Nvidia, Nature, Google, and Panera.
What's happening with Nvidia stock?
Well: Nvidia overtakes Microsoft as the most valuable stock in the world. This among high profile use cases failing, most prominently McDonalds, while UNESCO is noting concern over false holocaust information circled by LLMs.
Why is Nature going on strike?
The editorial staff at Springer Nature group is set to walk on June 20th which would be the first strike in the org's 155 year history. This is after a particularly scandalous year of retractions, fraud, and re-organization. One of their journals had an entire board resign after the org allegedly inappropriately appointed an editor from outside without consulting the serving staff. From the press release:
In 2022, Springer Nature Group made a profit of €487 million (around $530 million, representing a margin of 27%) on its global revenues of €1.8 billion ($2 billion). It has recently announced it is seeking to hire two new VPs, at salaries of up to $250,000 each. Its long-awaited IPO is speculated to happen soon, potentially even this year.
What happened with the Supreme Court case against Nvidia?
You win some, you lose some. On the same day that Nvidia is announced the most valuable stock in the world, the Supreme Court makes a decision that the securities fraud class action suit will be heard despite it being dismissed in 2022. A group of investors allege that Huang was dishonest and was not transparent with them about the volatility and risk he exposed Nvidia to through crypto investing.
What is Google doing in quantum research?
While Google is down-sizing its AI research programs in favor of turning them into product orgs, it is soliciting new proposals for research in quantum transduction. Transduction is a key blocker to making quantum a scalable tech. Currently, quantum is plagued by loss of integrity, noisy data, degradation of velocity in transferring information between systems, and interoperability. A study of transduction would be a step toward a more scalable solution. Google is offering awards of up to $150K.
Why is Panera conducting layoffs?
Correlation is not causation but 24 hours before laying off workers and closing a dough making facility, it was revealed that Panera likely paid a ransom to hackers who took possession of employee personal identifying data. The number of companies paying ransoms and how frequently is becoming more and more apparent over the past few months, as ransomware attacks have increased by 68% since 2023. However, due to FBI pressure, could it simply be that more people are reporting them? The UK's National Cybersecurity Centre is reporting that AI is a vector enabling more attacks. While the UK study proposes the way LLMs are enabling quicker more cleverly constructed attacks at scale, some propose that the act of scraping itself is creating a vulnerability and has increased secondary black market demand for the resale of scraped data.
