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Bubble? What bubble?

Fears of an AI bubble have yet to scare off venture capitalists and private equity firms from pumping billions of dollars into the GPU-packed datacenters at the heart of the machine-learning craze.…

Nearly a quarter of Harvard Business School's 2024 M.B.A. graduates remained jobless three months after graduation, highlighting deepening employment challenges at elite U.S. business schools. The unemployment rate for Harvard M.B.A.s rose to 23% from 20% a year earlier, more than double the 10% rate in 2022. Major employers including McKinsey, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have scaled back M.B.A. recruitment, with McKinsey cutting its hires at University of Chicago's Booth School to 33 from 71. "We're not immune to the difficulties of the job market," said Kristen Fitzpatrick, who oversees career development at Harvard Business School. "Going to Harvard is not going to be a differentiator. You have to have the skills." Columbia Business School was the only top program to improve its placement rate in 2024. Median starting salaries for employed M.B.A.s remain around $175,000.

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US, Japan, South Korea vow to intensify counter efforts

North Korean blockchain bandits stole more than half a billion dollars in cryptocurrency in 2024 alone, the US, Japan, and South Korea say.…

Google is bundling its AI features into Workspace at no extra charge while raising the base subscription price by $2 to $14 per user monthly, the company said Wednesday. The move eliminates the previous $20 monthly fee for Gemini Business plan that was required to access AI tools in Gmail, Docs and other Workspace apps.

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Microsoft is relaunching its free Copilot for businesses as Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat today, complete with the ability to use AI agents. From a report: Copilot Chat is Microsoft's latest attempt to get people used to using AI at work and relying on it enough to tempt them into paying $30 per month to get the full Microsoft 365 Copilot. Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat is essentially a rebranding of what was once Bing Chat Enterprise before Microsoft rebranded it to just Copilot. It crucially now includes access to Copilot AI agents right within the chat interface -- which was previously only available in the full Microsoft 365 Copilot experience -- requiring a $30 per user per month subscription. These agents are designed to work like virtual colleagues and can do things like monitor email inboxes or automate a series of tasks. You'll be able to create and use agents using Copilot Studio, use agents that rely on web data, and even use agents grounded on work data through the Microsoft graph. The usage of agents with Copilot Chat will be priced through the Copilot Studio meter in Azure or through a pay-as-you-go option.

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She doesn't feel pity, remorse, or fear, but she'll craft a polite email message

Interview Mega HR, a Florida-based human resources startup, today launched an AI agent service called Megan that the biz claims can automate most recruiting and hiring tasks while improving communication with job applicants.…

Energy consumption set to become a key performance indicator by 2027

Most businesses rushing to adopt AI are unprepared for the energy demands it'll place on their infrastructure, and few have a handle on the power consumption of AI systems or the implications for their datacenters.…

Threat to quit still preferred to commuting on packed public transport

Years after the pandemic reshaped working practices across the world, many staff are still resisting corporate efforts to get them to return to the office preferring instead to quit in favor of a more flexible employer.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CoinTelegraph: Social media platform Meta has confirmed that its fact-checking feature on Facebook, Instagram and Threads will only be removed in the US for now, according to a Jan. 13 letter sent to Brazil's government. "Meta has already clarified that, at this time, it is terminating its independent Fact-Checking Program only in the United States, where we will test and refine the community notes [feature] before expanding to other countries," Meta told Brazil's Attorney General of the Union (AGU) in a Portuguese-translated letter. Meta's letter followed a 72-hour deadline Brazil's AGU set for Meta to clarify to whom the removal of the third-party fact verification feature would apply. [...] Brazil has expressed dissatisfaction with Meta's removal of its fact check feature, Brazil Attorney-General Jorge Messias said on Jan. 10. "Brazil has rigorous legislation to protect children and adolescents, vulnerable populations, and the business environment, and we will not allow these networks to transform the environment into digital carnage or barbarity." Last Tuesday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced an end to fact-checking on Facebook and Instagram -- a move he described as an attempt to restore free expression on its platforms. He likened his company's fact-checking process to a George Orwell novel, saying it "something out of 1984" and let to a broad belief that Meta fact-checkers "were too biased."

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Scheme involving bribes, bid rigging and insider info may have cost US taxpayers $1.3M

Four defendants have pleaded guilty in a US government IT procurement fraud case, which prosecutors claim has cost taxpayers at least $1.3 million in losses.…

Blue Ghost's first time, and second time lucky for Japanese company ispace?

SpaceX has successfully completed the 100th launch of a Falcon rocket from pad 39A and sent two landers on their way to the Moon.…

Collective Proceedings Order seeks £1.5B from iGiant

Seven weeks of court action began this week as a case over alleged breaches of competition law by Apple is heard at the UK's Competition Appeal Tribunal (CAT).…

Rising costs blamed, although any excuse to do more with less

British companies are looking to AI as a way of cutting investment in staff, according to new research.…

hackingbear shares a report from the Associated Press: As the threat of a TikTok ban looms, U.S. TikTok users are flocking to the Chinese social media app Xiaohongshu -- making it the top downloaded app in the U.S. Xiaohongshu, which in English means "Little Red Book" is a Chinese social media app that combines e-commerce, short video and posting functions, enticing mostly Chinese young women from mainland China and regions with with a Chinese diaspora such as Malaysia and Taiwan who use it as a de-facto search engine for product, travel and restaurant recommendations, as well as makeup and skincare tutorials. After the justices seemed inclined to let the law stand, masses of TikTok users began creating accounts on Xiaohongshu, including hashtags such as #tiktokrefugee or #tiktok to their posts. " I like your makeup," a Xiaohongshu user from Beijing comments one of the posts by Alexis Garman, a 21-year-old TikTok user in Oklahoma with nearly 20,000 followers, and Garman thanks them in a reply. A user from the southwestern province of Sichuan commented "I am your Chinese spy please surrender your personal information or the photographs of your cat (or dog)." "TikTok possibly getting banned doesn't just take away an app, it takes away jobs, friends and community," Garman said. "Personally, the friends and bond I have with my followers will now be gone." Xiaohongshu doesn't even have an English user interface. Reuters reports: In only two days, more than 700,000 new users joined Xiaohongshu, a person close to the company told Reuters. Xiaohongshu [which was founded in 2013 and is backed by investors such as Alibaba, Tencent and Sequoia], did not immediately respond to a request for comment. U.S. downloads of RedNote were up more than 200% year-over-year this week, and 194% from the week prior, according to estimates from app data research firm Sensor Tower. The second most-popular free app on Apple's App Store list on Tuesday, Lemon8, another social media app owned by ByteDance, experienced a similar surge last month, with downloads jumping by 190% in December to about 3.4 million.

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Good ol' spreadsheet data could benefit from 'revolutionary' approach to ML inferences

Move over ChatGPT and DALL-E: Spreadsheet data is getting its own foundation machine learning model, allowing users to immediately make inferences about new data points for data sets with up to 10,000 rows and 500 columns.…

Azure Local is about hybrid management, not hybrid resource pools, and is catching up with virtual rivals

Microsoft’s latest on-prem Azure offering is more about unified management than hybrid cloud as an enabler of elasticity or flexible resource pools.…

Parallels Desktop now supports running 64-bit x86 operating systems on Apple Silicon Macs through its proprietary emulation engine, enabling users to run traditional Windows and Linux distributions. However, performance is said to be "really slow." How-To Geek reports: The latest Parallels Desktop 20.2 update adds early support for x86 emulation on Apple Silicon, allowing traditional x86 PC operating systems to work on newer Mac computers. There were already apps like UTM that could do it (most of them are based on QEMU), but this feature uses Parallels' "proprietary emulation engine" paired with Apple's built-in hypervisor. [...] Parallels on Apple Silicon can now "run existing x86_64 Windows 10, Windows 11*, Windows Server 2019/2022, and some Linux distributives with UEFI BIOS via Parallels Emulator." You can also create new Windows 10 21H2 and Windows Server 2022 virtual machines if needed. There are some big limitations. You can only run 64-bit x86 operating systems -- sorry, FreeDOS fans -- but those 64-bit operating systems can run 32-bit applications. There's also no support for USB devices, nested virtualization (so WSL2 won't work), or the Parallels hypervisor. Performance will also be "really slow," since x86 instructions have to be translated to ARM. The company said, "Windows boot time is about 2-7 minutes, depending on your hardware. Windows operating system responsiveness is also low."

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No such problems at Airbus, which cruised at a high level and shipped almost two planes a day last year

Beleaguered aerospace outfit Boeing has revealed how many commercial aircraft it shipped in 2024, and the news isn’t good.…

This'll be good for you, don't you worry, CFO tells venture fund while pulling back the sling

Stricken silicon giant Intel has decided it doesn’t want to be the sole investor in its venture capital operation, so will spin it out for others to plow money into.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Hill: The number of deaths in the U.S. is expected to exceed the number of births by 2033, according to the Congressional Budget Office's (CBO) annual 30-year projection of the U.S. population released on Monday. That estimation comes seven years earlier than what the CBO estimated in its 30-year population outlook released last year. At that time, in January 2024, the CBO projected deaths to outpace births by 2040. The CBO's 2025 report projected lower population growth over the next three decades than it did in its 2024 demographic outlook. The CBO's population estimate for 2025 is 350 million, a slight increase from the 346 million it predicted for 2025 last year. But its projection for 2054 -- 372 million people -- has decreased since last year, when the CBO projected the population would be 383 million in 2054. The rate of growth projected over the next three decades -- 0.2 percent -- is significantly slower than the rate seen in the prior five decades, from 1975 to 2024, when the population grew at 0.9 percent. The growth rate over the next three decades is also expected to slow. From 2025 to 2035, the population is expected to grow an average of 0.4 percent a year. From 2036 to 2055, however, the growth rate is projected to be 0.1 percent. The CBO attributes this projected slow rate of growth to a variety of factors, including lower fertility, an aging population and lower immigration.

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