Month: August 2023

Enlarge (credit: SOPA Images / Contributor | LightRocket)

Banks with employees covertly texting about official business on apps like Signal, WhatsApp, and iMessage have been caught red-handed. Now federal agencies are charging banks with violating laws requiring recordkeeping on all business matters.

Today, the SEC and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) fined 11 firms a combined $549 million for what the SEC described as "widespread and longstanding failures by the firms and their employees to maintain and preserve electronic communications."

Wells Fargo was hit with the biggest fines, agreeing to pay the SEC a $125 million penalty and the CFTC another $75 million. Fines for other firms—including Bank of Montreal, BMO Capital Markets Corp., BNP Paribas, Houlihan Lokey Capital, Inc., Mizuho Securities USA, Moelis & Company LLC, SMBC Nikko Securities America, Inc., Société Générale, and Wedbush Securities Inc.—ranged between $9 million and $75 million.

Enlarge / The Disneyland castle in Anaheim, California. (credit: Getty Images)

The Walt Disney Company has formed a task force to investigate the potential applications of AI throughout its various business units, reports Reuters, including cutting costs and enhancing customer experiences. This comes despite ongoing Hollywood writers' and actors' strikes that have put some AI technologies in the crosshairs.

Among other uses, Disney hopes that AI can help control the soaring costs of movie and television production, which can sometimes reach $300 million for major film releases. AI could also enhance customer support and create unique interactions within Disney's theme parks. In 2021, Disney showed off Groot, a free-roaming AI-powered robot, based on the Marvel character, that can interact with park guests.

Currently, Disney's website lists several job openings seeking employees with expertise in machine learning or artificial intelligence, showing the company's commitment to exploring AI applications. These positions range from the company's film studios to its theme parks and advertising team, which is hoping to build an AI-powered advertising system.

Enlarge (credit: Andriy Onufriyenko)

As machine-learning algorithms grow more sophisticated, artificial intelligence seems poised to revolutionize the practice of science itself. In part, this will come from the software enabling scientists to work more effectively. But some advocates are hoping for a fundamental transformation in the process of science. The Nobel Turing Challenge, issued in 2021 by noted computer scientist Hiroaki Kitano, tasked the scientific community with producing a computer program capable of making a discovery worthy of a Nobel Prize by 2050.

Part of the work of scientists is to uncover laws of nature—basic principles that distill the fundamental workings of our Universe. Many of them, like Newton’s laws of motion or the law of conservation of mass in chemical reactions, are expressed in a rigorous mathematical form. Others, like the law of natural selection or Mendel’s law of genetic inheritance, are more conceptual.

The scientific community consists of theorists, data analysts, and experimentalists who collaborate to uncover these laws. The dream behind the Nobel Turing Challenge is to offload the tasks of all three onto artificial intelligence.

Enlarge / The Mac Studio, a likely recipient of a new M3 Max chip. (credit: Andrew Cunninghan)

Apple's M3 processor generation is continuing to take shape thanks to what seem to be unreleased internal test devices that are showing up in the analytics data of third-party app developers. Back in May, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reported on the specs of what appeared to be a new M3 Pro processor. Yesterday, Gurman revealed the specs of a new M3 Max, which has a total of 16 CPU cores and 40 GPU cores, plus 48GB of memory (likely not the maximum that will be available since the current MacBook Pros can go up to 96GB).

The current M2 Max, found in the 16-inch MacBook Pro and the Mac Studio, tops out at 12 CPU cores and 38 GPU cores. Gurman says that all four of the M3 Max's extra CPU cores should be large, high-performance cores rather than smaller efficiency cores; both kinds of cores boost speeds, but performance cores are obviously more useful for high-end workloads.

Earlier this week, Gurman also noticed a new base-model M3 chip that continued to use 8 CPU cores and 10 GPU cores, just like the current M2. This chip would still be a speed upgrade from the M2, but it would have to rely on architectural improvements and clock speed boosts rather than extra cores. The original M1 used eight CPU cores as well, also split evenly between high-performance and high-efficiency cores.