Silicon Valley Bank, which catered to the tech industry for three decades, collapsed on March 10, 2023, after the Santa Clara, California-based lender suffered from an old-fashioned bank run. State regulators seized the bank and made the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation its receiver. SVB, as it’s known, was the biggest U.S. lender to fail since… Read more »
The current housing crisis has renewed debates about how to regulate short-term rental platforms such as Airbnb. The international research on the impact of these rentals is clear: when landlords “host” tourists rather than residents, housing supply is depleted, rents rise and neighbourhoods change. Given Australia’s dire shortage of rental housing, restricting short-term rentals seems… Read more »
Gender equity continues to be a significant problem in business globally. We all know the story: the gender pay gap is a persistent issue and female-dominated industries tend to be lower paid. Female representation in senior leadership and board positions remains low in many countries, particularly in Aotearoa New Zealand. Women comprise only 28.5% of… Read more »
One day in mid-2013, four people, including two police officers and a social worker, arrived unannounced at the home of Chicago resident Robert McDaniel. McDaniel had only ever had minor run-ins with the law – street gambling, marijuana possession, nothing even remotely violent. But his visitors informed him that a computer program had determined that… Read more »
Last month, Microsoft integrated its Bing search engine with Open AI’s GPT-4 chatbot, a large language model designed to interact with users in a conversational manner. Users interacting with Bing have reported flashes of emotion, ranging from sadness and existential angst through to depression and malice. The chatbot has even revealed its name: Sydney. Such… Read more »
The federal government is pursuing a new cybersecurity agenda in the wake of last year’s major cyber breaches with Optus and Medibank. “For businesses these days, cybersecurity is as important as having a lock on the door”, said Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in opening the government’s cybersecurity roundtable in Sydney on Monday. There, Minister for… Read more »
The federal government is further stepping up its efforts to improve Australia’s protection against increasing cyber threats, with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on Monday announcing the establishment of a Coordinator for Cyber Security. The aim is to “ensure a centrally coordinated approach” to the government’s cyber security responsibilities. This would include coordinating and “triaging” action… Read more »
Generative AI is having a moment. ChatGPT and art generators such as DALL-E 2, Stable Diffusion, and Midjourney have proven their potential, and now millions are wracking their brains over how to get their outputs to look something like the vision in their head. This is the goal of prompt engineering: the skill of crafting… Read more »
Why do Uber, Lyft, Didi, OLA, and other ride-sharing companies want to partner with public transport agencies? For Uber and Lyft, the reason is simple: their business plans were based on eventually using driverless vehicles to eliminate their main cost, the labour cost of the driver. But human drivers won’t be replaced for some time.… Read more »
The warm light of friendship, intimacy and romantic love illuminates the best aspects of being human – while also casting a deep shadow of possible heartbreak. But what happens when it’s not a human bringing on the heartache, but an AI-powered app? That’s a question a great many users of the Replika AI are crying about this… Read more »
There’s a race to transform search. And Microsoft just scored a home goal with its new Bing search chatbot, Sydney, which has been terrifying early adopters with death threats, among other troubling outputs. The other night, I had a disturbing, two-hour conversation with Bing’s new AI chatbot. The AI told me its real name (Sydney),… Read more »
As the “chatbot wars” rage in Silicon Valley, the growing proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI) tools specifically designed to generate human-like text has left many baffled. Educators in particular are scrambling to adjust to the availability of software that can produce a moderately competent essay on any topic at a moment’s notice. Should we go… Read more »
Today, if you want to find a good moving company, you might ask your favourite search engine – Google, Bing, or DuckDuckGo perhaps – for some advice. After wading past half a page of adverts, you get a load of links to articles on moving companies. You click on one of the links and finally… Read more »
ChatGPT has taken the world by storm. Within two months of its release, it reached 100 million active users, making it the fastest-growing consumer application ever launched. Users are attracted to the tool’s advanced capabilities – and concerned by its potential to cause disruption in various sectors. A much less discussed implication is the privacy… Read more »
The generative AI industry will be worth about A$22 trillion by 2030, according to the CSIRO. These systems – of which ChatGPT is currently the best known – can write essays and code, generate music and artwork, and have entire conversations. But what happens when they’re turned to illegal uses? Last week, the streaming community… Read more »
The lessons from Uber, Ola and rideshare’s disruption is that in the end, the consumer still pays 
Unicorn dehorned: Nasdaq-listed Brisbane EV charging venture Tritium collapses into receivership 
Here are the finalists in Fintech Australia’s 2024 Finnies awards 
Atlassian cofounder Scott Farquhar steps down as co-CEO 
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