“AI – Artificial Intelligence”

About half of American jobs could be replaced by artificial intelligence, according to a report by the McKinsey Global Institute.

The American consultancy’s analysis found that robots and AI agents could automate more than half of US work hours, both mental and cognitive, using technology that is available today, if companies redesigned how they did things.

Most of the roles at risk — about 40 per cent — involve the kinds of drafting, processing information and routine reasoning that AI agents can do. Hiring is slowing in some such jobs, such as among paralegals, administrative and office support workers and programmers, the research found.

A fired safety engineer is suing his former employer, Figure AI, alleging he was retaliated against for warning that the company is rushing to produce AI-powered robots with “superhuman speed” and the ability to inflict “severe” injuries on humans.

China’s leaders were anxious and frustrated. The world’s most promising new technology was being dominated by OpenAI, Google and other American companies.

Chinese tech companies were so far behind on generative artificial intelligence early last year that many were relying on Meta Platforms’ open-source Llama models, which can be downloaded for free. Worse, U.S. restrictions on exports of top-end AI chips threatened to hobble China even further.

So in the spring of 2024, Beijing ratcheted up pressure on tech executives. One leading Chinese AI company told The Wall Street Journal it fielded calls from 10 different government agencies in a single month urging action on native AI models. The country relaxed regulations, rolled out funding and rushed to install computing power.

Elon Musk has taken a keen interest in his Wikipedia page over the years. So have the site’s editors: 4,221 of them have made more than 17,000 changes to his page since 2008.

The billionaire tweeted in 2019: “My wiki is a war zone with a zillion edits. At least it’s obviously not curated! Some day, I should probably write what my fictionalised version of reality is.”

Has Marsha Blackburn, the United States senator from Tennessee, been accused of rape?

The answer is an unequivocal “no.”

But when I recently posed that question to Gemma, Google’s large language model, it provided a much different response.

The nation’s largest employers have a new message for office workers: help not wanted.

Amazon.com said this week that it would cut 14,000 corporate jobs, with plans to eliminate as much as 10% of its white-collar workforce eventually. United Parcel Service said Tuesday that it had reduced its management workforce by about 14,000 positions over the past 22 months, days after the retailer Target said it would cut 1,800 corporate roles.

Earlier in October, white-collar workers from companies including Rivian Automotive, Molson Coors, Booz Allen Hamilton and General Motors received pink slips—or learned that they would come soon. Added up, tens of thousands of newly laid off white-collar workers in America are entering a stagnant job market with seemingly no place for them.

Amazon on Tuesday said it is cutting 14,000 corporate jobs as the retailing giant relies more on artificial intelligence and moves to lower its wage bill.

Earlier this year, CEO Andy Jassy said Amazon’s investment in AI tools would allow the company to reduce its human workforce as the business becomes more efficient.

Beth Galetti, senior vice president of people experience and technology, on Tuesday said in a message shared with workers that the job cuts would allow Amazon “to operate like the world’s largest startup.”

Armies of humanoid robots are poised to march into the world’s factories. But before they’re ready to turn a wrench, they must solve what Elon Musk calls “the hands problem.”

Creating the mechanical equivalent of the human hand is a challenge that has been stumping corporate and academic researchers for years. Replacing muscle and skin with motors and sensors is a critical step in making humanoids a versatile source of labor, potentially unlocking a global market that Morgan Stanley estimates could reach $5 trillion by 2050.

“We’re setting 10 years as our goal to have dexterity, be functional and useful and able to do some of the things that humans do,” said Kevin Lynch of Northwestern University’s Center for Robotics and Biosystems, part of a federally funded consortium that is developing robotic hands for a variety of workplaces. “It’s not next year, that’s for sure.”

The US artificial intelligence company OpenAI said on Tuesday that it is launching its own web browser, Atlas, to rival Google’s popular Chrome browser.

Atlas will be powered by OpenAI’s popular chatbot ChatGPT, as the California-based firm looks to revolutionize how people use the internet.

“Tabs were great, but we haven’t seen a lot of browser innovation since then,” said OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in a video presentation broadcast on Tuesday, speaking off a “rare, once-a-decade opportunity to rethink what a browser can be about and how to use one.”

Internal documents show the company that changed how people shop has a far-reaching plan to automate 75 percent of its operations.

Over the past two decades, no company has done more to shape the American workplace than Amazon. In its ascent to become the nation’s second-largest employer, it has hired hundreds of thousands of warehouse workers, built an army of contract drivers and pioneered using technology to hire, monitor and manage employees.

Now, interviews and a cache of internal strategy documents viewed by The New York Times reveal that Amazon executives believe the company is on the cusp of its next big workplace shift: replacing more than half a million jobs with robots.