Self Drive
Global tech

A decade after Elon Musk first began hyping self-driving vehicles, here’s why we still don’t have them yet

- March 24, 2023 4 MIN READ

According to predictions made nearly a decade ago, we should be riding around in self-driving vehicles today. It’s now clear the autonomous vehicle revolution was overhyped. Proponents woefully underestimated the technological challenges. It turns out developing a truly driverless vehicle is hard. The other factor driving the hype was the amount of money being invested… Read more »

NBN Layoffs
People

NBN Co surfs layoff wave, cutting 500 staff to ‘simplify’ as competition grows

- March 23, 2023 2 MIN READ

The ongoing wave of tech layoffs is buffeting NBN Co, which announced this month it will lay off 500 people as the company adjusts its operational and funding strategies to accommodate a climate of increasing competition and intensifying borrowing pressure. The company, which has built and operated the National Broadband Network (NBN) since 2009, will… Read more »

AI
AI/Machine Learning

Google and Microsoft are adding AI to their most popular apps, which is a big win for all of us – and especially cybercriminals

- March 22, 2023 4 MIN READ

Google and Microsoft are on a mission to remove the drudgery from computing, by bringing next-generation AI tools as add-ons to existing services. On March 16, Microsoft announced an AI-powered system called Copilot will soon be introduced to its 365 suite apps including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams. The news came about two days… Read more »

Business

Amazon axes again, sacking another 9,000 staff at AWS and Twitch

- March 21, 2023 2 MIN READ

Amazon is laying off another 9,000 employees, with senior management citing “the uncertain economy in which we reside”. The cuts will come from its cloud business Amazon Web Services (AWS), streaming platform Twitch, and its advertising department. This latest round of layoffs comes just two months after Amazon said it would cut more than 18,000… Read more »

burnout
Workplace

Australia’s ‘great burnout’: there was no ‘great resignation’ – a new study reveals workers are simply exhausted

- March 21, 2023 3 MIN READ

You’ve probably heard about the “great resignation” which saw large numbers of people resigning from their jobs in the US in 2021 and 2022. We didn’t see resignations over and above what is normal in Australia. However, we did see workers resisting the post-COVID return to the office. To better understand these trends, we conducted… Read more »

ChatGPT
AI/Machine Learning

Is GPT-4 a game-changer in the world of AI? Here’s what we know

- March 17, 2023 4 MIN READ

OpenAI, the artificial intelligence (AI) research company behind ChatGPT and the DALL-E 2 art generator, has unveiled the highly anticipated GPT-4 model. Excitingly, the company also made it immediately available to the public through a paid service. GPT-4 is a large language model (LLM), a neural network trained on massive amounts of data to understand… Read more »

Cyber attack
Cyber security

Hackers steal 100,000+ drivers licenses in Latitude Financial cyber attack

- March 16, 2023 3 MIN READ

The driver licence information of a hundred thousand Australians has been stolen after a major consumer finance company was targeted with a “sophisticated and malicious cyber-attack”. Latitude Financial, a major non-bank lender of consumer credit in Australia boasting 2.8 million customer accounts, revealed on Thursday that it had been breached following a significant cyber attack… Read more »

Turkey vultures, scavenging on Californian beach
Business

3 reasons why Silicon Valley Bank went belly up

- March 15, 2023 4 MIN READ

The Santa Clara, California-based Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) has collapsed. This is the second-largest banking failure in US history and the largest failure since the Global Financial Crisis. The US government has stepped in to protect depositors. The government will not bail out SVB. Shareholders are not protected. The deposit protection is funded by a special impost… Read more »

Work
Workplace

Senate committee urges government to lead the way in 4-day work week trial

- March 15, 2023 3 MIN READ

Government and Greens Senators have called for a significant trial of the four-day working week after hearing “substantial evidence” of its effectiveness. The Select Committee on Work and Care, chaired by Greens Senator Barbara Pocock, released its report late last week. A key recommendation from the report is for the federal government to undertake a… Read more »