Google is consolidating the teams that focus on building artificial intelligence (AI) models across Google Research and Google DeepMind. All this work will now be done within Google DeepMind, Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet, said in a note to employees posted on the company’s website Thursday (April 18).Pichai said in the note that this move will “scale our capacity to deliver capable AI for our users, partners and customers.”It will simplify development by concentrating compute-intensive model bu ...

The storyline is playing out nicely for Netflix.The streaming company reported its latest earnings on Thursday (April 18), with Wall Street keeping a close eye on expected revenue and subscriber growth resulting from its recent password-sharing crackdown.But no one expected the dramatic results it delivered: Netflix ended the first quarter with 269.6 million paying customers globally for an audience of more than a half billion people. Operating income, from subscriber fees as well as its burgeoning ad busin ...

Meta has introduced the latest version of its artificial intelligence (AI) assistant, Meta AI, powered by the latest advances with its large language model (LLM), Meta Llama 3.The assistant is free and can be used on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger, the company said in a Thursday (April 18) press release.It’s also now available on a website, meta.ai, for use on computers, according to the release.In addition, Meta AI is being offered in more countries. Previously available only in the United Sta ...

Change Healthcare’s troubles are apparently not over.The company, which is owned by UnitedHealth, said Thursday (April 18) it had fixed an issue that had hindered medical claims processing for some customers, per a report by Reuters.According to that report, a fix had been found and was being monitored to make sure it worked. A spokesperson told Reuters that the incident may have affected “a small subset and customers may have already been communicated,” and that the company will provide additional informat ...

Cart.com is working with Walmart Marketplace to simplify onboarding and help both new and existing sellers grow their sales on that platform.Customers using Cart.com’s multichannel management platform will be able to access special incentives across Walmart Marketplace’s shipping, advertising and repricing services as well as support for onboarding and customer success, Cart.com said in a Thursday (April 18) press release.“Cart.com is powering hundreds of millions of dollars in gross merchandise value for o ...

The $35 billion deal for Capital One to buy Discover Financial Services remains on track.And in a truncated first-quarter earnings call — where the usual question-and-answer session was not part of the proceedings — Discover’s management noted that consumer loans are on the upswing. In the meantime, credit card spending has been pressured by inflation.CFO John Greene said in his prepared remarks on the Thursday (April 18) call that card sales were down 1% compared to the prior year quarter.“Sales slowed acr ...

Google is laying off an unspecified number of employees and shifting some roles to other countries as part of a continuing effort to cut costs.The employees will be able to apply for other roles at the company and some of the impacted roles will move to hubs in India, Chicago, Atlanta and Dublin, a Google spokesperson told Reuters in a report posted Wednesday (April 17).The spokesperson did not specify the number of layoffs or the positions impacted but said the layoffs are not companywide, according to the ...

Cognizant and FICO plan to launch a cloud-based real-time payments fraud prevention solution designed for North American banks and other payment service providers.The joint offering would leverage both firms’ artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies, the companies said in a Wednesday (April 17) press release.“In today’s fast-paced financial landscape, staying ahead of fraudsters is crucial,” Alexandre Graff, global head of partners and alliances at FICO, said in the release. “Our ...

Amazon is pushing sales of its Just Walk Out technology even as it pulls back on the checkout system in its own grocery stores, a move that comes as tech giants compete to own the Click-and-Mortar™ grocery experience.The company recently shifted away from the technology to smart carts in its grocery stores, but according to a blog post Wednesday (April 17) from Dilip Kumar, vice president at AWS Applications, the company maintains that the technology works for smaller stores and that it will be a viable sys ...

U.S. Bancorp said in its latest earnings report that consumers are continuing to boost their credit card loans – and though charge-offs have increased, credit quality has remained strong.Credit card loans in the quarter were $28 billion, adding more than 9% year over year, the parent company of U.S. Bank said Wednesday (April 17).“Credit quality metrics continue to develop in line with our expectations,” CEO Andrew Cecere said, adding that “loan and deposit growth remains under pressure for the industry.”De ...