Friday 26th April 2024

Connecticut AI Bill Faces Uncertain Future

The Connecticut Senate pressed ahead Wednesday with one of the first major legislative proposals in the U.S. to rein in bias in artificial intelligence decision-making and protect people from harm, including manufactured videos or deepfakes.

The bill passed 24-12 after a lengthy debate. It is the result of two years of task force meetings in Connecticut and a year's worth of collaboration among a bipartisan group of legislators from other states who are trying to prevent a patchwork of laws across the country because Congress has yet to act.


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TikTok Ban Is 'Misguided,' Says Former Presidential Candidate

Some lawmakers are questioning if a nationwide TikTok ban is the right choice for the United States--and they're pointing to the potential harm faced by the country's entrepreneurs to make their point.

President Joe Biden signed a national security package on Wednesday containing a provision that forces TikTok to divest from its Chinese ownership and find a new owner within nine months. If not, the app would be banned from U.S. app stores, along with any future updates--rendering it unusable in the future. 


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Despite Recent Bill to Ban TikTok, Biden's Campaign Will Keep Using It

Forced inside by a rainstorm, he competed with 13-year-old Hurley "HJ" Coleman IV to make putts on a practice mat. The Coleman family posted video of the proceedings on the app--complete with Biden holing out a putt and the teen knocking his own shot home in response, over the caption, "I had to sink the rebuttal."

The network television cameras that normally follow the president were stuck outside.Biden signed legislation Wednesday that could ban TikTok in the U.S. while his campaign has embraced the platform and tried to work with influencers. Already struggling to maintain his previous support from younger voters, the president is now facing criticism from some avid users of the app, which researchers have found is a primary news source for a third of Americans under the age of 30.


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While Biden Touts Chip Plant Funds, Prospective Workers Wait for Production to Start

On Thursday, the Democratic president will head to upstate New York to celebrate Micron Technology's plans to build a campus of computer chip factories made possible in part with government support. But the initial phase of the project would open the first plant in 2028 and the second plant in 2029, with more time expected for the next two factories to be completed.

Staring down a rematch with Republican Donald Trump, Biden is asking voters to believe in a vision for the U.S. economy that is still largely a promise. This at a moment when voters are most worried about enduring pressures from high inflation, which have led most to rate Biden poorly on the economy.


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How This 26-Year-Old First-Time Founder Raised $55 Million for Her AI Startup

In November 2023, generative AI-powered video startup Pika announced that it had raised $55 million from a combination of angel investors and VC firms including Lightspeed Venture Partners and Factorial Capital. The raise positions Pika as a potential competitor to OpenAI's in-development video generation model, Sora. Pika was launched in 2023 by 26-year-old CEO Demi Guo, who, along with her friend and co-founder Chenlin Meng, dropped out of Stanford University's artificial intelligence PhD program to start the company.

One of the keys to Pika's fundraising success is a professional network Guo has been cultivating since middle school. Mentors that Guo met through computer science competitions like the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI), in which she won a silver medal in 2015, helped secure Pika's first meetings with investors.


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In Settlement, FTC Sends $5.6 Million in Refunds to Ring Customers

The Federal Trade Commission is sending more than $5.6 million in refunds to consumers as part of a settlement with Amazon-owned Ring, which was charged with failing to protect private video footage from outside access.

In a 2023 complaint, the FTC accused the doorbell camera and home security provider of allowing its employees and contractors to access customers' private videos. Ring allegedly used such footage to train algorithms without consent, among other purposes.


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These Women Faced the Glass Cliff--and Leveraged Their Experience to Become Successful Entrepreneurs

In 2009, she was offered the CEO role at Merrill Lynch Wealth Management and U.S. Trust and was tasked with turning around the business amid the mass exits of financial advisors as well as ongoing fallout from the subprime mortgage crisis. However, just before her two-year anniversary at the company, when Krawcheck felt confident that the company was gaining market share, she says she was "re-orged out."

Krawcheck is just one of many examples of the glass cliff, a term coined in 2005 by University of Exeter researchers Michelle Ryan and Alexander Haslam to describe the phenomenon where women and people of color are often put in C-suite or leadership positions at a business that is facing hardship, with the expectation that they will be able to turn it all around. If you've never heard of the term before, you haven't been paying attention. 


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A Proven Model to Combat U.S. Drug Shortages

Drug shortages continue to plague the United States. In many ways, the problem is the result of deficiencies in the current pharma market. But a model for addressing this problem is showing that it isn’t intractable. The company employing this model is Civica Rx, which was established in 2018 by health systems and philanthropies to address shortages of generic sterile injectable drug. This article discusses the elements of its model and its achievements.

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Special Series: Tech at Work

JUAN MARTINEZ: Well, you just mentioned every technology from the past 50 years, and didn’t leave me an option. So I’m just going to steal yours and say the iPhone. I mean, the ability to have a computer and every application and every website in your pocket at all times is a vast change from anything we’ve ever had.

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The Myths and Realities of Being a Product Manager

Product management has become an aspirational career. A group of popular social media influencers regularly offers advice on what it takes to attain a job and succeed in this field. But their content tends to glamorize the profession, gloss over the day-to-day-realities, and dispense wisdom that isn’t always on point.

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