New findings from Pew Research reveal that a quarter of Twitter users don’t expect to be using the platform in a year, with this portion rising to 30% for women and 29% for Democrats.

60% of Twitter users have taken a break from the platform in the last 12 months too, with numbers jumping up after billionaire and serial CEO Elon Musk stepped into the office.

This survey was released just days after the platform announced its new CEO, Linda Yaccarino. But with Yaccarino already facing backlash over her ties to Donald Trump, is this move enough to stop the social networking platform from hemorrhaging users?

25% of Twitter Users Aren’t Expecting to Stick Around

As Twitter descends further into chaos, new research from Pew reveals that six in ten US users have left the app for several weeks or more within the last 12 months.

Musk’s rein hasn’t impacted demographics evenly either, with 69% of women and 67% of black users temporarily leaving the platform, compared to 54% of men and 60% of white users. Despite Musk’s polarizing political opinions, however, there weren’t any major differences by political affiliation.

But taking a hiatus from a social media app is normal, right? Well, while fluctuation is within the norm, the survey reveals that lots of US users aren’t planning on coming back, with a quarter of respondents expecting to ditch the platform permanently within the next year.

People dropping Twitter isn’t really news, though. Musk taking over the company sparked an exodus of 1.3 million users, with many regular users, celebrities, and companies alike defecting to alternatives like Mastodon and Discord.

Unfortunately for Twitter, its issues didn’t stop there. In recent months Twitter has been riddled with technical issues, from Tweetdeck repeatedly crashing to internal links breaking temporarily across the site. The Tesla Chief’s prioritization of free speech over content moderation and removal of legacy blue ticks has been a spark plug for many users too.

A lot of companies have decided to suspend Tweeting too. After being falsely labeled as “US state-affiliated media” in April, news outlet NPR decided to leave the platform, reflecting similar moves made by CBS News and KCRW last year.

Can Twitter’s New CEO Save the Platform?

After 10 million people voted in favor of Musk stepping down as chief executive in a somewhat humiliating display, the billionaire agreed to step aside once he found someone “foolish enough to take the job.”

His successor, Linda Yaccario — an ex-NBCUniversal Global chief and former appointee of former President Donald Trump — was appointed earlier this week. As Twitter struggles to retain advertisers, Yaccarino’s impressive marketing credentials could prove to be useful.

However, her right-wing political beliefs have already stirred up controversy among Twitter users. Also, with Twitter already suffering so much reputational and financial damage, it’s yet to be determined if this leadership switch-up will be enough to patch up the platforms sinking ship.

The FBI, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and the Australian Cyber Security Center (ACSC) are warning small businesses about using remote access software like Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) due to escalating threats posed by the BianLian ransomware gang.

The cybergang, which has been running rampant since 2022, has been successfully breaching Windows systems using RDP credentials. Once private data is obtained, they extort money by threatening to release the information publicly.

According to the agency’s #StopRansomware advisory, limiting the use of remote access software is the most effective way businesses can avoid extortion. But there are a number of other practical measures businesses can take, which we’ll cover in this article.

Cybergang BianLian is Targeting Remote Desktop Software

If you’re using Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP), it may be time to consider switching to an alternative.

This is because, according to a release by the joint Cybersecurity Advisory (SCA), the computer software is being exploited by BianLian — a cybercriminal gang and ransomware developer that has been targeting businesses and critical infrastructure organizations for almost a year.

According to the statement recently sent out by the agencies, the cybergang has been using RPD as a point of entry into Windows Sytems. Then, after gaining entry, they deploy harmful software to steal additional credentials or exfiltrate sensitive data in an effort to extort the victim.

Aside from exploiting RPD credentials, the threat actors have also been known to use phishing tactics to lure sensitive information from workers.

The BianLian ransomware group was first discovered in June 2022. Since its origin, the gang has listed a total of 118 organizations on its extortion portal, with 71% of which being US companies.

The gang has also switched from extorting victims by encrypting their files to threatening to leak stolen data to the public. As BianLian’s strategies grow more ruthless, the threats it poses to US businesses have never been starker.

So, what are the best ways to evade these tactics, according to the security agencies’ latest report?

How Can Businesses Stay Safe From BianLian?

Unsurprisingly, the best way to avoid being targeted by BianLian is to limit the use of remote desktop software like RDP.

If you’re not able to stop using the software, the cybersecurity advisory recommends auditing remote access tools and keeping an eye out for abnormal use of these programs by reviewing logs.

Closing unused RDP ports, enforcing account lockouts after a specified number of login attempts, and applying phishing-resistant multifactor authentication (MFA) are some other tips the cybersecurity agencies put forward in their release.

Aside from auditing your remote desktop software, they also advise restricting the use of PowerShell and updating Windows PowerShell to its latest version.

Maintaining good password hygiene is another way threats can be kept at bay, according to the guidance. This includes creating passcodes of 15 characters or longer, storing them in industry-recognized password managers, and disabling password hints.

Check out our password security guide for more best practices.

Montana has become the first US state to ban TikTok outright, as lawmakers take a firm stand against the app’s alleged ties with the Chinese Communist Party.

The proposed ban will take effect from January 1 2024, and major app stores such as the App Store and Google Play will be slapped with a daily fine of $10,000 if they continue to host the video-sharing platform after this date.

TikTok, which currently has 150 million American users, calls this ban ‘unlawful’. But as the Beijing-based app comes under increasing scrutiny from US lawmakers for leaking information to the Chinese state, this state ban could likely set a precedent throughout the rest of the country.

Montana Becomes the First US State to Ban TikTok

If you’re a resident of Montana, it looks like your days scrolling TikTok may be numbered, with the Western state officially becoming the first US territory to ban the app for its residents.

The bill is due to come into effect from January 1 of next year, and will prohibit app marketplaces from allowing the app to be downloaded. The App Store and Google Play will be subject to a daily fee of $100,000 if they don’t comply, although no penalties will be passed down to its users.

The law was signed by Governor Greg Gianfore on Wednesday, who says the ban was put in place to “protect Montanans’ personal and private data from the Chinese Community Party (CCP)”.

While this is the first time the popular video app has been outlawed for regular American users, TikTok has already been banned on government devices in over 25 states including Texas, North Carolina, and Wisconsin.

But TikTok isn’t the only app that will become off-limits to government workers. Montana Governor, Gren Gianfore, announced he would be banning all social media apps linked to “foreign adversaries” on state equipment from June 1, including Chinese-owned WeChat, and Russian-owned Telegram.

Concerns over TikTok’s information practices are nothing new — with the ByteDance-owned app facing scrutiny since it was first launched on US soil in 2016. However, prohibiting its use for regular citizens definitely a gutsy move from lawmakers. So, how did we get here?

Accusations Over TikTok’s Ties to China Heat Up

To say TikTok time in the US has been rocky would be an understatement. In June last year, news broke that the video app was using “aggressive” tactics to collect ‘excessive’ amounts of user data, and the platform has repeatedly been accused of sharing personal information with the CCP via its founding company ByteDance.

While these concerns never faded away, a recent complaint from Yintao “Roger” Yu — the ex-head of engineering for US operations at Bytedance — has fanned the flames once more. In a lawsuit that takes aim at the company for his wrongful termination, Yu claims that the CCP has ‘supreme access’ to TikTok data, including on US servers.

‘The Committee maintained supreme access to all the company data, even data stored in the United States.’ – Yintao Yu, ex-ByteDance employee

Yu also claims that Bytedance has been used as a ‘useful propaganda tool’ for the CPP, and said the party had a special office called the ‘Committee’ where they would guide Bytedance in how it advanced ‘Communist values’.

Yu’s allegations are pretty damning, and provide the US government with even more ammo for banning the app outright. But how have ByteDance and TikTok responded to these claims and legislative crackdowns?

TikTok Calls Montana’s Ban ‘Unlawful’

When speaking to CNN, a Bytedance spokesperson said they “vigorously” oppose Yu’s claims, attesting that the ex-employee worked on an app called Flipagram which was discontinued because of business reasons.

They also told the outlet that Bytdance is ‘committed to respecting the intellectual property of other companies’, with regard to their acquisition of TikTok data.

TikTok isn’t happy about its proposed ban in Montana, either. A spokesperson for the company, Brook Oberwetter, called the bill “unlawful”, claiming it goes against Americans’ first amendment rights.

‘We want to reassure Montanans that they can continue using TikTok to express themselves, earn a living, and find community as we continue working to defend the rights of our users inside and outside of Montana.’ – Brooke Oberwetter, TikTok Spokesperson

She also reassured Montanans that they can continue using the app for the time being. However, with the bill coming into effect soon, and other states considering similar actions, it’s seems that TikTok days in the US may well be limited.

Zoom is the latest company to jump on the AI bandwagon, with the pandemic poster child announcing a new partnership with startup Anthropic to integrate its Claude AI into the platform.

From Microsoft to Salesforce, companies around the world have been scrambling to make AI part of their platforms in recent months, adding the technology to search engines, messaging apps, and everything in between.

Given Zoom’s newly found status as a go-to option for productivity tools, it makes sense that they’re making a play on AI, but can they catch up to the rest of big tech?

Zoom Partners With Anthropic for Generative AI Push

Announced in a company blog post, Zoom is partnering with Anthropic to allow the startup’s Claude AI assistant to be integrated with the productivity platform. The integration will first be rolled out to the Zoom Contact Center but will eventually be added to help with tasks across the rest of the platform.

“With Claude guiding agents toward trustworthy resolutions and powering self-service for end-users, companies will be able to take customer relationships to another level.” – Smita Hashim, chief product officer for Zoom

The integration will specifically add a wide range of self-service features to the Zoom Contact Center interface and guide agents to the best solutions for their customers.

This partnership represents arguably the biggest step in Zoom’s “federated approach to AI,” which has seen the company adding new features and functionality across the board to align with the AI-powered business world.

AI and Productivity Platforms

Zoom is certainly not the first company to integrate AI solutions into its platforms, and it absolutely will not be the last. The technology has become a driving force, with the biggest companies in the industry vying for the best product.

Microsoft, obviously, is well-known for having acquired OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPt, which launched the whole AI gold rush in the first place. Google naturally threw its hat in the ring next with its Bard solution, which compared to ChatGPT is an admirable runner-up.

Even popular CRM Salesforce has made an investment in an ChatGPT alternative, with plans to roll it out across the platform.

All that to say, AI is clearly coming to the business productivity world, and coming fast. Not only Zoom and Salesforce, but Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 will likely soon be crawling with AI assistants and automated tasks that will improve efficiency on a dramatic scale.

Is Zoom Good for Business?

If you’re considering a communication tool like Zoom for your business, we don’t blame you. Since its meteoric rise during the pandemic, the company has been in overdrive mode to provide an all-in-one hybrid working platform to help businesses manage remote employees.

As for how it actually performs for businesses, its best feature is the ease of use. While competitors like Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 are quite popular for their massive feature catalogs, Zoom comes with a more intuitive interface that some businesses find a bit more user friendly.

Plus, given the investment in AI, it’s safe to assume the company plans to roll out some automation features that will keep pace with the rest of the industry. Because at this point, if you aren’t leveraging AI for your business, you could be in trouble.

The development of generative AI platforms continues to advance at break-neck speed, with a report from Microsoft — the parent company of OpenAI, which developed ChatGPT — noting that the tech is “strikingly close to human-level performance.”

ChatGPT and its many alternatives have taken the tech world by storm, quickly becoming go-to productivity tools at businesses around the world. While the tech has been decidedly controversial for a number of reasons, few meaningful regulations have been handed down, which has allowed for the notably rapid development of the tech.

In fact, the development has been so rapid that Microsoft now says that AI is almost at the level of human reasoning. So what does that mean for the workplace?

Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence

In a study from a Microsoft Research team titled Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence, researchers explored the effectiveness of AI platforms like ChatGPT through a series of experiments. And the results showed that this technology really is on the fast track.

“Beyond its mastery of language, GPT-4 can solve novel and difficult tasks that span mathematics, coding, vision, medicine, law, psychology and more, without needing any special prompting. Moreover, in all of these tasks, GPT-4’s performance is strikingly close to human-level performance.”

Researchers explained that this level of proficiency from AI platforms could conceivably be considered ” an early yet still incomplete version” of artificial general intelligence.

What Is Artificial General Intelligence?

While platforms like ChatGPT are quite impressive, they are still considered “narrow artificial intelligence,” in that they are exclusively designed for a specific and limited task like writing content or generating images. In so many words, they are no match for the human brain.

Artificial general intelligence (AGI), on the other hand, is the evolution of that idea. Essentially, it describes technology that can perform multiple tasks, learn and generalize without oversight, and possesses a human-like level of common sense.

Subsequently, Microsoft’s claim that AI is “strikingly close” to reaching the level of AGI is quite significant. In fact, they are the first big tech company to make this kind of claim, although individuals in the industry have done so at their own peril. In fact, a Google employee was recently fired for claiming that AI was sentient (the next stage of evolution), which demonstrates the seriousness of these kinds of claims.

Should You Be Worried About AI?

A lot of fear around artificial intelligence is widely misplaced. Movies like the Terminator have made it seem like robots are going to take over the world in a sci-fi nightmare scenario if artificial intelligence gets too powerful.

The truth, however, is that we are miles away from even the faintest chance of that happening, and even the idea of artificial general intelligence is widely debated. In fact, despite the study from Microsoft making such claims, researchers were all too quick to put these findings in context.

“We acknowledge that this approach is somewhat subjective and informal, and that it may not satisfy the rigorous standards of scientific evaluation. However, we believe that it is a useful and necessary first step to appreciate the remarkable capabilities and challenges of GPT-4, and that such a first step opens up new opportunities for developing more formal and comprehensive methods for testing and analyzing AI systems with more general intelligence.”

In so many words, this particular step in AI evolution shouldn’t necessarily worry you in any meaningful way. Still, there are a lot of concerning trends in these early days of AI roll-out, so hopefully some AI regulations start showing up before it’s too late.

While many big tech companies appear to be pivoting back to office-based working, a survey has found that Gen Z workers feel remote working has had a positive impact on their career advancement.

The survey by National Broadband Ireland in partnership with Grow Remote polled 1,236 workers across the Republic of Ireland, producing a comprehensive national view of how attitudes and behaviors towards remote working have evolved since the Covid-19 pandemic.

The positive effects of remote working may well have a huge impact on how Gen Z finds that next job, compared to their older colleagues.

WFH: What’s So Appealing to Gen Z?

Gen Z are digital natives, they take to new IT platforms and programs with ease, they naturally prefer to send a DM as opposed to making a phone call or arranging a face-to-face meeting with a colleague. It seems this group is willing to forego the professional development via mentoring and collaboration opportunities the office grants them for some of the many benefits of working remotely.

Research from the National Broadband Ireland study showed that over 55% of 18-24 year-olds polled felt remote and hybrid work had a positive impact on their career, as opposed to only 23% of 45-54 year-olds.

The study also found that 57% of all workers felt remote work in Ireland opened them up to better job opportunities. While 60% stated that it gave companies the chance to improve diversity and inclusion, a big concern for Gen Z.

Another study conducted by SMRS in 2023 found that Gen Z cited two main reasons for preferring flexible and hybrid working. Firstly, saving money (38%) and second, being happier (37%). Flexible working gives a sense of being your own boss and also promotes the work-life balance Gen Z craves.

Return to Office Mandates On the Rise

To Gen Z’s disappointment, many companies which adopted work from home policies during the pandemic are now realizing the long-term implications of remote working and are coaxing their workers back into more traditional settings.

Executives at Big Four firms Deloitte and PWC told the Financial Times that workers who graduated during the pandemic have weaker teamwork, communication, and collaboration skills. They also cited a difficulty in training new hires due to the lack of learning through observation when employees are not onsite.

Earlier this year, Amazon demanded office workers return to the office at least 3 days per week alongside other global firms: Apple, Twitter, Disney, Activision Blizzard, and Google, to name but a few. Some companies are even offering to pay relocation costs in a bid to end remote working. However, many of these firms have faced backlash from their employees who have come to appreciate the benefits of working from home.

Elon Musk gave a harsh criticism of remote workers in an interview with CNBC’s David Faber on Tuesday. He described the people working remotely as “laptop classes”, saying that it’s unfair on workers such as those in the service industry who cannot work from home.

He argued, ‘I think that the whole notion of work from home is a bit like the fake Marie Antoinette quote, “Let them eat cake”,’ Musk said. ‘It’s not just a productivity thing. I think it’s morally wrong.’

How to Find Companies with WFH Policies

Despite the shift in perception among bosses, Gen Z remains fixated on remote and hybrid roles. The jury’s still out on who will eventually win this battle.

This trend is changing the way Gen Z and Millennials search for jobs. Remote and hybrid working is now high up their wishlist when job hunting, but with policies evolving regularly, finding out which companies offer remote roles is not an easy task.

A new tool called the ‘Flex Index’ is collecting companies’ remote work policies and putting them into its own search engine. The database is using standard terminology such as “fully remote” or “specific days/week” to categorize types of remote work set-ups pulled in from employee surveys, career web sites and job postings.

Technology like this will help to empower Gen Z in weeding out those employers who don’t offer the benefits they are looking for and with some persistence could change the future of work.

OpenAI’s chatbot, ChatGPT, which has taken the world by storm since its launch in November 2022, has unveiled a major update. The update allows users to browse the web with ChatGPT, opening up a host of new web-enabled capabilities.

The AI chatbot rapidly rose to fame late last year, hitting 100 million users in just two months, and businesses are already making full use of the tool. OpenAI, the non-profit research lab which owns ChatGPT, has announced 8 updates since its launch, each containing multiple new feature rollouts in its rapid evolution, the latest of which being the web integration.

This update is a game changer for ChatGPT. Prior to this update, the chatbot had been trained on a dataset that ended in 2021, putting it at risk of becoming obsolete in comparison to competitors trained on fresher datasets. Now, the chatbot is able to draw on up-to-date information across the web to deliver timely responses.

New Features Enabled in the ChatGPT Update

The update to ChatGPT allows access to 70 third-party browser plugins which you enable from the plugin store. Users can install as many plugins as they want.

The plugins are selected to appeal to a broad spectrum of users. They will enable users to perform actions such as planning travel, searching for a job or real estate, business management, shop, game and much more. Names such as Zapier, Slack, OpenTable and Expedia have all made the list.

Developers that want to create ChatGPT plugins can join the plugins waitlist.

Who Can Access ChatGPT on the Web?

These new features aren’t currently available to all users yet, OpenAI tweeted: “We’re rolling out web browsing and Plugins to all ChatGPT Plus users over the next week! Moving from alpha to beta, they allow ChatGPT to access the internet and to use 70+ third-party plugins.”

ChatGPT Plus is a paid subscription service that costs $20 per month. Limiting the new features to premium account holders might make an enticing reason for users to upgrade, a way for OpenAI to monetize.

Of course, ChatGPT can still do plenty of things for free, and there are many other options out there for thrifty AI users looking for a ChatGPT alternative.

OpenAI’s Update Days after Google’s I/O Conference: Coincidence?

Google’s artificial intelligence chatbot, Bard, was the main focus during its annual Google I/O developer conference last week, with the announcement that it is now available for everyone without the need to join a waitlist.

Chief executive Sundar Pichai announced that AI has reached an ‘inflection point’ before unveiling the integration of Google’s generative AI into its Maps, Gmail and Search, in-line with the tech giant’s pledge to be an ‘AI first company.’

The Gap is closing between ChatGPT and Bard. Prior to this update they were largely differentiated by their dataset usage with Bard having always had access to the internet in real-time and ChatGPT using a dataset which ended in 2021. Although there are a few other nuances which set the chatbots apart.

Find out how each compared when we put Bard and ChatGPT head-to-head.

Google is set to vaporize a big chunk of online data in the name of cybersecurity. In December, the company will get rid of any accounts that have been inactive for two years or longer.

This includes Gmail, Docs, Drive, Meet, Photos, and Calendar, plus the Google-owned YouTube. Start trying to recall your high school Gmail account’s password now, because your past memories might be on the chopping block.

We don’t know how many user accounts will be impacted, but Google has hosted billions of them for longer than the iPhone has existed, so it’s safe to say that it will be a large number. All Google business accounts or school accounts will be safe.

Why Google Is Deleting Accounts

Granted, Google has a pretty good reason for the destruction. Old, long-inactive accounts are more likely to be compromised by bad actors, as the company says in a recent blog post announcing the changes to its inactive accounts policy.

“This is because forgotten or unattended accounts often rely on old or re-used passwords that may have been compromised, haven’t had two factor authentication set up, and receive fewer security checks by the user. Our internal analysis shows abandoned accounts are at least 10x less likely than active accounts to have 2-step-verification set up.”

Once these vulnerabilities are exploited, Google says, old accounts can serve as hubs for malicious activity that could include spam or identity theft.

Perhaps coincidentally, Google has also been focused on other cost-cutting measures recently.

The new policy is in effect now, but no accounts will be deleted until December 2023. Google will send “multiple notifications over the months leading up to deletion” to both the account’s email address and to a recovery email address, provided one is available.

The Internet Is Ephemeral

This news is a big blow for internet archivists, who will now lose access to a host of YouTube commentary and forum post images hosted in Google Photos. Google is joining a long list of companies that have deleted swathes of internet history with the click of a button.

The reasons can vary. In 2019, Myspace deleted 12 years of music by accident during a server migration. Last year, Flickr deleted its free accounts’ non-public photos (after the first 50) in order to free up storage space. Back in 2018, Tumblr banned years’ worth of posts in a failed bid to lure advertisers by ditching adult content.

More recently, Twitter announced plans to delete inactive accounts as well, wiping out the digital footprint of most deceased or dormant users from the platform’s history.

The internet may seem like it will last forever, it’s no Great Pyramid of Giza. Some of its biggest sources of data storage are already showing cracks just a few decades in.

What Should I Do About It?

If you have an old Gmail account that you’d like to keep around, it’s easy to save. You just need to log into it and create a little activity. But all bets are off after December, so don’t put it off until the last minute. Plus, you’ll need to continue logging in every two years, or you’ll just lose the account on a later date.

Good luck, though, as digging up old passwords can be tough, unless you invested in a good password manager.

Plenty of old Gmail account passwords are already lost like tears in the rain, and within months, all their photos, files, and personal messages will just be another dim memory.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has headed to Washington, testifying before the US Senate that AI needs regulation, even for his own company’s ChatGPT.

While in front of the Senate subcommittee for privacy, technology and the law, Altman called out AI’s impact on election integrity, stating that it is a “significant area of concern.”

His solution? A national or international agency with the authority to license the biggest AI systems, complete with the power to “take that license away and ensure compliance with safety standards.” Critics are calling this a move to limit further innovation within the space.

Sam Altman’s Senate Panel Remarks

Altman focused on the difference between AI and social media in order to argue that an entirely new regulatory agency is needed, whether in the US or globally, the New York Times reports.

“I think if this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong. And we want to be vocal about that. We want to work with the government to prevent that from happening.” ~Sam Altman

Despite calling for a new regulatory agency, Altman remained fairly optimistic about the benefits of AI, downplaying certain concerns such as the potential for a reduction in jobs as a result of the greater AI-powered automation.

While AI will automate some jobs, he claims, it will at the same time create new ones that “we believe will be much better.”

AI and Regulatory Capture: Squashing Innovation?

Is Altman’s perspective the wisdom of an insider who cares for a slow, steady process? It may well be. Some critics have a different explanation.

They think that Altman’s call for regulation is a ploy to create an environment that could keep potential rivals from growing powerful enough to knock OpenAI off its perch as one of the biggest AI companies. In effect, these critics say, Altman would be pulling the ladder up behind himself.

An industry leader calling for regulation within that industry is rare, but regulatory capture — the term refering to a company gaining control over the regulatory group designed to keep it in check — is not.

Regulatory capture in action: Facebook, Palantir, OpenAI all say, "regulate us," for it 1) absolves them of their own decision-making and 2) acts as a barrier to entry to new, small competitors. https://t.co/2T3r6w3UeR

— Jeff (Gutenberg Parenthesis) Jarvis (@jeffjarvis) May 16, 2023

Privacy expert Elizabeth M. Renieris tweeted her own concerns, too, arguing that Altman “wants a new agency because it buys him lots of time to pretend they’re unregulated.”

AI Could Be Regulated in a Lot of Ways

One final question remains: How and in what ways should AI be regulated? Plenty of concerns about the technology can all compete with each other for attention: Copyright issues, training data vetting, job protections, and even the possibility of a universal basic income have all been raised.

Should the use of AI require an acknowledgement? For the record, I wrote this article without any AI help.

If we don’t have the correct people in charge of regulation, we might wind up missing the forest for the machine-learning trees.

The tech layoffs haven’t ended yet: Vodafone has announced plans to slash 11,000 jobs around the globe, the biggest cuts in the company’s history.

The multinational telecommunications company says that the job cuts — which are set to take place over the next three years — are part of a turnaround plan for its flagging performance in recent years.

More than a few major tech companies have issued their own mass layoffs since the trend began in late 2022, often citing an uncertain economy. The biggest job losses have been at Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook, but Vodafone is now joining their ranks.

Vodafone Needs a Big Turnaround

Shares of Vodafone dipped in response to the news, dropping as much as 9% within the day and reaching their lowest levels since 2002.

Unlike a lot of headline-generating tech layoffs in recent months, Vodafone’s job cuts come within the context of a larger plan. New Vodafone CEO Margherita Della Valle just took the role last month, after serving as CFO for Vodafone Group. She’s tasked with reinvigorating the company, which has been losing to its rivals in major European markets, Reuters reports.

The company is underperforming in Germany, its biggest market, Della Valle explains. The company has already made some cuts in its central operations, slashing 500 positions early in the year.

The Big Tech Layoffs Will Continue

We’ve tracked the mass layoffs in tech for months, and they’re still on the roll. Cutting five or six percent of the total workforce appears to be the formula that tech executives are operating with.

Other measures of austerity go hand-in-hand with layoffs. Many major tech companies are pushing for a return to the office and a rollback of remote working options.

At the same time, some corporations are cutting back on benefits: Google is ending its complimentary snacks, shuttles, and fitness classes. In other words, the boom years are over for the tech world.

Are Layoffs Really Needed?

The actual necessity of any large-scale layoffs can be hard to pin down amid a flood of thin but PR-friendly company lines.

Some experts hold that companies issuing indiscriminate layoffs aren’t helping themselves from a revenue perspective: Speaking to The Verge in January, Stanford Graduate School of Business professor Jeffrey Pfeffer said that layoffs may actually reduce the productivity needed for continued success.

“Oftentimes, companies don’t have a cost problem. They have a revenue problem. And cutting employees will not increase your revenue. It will probably decrease it.” – Jeffrey Pfeffer

We wrote last month that more than 100,000 people have lost their jobs in tech since last year. Now, that number is set to continue growing, with Vodafone’s job losses metered out over three more years.

Privacy-focused browser app Brave has released a new “Forgetful Browsing” feature, which helps to combat unwanted first-party re-identification, an intrusive tracking practice deployed by many websites.

Other than a reliable VPN, using a browser like DuckDuckGo or Brave when you’re on the internet is one of the easiest ways to significantly improve your online privacy.

For a browser like Brave, it’s a particularly tough time to be competing with Google and Bing. But if it continues to bring out unique privacy features — as well as useful AI tools like “Summarizer” — it’ll be well placed to keep pace.

Brave: Staying One Step Ahead

In a recent blog post explaining the new feature, Brave remarks on the fact that bigger browsers — which once allowed all sorts of third-party tracking — have started to make efforts to limit it.

Chrome, for instance, is set to phase out third-party cookies in 2024, recent reports suggest.

Brave says, however, that this general trend led to more sites relying on “first-party storage” to store information on users and re-identify them, which is what forgetful browsing fights back against.

With Forgetful Browsing activated, Brave will immediately clear all cookies stored in a site immediately after the site is closed down.

Not only will it enhance your privacy, but it’ll also improve your overall browsing experience by making it impossible to enforce rate limits, such as the number of times you can use a chatbot or read articles, as it won’t be able to recognize you’ve already visited the site.

Can You Really Trust Brave?

Emphatically, yes. In a world where the average browsing experiences are still extremely intrusive, on the whole, Brave’s commitment to privacy is all the more impressive.

Brave, as it states in its FAQs, “does not have access to identifiable user data” and all of its software is open source. Browsing history is not stored by default.

Overall, it has an extremely robust privacy policy and has a huge amount of information about how it secures customer data and blocks tracking applications available online.

Summarizer: Brave’s AI-Powered Answer to Bing Chat

It’ll be interesting to see how smaller browsers like Brave fare in this new era of information sourcing. Bigger browsers, like Chrome and Bing, are expending seemingly endless resources developing and improving AI tools and integrating them into their interface.

In March, Brave launched a tool called “Summarizer,” which effectively uses artificial intelligence to provide a short, succinct, and straightforward answer based on a collection of top web results, or a single, well-rated source.

It’s a little bit more basic than the likes of Bard and ChatGPT, but AI chatbots aren’t necessarily for everyone, especially ones that don’t cite their sources, as Brave’s Summarizer does every time it serves you an answer.

How to Enhance Your Privacy Online

In 2023, there are a lot of things to consider when you head onto the internet — not least how private your browsing experience is.

Brave is a great option if you’re looking for a privacy-focused browser that won’t deploy the same sort of invasive tracking or data-sharing procedures that Google will.

However, DuckDuckGo is another option worth considering, and in terms of blocking third-party trackers, performs a similar job effectively.

As we mentioned at the start of this article, pairing one of these browsers with a secure VPN  service such as Surfshark — which will encrypt all of your data, mask your IP address, and only costs a couple of dollars per month — is a good place to start.

If you live under an authoritarian regime and need more assurances when it comes to online privacy, you may want to consider using the Tor (“The Onion Router)” network, which is pretty much as close are you’re going to get to anonymity online.

NordVPN is one of the only major VPN providers to offer an Onion-Over-VPN feature that makes connecting to the TOR network even more secure — and Brave also has a built-in Tor integration. This will be a little excessive if you don’t live under draconian censorship laws, but it’s good to make sure you’re clued up on all the options, wherever in the world you live.

Amazon’s VP of Customer Fulfillment & Global Ops Services told CNBC that the company is particularly focused on leveraging AI to cut down on delivery times.

The ecommerce giant says it’s going to use artificial intelligence to aid with “regionalization” – ensuring inventory is being delivered locally, rather than shipped across the country. AI can analyze huge amounts of customer data, which can then be used to predict future product demand.

This is just one of many ways that Amazon is implementing AI throughout its business infrastructure and product range, from its customer support and service to its virtual home assistant, Alexa.

Amazon Focused on Cutting Down Delivery Times With AI

This week, Amazon’s customer fulfillment chief Stefano Preregro told CNBC’s Arjun Kharpal that utilizing AI to work out precisely where to put all of Amazon’s inventory is a “key focus” for the company.

Simply put, the closer the distance between the product and the customer, the quicker it’ll be to deliver items from door to door, Prerego explained.

He revealed that almost three quarters of products being ordered by customers on Amazon are sent from warehouses within their region.

Within the delivery process, the company is also using AI to help with route planning, which is often impacted by changing weather conditions.

Robotics: The “Other Side” of Artificial Intelligence

Before ChatGPT was released, if you asked the average person which jobs would be replaced by artificial intelligence first, they would probably have mentioned manual labor roles, such as warehouse work. In other words, physical and repetitive jobs with little variation.

OpenAI’s chatbot emphatically changed the conversation after showing itself capable of completing various aspects of the average knowledge worker’s daily workload, barely leaving a single sector untouched.

The gradual robotization of Amazon’s order fulfillment infrastructure is a reminder that the AI revolution knows few bounds. Preregro told CNBC that 75% of the orders the company processes are now handled “in part by robotics.”

How Else Is Amazon Using Artificial Intelligence?

Order fulfillment isn’t the only part of the business harnessing the power of artificial intelligence. For instance, Alexa – the company’s virtual home assistant – has more than 100,000 available “skills” that can be used to adhere to a variety of user commands on the fly.

The ecommerce platform has also utilized artificial intelligence to deal with customer service queries for some years now.

In 2020, a post on Amazon’s Science blog described how the company had begun to use “automated agents that use neural networks rather than rules” for customer service.

“These agents can handle a broader range of interactions with better results, allowing our customer service representatives to focus on tasks that depend more on human judgment.”

Although most of the focus may be on Google and Microsoft’s AI chatbots, Amazon’s rich history of implementing AI within its infrastructure positions – for both physical and ‘mental’ work – could put the company in good stead.

This weekend, Elon Musk announced that ex-NBC Universal Global Advertising chief and former Trump appointee Linda Yaccarino has succeeded him as Twitter’s Chief Executive Officer.

Interestingly, however, Musk has retained his position as executive chair, and will continue to take the lead on product design and development at the social media site.

So what exactly are Linda Yaccarino’s core responsibilities as CEO, and will she really be able to exert her influence with Musk still so intimately involved?

Twitter’s New CEO: So Who’s Actually in Charge of What, Exactly?

Elon Musk initially revealed he’d found someone to take control of Twitter last week, and since then, advertising guru Linda Yaccarino has officially been named as Twitter’s new CEO. She will assume the responsibilities of the role in the next six weeks.

However, Musk is still the Executive Chair of Twitter – which leaves room for him to exert significant control over day-to-day operations – and is still the Chief Technical Officer.

He will continue to lead on product design, development, and delivery, reports suggest.

Yaccarino is widely-known and well-regarded in the world of advertising and will bring expertise and influence sorely needed to a platform that has witnessed a huge percentage of its advertisers jump ship since Musk acquired it for $44 billion last year.

The billionaire SpaceX owner initially wanted advertising to make up a smaller proportion of Twitter’s future revenue – which is why he’s aggressively pushed Twitter Blue subscriptions since his takeover – but Yaccarino’s appointment may suggest his desired change of tack is dead in the water.

At present, it’s unclear precisely how much freedom the new CEO will be given by Musk to implement her own initiatives, who will have final sign-off on the biggest decisions, and whether we’ve seen Musk make his last round of layoffs at the site.

Yaccarino’s Political Leanings Cause a Stir

Although her background in advertising made her a shoo-in for the role in Musk’s eyes, Linda Yaccarino’s perceived politics have already proven unpopular among conservatives and liberals alike.

As a former President’s Council appointee under Trump, whose following list reportedly includes election denier Sidney Powell, Libs of TikTok account owner Chaya Raichik and right-wing Twitter account “Catturd”, left-wingers have been far from enthused by the appointment – but she’s already faced criticism from the right either, too.

Yaccarino is a former employer of the World Economic Forum, a multi-national lobbying organization focusing on global corporate and social cooperation – which Elon Musk himself described as an “unelected world government” as recently as January 2023. This aspect of her job history has not gone down well with “Twitter conspiracists”, Gizmodo reports.

Her support for masks and vaccinations during the Covid-19 pandemic – which were both deeply unpopular among Trump’s base – have also been re-shared and discussed since the announcement.

Despite her pro-vaccine, pro-mask stance being at odds with what some Republicans believe, most would consider her to be right-leaning. But even so, this has little to say about just how closely Yaccarino will tack to Musk’s self-professed “free speech absolutism” during her time as CEO.

Winning back many of the advertisers that have left the platform recently, as well as forging new commercial partnerships, may hedge on whether Yaccarino can provide assurances about content moderation.

Can Linda Yaccarino Put Her Own Stamp on Twitter?

At present, it’s unclear just how much authority Yaccarino will hold over Twitter. If she departs on a personal level from Musk’s when it comes to questions of what Twitter should be for, and who it should accommodate – or simply considers his general stance to be commercially damaging – things could turn ugly very quickly.

Typically, new CEOs have the power and authority to drive cultural change within a company and have a raft of value-focused responsibilities to deal with upon appointment. It’s unclear, at present, whether that’s within Yaccarino’s job description.

Throw in the fact that Musk is, as Tech CEO’s go, particularly cultish, particularly attention-seeking, and particularly fanatical about productivity and results, and what her role as CEO will really entail in practice becomes even harder to predict.

Yaccarino’s Biggest Problem: No Clean Break from Musk

With Elon Musk only really taking a half-step back from Twitter, to say Yaccarino is likely to have her work cut out rebuilding relationships with former advertising partners is an understatement.

You’d think that assuming a more detached role would give Musk a better shot at creating the sort of healthy distance between himself and Twitter you’d think would be needed to rebuild relationships with advertisers, as well as restore users’ faith in the social media platform. This seems to be at odds with the new setup.

Regardless of whether the new Twitter CEO role is less about culture, values, and strategic direction and more about maximizing ad revenue, Yaccarino is walking head-on into a Musk-induced mess that is likely to take years to sort out. It looks like Elon really has found his fool:

I will resign as CEO as soon as I find someone foolish enough to take the job! After that, I will just run the software & servers teams.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 21, 2022

Facebook owner Meta has announced a new generative AI tool for advertisers called AI Sandbox.

Launched at a press event in New York, company executives referred to AI Sandbox as a ‘testing playground’ with features focused on streamlining processes in three main areas: copywriting, visual asset generation, and image manipulation. It marks the latest AI tool from big tech.

Meta said that AI Sandbox is currently being made available to a ‘small group’ of advertisers, with a wider roll out planned for July this year as well as direct integration into its existing products.

A Closer Look at AI Sandbox’s Key Features

AI Sandbox comes with a crop of neat features, which Meta thinks will save advertisers time and money.

First up is Text Variation, which will have professional copywriters hitting the doubles this weekend. This feature allows advertisers to generate multiple versions of a piece of written copy, each one custom composed to target a different audience – all while promising to retain core brand messaging in each variation.

Next up is Background Generation, which will create background images from little more than text prompts. As well as being designed to help advertisers quickly furnish their campaigns with a diverse range of creative assets, we can see this being useful in A/B testing and other areas of UX product development.

Finally, Image Outcropping is potentially a huge timesaver and automatically adjusts visuals to the correct aspect ratio for different social media sharing mediums: Posts, Stories, Reels and so on. This one has Photoshop wizards and lazy interns alike thanking their lucky stars for the emergence of generative AI this year.

Meta Enters Big Tech AI Battle Royale

AI Sandbox is just the latest product on the generative AI scene, which includes other popular platforms like Microsoft’s ChatGPT tool.

In short, generative AI is a form of machine learning where something new is created from the sea of data, information and assets that already exist in the digital world. An obvious example is we could ask ChatGPT or Google Bard to write this article. Unless you’ve trained yourself to spot signs of artificial intelligence at play, you might not know.

In the case of Meta and its new AI Sandbox tool, the idea would seem to be that streamlining everyday tasks like image cropping helps advertisers save on certain overheads – and frees up money to be potentially reinvested directly in ad spend, one might argue.

Americans Unsure of AI’s Brave New World

Despite its recent surge in popularity, the jury is still out on whether or not AI should be fully embraced or not, especially in matters where trust is required.

A recently published joint study by KMPG and Australia’s University of Queensland found that just 40% of Americans currently trusted AI systems, while globally 60% of respondents were either unwilling or unsure about trusting artificial intelligence.

The study draws on responses from more than 17,000 people across 17 countries, so its findings can be deemed reliable. That doesn’t mean AI’s going anywhere, though. On the contrary, the steady stream of AI-related announcements – from Meta’s AI Sandbox to Google’s upcoming AI search update – suggest we’re still only on the precipice of this brave new world.

Dell has quietly reversed its remote working policy, with an internal company memo revealing that employees are being asked to return to the office ‘at least’ three days a week.

The news signals a return to the company’s pre-pandemic hybrid working model. Specifically, it stipulates that staff living within an hour’s one-way commute of a major Dell facility should plan to reacquaint themselves with physical working for three days of their choosing.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Dell’s workforce has been less than enthusiastic about the new mandate, with many employees feeling they were led to believe working for the tech giant post-pandemic would involve remote work flexibility.

Employees Take a Dim View of Office U-turn

As first reported by The Register, the announcement was delivered by Dell COO Jeff Clarke, who acknowledged that the process wouldn’t be a ‘light switch transition’ whilst still urging workers to adopt the new schedule ‘as soon as they can arrange it.’

While Dell never explicitly ruled out a return to hybrid working, disgruntled staff are pointing out it’s the same Clarke who said that work ‘was an outcome, not a place or a time’ when discussing his firm’s former remote-first strategy.

When hybrid working has been discussed, Clarke’s vision also seemed to be much less rigid than the mandate he has just handed down, with the exec saying he saw a future where staff ‘work from home mostly and come into the office one or two days a week.’

CEO Michael Dell was even spotted bragging on LinkedIn about his company’s flexible ethos, going so far as to say that companies with ‘forced hours in an office’ were ‘doing it wrong’.

The apparent U-turn has given rise to fears that the policy is effectively a ‘soft layoff’ measure designed to help Dell further reduce costs, following extensive formal layoffs earlier in the year.

The Tech Trend of Layoffs Followed by Office Return

Soft layoffs represent a worrying new trend in the technology industry whereby companies look to curb employee numbers by mandating a return to the office, with the expectation many staff will be unwilling to make the switch and opt to resign instead. Such a scenario absolves firms of their responsibility to pay redundancy costs to staff, making it a real kick in the teeth in the eyes of many.

Earlier in the year, Dell was at the fore of the first batch of tech company layoffs that rocked the sector in February. In opting to follow this up by mandating a return to the office, it joins a number of other major industry players.

These include Amazon, who announced it was culling a massive 18,000 jobs back in January, and followed it up with a physical working initiative a month later. Similarly, Google revealed it was cutting 12,000 at around the same time and pushed for a return to the office in April.

A final example is Salesforce, the outfit behind one of the best CRMs for sales teams. It began a series of rolling layoffs at the start of the year and has since mandated that employees return to the office at least three days a week – four if you’re in a customer-facing role.

Dell certainly didn’t start this trend, but it won’t be the one to end it, either. Expect to see even more tech companies call employees back to the office, and scrapping those web conferencing calls for face to face catch ups.

Elon Musk has announced in a tweet today that Twitter will be getting a new CEO and that “she will be starting in six weeks.”

Musk has served as CEO since acquiring the social media platform in October 2022, but he says he’ll be transitioning to a new role in the coming weeks. He’ll be the executive chair and CTO, in charge of overseeing product, software, and SysOps.

Further details have yet to be revealed.

Twitter’s New CEO Has Her Task Cut Out for Her

Twitter sold itself to Musk for $44 billion, but was recently valued at $20 billion — a valuation drop of more than fifty percent in less than a year. Musk has said that he sees a path towards a $200 billion value, but trends would have to reverse themselves pretty quickly for that to manifest any time soon.

Excited to announce that I’ve hired a new CEO for X/Twitter. She will be starting in ~6 weeks!

My role will transition to being exec chair & CTO, overseeing product, software & sysops.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 11, 2023

That’s a tall order for anyone. But for the yet-unnamed new CEO, it could mean butting heads with Musk himself, who’ll remain in a position of power within the company, and who saw valuation plummet under his recent decisions.

A New Leader Is Just the Latest Big Change at Twitter

In the meantime, Twitter is still rolling out changes. Some of them don’t seem bad, such as the decision to launch encrypted DMs, but others seem like they might reduce interest in using the platform.

For example, any users inactive for the past 30 days might be deleted entirely, which will reduce the benefit of preserving historical data such as the accounts of deceased celebrities or the social platform’s role in historical moments.

One group is likely to love the new CEO, however: Tesla’s investors, who have been concerned about Tesla CEO Musk’s focus shifting too far towards Twitter. Tesla Inc shares spiked 2.4% in volume following the news of a new Twitter head.

Will Musk Step Down This Time?

This isn’t the first time Musk has floated the concept of stepping down from his CEO role amid more than a few controversial decisions. His previous statements on the issue have led to plenty of news cycles, with no results.

In December 2022, Musk posted a poll asking if he should step down as CEO, saying in it that he would “abide by the results.” He lost, with 57.5% of the total votes in favor of him stepping down, and 42.5% against.

Then in April, Musk addressed the question again, saying that he had appointed his dog as CEO.

Now, we just have a single tweet to judge if Twitter is getting a new CEO. It certainly looks possible this time. Still, only one thing’s for sure: The fact that you’re reading this article means that we’ve milked yet another news cycle out of the question.

Detailed AI answers, shopping solutions, and a sneak-preview app available now: Google just announced a raft of artificial intelligence updates for its popular search engine.

The Search Generative Experience, or SGE, could usher in a new era for Google. The new changes were all just announced at I/O 2023, an annual Google event aimed at software developers.

Here’s what it all means for the average user.

AI-Generated Search Answers

Calling Google a popular search engine is an understatement. These days, “Googling” is just the general term for looking something up online. But now the tech giant is planning to make one of the biggest updates in its history — shifting its focus from sending users to other websites and towards giving users their own custom-tailored AI-generated answer.

Users will get a paragraphs-long AI answer, similar to what you’d see from generative text bots like ChatGPT. Follow up questions will be suggested, and their answers will include the same context established from the initial query, Google says.

The idea is that AI can answer more complex questions than just a simple search engine.

Shopping With Generative AI

Google’s Shopping Graph has more than 35 billion product listings, and those can also be accessed through AI. Most people tend to search for big purchases online before they make a decision, so Google is giving them reviews, ratings, prices, and images for each product searched.

According to Google, at least, AI will ensure that everything is up to date and relevant.

They’ll have to stay on the ball to make that a reality, though: Plenty of critics have argued that Amazon lost the battle against counterfeit products several years ago.

No Waitlist for Bard

Google’s AI chatbot Bard is getting more features and it is also losing the waitlist, so you’ll be able to start trying it out sooner.

The news comes a week after Microsoft dropped its own waitlist for Bing’s ChatGPT, so this looks like another sign of a big tech rivalry.

Here are the details, from our own coverage of the announcement:

“Announced at Google’s I/O event, where AI was very much the running theme of the occasion, the company revealed that Bard was to be rolled out to 180 countries and regions, after initially launching two months ago in the US and UK. It will also support Japanese and Korean language, with 40 more expected soon.”

Try Out the Search Generative Experience

The actual AI answers and product recommendations won’t arrive on Google.com for a while. But if you want to try a preview experience, check out the Search Generative Experience for Chrome desktops and on mobile within the Google App (Android and iOS).

The preview is only available in the US and in English for now. If you want to get a head start on all the AI updates, check it out today.

At Google’s I/O event on Wednesday, the company announced that it was to scrap waitlists to use Bard, its AI-powered chatbot.

The move comes just a week after Microsoft announced that it was to remove waitlists for its Bing AI platform, and is a sure fire sign of the fierce competition between the two tech giants.

In addition to the removal of the waitlist, it was also announced that Bard would be available in more countries than the initial US and UK , and would be packed with new features.

Google Scraps Waitlist for Bard

If you’ve been desperately waiting to use Google’s Bard, then good news – the company has done away with the waitlist, and it’s now available for everyone to use right now (mostly, there are still a few small caveats). Microsoft made a similar announcement last week when it ditched waitlists for Bing AI.

Announced at Google’s I/O event, where AI was very much the running theme of the occasion, the company revealed that Bard was to be rolled out to 180 countries and regions, after initially launching two months ago in the US and UK. It will also support Japanese and Korean language, with 40 more expected soon.

To use Bard today, you’ll need to be in one of the applicable countries, and have a Google account.

It’s been a rocky start for Bard, with a couple of high profile stumbles going so far as wiping around $100 billion from the value of the company. Nobody is more aware of the potential for falure than Google, but in the current AI arms race, no company wants to get left behind, especially when the tech is expected to revolutionize the way we search the internet. Google has now moved the platform to PaLM 2, describing it as a ‘far more capable language model’, which it surely hopes will address those initial teething problems.

See what happened when we tested Bard and ChatGPT alongside each other

New Bard AI Features Announced by Google

As well as announcing that waitlists were being removed from Bard, Google also revealed a host of new features at the I/O event.

Bard is to integrate Google Lens into the platform, allowing users to use photos with AI. Use cases could be asking Bard to generate descriptions or captions for photos a user has taken. In Google’s own example, it shows some possible ways to tag a photo of some pets:

In addition, Bard’s responses should now be a lot more visual. Ask it what the must see sights are in New Orleans for example, and it will show photos of local landmarks and places of interest, as well as text descriptions.

Fact: The phrase AI was mentioned 110 times during Google’s two hour event.

Google also announced that it had taken feedback onboard from developers, and would be making some key changes to the platform. This include:

• Sourcing citations – As of next week, Bard will give clearer citations for sources, allowing users to click on the relevant passage to see the initial source.
• Dark theme – Self explanatory, but those that prefer a darker screen that’s easier on the eyes, are now being catered to.
• Export button – A much requested feature from developers, Bard will let users export and run code, starting with Python. It will also be possible to export to Gmail and Google Docs.

These weren’t the only AI announcements from the I/O event – in fact, if you were keeping track of the times ‘AI’ got mentioned, you probably would have lost count early on (spoiler, it was 244). However, with Google betting big on Bard, it’s hard to argue that improvements to the platform aren’t significant, especially considering the number of competitors snapping at Google heels in the AI space.

Elon Musk has announced that Twitter will launch encrypted direct messaging this week, which should make communicating privately on the social media platform more secure than it has ever been.

At the moment, anyone working for Twitter could, in theory, read direct messages sent by any user. After encrypted messaging is rolled out, however, this would no longer be possible.

Video chat is also coming to Twitter, according to Musk, which might be the first in a long line of upcoming features designed to make the platform more of a multi-purpose, social hub and provide users with fewer reasons to log off.

End-to-End Encryption for Twitter DMs Is Here

In a tweet published today, Musk said that the encryption would “grow in sophistication rapidly” and suggested a good acid test would be if he “could not see [users’] DMs even if there was a gun to my head.”

End-to-end encryption has become a unique selling point for some apps, most notably WhatsApp and privacy-focused messaging app Signal, which now has tens of millions of users.

Facebook Messenger, however, is not end-to-end encrypted at present, but direct communication over Instagram (also owned by Meta) is protected in this way.

Other changes to direct messaging on Twitter include the ability for users to reply to any direct message within a thread (currently, you can only reply to the latest one) as well as an expansion of the emojis you can use to respond to DMs on the platform.

Video Chat for Twitter

In the same tweet revealing the end-to-end encryption plans, Musk teased the imminent release of “voice and video chat from your handle to anyone on this platform, so you can talk to people anywhere in the world without giving them your phone number.”

This would turn Twitter into a tool businesses could feasibly use to contact new clients or find new leads, although it won’t have many of the useful sales, collaboration, or contact management-based features that modern-day VoIP systems offer.

The pandemic also saw a meteoric rise of platforms offering web conferencing, such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet, with all competing fiercely and adding features regularly. It would likely take a lot to tear loyal customers away from these products.

Twitter: What’s Next for Musk’s Social Media Experiment?

In reality, we may not have to wait long for more features – business-focused or otherwise – if Musk’s publicly-stated desires for Twitter to become an all-encompassing app are borne out.

Last year, the CEO – who also heads up Tesla and SpaceX – made no secret of his admiration for Chinese app WeChat, which is a lot more multi-purpose than Twitter or other social media apps.

But it seems Twitter becoming just one part of a larger, umbrella app that has a much wider set of functions and features is more likely.

Musk’s purchase of the domain “X.com” half a decade ago, as well as comments made in various shareholder meetings, suggests plans for something bigger.

At the moment, plans are vague – but Musk will have to get his house in order before trying to take on the likes of Facebook, TikTok, and Snapchat, let alone WeChat.

Since Musk’s acquisition, Twitter has been plagued by internal scandals, layoffs, pay disputes, content moderation issues and advertisers jumping ship.

So tumultuous has Musk’s reign been that April – during which Twitter was merged into X Corp last month, and technically ceased to exist as an independent entity – was a relatively quiet month by recent standards.

What the future has in store for Twitter is unclear at best. Right now it feels as if there’s an equal chance of it turning into the biggest social media app on the market, or fading out of existence completely.

Microsoft’s Work Trends Index report has uncovered a rapidly developing “AI-Employee Alliance”, as employees identify artificial intelligence as a quick and easy way to quell job burnout.

Although a significant number of survey respondents admitted to harboring fears that their roles may be subsumed by artificial intelligence, a much larger proportion displayed an eagerness to delegate as much of their work as possible to AI.

As tools like AI assistants continue to be added to all sorts of workplace software, from project management tools to business communications platforms like Microsoft Teams, questions about AI’s capacity to replace jobs will persist – but opinions still vary greatly on its possible impact.

The AI-Employee Alliance Explained

Microsoft’s Work Trends Index, published this week – which draws responses from 31,000 full-time or self-employee workers across 31 markets – found that 70% would delegate “as much work as possible to AI”.

76% said they were comfortable using AI for admin-based tasks, and the vast majority said they saw no problem in using it for analytical tasks (79%) and creative work (73%).

We’re currently witnessing the creation of what Microsoft has dubbed the “AI-Employee Alliance”: AI, at least in the short term, is on the side of the overworked and the underpaid, tired of performing various aspects of their already-stressful jobs.

Luckily, almost twice as many business leaders see AI as a way to increase productivity (31%), rather than reducing the number of staff on their payroll (15%).

With huge fractions of the global workforce finding their mental health negatively impacted by their workplace, it’s understandable that workers are viewing AI tools like ChatGPT as a helping hand, not a hindrance.

But considering the ongoing public discourse and ominous predictions from think tanks, research groups, and consulting firms about AI subsuming hundreds of millions of jobs – as well as the fact that the survey found 49% of people are worried Ai will replace their jobs – the results are still somewhat surprising.

“It’s fascinating that people are more excited about AI rescuing them from burnout than they are worried about it eliminating their jobs,” author and organizational psychology professor Adam Grant said while commenting on the findings.

An Optimistic, Open-Minded Global Workforce

In the Microsoft survey, the company also revealed that the vast majority of workers believe AI “can enhance creativity”.

Along with the administrative and analytical tasks mentioned above, Formulating ideas for work (76%), as well as editing (75%) were also popular use cases identified by survey respondents as jobs for generative AI tools and/or other kinds of artificial intelligence.

According to the data, it seems like the more time you spend using AI, the more likely you are to appreciate its capabilities. 87% of workers in creative roles who consider themselves “extremely familiar” with AI, for instance, said they’d be happy utilizing AI for creative tasks.

Why Building AI Aptitude is Important for the AI-Employee Alliance

AI aptitude, as Microsoft puts it, is an umbrella term for a collection of workplace skills that all employees are going to need going forward, especially knowledge workers.

82% of leaders say their employees will need “new skills” to be prepared for the growth of AI.

“Skills like critical thinking and analytical judgment, complex problem solving, and creativity and originality are new core competencies – and not just for technical roles or AI experts,” Microsoft says.

The tech behemoth – which has bankrolled ChatGPT creators OpenAI – said that the business leaders they surveyed cited how important it was that employees understand when is best to “leverage” AI in productive ways, as well as more specific skills like prompt engineering and writing.

Employees that want to upskill themselves should take a two-pronged approach: firstly, building that AI aptitude that Microsoft suggests, while also investing time in developing skills like flexibility and emotional intelligence.

These are skills that AI tools will struggle – or take longer – to develop but also seem the most necessary in a working world that will be full of challenges, but also opportunities for reinvention.

Microsoft has announced that it’s widening access to its AI-powered Copilot tool, which will be built into popular Microsoft 365 apps like Word and Excel, as well as other products such as Microsoft Teams.

The company, which has launched a new project management platform Loop and made AI tools available in Microsoft Teams in recent months, is also adding new features and capabilities to the product.

Copilot has the potential to transform the way millions of people approach day-to-day work tasks and adds more fuel to the ongoing conversation surrounding AI job replacement.

Microsoft Expands Access to Copilot

Microsoft has launched the Copilot Early Access Program, which will let 600 enterprise customers use the tool for a period of time before it is released to the wider public.

The program is a paid access, invitation-only affair, so if your business isn’t one of the lucky 600 that have been asked to try out the new features, it looks like you’ll have to wait a little longer. The figures the businesses in question have paid to be part of the program have not been made public.

Microsoft is yet to say precisely when Copilot – which is powered by OpenAI’s most capable language model yet, GPT-4 – will be rolled out to the hundreds of millions of people using Microsoft 365 programs and Microsoft Teams.

New CoPilot AI Features Added

Along with announcing the CoPilot Early Access Program, Microsoft also revealed a number of new features that will be added to Copilot.

Copilot in Whiteboard, for example, is designed for more effective brainstorming and group ideation sessions.

“Using natural language, you can ask Copilot to generate ideas, organize ideas into themes, create designs that bring ideas to life, and summarize Whiteboard content,” Microsoft explains in a blog post published this week.

Microsoft 365 users will soon be able to ask DALL-E to create unique, custom images for their PowerPoint presentations.

There will be support for staff writing high volumes of emails too. Copilot “will offer coaching tips and suggestions on clarity, sentiment, and tone to help users write more effective emails and communicate more confidently” within Outlook, Microsoft says.

Microsoft has also developed what it calls a “semantic index” for Copilot, which lets the generative AI tool search more effectively through your company’s documents and data to find things that staff need.

The AI Revolution: Should Your Business Use Copilot and ChatGPT?

Once it’s released, using a tool like Copilot to do your day-to-day heavy lifting and administrative legwork – as well as tasks like summarizing reports – is a no-brainer. Employees that are already using ChatGPT – as well as Google’s chatbot, Bard – are clawing back hours upon hours of their workday. Built-in tools could be the next stage of this high-paced AI revolution.

There are, however, important things to consider when using AI in the workplace, for businesses of all shapes and sizes. For example, if you’re publishing content produced by AI, it’ll be a good idea to specify this in your editorial guidelines or declare it in such articles. This is just one of a myriad of complex considerations many businesses will have to confront in the coming months.

Understanding the limitations of products like ChatGPT is crucial too. If your business is using ChatGPT, you need oversight over what people in your business are using it for, and whether they know important facts that should sculpt their usage, like the fact it struggles with questions relating to events post-2021.

With genuinely useful AI tools in their relative infancy – but rapidly improving – creating a strategy, as well as company guidelines for its use, will put you in good stead going forward.