When Google laid off 6% of its workforce — some of whom had worked for the company for decades — employees “got the news in their inbox,” writes Gawker’s founding editor in a scathing opinion piece in the New York Times:

That sting is becoming an all-too-common sensation. In the last few years, tens of thousands of people have been laid off by email at tech and digital media companies including Twitter, Amazon, Meta and Vox. The backlash from affected employees has been swift…. It’s not just tech and media. Companies in a range of industries claim this is the only efficient way to do a lot of layoffs. Informing workers personally is too complicated, they say — and too risky, as people might use their access to internal systems to perform acts of sabotage. (These layoff emails are often sent to employees’ personal email; by the time they check it, they’ve been locked out of all their employer’s own platforms.)

As someone who’s managed people in newsrooms and digital start-ups and has hired and fired people in various capacities for the last 21 years, I think this approach is not just cruel but unnecessary. It’s reasonable to terminate access to company systems, but delivering the news with no personal human contact serves only one purpose: letting managers off the hook. It ensures they will not have to face the shock and devastation that people feel when they lose their livelihoods. It also ensures the managers won’t have to weather any direct criticism about the poor leadership that brought everyone to that point…. Future hiring prospects will be reading all about it on Twitter or Glassdoor. In a tight labor market, a company’s cruelty can leave a lasting stain on its reputation….

The expectation that an employee give at least two weeks notice and help with transition is rooted in a sense that workers owe their employers something more than just their labor: stability, continuity, maybe even gratitude for the compensation they’ve earned. But when it’s the company that chooses to end the relationship, there is often no such requirement. The same people whose labor helped build the company get suddenly recoded as potential criminals who might steal anything that’s not nailed down….

Approval of unions is already at 71 percent. Dehumanizing workers like this is accelerating the trend. Once unthinkable, unionization at large tech companies now seems all but inevitable. Treating employees as if they’re disposable units who can simply be unsubscribed to ultimately endangers a company’s own interests. It seems mistreated workers know their value, even if employers — as they are increasingly prone to demonstrate — do not.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Do ‘Layoffs By Email’ Show What Employers Really Think of Their Workers?

segaboy81 shares a report from Neowin:
What do you get when the world’s largest CRM breaks into the research industry and leverages AI to build their products? You get ProGen, a new AI system that can make artificial enzymes from scratch that can work just as well as real ones found in nature. ProGen was made by Salesforce Research (yes, that Salesforce) and uses language processing to learn about biology. In short, ProGen takes amino acid sequences and turns them into proteins….
“The artificial designs are better than ones made by the normal process,” said James Fraser, a scientist involved in the project. “We can now make specific types of enzymes, like ones that work well in hot temperatures or acid.”

To make ProGen, the scientists at Salesforce fed the system amino acid sequences from 280 million different proteins. The AI system quickly made a staggering one million protein sequences, of which 100 were picked to test. Out of these, five were made into actual proteins and tested in cells. That’s just 0.0005% of the generated results….

The code for ProGen is available on Github for anyone who wants to try it (or add to it)

The project shows “how generative AI can lead to potential solutions for addressing challenges in human disease and the environment,” argues a statement form Salesforce.

More details from New Scientist:
The AI, called ProGen, works in a similar way to AIs that can generate text. ProGen learned how to generate new proteins by learning the grammar of how amino acids combine to form 280 million existing proteins. Instead of the researchers choosing a topic for the AI to write about, they could specify a group of similar proteins for it to focus on. In this case, they chose a group of proteins with antimicrobial activity.

The researchers programmed checks into the AI’s process so it wouldn’t produce amino acid “gibberish”, but they also tested a sample of the AI-proposed molecules in real cells. Of the 100 molecules they physically created, 66 participated in chemical reactions similar to those of natural proteins that destroy bacteria in egg whites and saliva. This suggested that these new proteins could also kill bacteria. The researchers selected the five proteins with the most intense reactions and added them to a sample of Escherichia coli bacteria. Two of the proteins destroyed the bacteria.

The researchers then imaged them with X-rays. Even though their amino acid sequences were up to 30% different from any existing proteins, their shapes almost matched naturally occurring proteins. James Fraser at the University of California, San Francisco, who was part of the team, says it was not clear from the outset that the AI could work out how to change the amino acid sequence so much and still produce the correct shape…. He was surprised to have found a well-functioning protein in the first relatively small fraction of all the ProGen-generated proteins that they tested.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Anti-Microbial Proteins Are Being Developed With AI By… Salesforce?

segaboy81 shares a report from Neowin:
What do you get when the world’s largest CRM breaks into the research industry and leverages AI to build their products? You get ProGen, a new AI system that can make artificial enzymes from scratch that can work just as well as real ones found in nature. ProGen was made by Salesforce Research (yes, that Salesforce) and uses language processing to learn about biology. In short, ProGen takes amino acid sequences and turns them into proteins….
“The artificial designs are better than ones made by the normal process,” said James Fraser, a scientist involved in the project. “We can now make specific types of enzymes, like ones that work well in hot temperatures or acid.”

To make ProGen, the scientists at Salesforce fed the system amino acid sequences from 280 million different proteins. The AI system quickly made a staggering one million protein sequences, of which 100 were picked to test. Out of these, five were made into actual proteins and tested in cells. That’s just 0.0005% of the generated results….

The code for ProGen is available on Github for anyone who wants to try it (or add to it)

The project shows “how generative AI can lead to potential solutions for addressing challenges in human disease and the environment,” argues a statement form Salesforce.

More details from New Scientist:
The AI, called ProGen, works in a similar way to AIs that can generate text. ProGen learned how to generate new proteins by learning the grammar of how amino acids combine to form 280 million existing proteins. Instead of the researchers choosing a topic for the AI to write about, they could specify a group of similar proteins for it to focus on. In this case, they chose a group of proteins with antimicrobial activity.

The researchers programmed checks into the AI’s process so it wouldn’t produce amino acid “gibberish”, but they also tested a sample of the AI-proposed molecules in real cells. Of the 100 molecules they physically created, 66 participated in chemical reactions similar to those of natural proteins that destroy bacteria in egg whites and saliva. This suggested that these new proteins could also kill bacteria. The researchers selected the five proteins with the most intense reactions and added them to a sample of Escherichia coli bacteria. Two of the proteins destroyed the bacteria.

The researchers then imaged them with X-rays. Even though their amino acid sequences were up to 30% different from any existing proteins, their shapes almost matched naturally occurring proteins. James Fraser at the University of California, San Francisco, who was part of the team, says it was not clear from the outset that the AI could work out how to change the amino acid sequence so much and still produce the correct shape…. He was surprised to have found a well-functioning protein in the first relatively small fraction of all the ProGen-generated proteins that they tested.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Anti-Microbial Proteins Are Being Developed With AI By… Saleforce?

When you share your email, “you’re sharing a lot more,” warns the New York Times’ lead consumer technology writer:
[I]t can be linked to other data, including where you went to school, the make and model of the car you drive, and your ethnicity….

For many years, the digital ad industry has compiled a profile on you based on the sites you visit on the web…. An email could contain your first and last name, and assuming you’ve used it for some time, data brokers have already compiled a comprehensive profile on your interests based on your browsing activity. A website or an app can upload your email address into an ad broker’s database to match your identity with a profile containing enough insights to serve you targeted ads.

The article recommends creating several email addresses to “make it hard for ad tech companies to compile a profile based on your email handle… Apple and Mozilla offer tools that automatically create email aliases for logging in to an app or a site; emails sent to the aliases are forwarded to your real email address.”
Apple’s Hide My Email tool, which is part of its iCloud+ subscription service that costs 99 cents a month, will create aliases, but using it will make it more difficult to log in to the accounts from a non-Apple device. Mozilla’s Firefox Relay will generate five email aliases at no cost; beyond that, the program charges 99 cents a month for additional aliases.

For sites using the UID 2.0 framework for ad targeting, you can opt out by entering your email address [or phone number] at https://transparentadvertising.org.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – How to Handle Web Sites Asking for Your Email Address

To detect AI-generated text, Stanford researchers are proposing a new methodology “that leverages the unique characteristics of text generated by large language models (LLMs),” reports the tech-news site Neowin:

“DetectGPT” is based around the idea that text generated by LLMs typically hover around specific regions of the negative curvature regions of the model’s log probability function…. This method, called “zero-shot”, allows DetectGPT to detect machine written text without any knowledge of the AI that was used to generate it….
As the use of LLMs continues to grow, the importance of corresponding systems for detecting machine-generated text will become increasingly critical. DetectGPT is a promising approach that could have a significant impact in many areas, and its further development could be beneficial for many fields.
The article also includes its obligatory amazing story about the current powers of ChatGPT. “I asked it how to build an obscure piece of Linux software against a modern kernel, and it told me how. It even generated code blocks with the bash commands needed to complete the task.”
Then to test something crazier, Neowin asked ChatGPT to generate “a fictional resume for Hulk Hogan where he has no previous IT experience but wants to transition into a role as an Azure Cloud Engineer.

“It did that, too.”

Thanks to Slashdot reader segaboy81 for sharing the story.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – The Anti-ChatGPT Appears? Researchers Fights Back With ‘DetectGPT’

Fortune reports on what happened next:
As questions piled up over the weekend, Google CEO Sundar Pichai addressed the entire company in a meeting on Monday to answer questions, and announced then that top executives would take a pay cut this year as part of the company’s cost reduction measures, Business Insider reported. Pichai said that all roles above the senior vice president level will witness “very significant reduction in their annual bonus,” adding that for senior roles the compensation was linked to company performance. It was not immediately clear how big Pichai’s own pay cut would be.

Reuters also points out that Pichai “received a massive hike in salary a few weeks before Google announced layoffs.” But Fortune makes an interesting comparison:
Pichai’s move to cut the pay for senior executives comes only weeks after Apple’s Tim Cook announced his compensation would be 40% lower amid shareholder pressure. The iPhone maker had a strong 2022 and remains one of the few tech behemoths that hasn’t announced layoffs yet.

Last year Apple’s share price still dropped 27%, reports Forbes, and “According to the Wall Street Journal, Apple is expected next month to report its first quarterly sales decline in over three years.”

Yet Apple seems to have avoided layoffs — which Forbes argues is because Apple didn’t hire aggressively during the pandemic.
Compared to the other Big Tech companies, Apple scaled its workforce at a relatively slow pace and has generally followed the same hiring rate since 2016. While there was a hiring surge in Silicon Valley during the pandemic, Apple added less than 7,000 jobs in 2020….

The tech companies undergoing layoffs right now hired fervently during their pandemic — and even before. Alphabet has consecutively expanded its workforce at least 10% annually since 2013, according to CNBC….
Since 2012, Meta has expanded its workforce by thousands each year. In 2020, Zuckerberg increased headcount by 30% — 13,000 workers. The following year, the social media platform added another 13,000 employees to its payroll. Those two years marked the biggest growth in the company’s history.
Amazon has initiated its plan to separate more than 18,000 white-collar professionals from its payroll. In 2021, the online retailer hired an estimated 500,000 employees, according to GeekWire, becoming the second-largest employer in the United States after Walmart. A year later, the company expanded its workforce by 310,000.

Entrepeneur supplies some context about those layoffs at Google:

Reports indicate qualifying staff who were let go will receive their full notification period salary plus a severance package beginning at 16 weeks’ pay and two additional weeks for every year of employment. Also part of the package: bonuses, vacation time, and health care coverage for up to six months will be paid for, along with job placement and immigration support.

Entrepreneur also notes reports that Google’s latest round of layoffs “affected 27 massage therapists across Los Angeles and Irvine.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – After Layoffs: Executive Pay Cuts at Google – and How Apple Steered Clear