Antitrust Hearing Of Apple, Amazon, Google, And Facebook Will Be Held On Wednesday

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July 27, 2020

CEOs of Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Google, were about to undergo a Congressional hearing on Monday due to their the allegation of unfair dominance in the tech space. Lawmakers would question and assess these blue-chip companies for antitrust issues in the market and submit its report that could be used to device new rules to maintain competitiveness in the tech market.

Top executives of these organizations have faced backlash from critics, customers, and competitors about their monopoly in the market. It is believed that tech giants, especially, Facebook, Amazon, and Google, are leveraging their broader presence in the market to eliminate competition and implement rules that spoil customer experience.

Also Read: Tesla Sues Rivian And Accuses Of Theft

For one, Apple’s policies of App Store have always been under the scanner; many developers have claimed that the firm does not share essential information such as location data and other challenges in the approval process of applications. Similarly, Google will be questioned on the dominance of digital advertising, Facebook on its accusation of WhatsApp and Instagram, and Amazon on its treatment with third-party sellers.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler and Antitrust Subcommittee Chairman David Cicilline said in a statement Saturday: “Since last June, the Subcommittee has been investigating the dominance of a small number of digital platforms and the adequacy of existing antitrust laws and enforcement. Given the central role these corporations play in the lives of the American people, it is critical that their CEOs are forthcoming. As we have said from the start, their testimony is essential for us to complete this investigation.”

However, the antitrust hearing has been rescheduled to Wednesday as the members of Congress will be paying respect to the late Rep. John Lewis, who died on 17 July.

The hearing will be held remotely in which Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, and Sundar Pichai will explain their stand on various antitrust issues Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and Google are dealing with over the years.

Top Quote On Artificial Intelligence By Leaders

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Ratan Kumar

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July 25, 2020

Artificial intelligence is one of the most talked-about topics in the tech landscape due to its potential for revolutionizing the world. Many thought leaders of the domain have spoken their minds on artificial intelligence on various occasions in different parts of the world. Today, we will list down the top artificial intelligence quotes that have an in-depth meaning and are/were ahead of time.

Here is the list of top quotes about artificial intelligence: –

Artificial Intelligence Quote By Jensen Huang

“20 years ago, all of this [AI] was science fiction. 10 years ago, it was a dream. Today, we are living it.”
JENSEN HUANG, CO-FOUNDER AND CEO OF NVIDIA

The quote on artificial intelligence by Jensen Huang was said during NVIDIA GTC 2021 while announcing several products and services during the event. Over the years, NVIDIA has become a key player in the data science industry that is assisting researchers in further the development of the technology.

Quote On Artificial Intelligence By Stephen Hawking

“Success in creating effective AI, could be the biggest event in the history of our civilization. Or the worst. We just don’t know. So we cannot know if we will be infinitely helped by AI, or ignored by it and side-lined, or conceivably destroyed by it. Unless we learn how to prepare for, and avoid, the potential risks, AI could be the worst event in the history of our civilization. It brings dangers, like powerful autonomous weapons, or new ways for the few to oppress the many. It could bring great disruption to our economy.”
Stephen Hawking, 2017

Stephen Hawking’s quotes on artificial intelligence are very optimistic. Some of the famous quotes on artificial intelligence came from Hawking in 2014 when the BBC interviewed him. He said artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.

Here are some of the other quotes on artificial intelligence by Stephen Hawking.

Also Read: The Largest NLP Model Can Now Generate Code Automatically

Elon Musk On Artificial Intelligence

I have been banging this AI drum for a decade. We should be concerned about where AI is going. The people I see being the most wrong about AI are the ones who are very smart, because they can not imagine that a computer could be way smarter than them. That’s the flaw in their logic. They are just way dumber than they think they are.
Elon Musk, 2020

Musk has been very vocal about artificial intelligence’s capabilities in changing the way we do our day-to-day tasks. Earlier, he had stressed on the fact that AI can be the cause for world war three. In his Tweet, Musk mentioned ‘it [war] begins’ while quoting a news, which noted Vladimir Putin, President of Russia, though on the ruler of the world; the president said the nation that leads in AI would be the ruler of the world.

It begins … https://t.co/mbjw5hWC5J
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 4, 2017

Mark Zuckerberg’s Quote

Unlike negative quotes on artificial intelligence by others, Zuckerberg does not believe artificial intelligence will be a threat to the world. In his Facebook live, Zuckerberg answered a user who asked about people like Elon Musk’s opinion about artificial intelligence. Here’s what he said:

“I have pretty strong opinions on this. I am optimistic. I think you can build things and the world gets better. But with AI especially, I am really optimistic. And I think people who are naysayers and try to drum up these doomsday scenarios. I just don’t understand it. It’s really negative and in some ways, I actually think it is pretty irresponsible.”
Mark Zuckerberg, 2017

Larry Page’s Quote

“Artificial intelligence would be the ultimate version of Google. The ultimate search engine that would understand everything on the web. It would understand exactly what you wanted, and it would give you the right thing. We’re nowhere near doing that now. However, we can get incrementally closer to that, and that is basically what we work on.”
Larry Page

Stepped down as the CEO of Alphabet in late 2019, Larry Page has been passionate about integrating artificial intelligence in Google products. This was evident when the search giant announced that the firm is moving from ‘Mobile-first’ to ‘AI-first’.

Sebastian Thrun’s Quote On Artificial Intelligence

“Nobody phrases it this way, but I think that artificial intelligence is almost a humanities discipline. It’s really an attempt to understand human intelligence and human cognition.”
Sebastian Thrun

Sebastian Thrun is the co-founder of Udacity and earlier established Google X — the team behind Google self-driving car and Google Glass. He is one of the pioneers of the self-driving technology; Thrun, along with his team, won the Pentagon’s 2005 contest for self-driving vehicles, which was a massive leap in the autonomous vehicle landscape.

Tesla Sues Rivian And Accuses Of Theft

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Nandana Choudhury

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July 25, 2020

Tesla, the world’s leading manufacturer of electric vehicles, accused and filled a suit against its electric vehicle automaker rivals — Rivian.

According to Tesla, Rivian is stimulating employees of Tesla to leave their job and encouraging them to pouch the company’s trade secrets, confidential, and property information while leaving the firm.

Tesla also indicted Rivian by alleging that the rival startup has already recruited four of its employees who stole highly sensitive information while leaving. The largest automaker mentioned in the new suit that a total of 178 former Tesla employees are working at Rivian. And of which around 70 of them directly joined the rival startup.

Also Read: MIT Task Force: No Self-Driving Cars For At Least 10 Years

While Tesla is blaming its rival, Rivian defended itself with a statement to Tech Crunch: “We admire Tesla for its leadership in resetting expectations of what an electric car can be. Rivian is made up of high-performing, mission-driven teams, and our business model and technology are based on many years of engineering, design, and strategy development. This requires the contribution and know-how of thousands of employees from across the technology and automotive spaces. Upon joining Rivian, we require all employees to confirm that they have not, and will not, introduce former employers’ intellectual property into Rivian systems. This suit’s allegations are baseless and run counter to Rivian’s culture, ethos, and corporate policies.”

With investments from Amazon and Ford, Rivian is a significant player in the electric vehicle industry and had bagged high-profile deals from Amazon. The largest e-commerce company has ordered 100,000 electric delivery vans from Rivian, which are yet to be delivered by the Tesla rival. R.J Scaringe founded Rivian in the year 2009, and today the company has footprints in many countries such as Canada, California, Plymouth, Normal, San Jose, United Kingdom, and more.

This is not the first time Tesla alleged that its employees steal sensitive information and leave the company and joined rivals organizations such as Xpeng Motors and Zoox Inc.

MIT Task Force: No Self-Driving Cars For At Least 10 Years

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Nandana Choudhury

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July 24, 2020

In 2018, MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) introduced the MIT Task Force on The Work of Future. The main focus of the Task Force is to study the transmission of human work because of the emerging technologies and the skills required by humans to achieve the goal of the fully digital economy all over the world.

MIT’s faculty and student research team recently published a report mentioning the fact that fully automated driving systems (Cars, trucks, and buses) will take more than ten years to come into effect. According to the report’s latest brief, the growth of automatic vehicles intended to be slow and will occur region by region in specific categories of transportation, resulting in an alteration of availability over the world.

Also Read: Artificial Intelligence In Vehicles Explained

Visions of automation in mobility are still a matter of question and will not be readily accepted by people who are dubious of the possibility of self-driving technology. Many challenges may become the hurdle in the path of fully driverless vehicles. The cost can be one of the barriers, as suggested by coauthors John Leonard, MIT professor of mechanical and ocean engineering, and Erik Stayton, MIT doctoral candidate. For instance, Starsky — a self-driving vehicle company — shut down its operations, and Zoox shed its workforce during COVID-19 pandemic. In addition, we are yet to develop technology that can bring cognitive in AI-based systems that can allow self-driving companies to deliver fully autonomous vehicles.

Although the report by MIT says that the Level 5 autonomy is at least ten years away, Elon Musk, earlier this month in a Chinese AI conference, said that Tesla could accomplish complete autonomy by the end of 2020. “I remain confident that we will have the basic functionality for level five autonomy complete this year. I think there are no fundamental challenges remaining for level five autonomy,” said Musk.

Nevertheless, MIT’s report also mentioned that investing in the local and national infrastructure and private-public partnerships will encourage the unification of automatic vehicles and strengthen the growth in urban areas.

Read the full report here.

Dataflex: A New Low-Code Data Platform For Microsoft Teams

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Nandana Choudhury

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July 23, 2020

Microsoft has announced a platform named Dataflex — a relational database that helps business developers create, organize, and handle chatbots and Power Platform apps without leaving Microsoft Teams application.

Equipped with AI capabilities and security benefits, with Dataflex, Microsoft will give its users relational data storage, rich data types, the business-level authority with a single click arrangement. Dataflex is meant to help companies leverage organizational data to make low-code apps that would solve their business problems while leaving the complexities of managing facilities behind the relational database.

Microsoft Teams has been in the fastest growing app of the company since 2018; in April 2020, it achieved 7.5 million daily active users. With Dataflex, Microsoft is all set to help business developers build their own apps for Teams.

AI capabilities

Dataflex is built on top of the Power Platform, which will enable users to embrace artificial intelligence and predictive powers of the platform. Power Automata’s AI Builder helps your systems audit structured and unstructured data from paper-based invoices, images, and other analog sources. AI Builder works with six elements in Dataflex: category classification, entity extraction, key phrase extraction, language detection, sentiment analysis, and prediction. In other words, AI Builder provides a low-code experience for using artificial intelligence and machine learning in business applications.

Also Read: The Largest NLP Model Can Now Generate Code Automatically

Security and other Performance benefits

The Power Platform supports over 350 data connectors, thereby catering to the diverse needs of organizations. This helps business users to tie up with other business systems (SQL Server, Excel file, SharePoint list, or integrate with OneDrive or Dropbox) to reserve the data for their app or chatbot. It reduces the risk of migrating and storing data in other databases. Eliminating the need for a security expert will empower businesses to materialize their ideas rapidly. This will democratize its adoption among organizations, as it can bring value to firms quickly.

Click here for more.

After Google, IBM Will Now Invest In India’s Digital Initiative

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Nandana Choudhury

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July 22, 2020

After Google’s $10 billion (around 75,000 cr.) commitment in India for enhancing digitization, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna met Prime Minister Narendra Modi to brief about the tech giant’s investment plan. For investing in the tech sector, the current scenario is the ideal time, stated Modi, in a press release of the government.

Had an extensive interaction with CEO of @IBM, Mr. @ArvindKrishna. We discussed several subjects relating to technology, data security, emerging trends in healthcare and education. https://t.co/w9or8NWWbD pic.twitter.com/fCqFbmrzJx
— Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) July 20, 2020

When the whole world is going through a steady situation, FDI inflow in India is increasing rapidly. According to Modi, India is moving towards the journey of the self-contained country, which will enable India to become competitive globally. Besides, it is planning to make an enhanced supply chain that can assist the country in growing its economy.

Also Read: The Largest NLP Model Can Now Generate Code Automatically

As mentioned by the Govt’s Press Information Bureau, IBM CEO specified IBM’s major investment plans in India and conveyed his conviction to the idea of ‘Atmanirbhar Bharat’. In the conversation, Modi also showed his concern about the negative influence of COVID-19 pandemic on business continuity. However, he revealed that ‘work from home’ is getting adopted and appreciated all over the country. To assist in making a streamline transition into the new normal of work from home culture, the government is aiming at the smooth infrastructure, connectivity, and administrative culture.

Modi discussed about the technologies that can play a crucial role in democratizing work from home and the risk involved in the decision taken by IBM that will allow 75% of its employees to work from home post-COVID-19.

The Indian Prime Minister also discussed the future abilities to produce India specific AI-based tools for the welfare of the healthcare sector. In addition, he explored the possibilities of developing better equipment or models to predict diseases. In the future, IBM may play a vital role in accelerating India’s digital initiative developing and offering numerous tech-based services. Data security, cyber attacks, and privacy concerns and benefits of yoga were also the topic of their conversation.

The Largest NLP Model Can Now Generate Code Automatically

By

Analytics Drift

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July 20, 2020

GPT-3, the largest natural language processing model, was developed by OpenAI and released on 28 May 2020. Since its release, many developers tried their hands with the GPT-3 model. Similarly, Sharif Shameem, founder of debuild, tweeted a post in which he showed how GPT-3 can code automatically just by providing instruction.

This is mind blowing.

With GPT-3, I built a layout generator where you just describe any layout you want, and it generates the JSX code for you.

W H A T pic.twitter.com/w8JkrZO4lk
— Sharif Shameem (@sharifshameem) July 13, 2020

Shameem trained the model with just two samples, which you can see below.

However, this doesn’t mean that it can write the complete code for your projects. Such short tricks work well on social media and might not be able to help you immediately. Undoubtedly, this brings us to the question of whether AI can code. Maybe someday it would, but we are no way near to rely on AI for writing code.

Also Read: These 5 Technology Trends Will Shape Our Lives In 2020

Currently, OpenAI’s GPT-3 is overhyped, which was also pointed by the CEO of OpenAI. “The GPT-3 hype is way too much. It’s impressive (thanks for the nice compliments!) but it still has serious weaknesses and sometimes makes very silly mistakes. AI is going to change the world, but GPT-3 is just a very early glimpse. We have a lot still to figure out,” wrote Altman in this tweet.

GPT-3 code generator is fascinating, and you might get your hands on it as Shameem is planning to make it public. Replying to one of the comments on this post, Shameem also mentioned that he believes that we can have AI that can code in less than ten years.

The use of natural language is not new; many dashboards such as Qlik and Power BI leverage NLP to pull up reports or insights from data. The reports are generated by converting the plain English text into forming code and then extracting results from a colossal amount of data. But, this is a massive development in the AI landscape, which can further the advancement of ML models that can write its own code.

OpenAI’s GPT-3 paper.

Will Data Science Be Ever Automated

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Analytics Drift

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July 11, 2020

Data science has seen enormous growth in recent years due to the amount of data that is being collected by organizations. Ever since the word was coined in 2011, the data science domain has exploded in nine years. However, the increase in data collection is not the only reason why data science democratized over the years. The availability of computational resources was as vital as the data itself. But, as data became ubiquitous, companies struggle to process different types of information they gather. Therefore, this led to siloed data — information being stored on databases while waiting to be analyzed — within organizations. Consequently, companies are looking for automation tools that can streamline the data science initiative in organizations. This brings us to the question: will data science be ever automated? Or can AI take over data science?

Need For Automation In Data Science

Undoubtedly, the amount of data that organizations are gathering will take years for humans to analyze. And by the time they mold the data, will it be worth to find insights into the information that was generated a few years ago? In the ever-changing world, users’ behavior is continuously changing, and thereby historical data might not be useful in every use case. For instance, people used to watch longer videos; however, today, the rise of TikTok popularity tells a different story; users are consuming short videos more often. While historical data will still be relevant, but there is a need for quickly processing information to make business decisions and gain a competitive edge.

Also Read: Amazon Makes Its Machine Learning Course Free For All

Rise Of Automation Solutions

As IoT is expected to increase in the coming years, data will only get more ubiquitous. Consequently, firms are moving towards streaming analytics — real-time insights — for gaining insights into data immediately after it gets generated. However, this requires a robust data pipeline for simplifying data analysis, which is near impossible as information comes from different sources. Nevertheless, companies are trying to streamline the process on a case-by-case basis.

Another solution that is showing the promise is AutoML — automatic machine learning. AutoML solutions are focused on automating the machine learning model selection for data scientists. Usually, professionals waste time determining which ML model brings more value to businesses. Numerous companies, such as DataRobot, H2O.ai, among others, offer superior AutoML solutions for doing all the heavy lifting for organizations. Besides, these AutlML tools can be leveraged by non-experts to build ML models and make informed decisions.

Why Data Science Cannot Be Completely Automated

Data scientists require many skills like data intuition that cannot be integrated into AutoML tools. Besides, professionals spend 80 percent of their time finding, cleaning, and organizing data. Although a tedious task, data wrangling eats up most of the time. To carry out such tasks, data scientists need skills like identifying the data source, understanding the structure of the website to crawl the data, and more. Unfortunately, automation tools can never perform those cumbersome activities. However, this doesn’t mean that machines cannot automate other tasks. AutoML and streaming analytics tools are helping companies to simplify the data science workflows, but a plethora of data science techniques are still untouchable by these solutions.

Outlook

If you are not on Mars, you must be aware of the fact that artificial intelligence doesn’t have common sense. This makes AI models ineffectual in replicating humans in a wide range of tasks. Since the data science landscape must further evolve and accomplish common sense, we are poised to witness several changes in the way we process data. For one, the self-driving car could not deliver on the hype it created and need to be revamped the way it operates. Therefore, development in the data science space is going to increase further, which would be difficult for automation solutions to catch up with the market. However, if the landscape gets matured enough to enable AI agents to replicate human-like behaviors, one can then argue that data science might be automated.

Apple Exposed! It Will Now Pay $27 Million As Fine

By

Analytics Drift

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February 8, 2020

Apple for years has indulged in unfair practices for expediting its new iPhone sales. In 2017, it was reported that the firm deliberately slackens the device a few months before it releases new phones. This drew the interest of experts and users from all across the world, which led Apple to accept the claim.

However, Apple said that it adopted such practice to prolong the life of old devices. The firm stressed on the fact that due to the continuous charging and discharging of lithium-ion batteries, the phones fail to deliver peak performance. Consequently, Apple released a software update for iPhone 6, iPhone 6s, among others, to reduce the performance with the introduction of a dynamic power management system. But why didn’t the company notified the users to replace the battery?

Besides, Apple didn’t notify users about the changes it was going to make in their phones with the update, which bought the firm in the soup. Now, since Apple has been exposed, it will have to pay $27 million to France’s competition and fraud watchdog DGCCRF. The company has accepted the fine and will also publish a press release in the French language for a moth to inform stakeholders.

Irrespective of the public outrage since 2017 for its clever tricks, Apple continues to implement such practices. The organisation enables the feature as and when the battery starts degrading in newer iPhones. However, now it informs users of the decreased performance when it automatically switches the mode for avoiding unexpected shut down of devices.

“The effects of performance management on these newer models may be less noticeable due to their more advanced hardware and software design,” Apple said. Despite Apple’s rhetorics, users still question the timing of the release and believe that the company’s prime motive was to encourage them to buy new iPhones.

Will AWS Lose Its Monopoly To Azure And Google Cloud?

By

Ratan Kumar

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February 8, 2020

Cloud computing technologies have become the backbone for any organization to deliver robust products and scale their business effortlessly. As more and more companies are migrating towards the cloud, various blue-chip companies are offering their cloud services and catering to the needs of rising demands. In 2019 Q3, the global cloud infrastructure services market grew by 37% to reach $27.5 billion. And as AWS tapped into the market in 2006, it has created a monopoly in the current landscape. The report also stated that in Q3 2019, AWS has retained its dominant position with a growth of $2.3 billion, which is equal to the year-on-year increase of the next three competitors combined.

Varied Options In The Market

However, with the rise of various competitors such as Azure, IBM, Google, among others, AWS is starting to feel the heat. Such a wide range of options in the cloud market has slackened the growth of AWS; as per the report, AWS had 34% of the market share in Q2 2017 and has reduced by one percentage point to 33% in Q3 2019. Nevertheless, Azure has risen to 17% from 11% in Q2 2017.

Rise In Competition

Of all the competitors, Azure is giving AWS a run for its money. Although Microsoft is a distant second, it has matched AWS in providing superior services, and in some, it has overpowered AWS services. “We have seen a pretty big uptick in Azure, thus we can expect a big battle between the AWS and Azure. Microsoft has a robust partner program that has been assisting in accelerating its growth,” said Patrick Harr, CEO at Panzura.

Reportedly, Google top management has set 2023 as a deadline for beating Microsoft and Amazon in cloud computing. Google’s mission can be witnessed with the ramp-up of hiring senior executives for its cloud offerings. Thomas Kurian, Oracle executive, was hired earlier this year to run Google cloud.

Although Google cloud was built for internal development, now it has enhanced services for businesses. “We have transformed Google Cloud into more of an enterprise-ready company; we have all the services and enterprise companies should have,” said Kurian.

Another report evaluated the cloud computing performance and concluded that in comparison to AWS and Alibaba Cloud, Google and Azure delivered desired performance, especially outside the US. Therefore, in Asia specific, Azure retained its top spot in the region.

Azure Vs Google Vs AWS

Despite the surge in the competition, AWS has performed well by retaining its market share due to its superior security and customer service. Besides, AWS enhances the cloud platform by continually adding new features. Therefore, over the years, feature-rich services have allowed it to grow an average of 48% in the last three years.

However, with the Azure winning big deals like the $10 billion deal with Pentagon, although controversial, there could be a sign of AWS losing its shine. The resent is quite evident as Amazon challenges the Pentagon cloud deal.

Due to the fierce competition in the cloud market, Mike Maciag, CMO of Dynatrace, believes there might not be a single winner. “What I do know is the world very rarely settles on one thing. I’ve seen Microsoft come up and Google come up. In customers, we see a real desire to have the flexibility of deployment. I think people want choice,” said Maciag to a media firm.

Outlook

Currently, AWS has almost twice the market share than what Azure has; thus, Amazon might still lead the race. But Azure footprints are growing in the Asia Pacific. It may further gain momentum to close the gap quickly. And as Google is starting to show promise with Kurian, one can expect their spike as well. It won’t be straightforward for AWS to maintain its momentum throughout the world since Google and Azure are gaining prominence as well.