Microsoft has taken legal action against a group the company claims intentionally developed and used tools to bypass the safety guardrails of its cloud AI products. According to a complaint filed by the company in December in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, a group of 10 unnamed defendants allegedly used [β¦]
Microsoft is accusing three individuals of running a "hacking-as-a-service" scheme that was designed to allow the creation of harmful and illicit content using the companyβs platform for AI-generated content.
The foreign-based defendants developed tools specifically designed to bypass safety guardrails Microsoft has erected to prevent the creation of harmful content through its generative AI services, said Steven Masada, the assistant general counsel for Microsoftβs Digital Crimes Unit. They then compromised the legitimate accounts of paying customers. They combined those two things to create a fee-based platform people could use.
A sophisticated scheme
Microsoft is also suing seven individuals it says were customers of the service. All 10 defendants were named John Doe because Microsoft doesnβt know their identity.
OpenAI disbanded its robotics department. Then, it brought it back. Now, through a social media post from its hardware director and newly published job descriptions, OpenAI is revealing more about its plans for the revived team. In a post on X on Friday, Caitlin Kalinowski, who joined OpenAI to lead hardware last November from Metaβs [β¦]
OpenAI was sending βtens of thousandsβ of server requests trying to download Triplegangers' entire site which hosts hundreds of thousands of photos.
AI companies across the globe raised more than $100 billion in venture capital dollars in 2024, according to Crunchbase data, an increase of more than 80% compared to 2023. It encompasses nearly a third of the total VC dollars invested in 2024. Thatβs a lot of money funneling into a lot of AI companies. The [β¦]
Hugging Face, the AI developer platform, has settled a lawsuit against Korean AI startup FriendliAI, which had accused Hugging Face of infringing on one of its patents. Per a filing on Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Delaware, FriendliAI reached a βconfidential agreementβ with Hugging Face on January 8 and [β¦]
A newly compiled dataset of nearly one billion images of auroras is helping researchers categorizeβand perhaps ultimately anticipateβthe Northern Lights.
On Wednesday, the World Economic Forum (WEF) released its Future of Jobs Report 2025, with CNN immediately highlighting the finding that 40 percent of companies plan workforce reductions due to AI automation. But the report's broader analysis paints a far more nuanced picture than CNN's headline suggests: It finds that AI could create 170 million new jobs globally while eliminating 92 million positions, resulting in a net increase of 78 million jobs by 2030.
"Half of employers plan to re-orient their business in response to AI," writes the WEF in the report. "Two-thirds plan to hire talent with specific AI skills, while 40% anticipate reducing their workforce where AI can automate tasks."
The survey collected data from 1,000 companies that employ 14 million workers globally. The WEF conducts its employment analysis every two years to help policymakers, business leaders, and workers make decisions about hiring trends.
OpenAI says it has cut off API access to an engineer whose video of a motorized sentry gun controlled by ChatGPT-powered commands has set off a viral firestorm of concerns about AI-powered weapons.
An engineer going by the handle sts_3d started posting videos of a motorized, auto-rotating swivel chair project in August. By November, that same assembly appeared to seamlessly morph into the basis for a sentry gun that could quickly rotate to arbitrary angles and activate a servo to fire precisely aimed projectiles (though only blanks and simulated lasers are shown being fired in his videos).
Earlier this week, though, sts_3d started getting wider attention for a new video showing the sentry gun's integration with OpenAI's real-time API. In the video, the gun uses that ChatGPT integration to aim and fire based on spoken commands from sts_3d and even responds in a chirpy voice afterward.
A lawyer for Elon Musk has called on the California and Delaware attorneys general to force OpenAI to auction off a large stake in its business, intensifying a bitter fight with the companyβs chief executive Sam Altman.
In a letter to the statesβ top law officers seen by the Financial Times, Muskβs attorney Marc Toberoff said he was writing on behalf of big artificial intelligence investors who wanted to participate in an open and competitive bidding process for the OpenAI stake.
OpenAI had no plans for such an auction, according to a person with knowledge of the ChatGPT-makerβs thinking. Muskβs camp simply βwant more chaos,β they added.
Many have found temporary ways to generate some income while they look for jobs.
These strategies aren't always enough to prevent significant financial challenges.
Americans who are struggling to land full-time jobs are finding creative ways to pay the bills while they search for work.
Juan Pelaez has been looking for a job for more than two years. To generate some income, Pelaez said he's driven for Uber Eats and Instacart, done some part-time work for his prior employer, and was a background actor in the coming film "Happy Gilmore 2." However, since he was laid off from his account executive job at a marketing agency, Pelaez said he and his wife have taken on tens of thousands of dollars indebt from credit cards and personal loans.
Pelaez, 47, is based in New Jersey and said he earned about $3,500 across roughly 22 days of work for the acting opportunity. Landing the gig has helped him get similar work on a few other productions.
"It has not accounted for a full-time position salary, but it has been a great help," he told Business Insider.
Juan Pelaez has worked as a background actor to generate some income during his job search.
Juan Pelaez
Pelaez is among the Americans who have had a hard time finding work in recent years. Since October, more than 750 recent job seekers between the ages of 18 and 76 have responded to Business Insider's informal, nonrepresentative surveys and shared their stories with reporters through emails. Some said they've faced stiff competition for white-collar roles, while others shared that they couldn't land a job in their industry, despite having an advanced degree.
Their struggles have been driven in part by a widespread hiring slowdown in the US. Excluding a two-month pandemic-related dip in 2020, US businesses are hiring at the lowest rate since 2013. Among the nearly 7 million unemployed individuals as of December, about 1.5 million had been looking for work for at least six months β up from 1.1 million a year prior. To be sure, the unemployment rate remains low compared with historical levels.
The job seekers who BI heard from said part-time employment, gig work, selling their belongings, and other strategies have helped them stay afloat financially, butmany continue to face significant financial challenges.
Are you looking for a job and comfortable sharing your story with a reporter? Did an AI job tool help you land a job recently? Please fill out this form.
Many earning opportunities don't replace a full-time job
Some job seekers told BI they foundpart-time roles, but the jobs haven't paid enough to cover the bills.
Rhonda Alexander has been looking for customer success management jobs since being laid off from her tech role in March 2023. To earn some income, Alexander, who's 55 and based in Illinois, started working part-time as an AI content engineer last April. She said the role involved evaluating the quality of AI-generated content.
Alexander said she enjoyed the work but was paid $21 an hour,Β which she felt wasn't enough to support herself. She said that her contract came to an end in late December.
"It seems that I am back on this miserable roller coaster of seeking a role in order to literally put food on the table and a roof over my head," she said.Going forward, Alexander said she's focused on developing new income streams, including becoming a notary. She's also driven for Uber and DoorDash in recent months.
Amanda Wilson has beenlooking for work for months. She quit her part-time caregiving gig in July β which she said was unsustainable due to the long commute and the physical demands of the job. She said an injury she suffered last year has limited her.
The 35-year-old, who's based in Arizona,said she's applied to hundreds of jobs β including customer service and management roles β but has only received an offer for one job: a different part-time caregiving gig where she's working 10 hours a week.
To earn some income, Wilson said she sold her Xbox One and a few video games for about $150, as well as three swords from her collection for about $100 each. But this money wasn't enough: Wilson said she's been forced to max out her credit cards and draw upon her savings.
"Right now, I can afford rent and my car payment for this coming month, but that's it," she said in December, adding, "I will probably have to sell off more things."
Developers Max Brodeur-Urbas and Rahul Behal think that AI has the potential to automate lots of business-relevant tasks, but that many of the AI-powered automation tools on the market today are unreliable and costly. Part of the problem is that users expect too much of AI, Brodeur-Urbas told TechCrunch β for instance, they assume that [β¦]
Cohere cofounders Ivan Zhang, Nick Frosst, and Aidan Gomez.
Cohere
Enterprise AI startup Cohere has launched a new platform called North.
North allows users to quickly deploy AI agents to execute tasks across various business sectors.
The company says the platform cuts the time it takes to complete a task by over five-fold.
2025 is shaping up to be the year that AI "agents" go mainstream.
Unlike AI-based chatbots that respond to user queries, agents are AI tools that work autonomously. They can execute tasks and make decisions, and companies are already using them for everything from creating marketing campaigns to recruiting new employees.
Cohere, an AI startup focused on enterprise technology, unveiled North on Thursday β an all-in-one platform combining large language models, multimodal search, and agents to help its customers work more efficiently with AI.
Through North, users can quickly customize and deploy AI agents to find relevant information, conduct research, and execute tasks across various business functions.
The platform could make it easier for a company's finance team, for example, to quickly search through internal data sources and create reports. Its multimodal search function could also help extract information from everything from images to slides to spreadsheets.
AI agents built with North integrate with a company's existing workplace tools and applications. The platform can run in private, allowing organizations to integrate all their sensitive data in one place securely.
"North allows employees to build AI agents tailored to their role to execute complex tasks without ever leaving the platform," a representative for Cohere told Business Insider by email.
The company is now deploying North to a small set ofcompaniesin finance, healthcare, and critical infrastructure as it continues to refine the platform. There is no set date for when it will make the platform availablemore widely.
Cohere, launched in 2019 by Aidan Gomez, Ivan Zhang, and Nick Frosst, has quickly grown to rival ChatGPT maker OpenAI and was valued at over $5.5 billion at its Series D funding round announced last July, Bloomberg reported. As of last March, the company had an annualized revenue of $35 million, up from $13 million at the end of 2023.
The company is one of a few AI startups that are building their own large language models from the ground up. Unlike its competitors, it has focused on creating customized solutions for businesses rather than consumer apps or the more nebulous goal of artificial general intelligence.
Its partners include major companies like software company Oracle, IT company Fujitsu, and consulting firm McKinsey & Company.
This year, however, its goal is to "move beyond generic LLMs towards tuned and highly optimized end-to-end solutions that address the specific objectives of a business," Gomez said in a post on LinkedIn outlining the company's objectives for 2025.
Microsoft managers use forms to request retention bonuses for employees they can't afford to lose.
One such document, viewed by BI, includes a field specific to employees' AI contributions.
Microsoft AI employees earn much more than their colleagues, according to payroll data viewed by BI.
Some managers at Microsoft may be trying harder to retain talented employees with AI know-how, according to an internal document viewed by Business Insider.
Microsoft managers can request retention bonuses for employees they feel they can't afford to lose. The process involves filling out forms that include questions such as, "What harm is done if employee leaves Microsoft?"
The document viewed by BI showed a new field focusing on employee contributions in artificial intelligence.
"In the context of AI transformation as a key priority, please indicate if this individual is critical AI talent and share the risk to the AI initiative/s if talent is not retained," the document tells Microsoft managers.
The refreshed document was prepared for a specific, large group inside Microsoft. However, it's unclear whether the AI question is being added to similar retention documents in other parts of the company.
A Microsoft spokesperson said that the company did not have a central form for special stock and cash-award requests and that organizations and teams could choose whether to add different fields, depending on their strategic priorities.
Still, the addition of the AI question to this specific document suggests that the AI talent wars may be pushing some parts of Microsoft to do more to prevent poaching by rivals.
Google, OpenAI, Meta, and other tech companies are racing to develop the most powerful AI models and the best generative-AI tools, and they need employees who know the technical details of how to craft these products. That's caused bidding wars for some talent, along with multimillion-dollar compensation packages sometimes.
Higher pay for AI talent
Microsoft has already prioritized AI talent when it comes to compensation.
As of September, the average compensation in Microsoft's AI group was about 37% higher than the average for all the company's US employees. Software engineers working in AI, for example, earned 48% more than the average software engineer at the company, according to a payroll spreadsheet shared with BI.
In 2023, during a leadership crisis at OpenAI, Microsoft's chief technology officer, Kevin Scott, said the software giant would hire hundreds of OpenAI employees and match their compensation.
He made the announcement in the middle of job cuts and a salary freeze at Microsoft, which made some employees furious.
Are you a Microsoft employee or do you have insight to share?Contact the reporter, Ashley Stewart, via the encrypted messaging app Signal (+1-425-344-8242) or email ([email protected]). Use a nonwork device.
Hippocratic AI, a startup building AI solutions that can handle non-diagnostic patient-facing tasks, secured a massive $141 million Series B at a valuation of $1.64 billion led by Kleiner Perkins, the company announced Thursday. The funding comes nine months after Hippocratic AI raised a $53 million round from General Catalyst and Andreessen Horowitz and five [β¦]
Nvidia unveiled a prototype AI avatar at CES 2025 that lives on your PCβs desktop. The AI assistant, R2X, looks like a video game character, and it can help you navigate apps on your computer. The R2X avatar is rendered and animated using Nvidiaβs AI models, and users can run the avatar on popular LLMs [β¦]
