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Microsoft is promoting Judson Althoff, currently executive vice president and chief commercial officer at Microsoft, to a new role as CEO of its commercial business. From a report: It's the latest shakeup inside the company, as Microsoft navigates what CEO Satya Nadella calls a "tectonic AI platform shift." It's also a move that will allow Nadella to focus on more technical work at Microsoft, while still remaining overall CEO. In an internal memo to employees today, Nadella announced Althoff's promotion and said it's linked with the need for Microsoft to reinvent itself in the AI era and "bring together sales, marketing, operations, and engineering to drive growth and strengthen our position as the partner of choice for AI transformation." Althoff has led Microsoft's global sales organization for the past nine years, helping the company build out its Microsoft Customer and Partner Solutions (MCAPS) division. He will now also be responsible for the operations and marketing teams that help sell Microsoft's software and services to businesses, but not the engineering teams that help build them.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Immigration anxieties and a challenging job market have sparked an online backlash over China's latest attempt at attracting global talent -- a new visa program announced in August. The program, which was rolled out on Wednesday with the aim of attracting foreign professionals, will also test how China balances its immigration policy with its pursuit of technological ambitions. Under the new rules, young graduates -- in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics or STEM -- no longer need backing from a local employer and can enjoy more flexibility in terms for entry frequency and duration of stay. The keyword "K-visa" -- as China's new visa category is called -- was among the top searches on social media site Weibo for days, before chatter about National Day traffic jams pushed it off the charts as millions hit the road for a week-long holiday. Chinese social media users argue that the new visa tilts the playing field toward foreign graduates at the expense of those educated in China. Others on Weibo warned that without employer sponsorship, the program could invite fraudulent applications and open the door to a surge in arrivals from developing countries, piling pressure on an already strained labor market.

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In India, Bollywood stars are asking judges to protect their voice and persona in the era of AI. From a report: One famous couple's biggest target is Google's YouTube. Abhishek Bachchan and his wife Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, known for her iconic Cannes Film Festival red carpet appearances, have asked a judge to remove and prohibit creation of AI videos infringing their intellectual property rights. But in a more far-reaching request, they also want Google ordered to have safeguards to ensure such YouTube videos uploaded anyway do not train other AI platforms, legal papers reviewed by Reuters show. A handful of Bollywood celebrities have begun asserting their "personality rights" in Indian courts over the last few years, as the country has no explicit protection for those like in many U.S. states. But the Bachchans' lawsuits are the most high-profile to date about the interplay of personality rights and the risk that misleading or deepfake YouTube videos could train other AI models. The actors argue that YouTube's content and third-party training policy is concerning as it lets users consent to sharing of a video they created to train rival AI models, risking further proliferation of misleading content online, according to near-identical filings from Abhishek and Aishwarya dated September 6, which are not public.

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The mass adoption of ChatGPT is yet to have a big disruptive impact on US jobs, contradicting claims by chief executives and tech bosses that AI is already upending labour markets. Financial Times: Research from economists at the Yale University Budget Lab and the Brookings Institution think-tank indicates that, since OpenAI launched its popular chatbot in November 2022, generative AI has not had a more dramatic effect on employment than earlier technological breakthroughs. The research, based on an analysis of official data on the labour market and figures from the tech industry on usage and exposure to AI, also finds little evidence that the tools are putting people out of work. The study follows widespread concern that generative AI will spark job losses -- and even the disappearance of certain types of work -- amid a US labour market that has recently weakened.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Lufthansa announced plans to cut 4,000 roles on Monday as it aims to increase profitability and lean on AI to drive efficiency. The airline group said it will eliminate a total of 4,000 FTE, or full-time equivalent, roles worldwide by 2030. The company is targeting primarily admin roles, the majority of which will be affected at its home base in Germany, as part of a broader restructuring strategy. "The Lufthansa Group is reviewing which activities will no longer be necessary in the future, for example due to duplication of work. In particular, the profound changes brought about by digitalization and the increased use of artificial intelligence will lead to greater efficiency in many areas and processes," the company said in a release issued during its Capital Markets Day in Munich. CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski said earlier this year that artificial intelligence had partially helped to shrink the company's headcount by 40% down from 5,000 employees to almost 3,000.

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alternative_right shares a report from Phys.org: For the first time, a new study has tested the effectiveness of trigger warnings in real life scenarios, revealing that the vast majority of young adults choose to ignore them. A new Flinders University study has found that nearly 90% of young people who saw a trigger warning still chose to view the content, saying that they did so out of curiosity, rather than because they felt emotionally prepared or protected. The findings published in the Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry aligned with a growing body of lab-based research suggesting that trigger warnings rarely lead to the avoidance of potentially distressing material.

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Independent UK bookshops will now be able to sell ebooks via a new platform (Bookshop.org's expansion), keeping 100% of profits and offering a non-Amazon way to reach digital readers. "Bookshops now have an additional tool in their fight against Amazon," said Nicole Vanderbilt, managing director of Bookshop.org UK. "Digital readers don't depend on Amazon's monopoly any more, now that they can find ebooks at the same price on Bookshop.org." The Guardian reports: Bookshop.org launched in the UK in November 2020 as a platform for independent bookshops to sell physical books. Bookshops receive 30% of the cover price from each sale they generate; so far, the UK site has generated 4.5 million pounds for independent bookshops. Customers will also now be able to buy ebooks through a bookshop of their choice. Profits from orders without a specified bookshop will be added to a shared pool, which will be distributed among all participating bookshops on the platform. [...] The platform will launch with a catalogue of more than a million ebooks from all major publishers. It will be available online via a web browser and through the Bookshop.org apps on Apple and Android. "Due to Amazon's proprietary digital rights management [DRM] software and publishers' DRM requirements, it's not currently possible to buy DRM-protected ebooks from Bookshop.org or local bookshops and read them on your Kindle," said Bookshop.org. However, the site is working with the e-reader company Kobo to support Kobo devices "later this year," and longer term would "love to offer our own eInk device."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: US scientists have, for the first time, made early-stage human embryos by manipulating DNA taken from people's skin cells and then fertilizing it with sperm. The technique could overcome infertility due to old age or disease, by using almost any cell in the body as the starting point for life. It could even allow same-sex couples to have a genetically related child. [...] The Oregon Health and Science University research team's technique takes the nucleus -- which houses a copy of the entire genetic code needed to build the body -- out of a skin cell. This is then placed inside a donor egg that has been stripped of its genetic instructions. So far, the technique is like the one used to create Dolly the Sheep -- the world's first cloned mammal -- born back in 1996. However, this egg is not ready to be fertilized by sperm as it already contains a full suite of chromosomes. You inherit 23 of these bundles of DNA from each of your parents for a total of 46, which the egg already has. So the next stage is to persuade the egg to discard half of its chromosomes in a process the researchers have termed "mitomeiosis" (the word is a fusion of mitosis and meiosis, the two ways cells divide). The study, published in the journal Nature Communications, showed 82 functional eggs were made. These were fertilized with sperm and some progressed onto the early stages of embryos development. None were developed beyond the six-day-stage. The technique is far from polished as the egg randomly chooses which chromosomes to discard. It needs to end up with one of each of the 23 types to prevent disease, but ends up with two of some and none of others. There is also a poor success rate (around 9%) and the chromosomes miss an important process where they rearrange their DNA, called crossing over. Prof Mitalipov, a world-renowned pioneer in the field, told me: "We have to perfect it. "Eventually, I think that's where the future will go because there are more and more patients that cannot have children."

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