The company will use the new funding to continue to develop its technology and add new features to the platform.

“It has become a remarkably difficult task for developers to confirm crucial questions like, ‘What dashboards will this schema change affect?,’ ‘Can I deploy this code change safely?’ or ‘What data pipelines do we have that are not working?’” said Alon Nafta, CEO and co-founder of Foundational.

“The inability to validate simple code changes, and the lack of visibility and controls, and the time-consuming nature of data engineering create a dramatic bottleneck on innovation and adoption of data and AI”, he added.

By building partnerships with data organizations around the world, Foundational aims to redefine the way large-scale data platforms are built and maintained. With this funding, the company will continue to evolve its technology and introduce new product capabilities for data developers.

“I know many of you are wondering why this is happening. Over the last year, we’ve been working to build a more sustainable business so that Twitch will be here for the long run and throughout the year we have cut costs and made many decisions to be more efficient,” Clancy wrote.

“Unfortunately, despite these efforts, it has become clear that our organization is still meaningfully larger than it needs to be given the size of our business. Last year we paid out over $1 billion to streamers. So while the Twitch business remains strong, for some time now the organization has been sized based upon where we optimistically expect our business to be in 3 or more years, not where we’re at today”, he continued.

In 2014, Amazon acquired Twitch for nearly $1 billion. Following Amazon’s purchase of Twitch, the unit was largely not a priority for the tech giant, despite offering Prime subscribers perks on the live streaming platform, such as free games.

In March last year, Twitch laid off about 400 employees, and last October it laid off several employees in its customer-facing division.

The organization has experienced leadership changes, with Emmett Shear, the longstanding CEO, stepping down in March and passing the reins to Clancy, who had served as Twitch’s president. Additionally, the company witnessed departures from its Chief Customer Officer, Doug Scott, announced late last year, and Chief Content Officer, Laura Lee, who recently announced her exit.

Furthermore, Amazon has recently implemented its most extensive workforce reduction in history, with a staggering 27,000 employees laid off since 2022. These layoffs have been consistent, with the latest announcements affecting the Prime Video and MGM Studios units made on Wednesday.

The model demonstrates that improved learning methods can enhance the reasoning abilities of smaller language models to make them equivalent to larger models.

“Orca 2’s success lies in its application of diverse reasoning techniques and the identification of optimal solutions for various tasks. While it has several limitations, including limitations inherited from its base models and common to other language models, Orca 2’s potential for future advancements is evident, especially in improved reasoning, specialization, control, and safety of smaller models. The use of carefully filtered synthetic data for post-training emerges as a key strategy in these improvements,” the Microsoft team wrote in the previously mentioned blog post.

A Microsoft blog post says that compared to models of similar size, including the original Orca, Orca 2 significantly outperforms them and achieves performance levels similar to or better than those of models that are 5-10 times larger.

“Our findings underscore the value of smaller models in scenarios where efficiency and capability need to be balanced. As larger models continue to excel, our work with Orca 2 marks a significant step in diversifying the applications and deployment options of language models”, the Microsoft team added in a blog post.

Available in two sizes (7 billion and 13 billion parameters), both sizes of Orca 2 have undergone fine-tuning using specialized, high-quality synthetic data sourced from LLAMA 2 base models. Microsoft has made the weights of Orca 2 publicly accessible, aiming to promote additional research in the advancement, assessment, and alignment of smaller language models.

Elaborate instructions and numerous queries were employed to elicit responses from the teacher model, enabling the student model to grasp the underlying strategies and reasoning capabilities even in the absence of explicit task instructions. The objective is to enhance the performance of smaller models by customizing solution strategies according to the specific task at hand.

A new online safety bill will oblige social media companies to remove any animal cruelty content from their platforms or face a fine of up to £18 million, the BBC reports. The new changes are expected to come into force this autumn.

The reason for the drastic measures is BBC Eye’s “Monkey Haters” investigation, which uncovered a worldwide network of monkey abuse. Ministers say this is a clear example of the imperative for new changes to online safety law.

From this autumn, animal cruelty videos will be considered a “priority offence” under a new change to the bill that brings them into line with child sexual abuse and threats to kill.

Under the new proposals, social media platforms will be fined up to 10% of their global annual revenue if they do not actively tackle illegal content and remove it.

An undercover BBC reporter joins a private messaging group on Telegram, where he discovers that hundreds of people in the US and UK are ordering and paying for videos of baby monkeys being tortured and killed by humans in Indonesia.

In the US, a former member of the air force has been charged and more than 20 people are under investigation. Two men in Indonesia have been sentenced to prison and in the UK three women have been arrested and released as part of the investigation.

The social media companies did not remain unmoved. YouTube said animal abuse had “no place” on the platform and that it had removed hundreds of thousands of videos. Telegram said its moderators cannot preemptively patrol private groups. There are still active monkey abuse groups on social media.

Technology Secretary Michelle Donelan said that this kind of activity was “deeply disturbing” and that the bill would now broaden beyond its remit of protecting children to “stop the proliferation of animal abuse too”.

“The BBC’s diligent investigative work revealed a dark underbelly of our internet that pushes its sadistic criminal activity to everyday people,” she said.

David Bowles from the RSPCA (Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals)
was hopeful the amendment would be enacted.

“It’s deeply unsettling and disheartening just how widespread animal abuse videos and imagery are becoming and with young people spending so much time online, it can be incredibly challenging for parents and guardians to monitor the content they are seeing,” he said.

According to Nicola O’Brien, chief co-ordinator of the Social Media Animal Cruelty Coalition (SMACC), of which the RSPCA and Action for Primates are members, the new law change “will put more emphasis on platforms to take responsibility and stop providing a literal platform for animal abusers”, adding that they are currently not doing enough to prevent content being shared on their sites.

The Online Safety Act aims to make social media companies more responsible for the safety of their users on their platforms.

Silicon Valley tech giants, however, opposed some of the proposals.

Some platforms such as WhatsApp, Signal and iMessage claim they cannot access or view anyone’s messages without destroying existing privacy protections for all users. They issued a statement saying they would rather leave the UK and deprive users there than compromise on the security of messages.

The final changes to the legislation will be considered by Parliament today. Stay tuned for details.

The use of video calling apps has grown over the past few years, especially during the pandemic when telecommuting became a mainstream model and communication between people became online.

The company intends to extend the beta to Android developers later this year.

Interested developers, regardless of size, can sign up for the beta through T-Mobile’s DevEdge developer platform. Developers in the Seattle area will have the added benefit of joining T-Mobile engineers at the 5G Hub to test and validate this cutting-edge capability in their applications.

T-Mobile plans to expand network coverage to 300 million people by the end of the year.

In .NET 8 Preview 3, AOT support for ASP.NET Core was added. This makes it possible to publish an ASP.NET Core application with native AOT by creating a standalone application that is precompiled (AOT) in native code. Publishing and deploying a native AOT application can reduce the following things: disk size, memory requirement, and startup time.

Publishing the application as a native AOT improves startup time and application size. In the experiment, startup time was reduced by 80% and app size by 87%. These and other metrics are available on Microsoft’s public benchmarking dashboard.

Not all features and libraries in ASP.NET Core are compatible with native AOT. The .NET 8 platform represents the beginning of work to incorporate native AOT into ASP.NET Core, with an initial focus on including support for applications using minimal APIs, or gRPC, and deployed in cloud environments.

Initial support for server-side rendering using Blazor components has been added in this preview release. This is the beginning of work to unify Blazor to enable the use of Blazor components for all web UI needs, both client-side and server-side.

Work on enabling server-side rendering with Blazor components made it possible to render Blazor components outside the context of an HTTP request. Razor components can be rendered as HTML directly in a string or stream, independent of the ASP.NET Core hosting environment. This is useful in scenarios where you want to generate HTML snippets.

Another important Blazor-related feature is the addition of the SectionOutlet and SectionContent components. These provide support for identifying outputs for content that will be populated later. Sections are often used to define placeholders in layouts that are then populated by specific pages. Sections are referenced by either a unique name or a unique object identifier

Despite the capabilities provided by the new service, the company warned users that the new chatbot may make mistakes.

A post on Snap’s blog informs and further appeals users not to share secrets with My AI, and not to rely on it for advice.

According to Snap, there are currently 2.5 million users paying for early access to features like My AI, which will also help provide feedback as the company builds out its artificial intelligence capabilities.

Although marketers have praised Snap for the early introduction of a new AI-generated feature, there still don’t seem to be any clear applications that brands would want to use – at least for now.

The news comes just days after Meta provided a glimpse into how it thinks about generative artificial intelligence.

Last week, the social giant announced its latest large language model, called LLaMA, which stands for Large Language Model Meta AI. It’s also smaller than some others. For example, OpenAI’s GPT-3 has 175 billion parameters, but Meta’s LLaMA includes models ranging in size from 7 billion to 65 billion.

In Meta’s blog post and on LLaMA, the company also acknowledges that there is still work to be done in exploring and addressing the risks of bias, toxic comments and wrong answers.

By allowing limited access to its large language model, Meta is making it “a bit more of a controlled substance than a street drug,” according to Steve Susi, director of brand communication at the brand strategy firm Siegel+Gale.

“C++ surpassed Java for the first time in the history of the TIOBE Index, which means that Java is at position 4 now. This is the first time that Java is not part of the top 3 since the beginning of the TIOBE Index in 2001”,

said Paul Jansen.

Currently Python is in first place, C in second, C++ in third and Java in fourth. Despite the shift, Java still remains among the most popular programming languages.

But there is still positive news for Java. Research firm Slashdata, in the Q3 2022 version of its State of the Developer Nation report, found that Java has nearly doubled the size of its community in the past two years, from 8.3 million to 16.5 million.

The Slashdata report also notes that Kotlin and Rust represent the two fastest growing language communities, each having more than doubled in the past two years. Kotlin code runs on the Java Virtual Machine, so its rise lifts Java too.

And in a GitHub report on the state of the octopus in 2022, Java ranked third among the top programming languages. It’s no secret that Java took the second spot in 2019. Even if it’s not among the fastest-growing programming languages, Java has its own special section in the report for not succumbing to premature declarations of decline.

And that’s not all. According to a post by co-founder James Governor, major companies such as Amazon, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and now Oracle, are investing heavily in Java in an effort to win enterprise modernization workloads.

Key growth driver
The market is driven by the increasing demand for compact automation solutions. Most large industrial manufacturing companies that have access to huge capital have fully automated their production processes. However, switching to automated processes is a challenge for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) due to budget constraints. Consequently, most SMEs are looking for small form factors that can provide the same functionality and features of large devices while consuming less power. The availability of PLCs enables SMEs to use control-level automation at a low cost without compromising on performance.

Supplier Landscape
The global PLC market is dominated by established international suppliers such as Mitsubishi Electric, OMRON, Rockwell Automation, Schneider Electric and Siemens. These players have a dominant share despite the numerous competitors present in the PLC market. Rockwell Automation specializes in the discrete industry while Emerson Electric specializes in the process industry. Vendors are focusing on new product development and customization of PLCs to meet end-user requirements. Some suppliers are also looking for new growth opportunities by offering PLCs for new applications. For example, ABB offers the AC500 PLC for high-precision control of photovoltaic (PV), concentrated photovoltaic (CPV) and concentrated solar power (CSP) plants. With the changing demands of end users, suppliers are also addressing cybersecurity issues by offering cybersecurity solutions. Technavio identifies the following key vendors in the market.

Personal investment from Shantanu Rastogi (General Atlantic) and Ajay Gupta’s (Capital Foods) family office AJAX Capital and Holy Basil Consultancy led the funding round.

The round also saw participation from Manish Choksi’s (vice chairman at Asian Paints) family office, Sunidhi Group’s family office, Sanjaya Gupta (former MD & CEO of PNBHFL), among others. The co-founder and COO Shubha Lal said:

“The fundraising is a testament to the confidence of our stakeholders in our value proposition- sharp focus on product management and redefining customer service standards at a reasonable price.”

The funds will help the company deepen its presence in a competitive crowded market, she added.

Your-Space has over 7,000 operational beds in 9 cities. It targets to have more than 20,000 beds by July this year for the coming 2022-23 academic year.

The company’s goal was to make the students’ world better while they toil hard to study away from their homes.

It focuses on security, comfort, community and health.

The company said, the student housing market size is projected to reach over $25 billion annually by 2025.