An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: More than 500 Amazon workers reportedly signed a letter to Amazon Web Services' (AWS) CEO this week, sharing their outrage over Amazon's upcoming return-to-office (RTO) policy that will force workers into offices five days per week. In September, Amazon announced that starting in 2025, workers will no longer be allowed to work remotely twice a week. At the time, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said the move would make it easier for workers "to learn, model, practice, and strengthen our culture." Reuters reported today that it viewed a letter from a swath of workers sent to AWS chief Matt Garman on Wednesday regarding claims he reportedly made during an all-hands meeting this month. Garman reportedly told attendees that 9 out of 10 employees he spoke with support the five-day in-office work policy. The letter called the statements "inconsistent with the experiences of many employees" and "misrepresenting the realities of working at Amazon," Reuters reported. "We were appalled to hear the non-data-driven explanation you gave for Amazon imposing a five-day in-office mandate,'" the letter reportedly stated. [...]

In the letter, hundreds of Amazon workers reportedly lamented what they believe was a lack of third-party data shared in making the RTO policy. It said that Garman's statements "break the trust of your employees who have not only personal experience that shows the benefits of remote work but have seen the extensive data which supports that experience." The letter included stories from 12 anonymous employees about medical, familial, and other challenges that the new RTO policy could create. The letter also reportedly pointed out the obstacles that a five-day in-office work policy has on groups of protected workers, like those providing childcare. The new policy will not align with Amazon's "'Strive to be Earth's Best Employer' leadership principle,'" the letter said. In a statement, an Amazon spokesperson told Reuters that Amazon's benefits include commuter benefits, elder care, and subsidized parking fees.

Amazon, in what it described as a "difficult decision," is winding down Kindle Vella and shutting it down completely in February 2025. From a report: When the company launched the serialized story platform in 2021, it said Vella was a way for readers to discover new fictional stories and a new way for authors to earn from the Kindle Direct Publishing service. But it hasn't caught on as it had hoped, Amazon explains on its website, and it has decided to throw in the towel three years after Vella's debut.

Authors can only publish stories on Vella until December 4, which is also the last day readers can purchase tokens. While readers will no longer be able to purchase tokens after that, they can continue using those tokens to unlock episodes until the program closes in February. The good news for those who've been following specific authors or stories on Vella is that they won't lose their access to whatever episodes they've already unlocked even after the platform shuts down.

First we had friends. Then we had influencers. And if Mark Zuckerberg is correct, the next big thing in our social media feeds will be AI generated content. Lots of it. Fortune: Zuckerberg described our future feeds during Facebook-parent company Meta's third quarter earnings conference call on Wednesday, describing it as a natural evolution. "I think were going to add a whole new category of content which is AI generated or AI summarized content, or existing content pulled together by AI in some way," the Meta CEO said. "And I think that that's gonna be very exciting for Facebook and Instagram and maybe Threads, or other kinds of feed experiences over time."

Zuckerberg touted the company's Llama large language model and the success of products it powers, such as the Meta AI chatbot that is now used by more than 500 million users every month. But Llama will increasingly play a role across Meta's business, Zuckerberg said, including tools for business customers and advertisers. As AI tools become more widespread, AI content will proliferate within social media feeds. Such feeds are actively being worked on inside Meta, Zuckerberg noted. "It's something we're starting to test different things around." "I don't know if we know what's exactly going to work really well yet, but some things are really promising," he added. "I have high confidence that over the next several years, this will be one of the important trends and one of the important applications."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Siemens will buy Altair Engineering for $10.6 billion, the American engineering software firm said on Wednesday, as the German company seeks to strengthen its presence in the fast-growing industrial software market. The offer price of $113 per share represents a premium of about 18.7% to Altair's closing price on Oct. 21, a day before Reuters first reported that the company was exploring a sale. The deal for Michigan-based Altair is Siemens's biggest acquisition since Siemens Healthineers bought medical device maker Varian Medical Systems for $16.4 million in 2020. [...]

The transaction is anticipated to add to Siemens' earnings per share in about two years from the deal's closing, which is expected in the second half of 2025. It will also increase Siemens' digital business revenue by about 8%, adding approximately 600 million euros ($651.36 million) to the company's digital business revenue in fiscal 2023. The transaction would have a revenue impact of about $500 million per year in the mid-term and more than $1 billion per year in the long term, Siemens said.

Ars Technica's Samuel Axon reports on Microsoft's quarterly earnings: Some investors have been uneasy about the company's aggressive spending on AI, while others have demanded it. During this quarter, Microsoft reported that it spent $20 billion on capital expenditures, nearly double what it had spent during the same quarter last year. However, the company satisfied both groups of investors, as it revealed it has still been doing well in the short term amid those long-term investments. The fiscal quarter, which covered July through September, saw overall sales rise 16 percent year over year to $65.6 billion. Despite all that AI spending, profits were up 11 percent, too. The growth was largely driven by Azure and cloud services, which saw a 33 percent increase in revenue. The company attributed 12 percent of that to AI-related products and services.

Meanwhile, Microsoft's gaming division continued to challenge long-standing assumptions that hardware is king, with Xbox content and services posting 61 percent increased year-over-year revenue despite a 29 percent drop in hardware sales. [...] The company attributed 53 points of that to the recent $69 billion Activision acquisition.

The Register's Tobias Mann reports: Supermicro shares took a nose dive on Wednesday, sliding more than 30 percent after the accounting firm hired to review its reporting practices resigned after determining they were just a bit too sketchy to warrant the risk. "We are resigning due to information that has recently come to our attention which has led us to no longer be able to rely on management's and audit committee's representations," Ernst & Young wrote in a resignation letter, which also raised alarm bells regarding Supermicro CEO Charles Liang's influence over the board. The concerns, disclosed in a recent SEC filing, only serve to stoke the fires of controversy surrounding Supermicro, which, after more than two months, still hasn't filed its 10-K annual report and faces the possibility of being de-listed from the Nasdaq as a result. [...]

EY's resignation apparently came months after it raised concerns with management regarding the "governance, transparency, and completeness of" Supermicro's financial reporting, and warned that the release of the server maker's annual report was at significant risk. In response, Supermicro's board appointed an independent special committee and hired Cooley and forensic accounting firm Secretariat Advisors to review its internal controls and governance procedures. It seems EY was not too pleased with the special committee's findings which apparently raised yet more red flags. "After receiving additional information through the Review process, EY informed the special committee that the additional information EY received raised questions, including about whether the Company demonstrates a commitment to integrity and ethical values," the SEC filing reads.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Intercept: Less than a year after OpenAI quietly signaled it wanted to do business with the Pentagon, a procurement document obtained by The Intercept shows U.S. Africa Command, or AFRICOM, believes access to OpenAI's technology is "essential" for its mission. The September 30 document lays out AFRICOM's rationale for buying cloud computing services directly from Microsoft as part of its $9 billion Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability contract, rather than seeking another provider on the open market. "The USAFRICOM operates in a dynamic and evolving environment where IT plays a critical role in achieving mission objectives," the document reads, including "its vital mission in support of our African Mission Partners [and] USAFRICOM joint exercises."

The document, labeled Controlled Unclassified Information, is marked as FEDCON, indicating it is not meant to be distributed beyond government or contractors. It shows AFRICOM's request was approved by the Defense Information Systems Agency. While the price of the purchase is redacted, the approval document notes its value is less than $15 million. Like the rest of the Department of Defense, AFRICOM -- which oversees the Pentagon's operations across Africa, including local military cooperation with U.S. allies there -- has an increasing appetite for cloud computing. The Defense Department already purchases cloud computing access from Microsoft via the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability project. This new document reflects AFRICOM's desire to bypass contracting red tape and buy immediatelyMicrosoft Azure cloud services, including OpenAI software, without considering other vendors. AFRICOM states that the "ability to support advanced AI/ML workloads is crucial. This includes services for search, natural language processing, [machine learning], and unified analytics for data processing." And according to AFRICOM, Microsoft's Azure cloud platform, which includes a suite of tools provided by OpenAI, is the only cloud provider capable of meeting its needs.

Microsoft began selling OpenAI's GPT-4 large language model to defense customers in June 2023. Earlier this year, following the revelation that OpenAI had changed its mind on military work, the company announced a cybersecurity collaboration with DARPA in January and said its tools would be used for an unspecified veteran suicide prevention initiative. In April, Microsoft pitched the Pentagon on using DALL-E, OpenAI's image generation tool, for command and control software. But the AFRICOM document marks the first confirmed purchase of OpenAI's products by a U.S. combatant command whose mission is one of killing. OpenAI's stated corporate mission remains "to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity." The AFRICOM document marks the first confirmed purchase of OpenAI's products by a U.S. combatant command whose mission is one of killing. "Without access to Microsoft's integrated suite of AI tools and services, USAFRICOM would face significant challenges in analyzing and extracting actionable insights from vast amounts of data," reads the AFRICOM document. "This could lead to delays in decision-making, compromised situational awareness, and decreased agility in responding to dynamic and evolving threats across the African continent." The document contains little information about how exactly the OpenAI tools will be used.

Simon Sharwood, reporting for The Register: Organisers of WordCamps, community-organized events for WordPress users, have been ordered to take down some social media posts and share their login credentials for social networks. The order to share creds came from an employee of Automattic, the WordPress host whose CEO happens to be Matt Mullenweg, co-creator of WordPress.

A letter sent to WordCamp organizers explains that the creds are needed due to "recurrent issues with new organizing teams losing access to the event's social media accounts." So far, so sensible. But the requirement to share creds comes in the middle of a nasty spat in the WordPress community, sparked by Mullenweg's efforts to have rival hosting biz WP Engine license the WordPress trademark or devote more staff to working on the open source content management system's code.

Dropbox is letting go 20% of its workforce as the cloud company undergoes what CEO Drew Houston calls a "transitional period." From a report: In a letter to staff, Houston said that the reduction in headcount would impact 528 people. The goal, he added, was to make cuts in areas where Dropbox has "over-invested" while designing a "flatter, more efficient" team structure.

"As CEO, I take full responsibility for this decision and the circumstances that led to it, and I'm truly sorry to those impacted by this change," he wrote. "This market is moving fast and investors are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into this space. This both validates the opportunity we've been pursuing and underscores the need for even more urgency, even more aggressive investment, and decisive action." According to a filing with the SEC, Dropbox estimates it'll lay out total cash expenditures of $63 million to $68 million on the layoffs, primarily in the form of severance and benefits, and recognize $47 million to $52 million of incremental expense.

Visa customers with eligible debit cards will be able to deposit funds into their Coinbase accounts -- sometimes instantly -- via a partnership announced by the payments giant and crypto exchange. From a report: Coinbase already has millions of connections to customers' debit cards but this new development allows for the real-time flow of funds for customers in the US and European Union, according to the Tuesday statement.

Eligible Visa debit card holders can now "take advantage of trading opportunities day and night," said Yanilsa Gonzalez Ore, head of the Visa Direct business for North America. Visa, which powers the Coinbase debit card, said customers will also be able to buy cryptocurrencies on Coinbase with an eligible debit card and cash out their money from the platform to a bank account, also via the card.

In Reddit's third-quarter earnings results, the company reported a profit of $29.9 million, with $348.4 million in revenue -- a 68% increase year over year. The Verge reports: The company hasn't been profitable at any point in its nearly 20-year history. Since going public, Reddit lost $575 million during its first quarter on the market, but it decreased that loss to $10 million last quarter, and is now finally in the green. Reddit also grew to 97.2 million daily users over the past few months, marking a 47 percent increase from the same time last year. That number exceeded 100 million users on some days during the quarter, Reddit says.

Reddit's advertising revenue grew to $315.1 million, while "other" revenue reached $33.2 million on account of "data licensing agreements signed earlier this year." Both Google and OpenAI have cut deals with Reddit to train their AI models on its posts.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son reiterated his belief in the coming of artificial super intelligence (ASI) on Tuesday, saying it would require hundreds of billions of dollars of investment to realize. Artificial super intelligence will be 10,000 times smarter than a human brain and will exist by 2035, Son told an audience of global business, technology and finance leaders at a conference in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Son said he is saving up funds "so I can make the next big move," but did not provide any details as to his investment plans. He predicted that generative AI will require $900 trillion dollars in cumulative capital expenditure in data centers and chips in the future, adding that he thought chip maker Nvidia was undervalued on this basis.

OpenAI is partnering with Broadcom and TSMC to design its first in-house AI chip while supplementing its infrastructure with AMD chips, aiming to diversify its reliance on Nvidia GPUs. "The company has dropped the ambitious foundry plans for now due to the costs and time needed to build a network, and plans instead to focus on in-house chip design effort," adds Reuters. From the report: OpenAI has been working for months with Broadcom to build its first AI chip focusing on inference, according to sources. Demand right now is greater for training chips, but analysts have predicted the need for inference chips could surpass them as more AI applications are deployed. Broadcom helps companies including Alphabet unit Google fine-tune chip designs for manufacturing and also supplies parts of the design that help move information on and off the chips quickly. This is important in AI systems where tens of thousands of chips are strung together to work in tandem. OpenAI is still determining whether to develop or acquire other elements for its chip design, and may engage additional partners, said two of the sources.

The company has assembled a chip team of about 20 people, led by top engineers who have previously built Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) at Google, including Thomas Norrie and Richard Ho. Sources said that through Broadcom, OpenAI has secured manufacturing capacity with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company to make its first custom-designed chip in 2026. They said the timeline could change. Currently, Nvidia's GPUs hold over 80% market share. But shortages and rising costs have led major customers like Microsoft, Meta, and now OpenAI, to explore in-house or external alternatives.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: LinkedIn, the social platform used by professionals to connect with others in their field, hunt for jobs, and develop skills, is taking the wraps off its latest effort to build artificial intelligence tools for users. Hiring Assistant is a new product designed to take on a wide array of recruitment tasks, from ingesting scrappy notes and thoughts to turn into longer job descriptions, through to sourcing candidates and engaging with them. LinkedIn is describing Hiring Assistant as a milestone in its AI trajectory: it is, per the Microsoft-owned company, its first "AI agent" And one that happens to be targeting one of LinkedIn's most lucrative categories of users (recruiters).

LinkedIn said the AI assistant is now live with a "select group" of customers (large enterprises such as AMD, Canva, Siemens and Zurich Insurance among them). It's slated to be rolling out more widely in the coming months. [...] "It's designed to take on a recruiter's most repetitive task so they can spend more time on the most impactful part of their jobs," Hari Srinivasan, LinkedIn's VP of product, said in an interview -- "a big statement," he admitted. The product includes the ability to upload full job descriptions, or just note what you want it to have, along with job postings that you like the look of from other companies or roles. In turn, that becomes a list of qualifications you're looking for, as well as an initial pipeline of candidates that you can interact with -- to look for more potential hires that are similar to some, or less like others -- with algorithms designed to search based on skills rather than other indicators (such as where a person lives or went to school), per Srinivasan.

The AI assistant also integrates with third-party application tracking systems, although ultimately, the whole system is trained on LinkedIn data, which spans 1 billion users, 68 million companies and 41,000 skills. LinkedIn said Hiring Assistant is due to get more features soon, such as messaging and scheduling support for interviews, as well as handle follow-ups when candidates have questions before or after interviews. Basically the aim is for it to cover a lot of (time-consuming) admin-style tasks, plus take on some of the thinking, that recruiters have to do daily. Second, unlike many of the other AI features that LinkedIn has released, Hiring Assistant is very squarely aimed at LinkedIn's B2B business, the products it sells to the recruitment industry. "We're really focused on making Hiring Assistant great," said Erran Berger, VP of engineering, in an interview. "This is all bleeding edge, and I mean everything from the experience and how our users are going to interact with it, to the technology that backs it. And so we're really focused on nailing that a lot of the technology we've built is applicable to problems that we're trying to solve for our members and customers. But right now, you know, we really just want to nail this, and then we can figure out where we go from there."

Cryptocurrency firm Consensys said on Tuesday it would cut 20% of its total workforce, citing broader macroeconomic pressures and ongoing regulatory challenges facing the industry. From a report: The decision will impact 162 of a total of 828 employees at the company, Consensys CEO Joseph Lubin told Reuters in a mailed statement. Crypto companies have frequently accused the Securities and Exchange Commission of regulatory overreach and exceeding its jurisdiction, while the agency argues that the industry is disregarding securities laws designed to protect investors and other market participants.

"Multiple cases with the SEC, including ours, represent meaningful jobs and productive investment lost due to the SEC's abuse of power and Congress's inability to rectify the problem," Lubin said in a blog post, opens new tab. "Such attacks from the U.S. government will end up costing many companies that have been investigated, sued, or sent Wells Notices, many millions of dollars," he added.

Longtime Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares a report from the Associated Press: Tech behemoth OpenAI has touted its artificial intelligence-powered transcription tool Whisper as having near "human level robustness and accuracy." But Whisper has a major flaw: It is prone to making up chunks of text or even entire sentences, according to interviews with more than a dozen software engineers, developers and academic researchers. Those experts said some of the invented text -- known in the industry as hallucinations -- can include racial commentary, violent rhetoric and even imagined medical treatments. Experts said that such fabrications are problematic because Whisper is being used in a slew of industries worldwide to translate and transcribe interviews, generate text in popular consumer technologies and create subtitles for videos.

The full extent of the problem is difficult to discern, but researchers and engineers said they frequently have come across Whisper's hallucinations in their work. A University of Michigan researcher conducting a study of public meetings, for example, said he found hallucinations in eight out of every 10 audio transcriptions he inspected, before he started trying to improve the model. A machine learning engineer said he initially discovered hallucinations in about half of the over 100 hours of Whisper transcriptions he analyzed. A third developer said he found hallucinations in nearly every one of the 26,000 transcripts he created with Whisper. The problems persist even in well-recorded, short audio samples. A recent study by computer scientists uncovered 187 hallucinations in more than 13,000 clear audio snippets they examined. That trend would lead to tens of thousands of faulty transcriptions over millions of recordings, researchers said. Further reading: AI Tool Cuts Unexpected Deaths In Hospital By 26%, Canadian Study Finds

JPMorgan Chase is suing customers who exploited an ATM glitch that allowed them to withdraw funds before a check bounced. CNBC reports: The bank on Monday filed lawsuits in at least three federal courts, taking aim at some of the people who withdrew the highest amounts in the so-called infinite money glitch that went viral on TikTok and other social media platforms in late August. [...] JPMorgan, the biggest U.S. bank by assets, is investigating thousands of possible cases related to the "infinite money glitch," though it hasn't disclosed the scope of associated losses. Despite the waning use of paper checks as digital forms of payment gain popularity, they're still a major avenue for fraud, resulting in $26.6 billion in losses globally last year, according to Nasdaq's Global Financial Crime Report.

The infinite money glitch episode highlights the risk that social media can amplify vulnerabilities discovered at a financial institution. Videos began circulating in late August showing people celebrating the withdrawal of wads of cash from Chase ATMs shortly after bad checks were deposited. Normally, banks only make available a fraction of the value of a check until it clears, which takes several days. JPMorgan says it closed the loophole a few days after it was discovered.

The lawsuits are likely to be just the start of a wave of litigation meant to force customers to repay their debts and signal broadly that the bank won't tolerate fraud, according to the people familiar. JPMorgan prioritized cases with large dollar amounts and indications of possible ties to criminal groups, they said. The civil cases are separate from potential criminal investigations; JPMorgan says it has also referred cases to law enforcement officials across the country. "Fraud is a crime that impacts everyone and undermines trust in the banking system," JPMorgan spokesman Drew Pusateri said in a statement to CNBC. "We're pursuing these cases and actively cooperating with law enforcement to make sure if someone is committing fraud against Chase and its customers, they're held accountable."

AT&T has signed a $1 billion multi-year deal with Corning to acquire fiber and connectivity solutions. Reuters reports: With the U.S. wireless market facing a slowdown, telecom companies such as AT&T and rival Verizon have doubled down on their high-speed internet businesses, an area that has long been dominated by broadband companies such as Comcast. Demand has also been growing for AT&T's plans that allow customers to combine its high-speed fiber data with its wireless phone service for a discount. In the third quarter, AT&T reported 28.3 million fiber passings, or the number of potential customer locations a fiber network passes by. It remains on track to pass more than 30 million fiber passings by the end of 2025.

A commercial military simulation software, originally inspired by Tom Clancy novels, has become an unexpected tool for military training across NATO forces and defense analysts worldwide. Command: Professional Edition, developed by Britain's Slitherine Software, has secured contracts with the U.S. Air Force and British Strategic Command, while Taiwanese analysts use it to war-game potential conflicts with China.

The software's success stems from its vast database of military equipment and capabilities, compiled through contributions from its million-strong user base. Marine Corps University's wargaming director Tim Barrick employs the software to train officers, noting its effectiveness in developing tactical creativity. "These are not simple problems," said Barrick, a retired Marine colonel, told WSJ.

A fascinating excerpt from the report: Command's British publisher, Slitherine Software, stumbled into popularity. The family business got started around 2000 selling retail CD-ROM games like Legion, involving ancient Roman military campaigns. When Defense Department officials in 2016 first contacted Slitherine, which is based in an old house in a leafy London suburb, its father-and-son managers were so stunned they thought the call might be a prank. "Are you taking the piss?" J.D. McNeil, the father, recalled asking near the end of the conversation.

Italian technology firm Bending Spoons has emerged as an unconventional private equity player, acquiring struggling tech companies and dramatically restructuring them for profitability, most notably with its purchase of note-taking app Evernote.

The Milan-based company, valued at $2.6 billion, has acquired six companies since 2022, including WeTransfer and Meetup's assets. CEO Luca Ferrari has told investors the company could deploy up to $2 billion for future acquisitions. Bending Spoons typically targets subscription-based software companies with steady cash flow, implementing steep price hikes and significant staff reductions post-acquisition.

At Evernote, the company dismissed over half the workforce and increased annual subscription costs by 63% to $130. The strategy appears to be working. Bending Spoons reports annual sales have surged to $700 million from $162 million in 2022, with Evernote turning profitable earlier this year.