Month: January 2024

Enlarge / Billy Mitchell competes at a (presumably authentic) Donkey Kong cabinet. (credit: Flickr / daveynin)

After a nearly five-year legal battle between the scorekeepers at Twin Galaxies and Billy Mitchell over the veracity of Mitchell's contested Donkey Kong high score submissions, the recent settlement of the case before trial might feel a little anticlimactic. But Twin Galaxies attorney David Tashroudian tells Ars Technica that he wasn't surprised both sides opted for the cost savings and quick finality that come with avoiding arguments in front of a jury.

"A ton of cases end up settling prior to trial, just to avoid the expense and for all the parties to get finality and certainty on their own terms," Tashroudian told Ars. "There were going to be an inordinate amount of costs involved, and both parties were facing a lot of uncertainty at trial, and they wanted to get the matter settled on their own terms without putting it to a jury."

For Twin Galaxies, Tashroudian said he wasn't sure if cost "was our primary motivating factor, but I think the finality really is something that we wanted to achieve."

Enlarge / A camera in a hospital. (credit: Getty | Arne Dedert)

AI-powered surveillance technology is quickly making its way into hospital operating rooms around the country, where it works to constantly collect audio, video, patient vital signs, and a wealth of other surgical data, all in the name of improving safety and efficiency.

The surveillance technology has been implanted in operating rooms in over two dozen hospitals in the US and Canada so far. Most recently, the Boston area's Brigham and Women's Faulkner Hospital became one of the latest adopters of the technology, which is sold by Surgical Safety Technologies Inc. in Toronto.

The AI-powered platform is called the OR Black Box, named after the recording devices used in aircraft to help understand events that led to a disaster or other incident. But the name is a bit of a misnomer. The technology is not a literal black box; it's a set of wide-angled cameras and proprietary, customized AI models. It's also not necessarily intended to sort out the events that led to a surgical disaster or incident after the fact. Rather, it's intended to help prevent any mishaps from happening, and its makers and adopters have had to repeatedly assure medical staff that the all-seeing AI won't be used to pick out individual errors and assign blame to staff.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Alexander Koerner)

In December, we heard that job cuts might be coming for Google's ad sales division, and it's here. Business Insider reports Google is laying off "hundreds of employees" from the ad sales team. The cuts are mostly in the "Large Customer Sales" (LCS) team, which serves the company's biggest advertising clients.

We expected this. The Information detailed that layoffs would come to Google's Ad division this month. That report said that many of those are being laid off or reassigned because AI is replacing them. Google has been packing Google Ads—its most important product—with tons of generative AI features lately. One is a natural-language chatbot that helps people navigate the large selection of ad products; another is a system that can just make ad assets like images and text on its own based on a budget and goals given by the ad purchaser. Google's generative AI ad system is part of a product called "Performance Max" which works by autonomously remixing and tweaking your ads using the click-through rate as an instant feedback system. Google used to have humans do sales guidance for its products, create art assets, and decide on text and layouts, but now AI can do it a thousand times a second.

For Google, this is the latest in an increasing number of layoffs since last year. Last week, there were "hundreds" laid off from the hardware, Google Assistant, and AR divisions. Before that, there were layoffs in Google News, and before that, layoffs came to recruiting, Waze, Waymo, a robot division, and generally all across Google.