AI
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UK-based Google DeepMind workers vote to unionize over military AI contracts amid internal backlash over its Pentagon deal
Google’s UK-based DeepMind workers have launched a bid to form what would be the world’s first union at a frontier AI lab. The move follows a controversial deal Google inked with the Pentagon, sparking a wave of internal backlash over the company’s military contracts. Last week, Google agreed to let the U.S. Department of Defense
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Exclusive: Nova Intelligence raises $31.5 million to bring agentic AI to SAP’s $89 billion migration wave
An estimated 77% of the world’s transactions touch an SAP system at some point. And most of that code is decades old, written in a proprietary language, and locked inside the workflows at the largest enterprises on earth. It is also, by SAP’s own mandate, on a clock. Nova Intelligence is betting that’s a generational
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An AI ‘godfather’ says CEOs hyping job loss are ‘extremely destructive’—and your kids are paying the price
It’s become a common pattern over the past few months: A business leader makes an ominous claim about the impact of AI on the labor market, sparking weeks of discourse and sending U.S. workers reeling. Now, a “godfather” of AI is pushing back on those claims—and warning about the dangers they spur. In an interview
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A Harvard study just found AI can now out-diagnose physicians in the ER: ‘We’re already at the ceiling’
AI has entered your office, your kid’s classroom, and the courtroom. Now, it’s coming for the hospital. A recent study from a team led by physicians and computer scientists at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center compared emergency room diagnoses from OpenAI’s o1-preview against those offered by two internal medicine attending physicians.
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Anthropic takes shot at consulting industry in joint venture with Wall Street giants
Anthropic announced Monday that it has partnered with Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, and Goldman Sachs to launch a new AI-native enterprise services company — one that puts the Claude maker in direct competition with the world’s largest consulting firms for the lucrative business of corporate AI transformation. The venture, backed by approximately $1.5 billion in
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Employee revolt once forced Google to back off on military contracts. But, in the wake of a new Pentagon AI contract, their leverage appears limited
Google inks a major contract to help the Pentagon use AI. Hundreds of employees sign an open letter opposing the deal. The company’s leadership initially digs in its heels. Several employees resign in protest. As the employee revolt builds, Google’s management reverses course and opts not to renew the lucrative military relationship. That was 2018.
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A decade after the ‘Godfather of AI’ said radiologists were obsolete, their salaries are up to $571K and demand is growing fast
In 2016, the “Godfather of AI,” Geoffrey Hinton, stood onstage at a machine learning conference in Toronto and declared AI would soon kill the radiology profession. At the time, he said people should even stop training new radiologists because it was “completely obvious” that within five years (or 10 at most) AI would do a
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Chinese court rules firms can’t lay off workers on AI grounds
A Chinese court ruled that companies cannot terminate employees just to replace them with artificial intelligence systems, as authorities juggle the need to stabilize the domestic labor market with a global race to develop AI technologies. The court decided that a tech firm in eastern China had illegally fired one of its workers after he
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Sam Altman says the quiet part out loud, confirming some companies are ‘AI washing’ by blaming unrelated layoffs on the technology
As debate continues over AI’s true impact on the labor force, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said some companies are engaging in “AI washing” when it comes to layoffs, or falsely attributing workforce reductions to the technology’s impact. “I don’t know what the exact percentage is, but there’s some AI washing where people are blaming AI
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Unionized workers form alliance with rich tech giants on AI data centers, pushing back on local opposition and redrawing political lines
Building trades unions — long fashioned as the voice of the American worker — are now intertwined with the richest companies in the world as they create America’s artificial intelligence economy. Unionized workers are employed on a huge number of massive data center projects and scrambling to recruit new apprentices to feed the explosive demand.