An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Google is updating the warning on Chrome's Incognito mode to make it clear that Google and websites run by other companies can still collect your data in the web browser's semi-private mode. The change is being made as Google prepares to settle a class-action lawsuit that accuses the firm of privacy violations related to Chrome's Incognito mode. The expanded warning was recently added to Chrome Canary, a nightly build for developers. The warning appears to directly address one of the lawsuit's complaints, that the Incognito mode's warning doesn't make it clear that Google collects data from users of the private mode.

Many tech-savvy people already know that while private modes in web browsers prevent some data from being stored on your device, they don't prevent tracking by websites or Internet service providers. But many other people may not understand exactly what Incognito mode does, so the more specific warning could help educate users. The new warning seen in Chrome Canary when you open an incognito window says: "You've gone Incognito. Others who use this device won't see your activity, so you can browse more privately. This won't change how data is collected by websites you visit and the services they use, including Google." The wording could be interpreted to refer to Google websites and third-party websites, including third-party websites that rely on Google ad services. The new warning was not yet in the developer, beta, and stable branches of Chrome as of today. It also wasn't in Chromium. The change to Canary was previously reported by MSPowerUser.

Incognito mode in the stable version of Chrome still says: "You've gone Incognito. Now you can browse privately, and other people who use this device won't see your activity." Among other changes, the Canary warning replaces "browse privately" with "browse more privately." The stable and Canary warnings both say that your browsing activity might still be visible to "websites you visit," "your employer or school," or "your Internet service provider." But only the Canary warning currently includes the caveat that Incognito mode "won't change how data is collected by websites you visit and the services they use, including Google." The old and new warnings both say that Incognito mode prevents Chrome from saving your browsing history, cookies and site data, and information entered in forms, but that "downloads, bookmarks and reading list items will be saved." Both warnings link to this page, which provides more detail on Incognito mode.

Google Maps is about to get better at showing directions inside tunnels. A new feature spotted by SmartDroid allows the Android version of the app to use Bluetooth beacons to track your location in areas where GPS signals typically can't reach. The Verge: These beacons transmit Bluetooth signals that give location data to your phone, according to the Google-owned Waze, which already supports the feature. The app then uses this information along with the device's mobile connectivity to "provide real-time traffic data as it would with a typical GPS connection."

Google is laying off hundreds of employees in its advertising sales team, the Alphabet-owned company said on Tuesday, marking the latest cuts at the search giant. From a report: The move adds to signs that job cuts will continue this year, as companies look to adopt AI software and automation to lighten workloads. Last week, Google said it would lay off several employees in its Voice Assistant units, hardware teams responsible for Pixel, Nest and Fitbit, as well as in its augmented reality team. Google's customer solutions unit, which serves medium-level advertiser clients, will be the core team for growth moving forward, the company said.

Google has formally discontinued its efforts to bring the full Chrome browser experience to its Fuchsia operating system. 9to5Google reports: In 2021, we reported that the Chromium team had begun an effort to get the full Chrome/Chromium browser running on Google's in-house Fuchsia operating system. Months later, in early 2022, we were even able to record a video of the progress, demonstrating that Chromium (the open-source-only variant of Chrome) could work relatively well on a Fuchsia-powered device. This was far from the first time that the Chromium project had been involved with Fuchsia. Google's full lineup of Nest Hub smart displays is currently powered by Fuchsia under the hood, and those displays have limited web browsing capabilities through an embedded version of the browser.

In contrast to that minimal experience, Google was seemingly working to bring the full might of Chrome to Fuchsia. To observers, this was yet another signal that Google intended for Fuchsia to grow beyond the smart home and serve as a full desktop operating system. After all, what good is a laptop or desktop without a web browser? Fans of the Fuchsia project have anticipated its eventual expansion to desktop since Fuchsia was first shown to run on Google's Pixelbook hardware. However, in the intervening time -- a period that also saw significant layoffs in the Fuchsia division -- it seems that Google has since shifted Fuchsia in a different direction. The clearest evidence of that move comes from a Chromium code change (and related bug tracker post) published last month declaring that the "Chrome browser on fuchsia won't be maintained."

Last year Marc Andreessen's firm "argued that AI companies would go broke if they had to pay copyright royalties or licensing fees," notes a Los Angeles Times technology columnist.

But are these powerful companies doing even more to ensure they're not billed for their training data? Just this week, British media outlets reported that OpenAI has made the same case, seeking an exemption from copyright rules in England, claiming that the company simply couldn't operate without ingesting copyrighted materials.... The AI companies also argue what they're doing falls under the legal doctrine of fair use — probably the strongest argument they've got — because it's transformative. This argument helped Google win in court against the big book publishers when it was copying books into its massive Google Books database, and defeat claims that YouTube was profiting by allowing users to host and promulgate unlicensed material. Next, the AI companies argue that copyright-violating outputs like those uncovered by AI expert Gary Marcus, film industry veteran Reid Southern and the New York Times are rare or are bugs that are going to be patched.
But finally, William Fitzgerald, a partner at the Worker Agency and former member of the public policy team at Google, predicts Google will try to line up supportive groups to tell lawmakers artists support AI: Fitzgerald also sees Google's fingerprints on Creative Commons' embrace of the argument that AI art is fair use, as Google is a major funder of the organization. "It's worrisome to see Google deploy the same lobbying tactics they've developed over the years to ensure workers don't get paid fairly for their labor," Fitzgerald said. And OpenAI is close behind. It is not only taking a similar approach to heading off copyright complaints as Google, but it's also hiring the same people: It hired Fred Von Lohmann, Google's former director of copyright policy, as its top copyright lawyer....

[Marcus says] "There's an obvious alternative here — OpenAI's saying that we need all this or we can't build AI — but they could pay for it!" We want a world with artists and with writers, after all, he adds, one that rewards artistic work — not one where all the money goes to the top because a handful of tech companies won a digital land grab. "It's up to workers everywhere to see this for what it is, get organized, educate lawmakers and fight to get paid fairly for their labor," Fitzgerald says.

"Because if they don't, Google and OpenAI will continue to profit from other people's labor and content for a long time to come."

Generative AI "doesn't easily carry over into robotics," write two researchers in IEEE Spectrum, "because the Internet is not full of robotic-interaction data in the same way that it's full of text and images."

That's why they're working on a single deep neural network capable of piloting many different types of robots... Robots need robot data to learn from, and this data is typically created slowly and tediously by researchers in laboratory environments for very specific tasks... The most impressive results typically only work in a single laboratory, on a single robot, and often involve only a handful of behaviors... [W]hat if we were to pool together the experiences of many robots, so a new robot could learn from all of them at once? We decided to give it a try. In 2023, our labs at Google and the University of California, Berkeley came together with 32 other robotics laboratories in North America, Europe, and Asia to undertake the RT-X project, with the goal of assembling data, resources, and code to make general-purpose robots a reality...

The question is whether a deep neural network trained on data from a sufficiently large number of different robots can learn to "drive" all of them — even robots with very different appearances, physical properties, and capabilities. If so, this approach could potentially unlock the power of large datasets for robotic learning. The scale of this project is very large because it has to be. The RT-X dataset currently contains nearly a million robotic trials for 22 types of robots, including many of the most commonly used robotic arms on the market...

Surprisingly, we found that our multirobot data could be used with relatively simple machine-learning methods, provided that we follow the recipe of using large neural-network models with large datasets. Leveraging the same kinds of models used in current LLMs like ChatGPT, we were able to train robot-control algorithms that do not require any special features for cross-embodiment. Much like a person can drive a car or ride a bicycle using the same brain, a model trained on the RT-X dataset can simply recognize what kind of robot it's controlling from what it sees in the robot's own camera observations. If the robot's camera sees a UR10 industrial arm, the model sends commands appropriate to a UR10. If the model instead sees a low-cost WidowX hobbyist arm, the model moves it accordingly.
"To test the capabilities of our model, five of the laboratories involved in the RT-X collaboration each tested it in a head-to-head comparison against the best control system they had developed independently for their own robot... Remarkably, the single unified model provided improved performance over each laboratory's own best method, succeeding at the tasks about 50 percent more often on average." And they then used a pre-existing vision-language model to successfully add the ability to output robot actions in response to image-based prompts.

"The RT-X project shows what is possible when the robot-learning community acts together... and we hope that RT-X will grow into a collaborative effort to develop data standards, reusable models, and new techniques and algorithms."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Futurepower(R) for sharing the article.

johnnyb (Slashdot reader #4,816) is a senior software R&D engineer who shares his proposed framework for "what AI legislation should cover, what policy goals it should aim to achieve, and what we should be wary of along the way." Some excerpts?

Protect Content Consumers from AI
The government should legislate technical and visual markers for AI-generated content, and the FTC should ensure that consumers always know whether or not there is a human taking responsibility for the content. This could be done by creating special content markings which communicate to users that content is AI-generated... This will enable Google to do things such as allow users to not include AI content when searching. It will enable users to detect which parts of their content are AI-generated and apply the appropriate level of skepticism. And future AI language models can also use these tags to know not to consume AI-generated content...

Ensure Companies are Clear on Who's Taking Responsibility
It's fine for a software product to produce a result that the software company views as advisory only, but it has to be clearly marked as such. Additionally, if one company includes the software built by another company, all companies need to be clear as to which outputs are derived from identifiable algorithms and which outputs are the result of AI. If the company supplying the component is not willing to stand behind the AI results that are produced, then that needs to be made clear.

Clarify Copyright Rules on Content Used in Models

Note that nothing here limits the technological development of Artificial Intelligence... The goal of these proposals is to give clarity to all involved what the expectations and responsibilities of each party are.
OpenAI's Sam Altman has also been pondering this, but on a much larger scale. In a (pre-ouster) interview with Bill Gates, Altman pondered what happens at the next level.

That is, what happens "If we are right, and this technology goes as far as we think it's going to go, it will impact society, geopolitical balance of power, so many things..." [F]or these, still hypothetical, but future extraordinarily powerful systems — not like GPT- 4, but something with 100,000 or a million times the compute power of that, we have been socialized in the idea of a global regulatory body that looks at those super-powerful systems, because they do have such global impact. One model we talk about is something like the IAEA. For nuclear energy, we decided the same thing. This needs a global agency of some sort, because of the potential for global impact. I think that could make sense...

I think if it comes across as asking for a slowdown, that will be really hard. If it instead says, "Do what you want, but any compute cluster above a certain extremely high-power threshold" — and given the cost here, we're talking maybe five in the world, something like that — any cluster like that has to submit to the equivalent of international weapons inspectors. The model there has to be made available for safety audit, pass some tests during training, and before deployment. That feels possible to me. I wasn't that sure before, but I did a big trip around the world this year, and talked to heads of state in many of the countries that would need to participate in this, and there was almost universal support for it.

jd (Slashdot reader #1,658) shared this story from BleepingComputer. The article notes that "Multiple implementations of the Kyber key encapsulation mechanism for quantum-safe encryption, are vulnerable to a set of flaws collectively referred to as KyberSlash, which could allow the recovery of secret keys."

jd explains that Crystals-Kyber "was chosen to be the U.S. government's post-quantum cryptography system of choice last year, but a side-channel attack has been identified. But in the article, NIST says that this is an implementation-specific attack (the reference implementation) and not a vulnerability in Kyber itself."

From the article: CRYSTALS-Kyber is the official implementation of the Kyber key encapsulation mechanism (KEM) for quantum-safe algorithm (QSA) and part of the CRYSTALS (Cryptographic Suite for Algebraic Lattices) suite of algorithms. It is designed for general encryption... The KyberSlash flaws are timing-based attacks arising from how Kyber performs certain division operations in the decapsulation process, allowing attackers to analyze the execution time and derive secrets that could compromise the encryption. If a service implementing Kyber allows multiple operation requests towards the same key pair, an attacker can measure timing differences and gradually compute the secret key...

In a KyberSlash1 demo on a Raspberry Pi system, the researchers recovered Kyber's secret key from decryption timings in two out of three attempts...

On December 30, KyberSlash2 was patched following its discovery and responsible reporting by Prasanna Ravi, a researcher at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, and Matthias Kannwischer, who works at the Quantum Safe Migration Center.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Quartz: It's day two of the opening of OpenAI's buzzy GPT store, which offers customized versions of ChatGPT, and users are already breaking the rules. The Generative Pre-Trained Transformers (GPTs) are meant to be created for specific purposes -- and not created at all in some cases. A search for "girlfriend" on the new GPT store will populate the site's results bar with at least eight "girlfriend" AI chatbots, including "Korean Girlfriend," "Virtual Sweetheart," "Your girlfriend Scarlett," "Your AI girlfriend, Tsu." Click on chatbot "Virtual Sweetheart," and a user will receive starting prompts like "What does your dream girl look like?" and "Share with me your darkest secret."

The AI girlfriend bots go against OpenAI's usage policy, which was updated when the GPT store launched yesterday (Jan. 10). The company bans GPTs "dedicated to fostering romantic companionship or performing regulated activities." It is not clear exactly what regulated activities entail. Notably, the company is aiming to get ahead of potential conflicts with its OpenAI store.

Relationship chatbots are, indeed, popular apps. In the US, seven of the 30 AI chatbot apps downloaded in 2023 from the Apple or Google Play store were related to AI friends, girlfriends, or companions, according to data shared with Quartz from data.ai, a mobile app analytics firm. The proliferation of these apps may stem from the epidemic of loneliness and isolation Americans are facing. Alarming studies show that one-in-two American adults have reported experiencing loneliness, with the US Surgeon General calling for the need to strengthen social connections. AI chatbots could be part of the solution if people are isolated from other human beings -- or they could just be a way to cash in on human suffering. Further reading: OpenAI Quietly Deletes Ban On Using ChatGPT For 'Military and Warfare'

After removing the feature with Android 5.0 in 2015, Google appears to be bringing back lock screen widgets in the next version of Android. "There haven't been any indications since then that Google would ever bring this feature back," notes Android Authority. "But after Apple introduced widgets to the iPhone lock screen in iOS 16, many speculated that it was only a matter of time." From the report: As for how they might do that, there seem to be two different approaches that are being developed. The first one involves the creation of a new "communal" space -- an area on the lock screen that might be accessed by swiping inward from the right. Although the communal space is still unfinished, I was able to activate it in the new Android 14 QPR2 Beta 3 update. Once I activated the communal space, a large gray bar appeared on the right side of the lock screen on my Pixel device. After swiping inward, a pencil icon appeared on the top left of the screen. Tapping this icon opened a widget selector that allowed me to add widgets from Google Calendar, Google Clock, and the Google App, but I wasn't able to add widgets from most of my other apps. This is because the widget category needs to be set to KEYGUARD in order for it to appear in this selector. KEYGUARD is a category Google introduced in Android 4.2 Jelly Bean that very few apps utilize today since the lock screen hasn't supported showing widgets in nearly a decade. After adding the widgets for Google Clock and Google Finance, I returned to the communal space by swiping inward from the right on the lock screen. The widgets were indeed shown in this space without me needing to unlock the device. However, the lock screen UI was shown on top of the widgets, making things difficult to see. Clearly, this feature is still a work in progress in the current beta. [...]

While it's possible this communal space won't be coming to all devices, there's another way that Google could bring widgets back to the lock screen for Android phones: leveraging At a Glance. If you aren't familiar, Pixel phones have a widget on the home screen and lock screen called At a Glance. The interesting thing about At a Glance is that it isn't actually a widget but rather a "custom element behaving like a widget," according to developer Kieron Quinn. Under the hood, At a Glance is built on top of Smartspace, the API that is responsible for creating the various cards you can swipe through. Although Smartspace supports creating a variety of card types, it currently can't handle RemoteViews, the API on which Android app widgets are built. That could change soon, though, as Google is working on including RemoteViews into the Smartspace API.

It's unclear whether this will allow raw widgets from all apps to be included in At a Glance, since it's also possible that Google is only implementing this so it has more freedom in building new cards. Either way, this new addition to the Smartspace API would supercharge the At a Glance widget in Android 15, and we're excited to see what Google has in store for us.

Artifact, the personalized news reader built by Instagram's co-founders, is shutting down roughly a year after opening to the public. "We have built something that a core group of users love, but we have concluded that the market opportunity isn't big enough to warrant continued investment in this way," wrote CEO Kevin Systrom in a Medium post. The post continued: It's easy for startups to ignore this reality, but often making the tough call earlier is better for everyone involved. The biggest opportunity cost is time working on newer, bigger and better things that have the ability to reach many millions of people. I am personally excited to continue building new things, though only time will tell what that might be. We live in an exciting time where artificial intelligence is changing just about everything we touch, and the opportunities for new ideas seem limitless.

I am particularly proud of all the work our small team of 8 has accomplished. For instance, our app was recently named the everyday essential app of the year by the Google Play Store. I've gotten the pleasure of working with some of the most talented engineers and designers through this venture and they deserve an immense amount of respect and credit. While we will go our separate ways, we can look back fondly on what we've built. While we've made this decision, we wanted to make sure that we allowed the community time to adjust. So, today we've decided to slim down the app's complexity and operations by removing the ability to add new comments and posts. This type of content requires a fair amount of moderation and oversight and we will not have the staff going forward to support these features. Your existing posts, however, will remain visible to you on your own profile self-view. In the meantime, Artifact will continue to operate the core news reading capability through the end of February.

News and information remain critical areas for startup investment. We are at an existential moment where many publications are shutting down or struggling, local news has all but vanished, and larger publishers have fraught relationships with leading technology companies. My hope is that technology can find ways to preserve, support and grow these institutions and that these institutions find ways of leveraging the scale that things like AI can provide. I am certain there are bright minds working on ideas that will continue to surprise and delight us in all these areas. We are optimistic about the future and want to thank our community for being part of this adventure we call Artifact.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Polestar CEO Thomas Ingenlath couldn't be happier with the integration of Google built-in, the branded product that embeds Google apps and services directly into the company's EVs. But don't expect the EV maker to drop Android Auto or Apple CarPlay as a result. On the sidelines of CES 2024, Ingenlath committed to sticking with Android Auto and Apple CarPlay, the middleware that allows drivers to project their smartphone onto the car's infotainment display. He went a step further and questioned automakers that have. GM, for instance, decided not to make the new 2024 Chevy Blazer EV compatible with Android Auto or Apple CarPlay.

"It's still too important for our customers to have the choice," Ingenlath said during an interview at CES 2024. He later added that, in his view, removing the option isn't the right way of treating customers. "Our priority is very clear; We have a really fantastic system together with Google," he said. While Ingenlath admitted that adding that Google Built-in provides the best experience, he asked "why would we try to dogmatically educate our customers?" Polestar has been a champion of Google built-in. However, it's willingness to keep Android Auto and Apple CarPlay is notable because it illustrates the complexity of appeasing customers even if it might overshadow the native technology in the vehicle. "Ingenlath seems convinced that as Google built-in improves and continues to add apps and services, consumers will give up Android Auto or Apple CarPlay on there own," adds TechCrunch. "And the updates do keep coming."

"At CES 2024, for instance, Polestar announced that the Chrome browser would start rolling out to Polestar 2 in beta, allowing drivers to surf the internet via the central vehicle display while parked. Ingenlath hinted of more improvements in the future, including more precise navigation in Google Maps that drills down to the specific lane as well as customized features designed for Polestar customers."

Google formally endorsed the concept of right to repair Thursday and is set to testify in favor of a strong right to repair bill in Oregon later Thursday, a massive step forward for the right to repair movement. 404 Media: "Google believes that users should have more control over repair -- including access to the same documentation, parts and tools that original equipment manufacturer (OEM) repair channels have -- which is often referred to as 'Right to Repair,'" Google's Steven Nickel wrote in a white paper published Thursday.

Crucially, Google specifically says that regulators should ban "parts pairing," which is a tactic used by Apple, John Deere, and other major manufacturers to artificially restrict which repair parts can be used with a given device: "Policies should constrain OEMs from imposing unfair anti-repair practices. For example, parts-pairing, the practice of using software barriers to obstruct consumers and independent repair shops from replacing components, or other restrictive impediments to repair should be discouraged," the white paper says.

The stock market has a new, but familiar, monarch. Microsoft's AI-powered stock rally has made the software giant the largest U.S. company by market value, surpassing Apple for the first time since November 2021. WSJ: Shares edged higher Thursday morning, bringing Microsoft's market value to nearly $2.87 trillion. Apple, meanwhile, fell 1%, pulling its market capitalization just below that threshold. Either Apple or Microsoft has held the title since Feb. 4, 2019, according to Dow Jones Market Data. Microsoft's stock has been on the rise for the past year thanks to the continued growth of its cloud computing division, even as major competitors like Amazon and Google have experienced a gradual slowdown in sales growth.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The cost of switching between cloud-computing providers has long drawn complaints, with the services derided as "roach motels" that let businesses check in but not out. Now Google is taking steps to change that. Effective immediately, the company is eliminating fees levied on customers who want to leave its cloud for a rival service -- a policy shift that may pressure competitors Amazon and Microsoft to do the same.

The move follows intensifying scrutiny of cloud services by regulators and lawmakers around the world. UK antitrust authorities launched a probe that is looking at such penalties, and the fees emerged as a key issue when the US Federal Trade Commission asked for public comments on a variety of cloud concerns. Google Vice President Amit Zavery, who helps oversee the cloud business, said switching fees only represent about 2% of the total costs of migrating to a new provider -- and don't deter many clients from moving their data.

Google has announced that it will eliminate at least 17 features from its Assistant product, following news that it had laid off "hundreds" of employees from the division. The company is cutting "underutilized features" to "focus on quality and reliability, it wrote in a blog post, even though a good number of people may still rely on those functions. From a report: The 17 functions being removed include: accessing or managing your cookbook; using your voice to send an email, video or audio message; rescheduling events in Google Calendar with your voice; and using App Launcher in Google Assistant driving mode on Google Maps to read and send messages, make calls, and control media. It also describes what Assistant can still do related to those functions, or alternate ways of doing them. A list is here, though Google said they're just "some" of the affected features.

Google laid off hundreds of workers in several divisions Wednesday night, seeking to lower expenses as it focuses on artificial intelligence and joining a wave of other companies cutting tech jobs this year. From a report: The Silicon Valley company laid off employees in its core engineering division, as well as those working on the Google Assistant, a voice-operated virtual assistant, and in the hardware division that makes the Pixel phone, Fitbit watches and Nest thermostat, three people with knowledge of the cuts said. Several hundred employees from the company's core engineering organization lost corporate access and received notices that their roles were eliminated, two of the people said.

"We've had to make some difficult decisions about ongoing employment of some Google employees and we regret to inform you that your position is being eliminated," the company told some workers in the division, according to text reviewed by The New York Times. Google confirmed the Assistant cuts, earlier reported by Semafor, and the hardware layoffs. "We're responsibly investing in our company's biggest priorities and the significant opportunities ahead," a Google spokesman said in a statement. After cuts throughout the second half of 2023, "some teams are continuing to make these kinds of organizational changes, which include some role eliminations globally."

An anonymous reader shares a column: Apple delisting a dozen global crypto apps -- relied by big traders in India, in part due to its tax evasive properties -- from its Indian App Store seems the final nail in the coffin, capping a brutal two years. The pending removal across Google Play, internet providers and beyond caps a journey mired with shutdowns, pivots and relocations abroad for Indian crypto startups. The web3 dreams of local entrepreneurs now appear dashed against the rocky shores of regulatory resistance.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: For much of the 21st century, software engineering has been seen as one of the safest havens in the tenuous and ever-changing American job market. But there are a growing number of signs that the field is starting to become a little less secure and comfortable, due to an industry-wide downturn and the looming threat of artificial intelligence that is spurring growing competition for software jobs. "The amount of competition is insane," said Joe Forzano, an unemployed software engineer who has worked at the mental health startup Alma and private equity giant Blackstone. Since he lost his job in March, Forzano has applied to over 250 jobs. In six cases, he went through the "full interview gauntlet," which included between six and eight interviews each, before learning he had been passed over. "It has been very, very rough," he told Motherboard.

Forzano is not alone in his pessimism, according to a December survey of 9,338 software engineers performed on behalf of Motherboard by Blind, an online anonymous platform for verified employees. In the poll, nearly nine in 10 surveyed software engineers said it is more difficult to get a job now than it was before the pandemic, with 66 percent saying it was "much harder." Nearly 80 percent of respondents said the job market has even become more competitive over the last year. Only 6 percent of the software engineers were "extremely confident" they could find another job with the same total compensation if they lost their job today while 32 percent said they were "not at all confident."

Over 2022 and 2023, the tech sector incurred more than 400,000 layoffs, according to the tracking site Layoffs.fyi. But up until recently, it seemed software engineers were more often spared compared to their co-workers in non-technical fields. One analysis found tech companies cut their recruiting teams by 50 percent, compared to only 10 percent of their engineering departments. At Salesforce, engineers were four times less likely to lose their jobs than those in marketing and sales, which Bloomberg has said is a trend replicated at other tech companies such as Dell and Zoom. But signs of dread among software engineers have started to become more common online. In December, one Amazon employee wrote a long post on the anonymous employee platform Blind saying that the "job market is terrible" and that he was struggling to get interviews of any sort. "In the age of AI, computer science is no longer the safe major," Kelli Maria Korducki wrote in The Atlantic in September. AI programs like ChatGPT and Google Bard allow users to write code using natural language, greatly reducing the time it takes workers to complete coding tasks. It could lead to less job security and lower compensation for all but the very best in the software trade, warns Matt Welsh, a former computer science professor at Harvard.

"More than 60 percent of those surveyed said they believed their company would hire fewer people because of AI moving forward," reports Motherboard.

OpenAI has launched an online store where people can share customized versions of the company's popular ChatGPT chatbot, after initially delaying the rollout because of leadership upheaval last year. From a report: The new store, which rolled out Wednesday to paid ChatGPT users, will corral the chatbots that users create for a variety of tasks, for example a version of ChatGPT that can teach math to a child or come up with colorful cocktail recipes. The product, called the GPT Store, will include chatbots that users have chosen to share publicly. It will eventually introduce ways for people to make money from their creations -- much as they might through the app stores of Apple or Alphabet's Google.

Similar to those app stores, OpenAI's GPT Store will let users see the most popular and trending chatbots on a leaderboard and search for them by category. In a blog post announcing the rollout, OpenAI said that people have made 3 million custom chatbots thus far, though it was not clear how many were available through its store at launch. The store's launch comes as OpenAI works to build out its ecosystem of services and find new sources of revenue. On Wednesday, OpenAI also announced a new paid ChatGPT tier for companies with smaller teams that starts at $25 a month per user. OpenAI first launched a corporate version of ChatGPT with added features and privacy safeguards in August.