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Substack

Why is Twitter blocking Substack links?

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The Twitter vs. Substack conflict persists as the social media platform appears to keep discouraging users from boosting offsite Substack posts by classifying all website links as “unsafe.”

The Verge noted that on April 7, Twitter seemed to add a warning advising users to avoid the platform and labeling them as potentially “spammy or unsafe” to all external Substack links.

substack
Image Source: bloomberg.com

Later, Elon Musk refuted reports that the website was obstructing Substack links. Then, Musk’s assertion that Substack was getting Twitter data beyond the parameters of its API database was denied by Substack co-founder Chris Best.

Also Read: Baidu Sues Apple, app developers over fake Ernie bot apps

He stated, “We feel we are in compliance with the terms, but if they have any specific concerns, we would love to know about them! We’d be happy to address any issues.”

The creators of Substack, Chris Best, Hamish McKenzie, and Jairaj Seth, expressed their disappointment with Twitter’s decision to limit writers’ ability to share their work in a statement to The Verge. They noted, “Writers should be able to freely distribute links to Substack and other websites.

This sudden shift serves as a reminder of the need for a paradigm that puts writers in control, compensates for excellent work, and safeguards free speech and the press. Their livelihoods shouldn’t be dependent on platforms where the rules can be altered at any time and where they don’t control their relationship with their audience, they continued.”

With the release of its new Notes feature earlier this week, the newsletter service appeared to throw the final switch against Twitter. This “recommendations” feed has a remarkable resemblance to the conventional, scrollable social feed that is the core of Twitter’s functionality.

Substack appeared to be offering options as users sought to abandon the Elon Musk-owned social networking platform, including a recently introduced chat feature that enables interaction between newsletter writers and subscribers. Twitter swiftly erected barriers to Substack boosters on the network, including the website’s official account.

The ability to embed tweets in stories was restricted by Twitter on Thursday. Shortly after, it appeared that tweets with links to Substack posts were no longer eligible for interaction, with users only able to quote tweet postings and no one else able to like or retweet them.

Also Read: Are Google’s AI supercomputers faster than Nvidia’s?

In December, Musk stated that he believed “relentless advertising of competitors” to be a policy violation and barred sharing links to Mastodon, Instagram, Facebook, and other sites.

These limitations, however, were later lifted. Although it is important to note that, for the time being at least, users are still able to tweet a Substack link, it is likely that he has decided to restore it now that he considers that Substack is attempting to compete with Twitter. Anyone attempting to follow it will only need to click through the warning to access the content.

Baidu

Baidu sues Apple, app developers over fake Ernie bot apps

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The Chinese search engine Baidu has filed a lawsuit against Apple & “relevant” app developers allegedly selling counterfeit versions of its newly released Ernie bot application on the App Store. The artificial intelligence-powered chatbot Ernie has been regarded as the most competitive substitute for the US-developed ChatGPT in China.

Baidu
Image Source: lbcgroup.tv

ChatGPT’s immediate rival is Baidu’s Ernie chatbot. It is a Baidu AI product that has reportedly been in production since 2019. Yet it was only made available a short time after ChatGPT went global.

Also Read: Amazon plans to trim employee stock awards amid tough economy

According to the business, Ernie is fully capable of processing natural language and can converse, answer questions live online, write articles, write codes, etc.

On Friday, Baidu declared that it has registered cases in Haidian People’s Court, Beijing, against Apple and also the app developers who created the knockoff editions of its Ernie bot. There isn’t yet an official Ernie app accessible, according to a comment from Baidu on its main “Baidu AI” WeChat account.

“At present, Ernie does not have any official app,” Baidu said in a statement late on Friday posted on its official “Baidu AI” WeChat account.

“Until our company’s official announcement, any Ernie app you see from App Store or other stores are fake,” it said.

Source: reuters.com

Baidu also uploaded a picture of its court document, emphasizing that until a formal notice is made, any Ernie apps that seem to be accessible through the App Store or any other stores are fake.

Apple has not made any comment on the circumstances yet. According to a search done by Reuters on Saturday, at least four applications with the Mandarin name “Ernie bot” are still available on the App Store, but they are all fake.

As per Baidu, those who have gotten legitimate access codes are the only ones who can access the Ernie bot. In its comment, the business also issued a warning against people who try to sell access codes.

Also Read: Meta releases AI model that can identify items within images

The AI-backed chatbot known as Ernie, meaning “Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration,” was introduced by Baidu in March of this year. Because of the popularity of ChatGPT powered by Microsoft, Chinese businesses and tech companies are racing to develop a rival.

Baidu’s cloud platform currently enables businesses to include the bot in their services by submitting a request. Originally, the Ernie bot was only obtainable to a small set of customers with invitation credentials.

Amazon

Amazon plans to trim employee stock awards amid tough economy

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As the world’s largest online retailer experiences an unstable economic climate, Amazon.com Inc said it will limit employee stock grants, a component of its compensation scheme.

Employees of Amazon are given shares of Amazon stock as just a component of their complete compensation scheme. These stocks are known as Restricted Stock Units (RSUs). These stocks vest throughout time as opposed to being granted at one time.

Amazon
Image Source: investing.com

The tech behemoth stated in March that it intended to eliminate 9,000 employees, making it the most recent business in that sector to do so in the context of a potential downturn.

Also Read: Meta releases AI model that can identify items within images

Adding to a surge of job losses that have rocked the tech industry as a challenging economy compels corporations to get smaller, this announcement comes weeks since Amazon declared a new round of major layoffs.

“We made the decision to reduce RSU (restricted stock units) awards in the final outlook year by a small amount (other years are not impacted),” an Amazon spokesperson said in an emailed statement, without specifying the period of the final outlook year.

Source: economictimes.indiatimes.com

The announcement comes with Amazon’s announcement of a 2nd round of huge job cuts a few weeks earlier, adding to a surge of job losses that have rocked the technology industry since tough economic times compel firms and various businesses to become smaller.

The proposed adjustment to the firm’s pay scale was initially reported by Business Insider, which also stated that Amazon would re-evaluate 2025 salary during the initial quarter of 2019 to prepare for stock variation

“The company was weighing the possibility of adjusting its compensation model in the future to be more balanced between base cash compensation and equity, after looking at the combination of an uncertain economy and its compensation budget,” the spokesperson said.

Source: livemint.com

Following a nearly 50 percent share decline in 2022, Amazon’s share price has increased this year by more than 20 percent.

Also Read: Google Workers in London stage walkout over job cuts

As a part of massive layoffs, Amazon.com Inc. fired around 100 staff from its video-game businesses, Game Growth, including Prime Gaming, and the firm’s San Diego facility.

Even with its Crown channel which is an entertainment channel on the Twitch streaming video service, Amazon has had difficulty making the most of its gaming tools.

supercomputers

Are Google’s AI supercomputers faster than Nvidia’s?

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As powerful models for machine learning continue to be the hottest topic in the tech business, Google released information about one of the company’s AI supercomputers on Wednesday, claiming it is quicker and more effective than rival Nvidia systems.

Tensor Processing Units, or TPUs, are artificial intelligence (AI) chips that Google has been developing and utilizing since 2016. Nvidia currently holds a 90% share of the overall market for AI training models and deployment.

supercomputers
Image Source: techzine.eu

As a leading innovator in AI, Google has produced several of the most significant developments in the area during the past ten years. However, some people think the company has lagged behind in commercializing its ideas, and internally, the corporation has been rushing to develop items to show it hasn’t wasted its lead, creating a “code red” situation.

Also Read: What’s Next for Users as Google Now Launcher Shuts Down?

A large number of supercomputers and a lot of processors must work simultaneously to train models, with the computers operating nonstop for weeks or months, as is the case with AI models and products like Google’s Bard or OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which are powered by Nvidia’s A100 chips.

On Tuesday, Google announced that it has developed a system with more than 4,000 TPUs connected to specialized parts intended to operate and train AI models. It has been in operation since 2020 and has been used for 50 days to train Google’s PaLM model, which challenges OpenAI’s GPT model.

The Google researchers claimed that the TPU-based supercomputer, known as TPU v4, is “1.2x-1.7x faster and uses 1.3x-1.9x less power than the Nvidia A100.” The researchers said, “The performance, scalability, and availability make TPU v4 supercomputers the workhorses of large language models.”

The H100, the most recent Nvidia AI chip, was not compared to Google’s TPU results, however, because the H100 is more modern and was manufactured using more sophisticated manufacturing techniques, according to Google researchers.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said that the findings for the company’s most current chip, the H100, were noticeably faster than those for the previous generation. findings and rankings from an industry-wide AI chip test called MLperf were published on Wednesday.

Given the high cost of the significant computing power required for AI, many in the sector are concentrating on creating new processors, hardware elements like optical links, or software innovations that will lower the required computing power.

Also Read: Can we use nearby share between Android and Windows?

The computational demands of AI also benefit cloud service providers like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, who may rent out computer processing on an hourly basis and give startup companies credits or computing time to foster business partnerships. For instance, Google claimed that their TPU chips were used to train the AI image generator Midjourney.

Meta

Meta releases AI model that can identify items within images

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On Wednesday, Meta, the owner of Facebook, released a collection of image annotations that it claimed was the biggest ever of its kind combined with a model based on AI that can identify specific items within an image. The final dataset contains over 1.1 billion masks of segmentation from over 11 million licenced and privacy-preserving photos.

Meta
Image Source: tribune.com.pk

The organization’s research department said in a blog article that the company’s Segment Anything Model, or SAM, could recognise objects in pictures and videos even when it hadn’t seen those objects during training.

Also Read: Google Workers in London stage walkout over job cuts

SAM allows users to select objects by clicking on them or by entering text commands. Typing the word “cat” in one demonstration caused the tool to generate boxes around each of the multiple cats in a picture.

Meta noted, “Meta stated, “Our objective was to build a foundation model for image segmentation… a promotable model that is trained on a variety of data and can adapt to specific tasks, analogous to the use of prompting in models of natural language processing.”

However, in contrast to images, videos, and text, the segmentation data required to train such a model is not easily accessible online or anywhere else. So, with Segment Anything, we set out to simultaneously create a segmentation dataset of unprecedented scale and develop a general, prompt segmentation model.”

Since Microsoft-backed OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot became an internet hit in the fall, sparking a surge of investments and a race to dominate the area, large tech firms have been bragging about their artificial intelligence advances.

Though it hasn’t yet made a product available, Meta has teased a number of features that use the generative AI made famous by ChatGPT, which generates entirely new material rather than just recognising or categorising data like other AI.

Examples include a programme that creates surrealist films from word cues and another that turns prose into pictures for children’s books.

Also Read: UBS to cut up to 30% of the global workforce

According to Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, adding these generative AI “creative aids” to Meta’s products is a top focus for this year. Internally, Meta does make use of SAM-like technologies for tasks including tagging photographs, removing objectionable information, and choosing which articles to promote to Facebook and Instagram users.

The corporation said that the introduction of SAM will increase access to that kind of technology. A non-commercial licence will be required to download the SAM model and dataset. Users who upload their own photographs to an associated prototype must also consent to use them strictly for study.

Google

Google workers in London stage walkout over job cuts

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Following a dispute regarding layoffs, hundreds of Google workers organized a protest at the company’s London offices on Tuesday.

Google’s parent company Alphabet revealed in January that it would be laying off 12,000 workers globally, or 6% of its total workforce.

Google
Image Source: channelnewsasia.com

The decision was made in the midst of a wave of layoffs sweeping corporate America, especially in the tech industry, where companies have so far fired over 290,000 employees since the year’s beginning, according to tracking website Layoffs.fyi.

Also Read: UBS to cut up to 30% of the global workforce

The trade union Unite, which has hundreds of Google workers in the UK as members, claimed that the company had disregarded employee complaints. According to Unite regional officer Matt Whaley, “Our members are clear: Google needs to listen to its own advice of not being evil.

They and Unite will not back down until Google allows workers full union representation, engages properly with the consultation process, and treats its staff with the respect and dignity they deserve.”

Speaking anonymously out of concern for retaliation, a Google employee who was present at the walkout told Reuters that discussions with company management turned out to be “extremely frustrating.” He stated, “It has been difficult for those involved. We have a redundancy process for a reason so that employees can make their voice heard,” they said. But it feels as if our concerns have fallen on deaf ears.”

In many European countries, Google’s top management has held layoff discussions in accordance with local labor laws. Employee representatives claimed that Google had rejected their suggestions to limit job cuts, and employees at the company’s Zurich branch in Switzerland conducted a walkout akin to this one last month.

A representative for Google stated, “As we said on January 20, we’ve made the difficult decision to reduce our workforce by approximately 12,000 roles globally.

We know this is a very challenging time for our employees. In the UK, we have been constructively engaging and listening to our employees through numerous meetings, and are working hard to bring them clarity and share updates as soon as we can in adherence with all UK processes and legal requirements.”

Also Read: Google Drive now caps the number of files you can create

In the UK, Google has a workforce of over 5,000 employees. The Sundar Pichai-led corporation said it was ready for “a different economic reality” and that the CEO accepted “full responsibility” for the choices that resulted in the layoffs when it announced them in January.

In an effort to prepare for a global economic slowdown, a number of other tech firms, including Microsoft, Twitter, and Meta, among others, have fired thousands of employees. Apple Inc. reportedly cut staff within particular corporate store teams earlier this week, signaling a change in the way the company handles layoffs.