Apple hires another AI expert from Google. Ian Goodfellow, considered the creator of an AI approach known as generative adversarial networks, will take a director role at Apple Inc., CNBC reports. Last year Apple hired John Giannandrea, former search and artificial intelligence chief, to oversee AI strategy.
Amazon plans for broadband-delivering satellites. The company plans to launch more than 3,000 low-Earth orbit satellites to deliver connectivity to populations that lack basic access to the internet, Reuters reports. The company didn't provide a timeline for the effort, dubbed Project Kuiper.
Jeff Bezos to retain voting control of wife’s Amazon shares after divorce. MacKenzie Bezos on Twitter Thursday said Mr. Bezos will retain 75% of the shares he owns with her. Mr. Bezos also will hold voting control of her Amazon.com Inc. shares, as well as stakes in the Washington Post and Blue Origin, the WSJ reports.
Amazon gains in online ads. Advertisers are starting to shift spending on search ads from Alphabet Inc.’s Google toward Amazon.com Inc., a sign of how the online retailer is capitalizing on becoming the top destination for consumers’ product searches. Still, Amazon has a long way to go to catch Google, which had 78% of the $44.2 billion U.S. search-ad market in 2018, the WSJ reports.
Annals of tweeting. A federal judge Thursday told Elon Musk and the U.S. government to craft a compromise that would avoid the need to determine whether the Tesla Inc. chief executive violated a court order governing his communications on social media. The Securities and Exchange Commission sought controls around his Twitter use after it alleged a series of tweets he issued in 2018 about securing funding to take the company private amounted to fraud. The WSJ has more.
Google shutters AI council. Formed a week ago with AI experts outside of Google, the Advanced Technology External Advisory Council was supposed to help guide the company on AI work. But the council faced protests from Google employees from the beginning, particularly over the inclusion on the board of Heritage Foundation President Kay Coles James, Vox reports. Another board member, privacy researcher Alessandro Acquisti, resigned.
Americans agree: Social media is divisive (and yet...). Across age groups and political ideologies, adults in a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll said they held a negative view of the effects of social media—even though 70% use such services at least once a day.
Microsoft employees protest treatment of women. It began on March 20, according to Quartz, when a female Microsoft Corp. employee asked a colleague for advice on how to advance. What followed was an email chain of hundreds of responses with women sharing guidance, but also detailing their experiences with alleged discrimination and claims of harassment. Wired reports that a group of Microsoft employees appeared Thursday at an employee meeting with CEO Satya Nadella to protest the company’s treatment of women.
Humans augmenting machines. Backing up the Apollo missions of the 1960s was the Real-Time Computer Complex, a room full of IBM Corp. computers. Backing up the machines: real-live mathematicians, who not only double-checked computations but jumped in to apply math to unexpected situations. “We were able to make changes on a real-time basis on the flight,” Dennis Sager, a member of the Houston-based team, tells MIT Technology Review. “We could do things that weren’t even thought of beforehand.”
|