Comment on Intuit’s AI gamble: Mass layoff of 1,800 paired with hiring spree

Enlarge / View of San Francisco with Russian Hill in the background. (credit: Getty Images | Terraxplorer) San Francisco's Board of Supervisors this week approved a ban on software that is allegedly used by landlords to collude on rent prices. Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin recently proposed what his office called "the first local ordinance in the country banning the sale or use of software which enables price collusion among large corporate landlords for the purpose of rent-gouging." The ordinance was approved on a first reading by a 10-0 vote by the board on Tuesday.

Enlarge (credit: David Tran | iStock Editorial / Getty Images Plus) Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has joined progressive groups—including Demand Progress, Open Markets Institute, and the Tech Oversight Project—pressuring the US Department of Justice to investigate Nvidia's dominance in the AI chip market due to alleged antitrust concerns, Reuters reported. In a letter to the DOJ's chief antitrust enforcer, Jonathan Kanter, groups demanding more Big Tech oversight raised alarms that Nvidia's top rivals apparently "are struggling to gain traction" because "Nvidia’s near-absolute dominance of the market is difficult to counter" and "funders are wary of backing its rivals." Nvidia is currently "the world’s most valuable public company," their letter said, worth more than $3 trillion after taking near-total control of the high-performance AI chip market.

Enlarge (credit: Maria Korneeva via Getty Images) On Wednesday, US Sens. Chris Coons (D-Del.), Marsha Blackburn (R.-Tenn.), Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), and Thom Tillis (R-NC) introduced the Nurture Originals, Foster Art, and Keep Entertainment Safe (NO FAKES) Act of 2024. The bipartisan legislation, up for consideration in the US Senate, aims to protect individuals from unauthorized AI-generated replicas of their voice or likeness. The NO FAKES Act would create legal recourse for people whose digital representations are created without consent.

Enlarge / Microsoft's Arm-powered Surface Laptop 7. We're still waiting for Arm chips to make their way into cheaper PCs. (credit: Andrew Cunningham) For the first time in the decade-plus that Microsoft has been trying to make Arm-powered Windows PCs happen, we’ve finally got some pretty good ones. The latest Surface Pro and Surface Laptop (and the other Copilot+ PCs) benefit from extensive work done to Windows 11’s x86 translation layer, a wider selection of native apps, and most importantly, Snapdragon X Pro and X Elite chips from Qualcomm that are as good as or better than Intel’s or AMD’s current offerings. The main problem with these computers is that they’re all on the expensive side.

Enlarge / A rendering of NASA's proposed lunar gateway. (credit: NASA) Do you remember the Lunar Gateway? You could be forgiven if not, as the program continues to be tossed around by NASA planners, and it is still not entirely clear what purpose the lunar space station is supposed to serve. The Gateway—a small space station that will fly in a halo orbit around the Moon and spend most of its time far from the lunar surface—was initially supposed to launch in 2022. That obviously did not happen, and now, according to a new report from the US Government Accountability Office, the space agency does not expect the launch of the initial elements of the Gateway until at least December 2027. The baseline cost estimate is $5.3 billion. NASA's present plans contemplate using the Gateway as part of the Artemis IV mission, presently scheduled for September 2028.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) A wireless charging pad is now the most-desired in-car feature among people intending to buy a new vehicle. Being able to forget about a USB cable and still not run down one's battery topped the list of 163 features that AutoPacific asked about in its annual survey on future demand.