Before Ibtihal Aboussad was fired by Microsoft for protesting the company's work with the Israeli military during a celebration of the firm's 50th anniversary, she sent two emails. The first went to all of her colleagues. She appealed to their universal humanity and urged them to stand against Microsoft's contracts to provide cloud computing software and artificial intelligence products to the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). She sent the second to the "Muslims at Microsoft" email list. With her email, Aboussad told the Guardian, she wanted Muslim staff of companies such as Microsoft, Google and Amazon to stop regarding the question of whether they organize against their employer's work with the IDF as an issue of secular or professional ethics. It was a question of Islam, of their faith, she argued.

No Tech for Apartheid (NOTA), a coalition of tech workers demanding big tech companies to drop their contracts with the Israeli government, is close to reaching its goal for a campaign asking students not to work with Google and Amazon. As Wired reports, more than 1,100 people who identified themselves as STEM students and young workers have taken the pledge to refuse jobs from the companies "for powering Israel's Apartheid system and genocide against Palestinians." Based on its website, NOTA's goal is to gather 1,200 signatures for the campaign. "As young people and students in STEM and beyond, we refuse to have any part in these horrific abuses. We're joining the #NoTechForApartheid campaign to demand Amazon and Google immediately end Project Nimbus," part of the pledge reads.

Last Thanksgiving, Brian Israel found himself being asked the same question again and again. The general counsel at the AI lab Anthropic had been watching dumbfounded along with the rest of the tech world as, just two miles south of Anthropic's headquarters in San Francisco, its main competitor OpenAI seemed to be imploding. OpenAI's board had fired CEO Sam Altman, saying he had lost their confidence, in a move that seemed likely to tank the startup's 80 billion-plus valuation. The firing was only possible thanks to OpenAI's strange corporate structure, in which its directors have no fiduciary duty to increase profits for shareholders--a structure Altman himself had helped design so that OpenAI could build powerful AI insulated from perverse market incentives. To many, it appeared that plan had badly backfired.

No one can make that choice for you. But I can say with confidence born of experience that such choices can be more easily made if workers know what exactly the companies they work for are doing with militaries at home and abroad. And I also know this: those same companies themselves will never reveal this information unless they are forced to do so--or someone does it for them. For those who doubt that workers can make a difference in how trillion-dollar companies pursue their interests, I'm here to remind you that we've done it before. In 2017, I played a part in the successful #CancelMaven campaign that got Google to end its participation in Project Maven, a contract with the US Department of Defense to equip US military drones with artificial intelligence.

The United States trade regulator launched an inquiry on Thursday into generative artificial intelligence investments and partnerships. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) said in a statement that it issued orders to five companies requiring them to provide information on the matter. The companies were Google's parent company Alphabet, Amazon, Anthropic, Microsoft, and ChatGPT maker OpenAI, the agency's statement said. The inquiry will focus on what authority and rights the tech giants' investments in the fledgling AI companies have conferred and whether those deals harm competition. "Our study will shed light on whether investments and partnerships pursued by dominant companies risk distorting innovation and undermining fair competition," FTC chair Lina Khan said in a statement.

Hundreds of Google workers and their supporters gathered near the company's downtown San Francisco offices Thursday, raising signs that read "No Tech for Apartheid" and filling the air with chants of "Tech from Amazon and Google! You can't claim that you are neutral!" Similar scenes unfolded outside Google and Amazon offices in New York and Seattle, and a Google office in Durham, North Carolina. Google and Amazon employees were joined at the rallies by tech workers from other companies and Palestinian rights organizations. They all convened to protest Project Nimbus, Google and Amazon's cloud computing contract with the Israeli government.

Researchers believe these devices could one day speed the creation of new medicines, power advances in artificial intelligence and summarily crack the encryption that protects computers vital to national security. In 2019, Google announced that its machine had reached what scientists call "quantum supremacy," which meant it could perform an experimental task that was impossible with traditional computers. Part of the challenge is that a qubit breaks, or "decoheres," if you read information from it -- it becomes an ordinary bit capable of holding only a 0 or a 1 but not both. But by stringing many qubits together and developing ways of guarding against decoherence, scientists hope to build machines that are both powerful and practical. Ultimately, ideally, these would be joined into networks that can send information between nodes, allowing them to be used from anywhere, much as cloud computing services from the likes of Google and Amazon make processing power widely accessible today.

We in pharma are all about improving our customer experience and customer engagement. A lot is being done in this area. However, if you really want to put your customer experience and customer engagement on steroids, you need to consider using AI in the process. For the past decade, pharma companies have employed one-to-many communications using social media in their customer engagement efforts. There is a great opportunity for companies to use conversational AI for ongoing customer engagement rather than just a one off transactional point in time. I mean conversations that use natural language with a conversational flow, not'Push 1 to discuss X, Push 2 to discuss Y' prompts.

But, there are other emerging roles that are demonstrating key value to organizations that you should consider based on your existing or desired skill sets. An ML engineer, on the other hand, will shine at building and optimising data flows, implementing models, and putting them in production. He or she will come from a computer science background, might have less formal education than data scientists, and will be good at programming and understanding cloud infrastructures, for instance. That means many organisations are hiring people to solve basically the same types of problems, over and over again, in parallel. At the same time, we see companies like Google and Amazon, who have some of the best data scientists in the world, working on "ready-to-use" ML systems on their cloud platforms (GCP and AWS, respectively).

In SEO, the focus is so often on Google. 'How do I rank higher in the Google SERPs?', or'How can I get more rich snippets on Google?' Of course, Google is one of the most popular search engines, but it's certainly not the only one. Different search engines have different audience demographics and different pros and cons, so when you're optimizing your website, you don't want to miss out on a significant share of a certain market. In this article, you will find a complete list of all top internet search engines, their pros and cons, and whether Google really is the most popular. We made a list of the top ten search engines widely used today.