By Hisan Kidwai Downloading a new game can be very exciting. However, this happiness quickly turns into frustration when…
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By Hisan Kidwai Cloud storage, especially Google Drive, has well and truly simplified storage for many people, letting them…
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Workday said Wednesday it will lay off 1,750 employees, roughly 8.5% of its workforce, as part of a restructuring plan to invest more heavily in artificial intelligence (AI) and accelerate international growth.

The California-based company disclosed the layoffs in a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, attributing the decision to its focus on what its leaders call “durable growth.” While details on specific departments affected were not provided in the filing, executives emphasized that artificial intelligence initiatives and overseas markets represent key areas where the company will continue hiring.

“Companies everywhere are reimagining how work gets done, and the increasing demand for AI has the potential to drive a new era of growth for Workday,” Carl Eschenbach, CEO of Workday, said in a memo to employees included with the filing.

Concern about customer support

Some industry observers are concerned about how Workday’s layoffs affect customer support. John Yensen, who leads the managed IT services firm Revotech Networks, said he believes customers will likely face disruptions to their support and service soon.

“AI could help offset this by automating routine inquires and streamlining the customer service process, but the largest concern, as in all similar cases, is whether AI support will able to handle and improve the level of service that enterprise clients expect and have become accustomed to,” he said.

Timothy DeStefano, associate professor of research at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, suggested that the outcome will largely depend on the company’s approach to the restructuring.

“One way to try to prevent layoffs from affecting the level and quality of customer support is to avoid eliminating positions that are customer-facing or critical to customer engagement,” DeStefano said. “It may also be helpful for the business to cross-train employees so that the remaining workers can handle multiple roles during the transition.”

Workday did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Strategy suggests a ‘careful realignment of resources’

Workday’s leadership has pointed to artificial intelligence as a central reason for the reallocation of resources. While the AI transition presents challenges, DeStefano noted that the investment could pay off: “Making investments in technology, particularly AI, is not cheap, but an accumulation of empirical evidence suggests that, if done correctly, performance improvements and efficiency gains can be achieved. However, it takes time and restructuring to implement new technologies, and thus, there may be some hiccups along the way.”

International expansion is another priority for Workday, which plans to seize the growing demand for cloud-based HR solutions outside the United States. DeStefano noted that the company is taking a three-pronged approach to ensure financial stability: “cost reductions, market expansion overseas, and investing in tools designed to enhance decision-making and improve efficiency. This is particularly relevant given the increasing competition within the market, increased consolidation through firm acquisitions, and the potential for slower demand due to higher interest rates.”

While specific regional targets weren’t disclosed, DeStefano observed that the company’s strategy suggests a careful realignment of resources. “Based on their statements, they have decided to close certain locations while opening new ones. This suggests that the geographical reorganization is designed to restructure their regional footprint to keep pace with evolving consumer demand across their markets,” he said. “Additionally, while the company is laying off employees, they are not enacting a hiring freeze. Instead, they have stated that they will add workers to critical locations and roles within the company, along with making AI investments, to maintain and enhance its applications for consumers throughout the transition and in the long run.”

Workday faces intense competition in HR software from both established firms and startups, according to Janice Quek, an analyst at investment research firm CFRA.

“However, the AI opportunity is clear, and the company will need to innovate in order to remain competitive in the enterprise software space,” Quek said. “On that front, it has released several AI products, including AI agents, that will unlock capacity for its users, with more solutions in the pipeline. We expect [Workday] to also leverage AI internally to alleviate talent gaps, streamline workflows, and automate their operational processes and services to smooth its transition and enhance its own execution.”

Source:: Computer World

If you get stressed out when surfing the web, Norwegian browser company Opera has something for you: a new browser for Windows and Mac designed to help you relax.

Opera Air offers a minimalist design and scheduled breaks for breathing exercises, neck training and meditation, among other things. The new browser can also play a combination of soothing sounds and music, Techcrunch reports.

The company explained its thinking about Opera Air in a YouTube video:

Opera already offers a number of alternatives to its “regular” browser, including the AI-enhanced Opera One and Opera GX, which is aimed at gamers.

Source:: Computer World

By Hisan Kidwai The PlayStation 1, or PS1, was one of the most iconic consoles that revolutionized gaming and…
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By The Conversation The potential of using artificial intelligence in drug discovery and development has sparked both excitement and skepticism among scientists, investors and the general public. “Artificial intelligence is taking over drug development,” claim some companies and researchers. Over the past few years, interest in using AI to design drugs and optimise clinical trials has driven a surge in research and investment. AI-driven platforms like AlphaFold, which won the 2024 Nobel Prize for its ability to predict the structure of proteins and design new ones, showcase AI’s potential to accelerate drug development. AI in drug discovery is “nonsense,” warn some industry veterans.…This story continues at The Next Web

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By Hisan Kidwai Google Drive’s share feature is pretty handy, allowing us to share important documents, files, and videos….
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2025 began in turmoil, with layoffs at some of the largest tech companies despite the support shown by the new US administration. 2024 had been a year of recovery, with the pace of layoffs slowing and IT employment the highest for years following two years of massive IT layoff in 2022 and 2023.

According to data compiled by Layoffs.fyi, the online tracker keeping tabs on job losses in the technology sector, 1,193 tech companies laid off 264,220 staff in 2023, dropping to “just” 152,104 employees laid off by 547 companies in 2024. In 2025, it has already logged 7,003 staff laid off by 31 companies.

Here is a list — to be updated regularly — of some of the most prominent technology layoffs the industry has experienced recently.

Tech layoffs in 2025

Salesforce

Meta

Feb. 4, 2025: Salesforce lays off over 1,000

At the same time as it’s hiring sales staff for its new artificial intelligence products, Salesforce is laying off over 1,000 workers across the company, according to Bloomberg. As of June, 2024, the company had over 72,000 employees, according to its website. Salesforce did not comment on the report. In 2024 the company reportedly laid off around 1,000 staff too, in two waves: January and July.

Jan. 14, 2025: Meta will lay off 5% of workforce

Mark Zuckerberg told Meta employees he intended to “move out the low performers faster” in an internal memo reported by Bloomberg. The memo announced that the company will lay off 5% of its staff, or around 3,600 staff, beginning Feb. 10. The company had already reduced its headcount by 5% in 2024 through natural attrition, the memo said. Among those leaving the company will be staff previously responsible for fact checking of posts on its social media platforms in the US, as the company begins relying on its users to police content.

Tech layoffs in 2024

Equinix

AMD

Freshworks

Cisco

General Motors

Intel

OpenText

Microsoft

AWS

Dell

Cisco

Nov. 26, 2024: Equinix to cut 3% of staff

Despite intense demand for its data center capacity, Equinix is planning to lay off 3% of its workforce, or around 400 employees. The announcement followed the appointment of Adaire Fox-Martin to replace Charles Meyers as CEO and the departures of two other senior executives, CIO Milind Wagle and CISO Michael Montoya.

Nov. 13, 2024: AMD to cut 4% of workforce

AMD will lay off around 1,000 employees as it pivots towards developing AI-focused chips, it said. The move came as a surprise to staff, as the company also reported strong quarterly earnings.

Nov. 7, 2024: Freshworks lays off 660

Enterprise software vendor Freshworks laid off around 660 staff, or around 13% of its headcount, despite reporting increased revenue and profits in its fourth fiscal quarter. The company described the layoffs as a realignment of its global workforce.

Sept. 17, 2024: Cisco lays off 6,000

After laying off around 4,200 staff in February, Cisco is at it again, laying off another 6,000 or around 7% of its workforce. Among the divisions affected were its threat intelligence unit, Talos Security.

Aug. 20, 2024: General Motors lays off 1,000 software staff

More than 1,000 software and services staff are on the way out at General Motors, signalling that it could be rethinking its digital transformation strategy. In an internal memo, the company said that it was moving resources to its highest-priority work and flattening hierarchies.

August 1, 2024: Intel removes 15,000 roles

Intel plans to cut its workforce by around 15% to reduce costs after a disastrous second quarter. Revenue for the three months to June 29 stagnated at around $12.8 billion, but net income fell 85% to $83 million, prompting CEO Pat Gelsinger to bring forward a company-wide meeting in order to announce that 15,000 staff would lose their jobs. “This is an incredibly hard day for Intel as we are making some of the most consequential changes in our company’s history,” Gelsinger wrote in an email to staff, continuing: “Our revenues have not grown as expected — and we’ve yet to fully benefit from powerful trends, like AI. Our costs are too high, our margins are too low. We need bolder actions to address both — particularly given our financial results and outlook for the second half of 2024, which is tougher than previously expected.”

July 4, 2024: OpenText to lay off 1,200

OpenText said it will lay off 1,200 staff, or about 1.7% of its workforce, in a bid to save around $100 million annually. It plans to hire new sales and engineering staff in other areas in 2025, it said.

June 4, 2024: Microsoft lays off staff in Azure division

Microsoft laid off staff in several teams supporting its cloud services, including Azure for Operations and Mission Engineering. The company didn’t say exactly how many staff were leaving.

April 4, 2024: Amazon downsizes AWS in a fresh cost-cutting round

Amazon announced hundreds of layoffs in the sales and marketing teams of its AWS cloud services division — and also in the technology development teams for its physical retail stores, as it stepped back from efforts to generalize the “Just Walk Out” technology built for its Amazon Fresh grocery stores.

April 1, 2024: Dell acknowledges 13,000 job cuts

Dell Technologies’ latest 10K filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission disclosed that the company had laid off 13,000 employees over the course of the 2023 fiscal year; it characterized the layoffs and other reorganizational moves as cost-cutting measures. “These actions resulted in a reduction in our overall headcount,” the company said. A comparison to the previous year’s 10K filing, performed by The Register, found that Dell employed 133,000 people at that point, compared to 120,000 as of February 2024. Dell announced layoffs of 6,650 staffers on Feb. 6, but it is unclear whether those cuts were reflected in the numbers from this year’s 10K statement.

Feb. 14, 2024: Cisco cuts 5% of workforce

Cisco will shed 4,200 of its 84,900 employees as it refocuses on more profitable areas of its business, including AI and security. The company’s last major round of layoffs was in November 2022. Cisco’s sales of telecommunications equipment have been hit by delays at telcos in rolling out equipment they havealready purchased. AI, on the other hand, is a growing business for Cisco, with AI-related sales in the billions—and that’s before it announced its recent partnership with Nvidia, which is making bank on sales of chips for AI applications. 

See news of earlier layoffs.

Source:: Computer World

According to a new policy document from Meta, the Frontier AI Framework, the company might not release AI systems developed in-house in certain risky scenarios.

The document defines two types of AI systems that can be classified as either “high risk” or “critical risk.” In both cases, these are systems that could help carry out cyber, chemical or biological attacks.

Systems classified as “high risk” might facilitate such an attack, though not to the same extent as a “critical risk” system, which could result in catastrophic outcomes. These could include, for example, taking over a corporate environment or deploying powerful biological weapons.

In the document, Meta states that if a system is “high risk,” the company will restrict internal access to it and will not release it until measures have been taken to reduce the risk to “moderate levels.” If, instead, the system is “critical risk,” security protections will be put in place to prevent it from spreading and development will stop until the system can be made safer.

Source:: Computer World

By Hisan Kidwai Apple’s iOS has several safeguards in place to prevent apps from accessing sensitive functions, such as…
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By Thomas Macaulay The NBA is experimenting with a digital brain for basketballs. The system is the brainchild of SportIQ, a Finnish startup that develops smart basketballs. Inside each ball’s valve, SportIQ embeds a sensor that tracks a player’s shots. Data is first extracted on their form, position, angle, power, and technique. Next, the information is fed to a mobile app for AI analysis. Players then receive direct feedback and advice. According to SportIQ, over 20 million shots have already been tracked. The company estimates that regular users improve their shooting accuracy by 12%. The results impressed bigwigs at the NBA. They revealed…This story continues at The Next Web

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By Hisan Kidwai Cookie Run Kingdom is a popular role-playing game (RPG) and city simulator in which players manage…
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AMD on Monday issued two patches for severe microcode security flaws, defects that AMD said “could lead to the loss of Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) protection.” The bugs were inadvertently revealed by a partner last week.

The most dangerous time for this kind of security hole is right after it is disclosed and before patches are applied. Due to the nature of microcode patches, enterprise users now have to wait for OEMs and other partners to implement the fixes in their hardware-specific microcode.

“This places more burden on hardware vendor OEMs to distribute and install. That may cause a delay in adoption,” said John Price, CEO at Cleveland-based security firm SubRosa. “This could potentially create a gap. The speed of adoption might not be as quick as we would like to see.”

Source:: Computer World

DeepSeek, founded in 2023 by Liang Wenfeng, a Chinese entrepreneur, engineer and former hedge fund manager, is generating a lot of buzz — and for good reason. Here are five things that make it stand out (as well as a listing of the latest news and analysis about DeepSeek).

DeepSeek offers:

More accessibility and efficiency: DeepSeek is designed to be less expensive to train and use than many competing large language models (LLMs).  Its architecture allows for high performance with fewer computational resources, which is designed to lead to faster response times and less energy consumption.

Open-source availability and rapid development: DeepSeek is under active development with new models and features being released regularly.  Models are often available for public download (on Hugging Face, for instance), which encourages collaboration and customization. 

Advanced capabilities: reasoning and multimodal learning: Models like DeepSeek-R1 are designed with a focus on advanced reasoning capabilities, aiming to go beyond simple text generation. DeepSeek is expanding into multimodal learning, handling diverse input types such as images, audio and text for a more comprehensive understanding.

Limitations: Bias and context: Like all LLMs, DeepSeek is susceptible to biases in its training data. Some biases may be intentional for content moderation purposes, which raises important ethical questions. While efficient, DeepSeek could have limitations in handling extremely long texts or complex conversations.

Architecture and performance DeepSeek uses  a “mixture of experts” architecture, employing specialized submodels for different tasks, enhancing efficiency and potentially reducing training data needs. DeepSeek has demonstrated competitive performance, comparable to established models in certain tasks, especially mathematics and coding.

Follow this page for latest news and analysis on DeepSeek.

The DeepSeek lesson -— success without relying on Nvidia GPUs

Feb. 3, 2025: During the past two weeks, DeepSeek unraveled Silicon Valley’s comfortable narrative about generative AI (genAI) by introducing dramatically more efficient ways to scale large language models (LLMs). Without billions in venture capital to spend on Nvidia GPUs, DeepSeek had to be more resourceful and learned how to “activate only the most relevant portions of their mode

Nvidia unveils preview of DeepSeek-R1 NIM microservice

Jan. 31, 2025: Nvidia stock plummeted after Chinese AI developer DeepSeek unveiled its DeepSeek-R1 LLM. Last week, the chipmaker turned around and announced the DeepSeek-R1 model is available as a preview NIM on build.nvidia.com. Nvidia’s inference microservice is a set of containers and tools to help developers deploy and manage gen AI models across clouds, data centers, and workstations.

Italy blocks DeepSeek due to unclear data protection

Jan. 31, 2025: Italy’s data protection authority Garante has decided to block Chinese AI model DeepSeek in the country. The decision comes after the Chinese companies providing the chatbot service failed to provide the authority with sufficient information about how users’ personal data is used.

How DeepSeek changes the genAI equation for CIOs

Jan. 30, 2025: The new genAI model’s explosion on the scene is likely to amp up competition in the market, drive innovation, reduce costs and make gen AI initiatives more affordable. It’s also a metaphor for increasing disruption. Maybe it’s time for CIOs to reassess their AI strategies.

DeepSeek leaks 1 million sensitive records in a major data breach

Jan. 30, 2025: A New York-based cybersecurity firm, Wiz, has uncovered a critical security lapse at DeepSeek, a rising Chinese AI startup, revealing a cache of sensitive data openly accessible on the internet. According to Wiz, the exposed data included over a million lines of log entries, digital software keys, backend details, and user chat history from DeepSeek’s AI assistant.

Microsoft first raises doubts about DeepSeek and then adds it to its cloud

Jan. 30, 2025: Despite initiating a probe into the Chinese AI startup, Microsoft added DeepSeek’s latest reasoning model R1 to its model catalog on Azure AI Foundry and GitHub.

How DeepSeek will upend the AI industry — and open it to competition

Jan. 30, 2025: DeepSeek is more than China’s ChatGPT. It’s a major step forward for global AI by making model building cheaper, faster, and more accessible, according to Forrester Research. While LLMs aren’t the only route to advanced AI, DeepSeek should be “celebrated as a milestone for AI progress,” the research firm said.

DeepSeek triggers shock waves for AI giants, but the disruption won’t last

Jan. 28, 2025: DeepSeek’s open-source AI model’s impact lies in matching US models’ performance at a fraction of the cost by using compute and memory resources more efficiently. But industry analysts believe investor reaction to DeepSeek’s impact on US tech firms is being exaggerated.

DeepSeek hit by cyberattack and outage amid breakthrough success

Jan. 28, 2025: Chinese AI startup DeepSeek was hit by a cyberattack, according to the company, prompting it to restrict user registrations and manage website outages as demand for its AI assistant soared. According to the company’s status page, DeepSeek has been investigating the issue since late evening Beijing time on Monday.

What enterprises need to know about DeepSeek’s game-changing R1 AI model

Jan. 27, 2025: Two years ago, OpenAI’s ChatGPT launched a new wave of AI disruption that left the tech industry reassessing its future. Now, within the space of a week, a small Chinese startup called DeepSeek has pulled off a similar coup, this time at OpenAI’s expense.

iPhone users turn on to DeepSeek AI

Jan. 27, 2025: As if from nowhere, OpenAI competitor DeepSeek has risen to the top of the iPhone App Store chart, overtaking ChatGPT’s OpenAI. It’s the latest in a growing line of genAI services and seems to offer some significant advantages, not least its relatively lower development and production costs. 

Chinese AI startup DeepSeek unveils open-source model to rival OpenAI o1

Jan. 23, 2025: Chinese AI developer DeepSeek has unveiled an open-source version of its reasoning model, DeepSeek-R1, featuring 671 billion parameters and claiming performance superior to OpenAI’s o1 on key benchmark. “DeepSeek-R1 achieves a score of 79.8% Pass@1 on AIME 2024, slightly surpassing OpenAI-o1-1217,” the company said in a technical paper. “On MATH-500, it attains an impressive score of 97.3%, performing on par with OpenAI-o1-1217 and significantly outperforming other models.”

Source:: Computer World

By The Conversation Wearable devices have become a big part of modern health care, helping track a patient’s heart rate, stress levels and brain activity. These devices rely on electrodes, sensors that touch the skin to pick up electrical signals from the body. Creating these electrodes isn’t as easy as it might seem. Human skin is complex. Its properties, such as how well it conducts electricity, can change depending on how hydrated it is, how old you are or even the weather. These changes can make it hard to test how well a wearable device works. Additionally, testing electrodes often involves human volunteers,…This story continues at The Next Web

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By Hisan Kidwai Borderlands 3 is a popular first-person shooter and action role-playing game. It revolves around the story…
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By Hisan Kidwai Flying bikes have been a big part of pop culture for decades. Take the speeder bike…
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By Thomas Macaulay As China’s DeepSeek threatens to dismantle Silicon Valley’s AI monopoly, a European alliance has emerged with an alternative to tech’s global order. They call their project OpenEuroLLM. Like DeepSeek, they aim to develop next-generation open-source language models — but their agenda is very different. Their mission: forging European AI that will foster digital leaders and impactful public services across the continent. To support these objectives, OpenEuroLLM is building a family of high-performing, multilingual large language foundation models. The models will be available for commercial, industrial, and public services. Over 20 leading European research institutions, companies, and high-performance computing (HPC) centres…This story continues at The Next Web

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By Deepti Pathak If you enjoy playing Anime Showdown, you probably know how helpful free rewards can be. They…
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OpenAI on Friday released the latest model in its reasoning series, o3-mini, both in ChatGPT and its application programming interface (API). It had been in preview since December 2024.

The company said in its announcement that it “advances the boundaries of what small models can achieve, delivering exceptional STEM capabilities — with particular strength in science, math, and coding — all while maintaining the low cost and reduced latency of OpenAI o1-mini.”

OpenAI said that o3-mini delivered math and factuality responses 24% faster than o1-mini, with medium reasoning effort, and testers preferred its answers to those generated by o1-mini more than half the time.

In addition, the announcement said, “while OpenAI o1 remains our broader general knowledge reasoning model, OpenAI o3-mini provides a specialized alternative for technical domains requiring precision and speed. In ChatGPT, o3-mini uses medium reasoning effort to provide a balanced trade-off between speed and accuracy. All paid users will also have the option of selecting o3-mini-high in the model picker for a higher-intelligence version that takes a little longer to generate responses. Pro users will have unlimited access to both o3-mini and o3-mini-high.”

The model is now available to users of ChatGPT Plus, Team, and Pro; Enterprise and Education users must wait another week. It will replace o1-mini in the model picker, providing higher rate limits and lower latency. OpenAI is tripling the rate limit for Team and Plus users from 50 messages per day (with o1-mini) to 150 messages per day with o3-mini. The company did not state usage limits for free plan users.

In addition, an early prototype of integration with search will find answers online, with links to their sources.

The model also offers new features for developers who incorporate OpenAI models in their software, including function calling, developer messages, and structured outputs. They can also choose one of three reasoning effort options — low, medium, and high — to adjust power and latency to suit the use case. However, unlike OpenAI o1, it does not support vision capabilities. The company said that o3-mini is available in the Chat Completions API, Assistants API, and Batch API now, to select developers in API usage tiers 3-5⁠.

In addition to its performance, OpenAI touted the model’s safety. “Similar to OpenAI o1, we find that o3-mini significantly surpasses GPT-4o on challenging safety and jailbreak evaluations. Before deployment, we carefully assessed the safety risks of o3-mini using the same approach to preparedness, external red-teaming, and safety evaluations as o1.”

Source:: Computer World