Eight years ago, a coalition of retail banks in India built a mobile payments system called the UPI. The system is interoperable, allowing users to make instant peer-to-peer transactions between them -- across all participating banks -- and to merchants at zero cost. Today, it processes more than 12 billion transactions each month -- more than all card payments combined in India -- and has become the most popular way Indians transact online. Many U.S. giants have cited UPI as an example that other countries should also explore developing. We have also covered UPI several times over the years.

NPCI, a quasi-regulator founded by India's central bank, oversees UPI. Four years ago, it announced plans to enforce a market share cap on each participating player. The quasi-regulator didn't want few players to become too powerful and any single participant to process more than 30% of all UPI transactions in a month. It later postponed the deadline to January 1, 2025. Walmart-owned PhonePe and Google Pay command more than 86% of the UPI market. Now, the NPCI is reportedly planning to extend the deadline again by up to two years. The reason? TechCrunch reports: The NPCI had initially planned to enforce the market share cap in January 2021, but postponed the deadline to January 1, 2025. TechCrunch had previously reported that the regulator was moving towards extending the deadline further after concluding that there is no practical solution to address the issue. One can argue that the NPCI shouldn't be interfering with free market forces and let people decide which apps they wish to use. TechCrunch adds: However, several UPI providers admit that an incentive plan that unfairly differentiates [one of the proposed solutions by some industry players] against PhonePe and Google Pay will be a bad look for the ecosystem and could send wrong signals to the investor community. U.S.-based investors, including Accel, Lightspeed, Tiger Global, Insight Partners, Invesco, Vanguard, BlackRock and Fidelity, are among some of the most prolific investors in Indian public firms and startups. Some of the choices made by the RBI [India's central bank] and other regulators have already spooked many investors.

The head of the world's biggest advertising group was the target of an elaborate deepfake scam that involved an AI voice clone. From a report: The CEO of WPP, Mark Read, detailed the attempted fraud in a recent email to leadership, warning others at the company to look out for calls claiming to be from top executives. Fraudsters created a WhatsApp account with a publicly available image of Read and used it to set up a Microsoft Teams meeting that appeared to be with him and another senior WPP executive, according to the email obtained by the Guardian.

During the meeting, the impostors deployed a voice clone of the executive as well as YouTube footage of them. The scammers impersonated Read off-camera using the meeting's chat window. The scam, which was unsuccessful, targeted an "agency leader," asking them to set up a new business in an attempt to solicit money and personal details. "Fortunately the attackers were not successful," Read wrote in the email. "We all need to be vigilant to the techniques that go beyond emails to take advantage of virtual meetings, AI and deepfakes."

Economist: What is the ideal job to outsource to AI? Today's AIs, in particular the Chatgpt-like generative sort, have a leaky memory, cannot handle physical objects and are worse than humans at interacting with humans. Where they excel is in manipulating numbers and symbols, especially within well-defined tasks such as writing bits of computer code. This happens to be the forte of giant existing outsourcing businesses -- India's information-technology companies. Seven of them, including the two biggest, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and Infosys, collectively laid off 75,000 employees last year. The firms say this reduction, equivalent to about 4% of their combined workforce, has nothing to do with ai and reflects the broader slowdown in the tech sector. In reality, they say, ai is an opportunity, not a threat.

Business services are critical to India's economy. The sector employs 5m people, or less than 1% of Indian workers, but contributes 7% of GDP and nearly a quarter of total exports. Simple services such as call centres account for a fifth of those foreign revenues. Three-fifths are generated by it services such as moving data to the computing cloud. The rest comes from sophisticated processes tailored for individual clients. Capital Economics, a research firm, calculates that an extreme case, in which ai wiped out the industry entirely and the resources were not reallocated, would knock nearly one percentage point off annual GDP growth over the next decade in India. In a likelier scenario of "a slow demise," the country would grow 0.3-0.4 percentage points less fast. The simplest jobs are the most vulnerable. Data from Upwork, a freelancing platform, shows that earnings for uncomplicated writing tasks like copy-editing fell by 5% between Chatgpt's launch in November 2022 and April 2023, relative to roles less affected by ai. In the year after Dall-e 2, an image-creation model, was launched in April 2022, wages for jobs like graphic design fell by 7-14%. Some companies are using AI to deal with simple customer-service requests and repetitive data-processing tasks. In April K. Krithivasan, chief executive of TCS, predicted that "maybe a year or so down the line" chatbots could do much of the work of a call-centre employee. In time, he mused, AI could foretell gripes and alleviate them before a customer ever picks up the phone.

T-Mobile and Verizon are in talks to buy parts of U.S. Ceullar in separate transactions, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday. Reuters reports: T-Mobile is closing in on a deal to buy a chunk of U.S. Cellular for more than $2 billion, taking over some operations and wireless spectrum licenses, the report said citing people familiar with the matter. Verizon's talks with the regional carrier is expected to take longer and might not result in an agreement, the report added.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: In 2022, at the height of the "great resignation," a record 4.5 million workers each month -- about 3% of the U.S. workforce -- were quitting their jobs. While some economists have said this pandemic-era trend is over, new research from Microsoft and LinkedIn forecasts that even more people plan to leave their jobs in 2024. Nearly half (46%) of professionals say they're considering quitting in the year ahead -- higher than the 40% who said the same ahead of 2021s great resignation, according to new research from Microsoft and LinkedIn, which surveyed more than 30,000 people in 31 countries between February and March 2024.

In the U.S., LinkedIn has seen a 14% increase in job applications per opening since last fall, with 85% of workers saying they plan to look for a new role in 2024, a survey of 1,013 U.S. professionals conducted between November and December 2023 found. And Americans' confidence in their job-hunting prospects has reached its highest point in two years, a February 2024 ZipRecruiter survey of more than 2,000 jobseekers shows. This renewed sense of optimism is aided by the fact that the U.S. economy avoided the recession forecast for 2023, ZipRecruiter chief economist Julia Pollak tells CNBC Make It. [...]

It's not just better labor market conditions driving more U.S. workers to consider a career change in 2024. Inflation is still squeezing Americans' budgets; nearly half (45%) of workers planning to switch jobs this year say they need a higher income, according to Monster's 2024 Work Watch Report. Job switchers tend to increase their salaries more quickly than those who stay put, per data from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. Changing jobs is coming with greater pay gains: New data from ADP shows the median year-over-year pay increase for job switchers was 10% in March, up from 2.9% six months prior. With salaries finally keeping up with inflation, Pollak adds, the return on investment of switching jobs feels "much higher" than it did six months ago.

The North Yorkshire Council in England announced it will ban apostrophes on street signs as it can affect geographical databases. Resident Anne Keywood told the BBC that she urged the authority to retain apostrophes, saying: "If you start losing things like that then everything goes downhill doesn't it?" From the report: North Yorkshire Council said it "along with many others across the country" had opted to "eliminate" the apostrophe from street signs. A spokesperson added: "All punctuation will be considered but avoided where possible because street names and addresses, when stored in databases, must meet the standards (PDF) set out in BS7666.

"This restricts the use of punctuation marks and special characters (e.g. apostrophes, hyphens and ampersands) to avoid potential problems when searching the databases as these characters have specific meanings in computer systems."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: Once a week, Sun Kai has a video call with his mother. He opens up about work, the pressures he faces as a middle-aged man, and thoughts that he doesn't even discuss with his wife. His mother will occasionally make a comment, like telling him to take care of himself -- he's her only child. But mostly, she just listens. That's because Sun's mother died five years ago. And the person he's talking to isn't actually a person, but a digital replica he made of her -- a moving image that can conduct basic conversations. They've been talking for a few years now. After she died of a sudden illness in 2019, Sun wanted to find a way to keep their connection alive. So he turned to a team at Silicon Intelligence, an AI company based in Nanjing, China, that he cofounded in 2017. He provided them with a photo of her and some audio clips from their WeChat conversations. While the company was mostly focused on audio generation, the staff spent four months researching synthetic tools and generated an avatar with the data Sun provided. Then he was able to see and talk to a digital version of his mom via an app on his phone.

"My mom didn't seem very natural, but I still heard the words that she often said: 'Have you eaten yet?'" Sun recalls of the first interaction. Because generative AI was a nascent technology at the time, the replica of his mom can say only a few pre-written lines. But Sun says that's what she was like anyway. "She would always repeat those questions over and over again, and it made me very emotional when I heard it," he says. There are plenty of people like Sun who want to use AI to preserve, animate, and interact with lost loved ones as they mourn and try to heal. The market is particularly strong in China, where at least half a dozen companies are now offering such technologies and thousands of people have already paid for them. In fact, the avatars are the newest manifestation of a cultural tradition: Chinese people have always taken solace from confiding in the dead.

The technology isn't perfect -- avatars can still be stiff and robotic -- but it's maturing, and more tools are becoming available through more companies. In turn, the price of "resurrecting" someone -- also called creating "digital immortality" in the Chinese industry -- has dropped significantly. Now this technology is becoming accessible to the general public. Some people question whether interacting with AI replicas of the dead is actually a healthy way to process grief, and it's not entirely clear what the legal and ethical implications of this technology may be. For now, the idea still makes a lot of people uncomfortable. But as Silicon Intelligence's other cofounder, CEO Sima Huapeng, says, "Even if only 1% of Chinese people can accept [AI cloning of the dead], that's still a huge market."

Dell is making sure its employees follow the company's updated return-to-office policy through a series of new tracking techniques. According to The Register, Dell will track employees' badge swipes and VPN connections and include a color-coded attendance grading system that summarizes employee presence.

"In the latest Jeff Clarke return-to-grade-school initiative, HR will be keeping an attendance report card on employees, grading them at four levels based on how well they meet the goal of being in the office 39 days a quarter," a source familiar with Dell told The Register, referring to the IT giant's chief operating officer. "Employees who do not meet the attendance requirement will have their status escalated up the ladder to Jeff Clarke, who apparently believes that being a hall monitor trumps growing revenue." From the report: Starting next Monday, May 13, the enterprise hardware slinger plans to make weekly site visit data from its badge tracking available to employees through the corporation's human capital management software and to give them color-coded ratings that summarize their status. Those ratings are: Blue flag indicates "consistent onsite presence"; Green flag indicates "regular onsite presence"; Yellow flag indicates "some onsite presence"; Red flag indicates "limited onsite presence".

A second Dell source explained managers aren't on the same page about the consequences of the color tiers, with some bosses suggesting employees want to remain Blue at all times and others indicating there's more leeway and they could put up with a few red flags. "It's a shit show here," we're told. [...] "Dell is tracking badge-ins and VPN connections to ensure employees are onsite when they claim they are (to deter 'coffee badging' or scanning your badge then going immediately home)," a third source told us. "This is likely in response to the official numbers about how many of our staff members chose to remain remote after the RTO mandate." [...]

We're told that the goal of the worker tracking appears to be workforce attrition. "The problem is the market is soft right now for tech," our second source, pointing to recent AWS job cuts. "Everyone is laying off." This person anticipates further Dell layoffs over the summer, though no dates have been set. Our third source indicated that the onsite tracking policy seems unusually aggressive for Dell. "Even pre-pandemic, they never pushed or pressured folks to be in the office," this person said. "A common phrase used to be 'Work happens where you make it,' with the office often being a ghost town multiple times a week, or after lunch, or pre-holidays." Dell in February reported fiscal year 2024 revenue of $88.4 billion, down 14 percent from 2023, and profits of $3.2 billion.

A new national survey (PDF) from CNBC/Generation Lab of 1,033 people aged 18 to 34 found that an overwhelming 81% of respondents believe a four-day workweek would boost their company's productivity, while 19% said productivity would decline. CNBC reports: Those results from the "Youth & Money in the USA" survey come amid discussions around the potential benefits of switching from the standard five-day U.S. workweek to a four-day cadence without a pay cut. Some companies have begun testing the arrangement, and say it has mitigated employee burnout and strengthened business performance. Exos, a U.S. coaching company that trains top athletes and leads corporate wellness programs, recently reported results from the first six months of an ongoing four-day workweek experiment. The company said the shortened workweek increased efficiency along with revenue and retention.

Although respondents to the CNBC/Generation Lab survey largely agreed on workweek length, they were less unified when asked about work setting. A 60% majority said they do their best work in the office, while the other 40% said they do so at home. Further reading: 32-Hour Workweek for America Proposed by Senator Bernie Sanders

Smart home device maker Brilliant has laid off most of its staff and is seeking a buyer after failing to secure funding, CEO Aaron Emigh told The Verge. The company has shut down its support center and halted sales of its smart light switches and controllers, which integrate with various smart home platforms. Emigh said existing devices will continue to function, but their long-term functionality remains uncertain. Founded in 2016, Brilliant aimed to simplify smart home control but struggled with high prices, interoperability issues, and slower-than-expected market growth. The company raised $60 million in funding over eight years.

AstraZeneca said on Tuesday it had initiated the worldwide withdrawal of its COVID-19 vaccine due to a "surplus of available updated vaccines" since the pandemic. From a report: The company also said it would proceed to withdraw the vaccine Vaxzevria's marketing authorizations within Europe. "As multiple, variant COVID-19 vaccines have since been developed there is a surplus of available updated vaccines," the company said, adding that this had led to a decline in demand for Vaxzevria, which is no longer being manufactured or supplied. According to media reports, the Anglo-Swedish drugmaker has previously admitted in court documents that the vaccine causes side-effects such as blood clots and low blood platelet counts.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MSN: The US has revoked licenses allowing Huawei to buy semiconductors from Qualcomm and Intel, according to people familiar with the matter, further tightening export restrictions against the Chinese telecom equipment maker. Withdrawal of the licenses affects US sales of chips for use in Huawei phones and laptops, according to the people, who discussed the move on condition of anonymity. House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul confirmed the administration's decision in an interview Tuesday. He said the move is key to preventing China from developing advanced AI. "It's blocking any chips sold to Huawei," said McCaul, a Texas Republican who was briefed about the license decisions for Intel and Qualcomm. "Those are two companies we've always worried about being a little too close to China."

While the decision may not affect a significant volume of chips, it underscores the US government's determination to curtail China's access to a broad swathe of semiconductor technology. Officials are also considering sanctions against six Chinese firms that they suspect could supply chips to Huawei, which has been on a US trade restrictions list since 2019. [...] Qualcomm recently said that its business with Huawei is already limited and will soon shrink to nothing. It has been allowed to supply the Chinese company with chips that provide older 4G network connections. It's prohibited from selling ones that allow more advanced 5G access.

An anonymous reader shares a report: According to data analyzed by Morgan Stanley and Pitchbook, the number of active venture capital firms worldwide surged from 2014 levels, more than doubling by 2021, before sharply contracting to below 2014 figures in a stunning reversal.

Lawyers for the defunct cryptocurrency exchange FTX said customers would receive all the money they lost when the firm collapsed in 2022 and receive interest on top of it. "But the recoveries come with a caveat," reports the New York Times. "The amount owed to customers was calculated based on the value of their holdings at the time of FTX's bankruptcy in November 2022. That means customers won't reap the benefits of a recent surge in the crypto market that sent the price of Bitcoin to a record high." From the report: The announcement was a landmark in the attempt to recover the $8 billion in customer assets that disappeared when FTX imploded virtually overnight, setting off a crisis in the crypto industry. Under a plan filed in federal bankruptcy court in Delaware, virtually all FTX's creditors, including hundreds of thousands of ordinary investors who used the exchange to buy and sell cryptocurrencies, would receive cash payments equivalent to 118 percent of the assets they had stored on FTX, the lawyers said. Those payments would flow from a pool of assets that FTX's lawyers have pulled together in the 17 months since the exchange collapsed, the lawyers said. [...] It will take months for the payouts to begin. The plan must be approved by the federal judge overseeing FTX's bankruptcy, John T. Dorsey.

At the 27th annual Milken Institute Global Conference on Monday, OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap said today's ChatGPT chatbot "will be laughably bad" compared to what it'll be capable of a year from now. "We think we're going to move toward a world where they're much more capable," he added. Business Insider reports: Lightcap says large language models, which people use to help do their jobs and meet their personal goals, will soon be able to take on "more complex work." He adds that AI will have more of a "system relationship" with users, meaning the technology will serve as a "great teammate" that can assist users on "any given problem." "That's going to be a different way of using software," the OpenAI exec said on the panel regarding AI's foreseeable capabilities.

In light of his predictions, Lightcap acknowledges that it can be tough for people to "really understand" and "internalize" what a world with robot assistants would look like. But in the next decade, the COO believes talking to an AI like you would with a friend, teammate, or project collaborator will be the new norm. "I think that's a profound shift that we haven't quite grasped," he said, referring to his 10-year forecast. "We're just scratching the surface on the full kind of set of capabilities that these systems have," he said at the Milken Institute conference. "That's going to surprise us." You can watch/listen to the talk here.

"With all the improvements in car safety over the decades, the recent addition of a plethora of high tech sensors and warnings comes with increased costs," writes longtime Slashdot reader smooth wombat. "And not just to have to have them on your car. Any time you get into an accident, even a minor one, it will most likely require a detailed examination of any sensors which may have been affected and their subsequent realignment, replacement, and calibration." CNN reports: Some vehicles require "dynamic calibration," which means, once the sensors and cameras are back in place, a driver needs to take the vehicle out on real roads for testing. With proper equipment attached the car can, essentially, recalibrate itself as it watches lane lines and other markers. It requires the car to be driven for a set distance at a certain speed but weather and traffic can create problems. "If you're in Chicago or L.A., good luck getting to that speed," said [Hami Ebrahimi, chief commercial officer at Caliber] "or if you're in Seattle or Chicago or New York, with snow, good luck picking up all the road markings."

More commonly, vehicles need "static calibration," which can be done using machinery inside a closed workshop with a flat, level floor. Special targets are set up around the vehicle at set distances according to instructions from the vehicle manufacturer. "The car [views] those targets at those specific distances to recalibrate the world into the car's computer," Ebrahimi said. These kinds of repairs also demand buildings with open space that meet requirements including specific colors and lighting. And it requires special training for employees to perform these sorts of recalibrations, he said

"The change that we've seen in the last five years is greater than we've seen, probably, in the last five decades," said Todd Dillender, chief operating officer of Caliber Collision, one of the biggest auto body repair companies in the United States with more than 1,700 locations across 41 states. [...] With a rapidly changing industry, qualified auto body repair technicians are in short supply, just as they are in the engine repair business. That's also led to upward pressure on pay in the industry as technicians have to be highly qualified and educated, Dillender said. That's good for people who work in the industry, of course, but tougher for those who pay, and for the insurance companies who, in turn, pay for the repairs. A new study from consumer automotive group AAA says the cost to fix sensors and cameras in new vehicles "now accounts for more than a third of the post-crash repair costs," reports CNN. However, "no one, including AAA, recommends not getting these features because of repair costs," since many of them can cut crash rates in half and improve a car's overall safety.

"They're not going to prevent everything," said Greg Brannon, director of automotive engineering at AAA. "And when you are in a crash, there are additional costs so it's sort of the old 'there's no free ride' when it comes to these things."

Motional, the autonomous vehicle startup borne out of a $4 billion joint venture between Hyundai and automotive supplier Aptiv, will pause its commercial operations and delay plans to launch a driverless taxi service as it undergoes a restructuring, TechCrunch reported Tuesday. From a report: The aim is make progress on the core technology and the business model, while preserving capital, according to sources familiar with the changes. Motional has pushed its plan to launch a commercial driverless robotaxi service with its second-generation AV -- the Hyundai Ioniq 5 -- to 2026, two years later than planned.

The company told employees Tuesday during an all-hands meeting that the changes will include layoffs, but did not provide a figure of how many people would be affected, according to sources who spoke to TechCrunch on condition of anonymity. Motional began notifying employees if they were laid off shortly after the meeting ended. The company employed more than 1,300 people prior to a 5% cut in workforce in March 2024. Motional will halt its commercial operations, which today includes taxi rides in autonomous Hyundai Ioniq 5 vehicles in Las Vegas via the Uber and Lyft network. The company will also end deliveries for Uber Eats customers in Santa Monica using its autonomous vehicles. A human safety operator is behind the wheel in all of its commercial operations.

Less than two weeks after President Biden signed a bill that will force TikTok's Chinese owner, ByteDance, to sell the popular social media app or face a ban in the United States, TikTok said it sued the federal government on Tuesday, arguing the law was unconstitutional. From a report: TikTok said that the law violated the First Amendment by effectively removing an app that millions of Americans use to share their views and communicate freely. It also argued that a divestiture was "simply not possible," especially within the law's 270-day timeline, pointing to difficulties such as Beijing's refusal to sell a key feature that powers TikTok in the United States.

"For the first time in history, Congress has enacted a law that subjects a single, named speech platform to a permanent, nationwide ban, and bars every American from participating in a unique online community with more than one billion people worldwide," the company said in the 67-page petition it provided, which initiates the lawsuit. "There is no question: The act will force a shutdown of TikTok by Jan. 19, 2025." TikTok is battling for its survival in the United States, with the fight set to play out primarily in courts over the next few months. While lawmakers who passed the bill have said the app is a national security threat because of its ties to China, the courts must now weigh those concerns against TikTok's argument that a sale or ban would violate the First Amendment free-speech rights of its users and hurt small businesses that owe their livelihood to the platform.

The Register provides a retrospective look at how Microsoft "absorbed the handset division of Nokia" ten years ago, only to kill the unit two years later and write it off as a tax loss. What went wrong? "It was a fatal combination of bad management, a market evolving in ways hidebound people didn't predict, and some really (with a few superb exceptions) terrible products," reports The Register. From the report: Like Nokia, Windows Mobile's popularity peaked in 2007, then started to drop away. The iPhone was the tech item of choice for fashionistas, Blackberry was seen as essential for serious business, and Android -- with Google as its new owner -- was gaining traction. Microsoft by that time had a new CEO in Steve Ballmer, who completely and famously failed to see the shifting sands in the mobile market. He dismissed the iPhone as a threat to what he thought was Windows Mobile's unassailable market position, and was roundly mocked for it. So the scene was set for a mobile standards war, and Steve Ballmer staked his professional pride on winning it. Microsoft recruited Nokia to help out. [...]

Under [Executive VP of Microsoft Stephen Elop's] leadership, a closer working relationship with Microsoft was a given -- but in 2013 Redmond announced it was going the whole hog and buying Nokia's handset business outright for $7.2 billion. The deal was done in April 2014, a decade ago from today. Microsoft also got a ten-year license on Nokia's patents and the option to renew in perpetuity. It also got Elop back, as executive vice president of the Microsoft Devices Group. That meant stepping down as CEO of Nokia, for which he trousered an 18.8 million bonus package -- a payoff the Finnish prime minister at the time called "outrageous." Nokia retained its networking business in Finland. It purchased Siemens' half of the Nokia Siemens Networks joint venture and renamed in Nokia Networks. The Nokia board rolled the dice again on hiring another non-Suomi manager, Rajeev Suri, and this time hit a double D20 in D&D terms.

When Ballmer stepped down from the helm at Microsoft in 2014 -- shortly before the Nokia deal completion -- he left a hot mess to deal with. His plan had been to develop the mobile operating system in conjunction with Windows 10, and Windows Mobile 10 was supposed to be a part of a unified code environment. While Windows 10 on the desktop wasn't a bad operating system, Windows Mobile 10 really was. The promised synergy just didn't happen -- it was power-hungry, clunky, and about as popular as a rattlesnake in a pinata. It was this mess that Satya Nadella faced when he took over the reins. Nadella was never very keen on the phone platform and spent more time in press conferences talking about cricket or the cloud than Microsoft's mobile ambitions. It was clear to all that this really wasn't working. Elop was laid off by Redmond a year later.

It was clear that Windows Mobile wasn't going to work. Android and iOS were drinking Microsoft's milkshake, and Redmond realized the game was up. Microsoft started shedding mobile jobs -- both in Finland and Redmond. While mobile was still publicly touted as the way forward for Microsoft with Ballmer gone, the impetus wasn't there and support for the mobile OS shriveled. In 2015 Microsoft declared it was writing off $7.6 billion on the Phone Hardware division as "goodwill and asset impairment charges" -- $400 million more than it had originally paid for the Finnish firm. Nokia bought European networking giant Alcatel-Lucent in a $16.7 billion deal in 2015. Around the same time, Suri announced a move into tablets, since it had a non-compete agreement with Microsoft on mobiles. Meanwhile a bunch of former Nokia execs who'd fled Elop and Microsoft had started a mobile biz of their own: HMD. It was Finnish, but outsourced production to Foxconn in China, and was planning to make cheapish Android devices. In 2016 Microsoft sold its mobile hardware arm to HMD for an undisclosed -- but probably not large -- sum. Nadella clearly wanted out of the whole business and the Finnish startup concentrated on selling good-enough Android smartphones to Nokia's traditional cheap markets.

From the Washington Post's "Technology 202" newsletter: As tech giants move toward a world in which chatbots supplement, and perhaps supplant, search engines, the Microsoft executive assigned to make sure AI is used responsibly said the industry has to be careful not to break the business model of the wider web. Search engines citing and linking to the websites they draw from is "part of the core bargain of search," [Microsoft's chief Responsible AI officer] said in an interview Monday....

"It's really important to maintain a healthy information ecosystem and recognize it is an ecosystem. And so part of what I will continue to guide our Microsoft teams toward is making sure that we are citing back to the core webpages from which the content is sourced. Making sure that we've got that feedback loop happening. Because that is part of the core bargain of search, right? And I think it's critical to make sure that we are both providing users with new engaging ways to interact, to explore new ideas — but also making sure that we are building and supporting the great work of our creators."
Asked about lawsuits alleging copyright use without permission, they said "We believe that there are strong grounds under existing laws to train models."

But they also added those lawsuits are "asking legitimate questions" about where the boundaries are, "for which the courts will provide answers in due course."