Chegg, the online education company, is laying off 319 workers as it struggles to compete against modern AI chatbots. SFGATE reports: Chegg announced the new layoff round, which will hit 21% of its workforce, in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday. The company delivered the news alongside another brutal quarterly financial report; Chegg lost more than $212 million from July through September. CEO Nathan Schultz, in prepared remarks accompanying the report, expressed some optimism but called it a "trying time" for his company. Chegg provides grammar and plagiarism checkers, plus course-by-course study help, along with much-used textbook solution guides.

"Technology shifts have created headwinds for our industry and Chegg's business specifically," Schultz said. "Recent advancements in the AI search experience and the adoption of free and paid generative AI services by students, have resulted in challenges for Chegg. These factors are adversely affecting our business outlook and are requiring us to refocus and adjust the size of our business." He specifically called out Google's AI overviews, a recent change to search results that pulls information from news outlets and sites like Chegg and summarizes above the classic blue links. Schultz said that his team believes Google is "shifting from being a search origination point to the destination" in an attempt to keep market share.

Schultz also blamed generative AI chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT, saying that students see the tool and others like it as "strong alternatives" to Chegg. Web traffic has dropped sharply as a result, Schultz wrote. A Wall Street Journal story published Saturday said Chegg "is trying to avoid becoming [ChatGPT's] first major victim" and that the company had lost more than 500,000 subscribers, some who paid almost $20 a month, since the chatbot's 2022 launch. Despite the negative business impact, it seems Chegg is experimenting with new tech. Schultz said in the remarks that the company had formed an "arena" to evaluate AI models and aims to "integrate AI into the full learning journey."

An update to OpenAI's ChatGPT app for macOS adds integration with third-party apps, including developer tools such as VS Code, Terminal, iTerm2 and Apple's Xcode. 9to5Mac reports: In a demo seen by 9to5Mac, ChatGPT was able to understand code from an Xcode project and then provide code suggestions without the user having to manually copy and paste content into the ChatGPT app. It can even read content from more than one app at the same time, which is very useful for working with developer tools. According to OpenAI, the idea is to expand integration to more apps in the future. For now, integration with third-party apps is coming exclusively to the Mac version of ChatGPT, but there's another catch. The feature requires a paid ChatGPT subscription, at least for now.

ChatGPT Plus and Team subscribers will receive access to integration with third-party apps on macOS starting today, while access for Enterprise and Education users will be rolled out "in the next few weeks." OpenAI told 9to5Mac that it wants to make the feature available to everyone in the future, although there's no estimate of when this will happen. For privacy reasons, users can control at any time when and which apps ChatGPT can read. The app can be downloaded here.

Most companies are starting to figure out how AI will change the way they do business. Chegg is trying to avoid becoming its first major victim. WSJ: The online education company was for many years the go-to source for students who wanted help with their homework, or a potential tool for plagiarism. The shift to virtual learning during the pandemic sent subscriptions and its stock price to record highs.

Then came ChatGPT. Suddenly students had a free alternative to the answers Chegg spent years developing with thousands of contractors in India. Instead of "Chegging" the solution, they began canceling their subscriptions and plugging questions into chatbots. Since ChatGPT's launch, Chegg has lost more than half a million subscribers who pay up to $19.95 a month for prewritten answers to textbook questions and on-demand help from experts. Its stock is down 99% from early 2021, erasing some $14.5 billion of market value. Bond traders have doubts the company will continue bringing in enough cash to pay its debts.

A former teacher has filed a federal lawsuit against PowerSchool, alleging the education technology giant illegally sells student data to third parties without proper consent. Emily Cherkin, lead plaintiff in the class action suit filed in San Francisco, claims PowerSchool has amassed 345 terabytes of data from 440 school districts, including sensitive information about students' health, behavior, and academic records. The company provides software services to more than 60 million students across 90 of the largest U.S. school districts.

The lawsuit alleges PowerSchool sells anonymized student data to over 100 partners, including educational consultants and government agencies, while marketing its analytics for workforce and policy planning. The company's Naviance college-planning software alone tracks 6 million high school students. PowerSchool has denied the allegations.

This week's Ubuntu Summit 2024 was attended by Lproven (Slashdot reader #6,030). He's also a FOSS correspondent for the Register, where he's filed this report: One of the first full-length sessions was presented by David Morin, executive director of the Academy Software Foundation, introducing his organization in a talk about Open Source Software for Motion Pictures. Morin linked to the Visual Effects Society's VFX/Animation Studio Workstation Linux Report, highlighting the market share pie-chart, showing Rocky Linux 9 with at some 58 percent and the RHELatives in general at 90 percent of the market. Ubuntu 22 and 24 — the report's nomenclature, not this vulture's — got just 10.5 percent. We certainly didn't expect to see that at an Ubuntu event, with the latest two versions of Rocky Linux taking 80 percent of the studio workstation market...

What also struck us over the next three quarters of an hour is that Linux and open source in general seem to be huge components of the movie special effects industry — to an extent that we had not previously realized.
There's a "sizzle reel" showing examples of how major motion pictures used OpenColorIO, an open-source production tool for syncing color representations originally developed by Sony Pictures Imageworks. That tool is hosted by a collaboration between the Linux Foundation with the Science and Technology Council of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (the "Academy" of the Academy Awards). The collaboration — which goes by the name of the Academy Software Foundation — hosts 14 different projects The ASWF hasn't been around all that long — it was only founded in 2018. Despite the impact of the COVID pandemic, by 2022 it had achieved enough to fill a 45-page history called Open Source in Entertainment [PDF]. Morin told the crowd that it runs events, provides project marketing and infrastructure, as well as funding, training and education, and legal assistance. It tries to facilitate industry standards and does open source evangelism in the industry. An impressive list of members — with 17 Premier companies, 16 General ones, and another half a dozen Associate members — shows where some of the money comes from. It's a big list of big names. [Adobe, AMD, AWS, Autodesk...]
The presentation started with OpenVBD, a C++ library developed and donated by Dreamworks for working with three-dimensional voxel-based shapes. (In 2020 they created this sizzle reel, but this year they've unveiled a theme song.) Also featured was OpenEXR, originally developed at Industrial Light and Magic and sourced in 1999. (The article calls it "a specification and reference implementation of the EXR file format — a losslessly compressed image storage format for moving images at the highest possible dynamic range.")

"For an organization that is not one of the better-known ones in the FOSS space, we came away with the impression that the ASWF is busy," the article concludes. (Besides running Open Source Days and ASWF Dev Days, it also hosts several working groups like the Language Interop Project works on Rust bindings and the Continuous Integration Working Group on CI tools, There's generally very little of the old razzle-dazzle in the Linux world, but with the demise of SGI as the primary maker of graphics workstations — its brand now absorbed by Hewlett Packard Enterprise — the visual effects industry moved to Linux and it's doing amazing things with it. And Kubernetes wasn't even mentioned once.

England and Wales have recorded their lowest birth rate since records began in 1938, with women having an average of 1.44 children in 2023, official data showed on Monday. The figure falls well below the 2.1 children per woman needed to maintain a stable population without migration in developed nations, the Office for National Statistics reported.

The rate has declined steadily since 2010. The steepest drops occurred among women under 30, with new mothers in 2023 averaging almost a year older than in 2013. Experts link the decline to multiple factors, including widespread contraception use, women's increased participation in education and employment, and rising childcare and housing costs. The trend mirrors similar patterns across developed economies, with EU nations like Italy and Spain reporting rates as low as 1.2 children per woman in 2023.

theodp writes: "Computer science education is a necessity for all students," argues tech-backed nonprofit Code.org in its newly-published 2024 State of Computer Science Education (Understanding Our National Imperative) report. "Students of all identities and chosen career paths need quality computer science education to become informed citizens and confident creators of content and digital tools."

In the 200-page report, Code.org pays special attention to participation in "foundational computer science courses" in high school. "Across the country, 60% of public high schools offer at least one foundational computer science course," laments Code.org (curiously promoting a metric that ignores school size which nonetheless was embraced by Education Week and others).

"A course that teaches foundational computer science includes a minimum amount of time applying learned concepts through programming (at least 20 hours of programming/coding for grades 9-12 high schools)," Code.org explains in a separate 13-page Defining Foundational Computer Science document. Interestingly, Code.org argues that Data and Informatics courses -- in which "students may use Oracle WebDB, SQL, PL/SQL, SPSS, and SAS" to learn "the K-12 CS Framework concepts about data and analytics" -- do not count, because "the course content focuses on querying using a scripting language rather than creating programs [the IEEE's Top Programming Languages 2024 begs to differ]." Code.org similarly dissed the use of the Wolfram Language for broad educational use back in 2016.

With its insistence on the importance of kids taking Code.org-defined 'programming' courses in K-12 to promote computational thinking, it's probably no surprise to see that the data behind the 2024 State of Computer Science Education report was prepared using Python (the IEEE's top programming language) and presented to the public in a Jupyter notebook. Just kidding. Ironically, the data behind the 2024 State of Computer Science Education analysis is prepared and presented by Code.org in a no-code Tableau workbook.

Applications to MBA programs jumped 12% in 2024, with full-time programs surging 32% to decade-high levels, WSJ is reporting, citing the Graduate Management Admission Council's latest survey. Top-tier U.S. schools reported significant gains, with Columbia Business School seeing a 27% rise and Harvard Business School applications climbing 21%. So what's behind the surge? The story adds: Today, the U.S. job market is strong, and unemployment remains low. But lower wage positions in retail and dining, as well as healthcare and government, have fueled much of the labor market's growth over the past two years.

A white-collar job market downturn that began with tech workers in 2022 has spread to other sectors. Major employers including Goldman Sachs, Lyft, Microsoft and PricewaterhouseCoopers have laid off a combined tens of thousands of workers this year. Hiring for roles that usually require a bachelor's degree dropped below 2019 levels in recent months, according to payroll provider ADP. That slump has been steeper for 20-somethings, who are running into a bottleneck on the lower rungs of the corporate ladder as more established professionals stay put.

"Biden forgives more student loans," read Thursday's headline at CNBC.

While this time it was $4.5 billion in student debt for over 60,000 public service workers, "The Biden-Harris Administration has approved $175 billion in student debt relief for nearly 5 million borrowers through various actions," according to an announcement from the White House on Thursday. (So the average amount received by each of the 5 million students is $35,000.) CNN calculates this eliminates roughly 11% of all outstanding U.S. federal student loan debt.

This latest round of forgiveness fixed a loophole in a bipartisan program (passed during the Bush administration in 2007) called Public Service Loan Forgiveness: "For too long, the government failed to live up to its commitments, and only 7,000 people had ever received forgiveness under Public Service Loan Forgiveness before Vice President (Kamala) Harris and I took office," Biden said in a statement. "We vowed to fix that," he added... Thursday's announcement impacts about 60,000 borrowers who are now approved for approximately $4.5 billion in student debt relief under PSLF.
CNN points out the total $175 billion in forgiven student debt is more than under any other president — though it's still "less than half of the $430 billion that would've been canceled under the president's one-time forgiveness plan, which was struck down by the Supreme Court last year." The Biden administration has made it easier for about 572,000 permanently disabled borrowers to receive the debt relief to which they are entitled. It also has granted student loan forgiveness to more than 1.6 million borrowers who were defrauded by their college... The Biden administration is conducting a one-time recount of borrowers' past payments and making adjustments if they had been counted incorrectly, bringing many people closer to debt relief.

The parents of a Massachusetts student are suing his school after he was penalized for using AI in a Social Studies project, claiming it was for research purposes only. The student received a detention and a lower grade, which his parents argue could harm his college prospects. The school is defending its AI policy and fighting to dismiss the case. The Register reports: "The Plaintiff Student will suffer irreparable harm that far outweighs any harm that may befall the Defendants," their filing reads [PDF]. "He is applying to elite colleges and universities given his high level of academic and personal achievement. Early decision and early action applications in a highly competitive admissions process are imminent and start in earnest on October 1, 2024. Absent the grant of an injunction by this Court, the Student will suffer irreparable harm that is imminent."

The school, however, is fighting back with a motion to dismiss [PDF] the case. The school argues that RNH, along with his classmates, was given a copy of the student handbook in the Fall of last year, which specifically called out the use of AI by students. The class was also shown a presentation about the school's policy. Students should "not use AI tools during in-class examinations, processed writing assignments, homework or classwork unless explicitly permitted and instructed," the policy states. "RNH unequivocally used another author's language and thoughts, be it a digital and artificial author, without express permission to do so," the school argues. "Furthermore, he did not cite to his use of AI in his notes, scripts or in the project he submitted. Importantly, RNH's peers were not allowed to cut corners by using AI to craft their projects; thus, RNH acted 'unfairly in order to gain an advantage.'"

Many colleges are under financial pressure, and the cracks are starting to show. From a report: At least 20 colleges closed in 2024, and more are set to shut down after the current academic year, according to the latest tally by Implan, an economic software and analysis company. Altogether, more than 40 colleges have closed since 2020, according to a separate report by Best Colleges.

As the sticker price at some private colleges nears six figures a year, students have increasingly opted for less expensive public schools or alternatives to a four-year degree altogether, such as trade programs or apprenticeships. At the same time, the population of college-age students is also shrinking, a trend referred to as the "enrollment cliff."

"Pig Butchering Alert: Fraudulent Trading App targeted iOS and Android users."

That's the title of a new report released this week by cybersecurity company Group-IB revealing the official Apple App Store and Google Play store offered apps that were actually one part of a larger fraud campaign. "To complete the scam, the victim is asked to fund their account... After a few seemingly successful trades, the victim is persuaded to invest more and more money. The account balance appears to grow rapidly. However, when the victim attempts to withdraw funds, they are unable to do so."

Forbes reports: Group-IB determined that the frauds would begin with a period of social engineering reconnaissance and entrapment, during which the trust of the potential victim was gained through either a dating app, social media app or even a cold call. The attackers spent weeks on each target. Only when this "fattening up" process had reached a certain point would the fraudsters make their next move: recommending they download the trading app from the official App Store concerned.

When it comes to the iOS app, which is the one that the report focussed on, Group-IB researchers said that the app remained on the App Store for several weeks before being removed, at which point the fraudsters switched to phishing websites to distribute both iOS and Android apps. The use of official app stores, albeit only fleetingly as Apple and Google removed the fake apps in due course, bestowed a sense of authenticity to the operation as people put trust in both the Apple and Google ecosystems to protect them from potentially dangerous apps.
"The use of web-based applications further conceals the malicious activity," according to the researchers, "and makes detection more difficult." [A]fter the download is complete, the application cannot be launched immediately. The victim is then instructed by the cybercriminals to manually trust the Enterprise developer profile. Once this step is completed, the fraudulent application becomes operational... Once a user registers with the fraudulent application, they are tricked into completing several steps. First, they are asked to upload identification documents, such as an ID card or passport. Next, the user is asked to provide personal information, followed by job-related details...

The first discovered application, distributed through the Apple App Store, functions as a downloader, merely retrieving and displaying a web-app URL. In contrast, the second application, downloaded from phishing websites, already contains the web-app within its assets. We believe this approach was deliberate, since the first app was available in the official store, and the cybercriminals likely sought to minimise the risk of detection. As previously noted, the app posed as a tool for mathematical formulas, and including personal trading accounts within an iOS app would have raised immediate suspicion.
The app (which only runs on mobile phones) first launches a fake activity with formulas and graphics, according to the researchers. "We assume that this condition must bypass Apple's checks before being published to the store. As we can see, this simple trick allows cybercriminals to upload their fraudulent application to the Apple Store." They argue their research "reinforces the need for continued review of app store submissions to prevent such scams from reaching unsuspecting victims". But it also highlights "the importance of vigilance and end-user education, even when dealing with seemingly trustworthy apps..."

"Our investigation began with an analysis of Android applications at the request of our client. The client reported that a user had been tricked into installing the application as part of a stock investment scam. During our research, we uncovered a list of similar fraudulent applications, one of which was available on the Google Play Store. These apps were designed to display stock-related news and articles, giving them a false sense of legitimacy."

Private equity firms are using US public sector workers' retirement savings to fund fossil fuel projects pumping more than a billion tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere every year, according to an analysis. From a report: They have ploughed more than $1tn into the energy sector since 2010, often buying into old and new fossil fuel projects and, thanks to exemptions from many financial disclosures, operating them outside the public eye, the researchers say. In many cases they are mortgaging workers' futures by taking the money they have put away for old age and investing it in assets that risk serious damage to the climate, the report claims.

"Public sector workers' money, through national, state, and retirement pensions, provides much of the capital for private equity firms' energy investments, but there is limited disclosure to the pension fund managers that the deferred earnings of their beneficiaries have potential climate impacts," it says. Researchers at Americans for Financial Reform Education Fund, Global Energy Monitor and Private Equity Stakeholder Project assessed the holdings of 21 private equity firms, overseeing a combined $6tn in assets under management. Together, the analysis found that the 21 firms were funding projects responsible for releasing more than 1.17bn tons of CO2 equivalent (tCO2e) a year.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Politico: It will soon be illegal for public and private universities in California to consider an applicant's relationship to alumni or donors when deciding whether to admit them. Gov. Gavin Newsom on Monday signed a ban on the practice known as legacy admissions, a change that will affect prestigious institutions including Stanford University and the University of Southern California. California's law, which will take effect Sept. 1, 2025, is the nation's fifth legacy admissions ban, but only the second that will apply to private colleges. "In California, everyone should be able to get ahead through merit, skill, and hard work," Newsom said in a statement. "The California Dream shouldn't be accessible to just a lucky few, which is why we're opening the door to higher education wide enough for everyone, fairly."

Like other states, California won't financially penalize violators, but it will post the names of violators on the state Department of Justice's website. California will also add to data reporting requirements that it implemented in 2022, when private colleges had to start sharing the percentage of admitted students who were related to donors and alumni. Schools that run afoul of the new law will also have to report more granular demographic information about their incoming classes to the state, including the race and income of enrolled students as well as their participation in athletics. [...] Public universities in California won't be affected by the change. California State University does not consider legacy or donor ties, and the University of California system stopped doing so in 1998, two years after California voters banned race-conscious admissions through a statewide ballot measure.

When it comes to professional certifications, the long-running nonprofit Linux Professional Institute boasts they've issued 250,000, making them the world's largest Linux/Open Source certification body. And last week they announced a "strategic alliance" with the Open Source Initiative (OSI), which will now be "participating in development and maintenance of these programs."

The announcement points out that the Open Source Initiative already has many distinct responsibilities. Besides creating the Open Source Definition — and certifying that Open Source licenses meet the requirements of Open Source software — the OSI's mission is to "encourage the growth of Open Source communities around the world," which includes "educational and outreach efforts to spread Open Source principles."

So the ultimate goal is "strengthening Linux and Open Source communities," according to the announcement, by "nurturing the growth of more highly skilled professionals," with the OSI encouraging more people to get certifications for employers. The Open Source movement "has never been in greater need of educated professionals," says OSI executive director Stefano Maffulli, "to drive the next leap forward in Open Source understanding, innovation, and adoption... "This partnership with LPI is one in a series of initiatives that will increase accessibility to the certifications and community participation that Open Source needs to thrive."

And the LPI's executive director says it's their group's mission "to promote the use of open source by supporting the people who work with it. A closer relationship with OSI makes a valuable contribution to this effort."

The move "reaffirms the commitment of LPI and OSI to enhance the adoption of Linux and Open Source technology," according to the announcement.

"Dozens of Fortune 100 organizations" have unknowingly hired North Korean IT workers using fake identities, generating revenue for the North Korean government while potentially compromising tech firms, according to Google's Mandiant unit. "In a report published Monday [...], researchers describe a common scheme orchestrated by the group it tracks as UNC5267, which has been active since 2018," reports The Record. "In most cases, the IT workers 'consist of individuals sent by the North Korean government to live primarily in China and Russia, with smaller numbers in Africa and Southeast Asia.'" From the report: The remote workers "often gain elevated access to modify code and administer network systems," Mandiant found, warning of the downstream effects of allowing malicious actors into a company's inner sanctum. [...] Using stolen identities or fictitious ones, the actors are generally hired as remote contractors. Mandiant has seen the workers hired in a variety of complex roles across several sectors. Some workers are employed at multiple companies, bringing in several salaries each month. The tactic is facilitated by someone based in the U.S. who runs a laptop farm where workers' laptops are sent. Remote technology is installed on the laptops, allowing the North Koreans to log in and conduct their work from China or Russia.

Workers typically asked for their work laptops to be sent to different addresses than those listed on their resumes, raising the suspicions of companies. Mandiant said it found evidence that the laptops at these farms are connected to a "keyboard video mouse" device or multiple remote management tools including LogMeIn, GoToMeeting, Chrome Remote Desktop, AnyDesk, TeamViewer and others. "Feedback from team members and managers who spoke with Mandiant during investigations consistently highlighted behavior patterns, such as reluctance to engage in video communication and below-average work quality exhibited by the DPRK IT worker remotely operating the laptops," Mandiant reported.

In several incident response engagements, Mandiant found the workers used the same resumes that had links to fabricated software engineer profiles hosted on Netlify, a platform often used for quickly creating and deploying websites. Many of the resumes and profiles included poor English and other clues indicating the actor was not based in the U.S. One characteristic repeatedly seen was the use of U.S-based addresses accompanied by education credentials from universities outside of North America, frequently in countries such as Singapore, Japan or Hong Kong. Companies, according to Mandiant, typically don't verify credentials from universities overseas. Further reading: How Not To Hire a North Korean IT Spy

Speaking of California, its governor Gavin Newsom has signed into law a a bill that requires schools to limit or ban the use of smartphones, amid a growing consensus that excess usage can increase the risk of mental illness and impair learning. From a report: Thirteen other states this year have banned or restricted cellphones in school or recommended local educators do so, after Florida led the way by banning phones in class in 2023, according to Education Week. California, with nearly 5.9 million public school students, has followed the lead of its own Los Angeles County, whose school board banned smartphones for its 429,000 students in June.

That same month U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy called for a warning label on social media platforms, akin to those on cigarette packages, likening the problem to a mental health emergency. Murthy cited a study in the medical journal JAMA showing adolescents who spend more than three hours a day on social media may be at heightened risk of mental illness, while referring to a Gallup poll showing the average teen spends 4.8 hours per day on social media. California's bill, which passed 76-0 in the state assembly and 38-1 in the senate, requires school boards or other governing bodies to develop a policy to limit or prohibit student use of smartphones on campus by July 1, 2026, and update the policy every five years.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBC News: Inside a bustling unit at St. Michael's Hospital in downtown Toronto, one of Shirley Bell's patients was suffering from a cat bite and a fever, but otherwise appeared fine -- until an alert from an AI-based early warning system showed he was sicker than he seemed. While the nursing team usually checked blood work around noon, the technology flagged incoming results several hours beforehand. That warning showed the patient's white blood cell count was "really, really high," recalled Bell, the clinical nurse educator for the hospital's general medicine program. The cause turned out to be cellulitis, a bacterial skin infection. Without prompt treatment, it can lead to extensive tissue damage, amputations and even death. Bell said the patient was given antibiotics quickly to avoid those worst-case scenarios, in large part thanks to the team's in-house AI technology, dubbed Chartwatch. "There's lots and lots of other scenarios where patients' conditions are flagged earlier, and the nurse is alerted earlier, and interventions are put in earlier," she said. "It's not replacing the nurse at the bedside; it's actually enhancing your nursing care."

A year-and-a-half-long study on Chartwatch, published Monday in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, found that use of the AI system led to a striking 26 percent drop in the number of unexpected deaths among hospitalized patients. The research team looked at more than 13,000 admissions to St. Michael's general internal medicine ward -- an 84-bed unit caring for some of the hospital's most complex patients -- to compare the impact of the tool among that patient population to thousands of admissions into other subspecialty units. "At the same time period in the other units in our hospital that were not using Chartwatch, we did not see a change in these unexpected deaths," said lead author Dr. Amol Verma, a clinician-scientist at St. Michael's, one of three Unity Health Toronto hospital network sites, and Temerty professor of AI research and education in medicine at University of Toronto. "That was a promising sign."

The Unity Health AI team started developing Chartwatch back in 2017, based on suggestions from staff that predicting deaths or serious illness could be key areas where machine learning could make a positive difference. The technology underwent several years of rigorous development and testing before it was deployed in October 2020, Verma said. Dr. Amol Verma, a clinician-scientist at St. Michael's Hospital who helped lead the creation and testing of CHARTwatch, stands at a computer. "Chartwatch measures about 100 inputs from [a patient's] medical record that are currently routinely gathered in the process of delivering care," he explained. "So a patient's vital signs, their heart rate, their blood pressure ... all of the lab test results that are done every day." Working in the background alongside clinical teams, the tool monitors any changes in someone's medical record "and makes a dynamic prediction every hour about whether that patient is likely to deteriorate in the future," Verma told CBC News.

In 2015 Amazon purchased chip designer Annapurna Labs, remembers IEEE Spectrum, "and proceeded to design CPUs, AI accelerators, servers, and data centers as a vertically-integrated operation."

The article argues that while AMD, Nvidia, and other big-name processor companies may also want to control the full stack (purchasing server, software, and interconnect companies) — Amazon Web Services "got there ahead of most of the competition." (IEEE Spectrum interviews Ali Saidi, technical lead for the AWS Graviton series of CPUs, and Rami Sinno, director of engineering at Annapurna Labs, on "the advantage of vertically-integrated design — and Amazon-scale...") Sinno: I was working at Arm, and I was looking for the next adventure, looking at where the industry is heading and what I want my legacy to be. I looked at two things: One is vertically integrated companies, because this is where most of the innovation is — the interesting stuff is happening when you control the full hardware and software stack and deliver directly to customers.

And the second thing is, I realized that machine learning, AI in general, is going to be very, very big. I didn't know exactly which direction it was going to take, but I knew that there is something that is going to be generational, and I wanted to be part of that. I already had that experience prior when I was part of the group that was building the chips that go into the Blackberries; that was a fundamental shift in the industry. That feeling was incredible, to be part of something so big, so fundamental. And I thought, "Okay, I have another chance to be part of something fundamental."

[...] At the end of the day, our responsibility is to deliver complete servers in the data center directly for our customers. And if you think from that perspective, you'll be able to optimize and innovate across the full stack. It might not be at the transistor level or at the substrate level or at the board level. It could be something completely different. It could be purely software. And having that knowledge, having that visibility, will allow the engineers to be significantly more productive and delivery to the customer significantly faster. We're not going to bang our head against the wall to optimize the transistor where three lines of code downstream will solve these problems, right...?

We've had very good luck with recent college grads. Recent college grads, especially the past couple of years, have been absolutely phenomenal. I'm very, very pleased with the way that the education system is graduating the engineers and the computer scientists that are interested in the type of jobs that we have for them.
It's an interesting glimpse into the unique world of designing chips at Amazon.

Graviton technical lead Saidi: I've been here about seven and a half years. When I joined AWS, I joined a secret project at the time. I was told: "We're going to build some Arm servers. Tell no one...

"In chip design, there are many different competing optimization points. You have all of these conflicting requirements, you have cost, you have scheduling, you've got power consumption, you've got size, what DRAM technologies are available and when you're going to intersect them... It ends up being this fun, multifaceted optimization problem to figure out what's the best thing that you can build in a timeframe. And you need to get it right."

With online dating apps, "Americans have increasingly been marrying someone more like themselves," reports Bloomberg, citing new research that says this accounts for roughly half of the rise in household income inequality between 1980 and 2020: Using data from the Census Bureau's American Community Survey from 2008 to 2021, when online dating quickly became prevalent, the economists found that women became slightly more selective when choosing partners based on age, while men became slightly more selective based on education. But when the researchers compared that with data on married couples from 1960 and 1980, they found that people in the recent period increasingly went for partners with the same wage and education levels...

Overall, the predominance of online apps to find a future partner has led to a 3-percentage-point increase in the Gini coefficient — a widely used measure of income inequality, the research shows.
The reseachers were from the Federal Reserve Banks of Dallas and St. Louis, and from Haverford College, according to the article — which also includes this quote from their paper.

"We find that the increase in income inequality over the past half a century is explained to a large extent by sorting on vertical characteristics, such as income and skill, and their interaction with education."