To gain valuable insights into user experiences with generative AI services, the organization Applause conducted a survey. More than 3,000 digital quality testing professionals from around the world participated in this survey, shedding light on the following findings.

Generative AI Use is growing
The majority of digital quality testing professionals are using generative AI; specifically:

– 59% said their workplace allows for generative AI use.
– 79% said they are actively using a generative AI service.

Reasons cited for using generative AI include writing software, doing research, and for more creative pursuits like writing song lyrics and creating electronic music.

Concerns about bias are growing too:
Despite the increased usage of generative AI, concerns around the technology are growing. When organizations asks testers about their concerns about bias, these worries became evident:

• 90% of respondents expressed concern over bias affecting the accuracy, relevance, or tone of AI-generated content, a 24% increase from Applause’s AI and Voice Applications Survey from March of this year.
• 47% shared they’ve experienced responses or content they considered to be biased.
• 18% said they had received offensive responses.

Concerns about AI hallucinations
Hallucinations in AI is another area of concern, with the survey finding:

• 37% of respondents have seen examples of hallucinations in AI responses.
• 88% of respondents expressed concern about the technology for software development because of the potential for hallucinations.

Data quality concerns
The survey queried digital quality testing professionals about the quality of data being used to train AI algorithms:

• 91% expressed some level of concern with data quality.
• 22% expressed extreme concern.

Concerns around Data Privacy and Copyright Infringement
If data privacy and copyright infringement were worries related to generative AI. Our survey found:

• 98% of respondents said data privacy needs to be considered when developing new technologies.
• 67% said they feel that most generative AI services infringe on data privacy.

When asked about the level of concern that content produced using generative AI that may be in breach of copyright or intellectual property protections, respondents shared:

• 21% are extremely concerned
• 41% are concerned
• 29% are slightly concerned
• 9% are not concerned

The burgeoning excitement, increasing adoption, and the expanding landscape of use cases surrounding generative AI underscore the immense potential and possibilities inherent in this technology. However, it is evident that certain concerns demand attention and resolution, including issues related to bias, hallucinations, and the emergence of harmful content.

To address and surmount these challenges, a pivotal strategy involves the engagement of real people who evaluate and test the technology. Their insights are invaluable in assessing the quality of the content generated, encompassing factors such as accuracy, subtleties of bias, and relevance. These collective efforts aim to enhance AI performance over time.

Simultaneously, the need to maintain a high standard for the data used to train these algorithms cannot be overstated. It is essential that the data adheres to stringent quality standards and complies with privacy and copyright laws, ensuring the ethical and responsible evolution of generative AI technology.

The company behind TikTok, ByteDance, is in the crosshairs of Western politicians who believe that user information could be given to bad actors.

ByteDance is based in Beijing, whose laws oblige companies in the country to share data with the government for national security reasons.

TikTok, however, has always been opposed to tracking its users or handing over any data to governments, saying Beijing’s laws do not apply to data stored overseas. Until Tuesday, users’ data was stored only on servers in the US and Singapore.

With the first European data centre in Europe, the entertainment platform is making another attempt to reduce the tension in politics and its skepticism.

A second such centre, which is in the process of being set up, will be located in Ireland, as well as another to be located in Norway.

TikTok chief executive Theo Bertram, the firm’s vice president of public policy in Europe, said this would create a “specifically hardened security environment around our European users’ data”.

The idea of protecting user data applies not only to users in EU countries, but also to the UK and Switzerland.

The company also said it would take steps to make it easier for competing products to work with its software.

“Today we are announcing proactive changes that we hope will start to address these concerns in a meaningful way, even while the European Commission’s investigation continues and we cooperate with it,” Microsoft’s vice president of European government affairs, Nanna-Louise Linde, said in a blog post.

News of Microsoft’s decision comes a month after the European Union’s Executive Commission launched a formal investigation into concerns that tying Teams to Office gives the company an unfair advantage over competitors.

“We take note of Microsoft’s announcement. We have no further comment to make”, a Commission spokesperson said.

This is all due to an alert filed in 2020 by Slack Technologies, the reason for the investigation.

According to Slack, Microsoft is abusing its dominant market position to eliminate competition – in violation of EU laws – by illegally combining Teams with the Office suite, which includes Word, Excel and Outlook.

Linde also said the changes in question were made to be able to address EU concerns that customers should be able to buy Office without Teams at a lower price and that “we need to do more to facilitate interoperability” with competing communication and collaboration software.

The changes will take effect on Oct. 1 in the 30-nation European Economic Area and Switzerland.

Microsoft is not the only company under pressure from Brussels because of concerns about their market dominance. The Commission is also investigating Google, Apple, Amazon and Facebook and Instagram.

Google’s proposal comes in response to the CMA’s enforcement action against the company last year, which was aimed at the conditions it placed on developers for in-app payments.

“Google’s complete control over in-app payments raised concerns this unfairly restricted app developers – by forcing them to use Google Play’s billing system – putting distance between them and their customers and reducing competition, to the detriment of Google Play users,”

said Ann Pope, Senior Director of Antitrust at the CMA.

The proposal offers two options: Developer Only (DOB) or User Choice (UCB), which will give users the option to choose between alternative billing and Google Play Billing (GPB).

The fee reductions are part of Google’s proposal to address the concerns raised by the CMA. Google has also asked for the option to phase in the proposed commitments, with the service initially available to non-game app developers and then extending to game apps no later than October 2023.

The CMA has launched a consultation on Google’s proposal and invites developers and other interested parties to respond by 19 May. After considering the responses, it will decide whether to accept the commitments and resolve the case.
The proposal is an extension of the alternative billing choice that Google already offers in the European Economic Area (EEA) and in other parts of the world, such as South Korea and India, where Google was forced to offer alternative billing due to a $162 million fine for antitrust practices.

Google’s proposal requires developers to meet appropriate consumer protection requirements, and fees and terms of service will continue to apply to support investment in Android and the Play Store.

The CMA is seeking feedback on Google’s proposed reduction in service fees, the proposed process for reporting to Google on turnover associated with in-app purchases, the use of information screens, the UCB billing choice screen, and the process Google proposes for monitoring compliance with commitments.

“Both DOB and UCB would allow app developers the opportunity to use billing systems of their choosing (and DOB would allow them to choose not to offer GPB at all), breaking the link that the GPB requirement currently creates between access to Google Play and the use of Google’s proprietary billing system for in-app sales of access to digital content or services,”

wrote the CMA in its Notice of Intent.

“Moreover, third-party payment processors will be able to offer their services to potential app developer customers for in-app purchases of digital content or services within an app distributed on Google Play, allowing app developers to benefit from increased choice and competition.”

the CMA continued.

Both DOB and UCB will enable app developers to use billing systems of their choice, breaking the link that the GPB requirement currently creates between access to Google Play and access to millions of Android users.

With the pre-release update also comes a new feature that Microsoft has dubbed “Microsoft Account Notifications,” which will appear in the Start menu pop-up window of Windows 11. This feature has been in testing since last year. Although some users have voiced their concerns about these notifications, Microsoft said they are only available to a small audience at the moment and will be rolled out more widely in the coming months.

In addition to these new features, the pre-release version of Windows 11 KB5023778 comes with several other improvements and bug fixes. This includes a fix for a Microsoft PowerPoint freezing issue and new features to Microsoft Defender for Endpoint. This update is optional and contains no security updates. But it is recommended for Windows administrators who want to test the improvements that will be released with Patch Tuesday next month.

After early next month, there will be no more optional non-security pre-releases of Windows 10. For those versions, only the cumulative monthly security updates will continue to apply. While Windows 10, version 22H2, will continue to receive security releases and optional releases. Starting in April 2023, optional pre-release non-security updates will be issued on the Tuesday of the fourth week of the month to replace the “C” and “D” releases previously issued in the third and fourth weeks.

According to sources with direct knowledge of the matter, the layoffs have affected the engineering teams, including those that support the advertising technology, Twitter’s core application, as well as the technical infrastructure to keep the systems up and running.

Roysters demanded a response to Twitter’s actions, but the tech giant is still keeping mum on the subject.

In early November, the platform laid off about 3,700 employees as part of a cost-cutting measure undertaken by Musk, who acquired the company for $44 billion.

The Information reported that the latest cuts are meant to offset the drop in revenue since Musk has been behind the company.

In November, Musk said the service suffered a “huge drop in revenue” as advertisers halted spending due to concerns about content moderation.

The behavior of Visual Studio in versions prior to Preview 3 would in some cases trigger a call to MSBuild, even if no code was changed. When Visual Studio needed to copy the artifacts of a linked project that had already been built to a source directory, it would call MSBuild to rebuild the project and copy the necessary files to the source directory. Additional builds were triggered even when no build was required, Infoq wrote on the topic.

In this pre-release, Visual Studio will avoid calling MSBuild when only copying the artifacts to the source directory is needed, and will instead copy them to the correct locations independently.

Accelerating builds can be enabled by adding the AccelerateBuildsInVisualStudio property to true in the Directory.Build.props file, or alternatively it can be enabled per project by adding the same key to the project file.

In a Reddit thread, some users discussed that adding additional proprietary features in Visual Studio instead of the .NET SDK is undesirable as it implies vendor lock-in. Reddit user Atulin voiced his concerns:

So one more thing is being added to the non-free VS instead of being added to the SDK? First the debugger, then the hot reload, and now performance improvements are being pushed into VS?

What’s next? Algebraic data types supported only by a dedicated VS compiler?

Adding this feature to Visual Studio for Mac is not out of the question, but it doesn’t seem to be planned at this time.

The latest preview version of Visual Studio can be downloaded from the official Microsoft site. Currently the latest preview version is Preview 6 was released on February 7.

For months, ByteDance has been working with the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) to establish the terms of a deal that would allow TikTok to continue operating in the U.S., with talks mainly focused on data storage and limiting China-based ByteDance employees’ access to U.S. user data. That arrangement envisioned TikTok partnering with Oracle to create a local data storage hub for U.S. users – but additional concerns have recently emerged about the way the app’s algorithm works.

“Conversations with U.S. authorities and lawmakers have become more pressing for TikTok in recent months as federal and state policymakers have taken steps to ban the app on government-issued devices. TikTok hopes that details of the planned reorganization – and promised measures to provide oversight of content recommendation algorithms – will convince potential allies in Washington of its ability to operate independently of its parent company, China-based ByteDance Ltd.”

reports The Wall Street Journal

This isn’t the first time TikTok has offered greater transparency on algorithms. Back in 2020, the global app announced plans to open a new transparency center in Los Angeles as part of its ongoing efforts to distance itself from concerns surrounding potential Chinese government interference. This is now an element of the ongoing negotiations, with the view being that by providing more information about its operations, it will reassure US officials about what’s happening at the app.

This could be a worrying development as it would effectively allow US officials to have some input into TikTok’s algorithmic process and potentially influence what the app does or doesn’t show users based on their assessment.

If ByteDance seeks to give U.S. employees a voice in the content that gains more popularity on the app, it may more closely resemble the Chinese model for Douyin, where employees reportedly have significant power over all aspects of the app’s operation.

Already 27 US states have banned TikTok on government-owned devices, as pressure mounts, ByteDance appears to be exploring more drastic measures to keep the app.

One thing is certain – TikTok will undergo significant changes in the coming months.

Investors poured US$5.3 billion into London fintech startups in the first half of the year, compared to US$2.1 billion in the same period in 2020, new research from Dealroom and agency London & Partners found.

London’s boom tracked soaring fintech investment levels globally as coronavirus lockdowns drove adoption of digital financial services, including payments and trading.

Fintech companies globally raised US$54.1 billion between January and June, overtaking the total amount secured in the two previous years, the research showed.

London fintechs accounted for a large share of Europe’s growth, representing over a third of the region’s funding.

Globally, the city of London ranks second behind San Francisco and slightly ahead of New York, the research found.

“Today’s investment figures are a vote of confidence for the UK fintech sector,” Anne Boden, CEO of neobank Starling, said.

Starling was among the London fintechs to secure a major funding round this year, raising £322 million (US$444.88 million). Other large rounds included US$478 million for payments firm SaltPay and US$450 million for payments unicorn company Checkout.com.

Despite the growth, concerns remain about the impact of Brexit, particularly around access to talent and licences.