Microsoft has changed its policy to ban U.S. police departments from using generative AI through the Azure OpenAI Service, the company’s fully managed, enterprise-focused wrapper around OpenAI technologies.Language added Wednesday to the terms of service for Azure OpenAI Service prohibits integrations with Azure OpenAI Service from being used “by or for” police departments in the U.S., including integrations with OpenAI’s text- and speech-analyzing models.A separate new bullet point covers “any law enforcem ...

Ahead of Google’s annual I/O developer conference in May, the tech giant has laid off staff across key teams like Flutter, Dart, Python and others, according to reports from affected employees shared on social media. Google confirmed the layoffs to TechCrunch, but not the specific teams, roles or how many people were let go.“As we’ve said, we’re responsibly investing in our company’s biggest priorities and the significant opportunities ahead,” said Google spokesperson Alex García-Kummert. “To best position ...

UnitedHealth Group chief executive officer Andrew Witty told senators on Wednesday that the company has now enabled multi-factor authentication on all the company’s systems exposed to the internet in response to the recent cyberattack against its subsidiary Change Healthcare.The lack of multi-factor authentication was at the center of the ransomware attack that hit Change Healthcare earlier this year, which impacted pharmacies, hospitals, and doctor’s offices across the United States. Multi-factor authentic ...

Pour one out for CodeWhisperer, Amazon’s AI-powered assistive coding tool. As of today, it’s kaput — sort of.CodeWhisperer is now Q Developer, a part of Amazon’s Q family of business-oriented generative AI chatbots that also extends to the newly-announced Q Business. Available through AWS, Q Developer helps with some of the tasks developers do in the course of their daily work, like debugging and upgrading apps, troubleshooting, and performing security scans — much like CodeWhisperer did.In an interview wit ...

Tesla has gutted its charging team in a new round of layoffs, despite recently winning over major automakers like Ford and General Motors and making its connector the defacto standard in North America.CEO Elon Musk announced the new layoffs in an overnight email to executives, first reported by The Information, in which he said he wants leaders to be “absolutely hard core about headcount and cost reduction,” as he ordered them to cut more employees who “don’t obviously pass the excellent, necessary and trus ...

Meta’s Threads social network passed the 150 million monthly users mark recently, but the company is not slowing down its growth engine. To increase engagement, the social media giant is running a limited-time bonus program for Threads.Over the last few days, many accounts have posted about this program. The company confirmed to TechCrunch about a limited-time invite-only program for creators, which began testing in March. Meta said that invited creators will have “individualized” requirements for bonuses.O ...

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration closed a long-standing investigation into Tesla’s Autopilot driver assistance system after reviewing hundreds of crashes involving its misuse, including 13 that were fatal.At the same time, NHTSA is opening a new investigation to evaluate whether the Autopilot recall fix that Tesla implemented in December is effective enough.NHTSA’s Office of Defects Investigation said in documents released Friday that it completed “an extensive body of work” which turned u ...

Google Cloud, Google’s cloud computing division, had a blockbuster fiscal quarter, blowing past analysts’ expectations and sending Google parent company Alphabet’s stock soaring 13%+ in after-hours trading.Google Cloud revenue jumped 28% to $9.57 billion in Q1 2024, bolstered by the demand for generative AI tools that rely on cloud infrastructure, services and apps. That continues a positive trend for the division, which in the previous quarter (Q4 2023) notched year-on-year growth of 25.66%.Google Cloud’s ...

Meta’s tracking ads business could be facing further legal blows in the European Union: An influential advisor to the bloc’s top court affirmed Thursday that the region’s privacy laws limits on how long people’s data can be used for targeted advertising.In the non-legally binding opinion, Advocate General Athanasios Rantos said use of personal data for advertising must be limited.This is important because Meta’s tracking ads business relies upon ingesting vast amounts of personal data to build profiles of i ...

Nvidia is acquiring Run:ai, a startup that makes it easier for developers and operations teams to manage and optimize their AI infrastructure, for an undisclosed sum.Ctech reported earlier this morning the companies were in “advanced negotiations” that could see Nvidia pay upwards of $1 billion for Run:ai. Evidently, those negotiations went well.Nvidia says that it’ll continue to offer Run:ai’s products “under the same business model” for the immediate future, and invest in Run:ai’s product roadmap as part ...