven't moved to the new Outlook app "will no longer be able to send and receive email using Windows Mail and Calendar." Microsoft has been rolling out the new Outlook for Windows app for years, with it officially reaching the general availability stage in August. The new web-based Outlook is designed to eventually replace the full desktop version of Outlook too, and Microsoft plans to provide enterprise customers a 12-month notice before it starts to move people away from the desktop version of Outlook.

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