Author: arthursheikin@gmail.com

[ad_1] If you had trouble accessing your Google Meet link or your firewall service, you are not alone.Multiple major sites, especially cloud platforms, experienced a mass outage on Thursday.Based on information on the Google Cloud Service Health page, a wide array of cloud services are down across multiple continents, from the Americas to Africa. As of 2 p.m. PT, active outages in the US included the agent assist function, speech-to-text, Cloud Memorystore, Cloud Workstations, and Google BigQuery.At around 11:30 a.m. PT, Downdetector showed over 13,000 reported incidents for Google Cloud.Soon after, web services that appeared to experience disruptions included Amazon…

[ad_1] Voice assistants are becoming a bigger part of our daily lives, and hype from frontier labs like OpenAI has sparked debate about whether talking chatbots might actually be a substitute for real human connections.But in many health and social care contexts, voice AI is less about replacing human-human connections and more about filling gaps and freeing up staff from busywork. In clinics across the US, AI-powered voice tools are already calling insurers and handling paperwork, freeing up staff for more meaningful, patient-facing work.At the individual level, AI voice companions are stepping in to offer conversation and comfort to people…

[ad_1] Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Argentina’s monthly inflation rate has fallen below 2 per cent for the first time in five years, a boost for libertarian President Javier Milei in his war against the country’s chronic price pressures.Consumer prices rose 1.5 per cent in May from the previous month, the country’s statistics agency said on Thursday. This compares with 2.8 per cent in April and a 25.5 per cent high in December 2023, when Milei took office. However, annual inflation is still 43.5 per cent, one…

[ad_1] It sounds like the start of a 21st-century horror film: Your browser history has been public all along, and you had no idea. That’s basically what it feels like right now on the new stand-alone Meta AI app, where swathes of people are publishing their ostensibly private conversations with the chatbot. When you ask the AI a question, you have the option of hitting a share button, which then directs you to a screen showing a preview of the post, which you can then publish. But some users appear blissfully unaware that they are sharing these text conversations, audio…

[ad_1] Klarna’s CEO, Sebastian Siemiatkowski, believes artificial intelligence is capable of doing all our jobs. His new chatbot is more reserved.The Swedish fintech company, known for its buy now, pay later service, created an AI version of Siemiatkowski that customers can call for support. The hotline launched on Thursday in the US and Sweden.I called the US number and spoke to the chatbot. It helped me learn more about purchasing power, expanded on some of Siemiantkowski’s views on AI, and shared a more modest take on AI’s role in the workforce.Siemiatkowski has been a vocal proponent of AI, and Klarna…

[ad_1] Oracle shares may be rallying on its latest earnings beat, but it still has much higher to go, according to Victoria Greene, chief investment officer at G Squared Private Wealth. The cloud computing company was one of three names Greene discussed on CNBC’s ” Power Lunch ” Thursday – two made her buy list, while one is a hold. Oracle Shares of Oracle rallied 13% on Thursday after the company’s fourth-quarter earnings and revenue topped analysts expectations . Although the stock is already up 20% year to date, Greene thinks it isn’t too late for investors to get in…

[ad_1] Tesla sued a former engineer for allegedly stealing trade secrets from its humanoid robotics program, Optimus, and using them to launch a rival startup. The lawsuit, which was filed on Wednesday and originally reported on by Bloomberg, accuses Zhongjie “Jay” Li of stealing trade secrets regarding Tesla’s development of “advanced robotic hand sensors” to launch his startup Proception, a Y Combinator-backed company building robotic hands. The complaint states that Li, who worked at Tesla from August 2022 to September 2024, downloaded confidential information about Optimus on two separate personal smartphones. The complaint also added that during the last few…

[ad_1] The S & P 500 has made a stunning comeback from its lows in April, but UBS said investors would be wise to add some defensive stocks to their portfolios to guard against uncertainty. In a June 6 report, UBS global equity strategist Andrew Garthwaite gave several reasons why his team is cautious on many cyclical names – that is, stocks whose performance is closely tied to the economic cycle – excluding financials. “UBS forecasts US GDP to slow (from 2.1% YoY in Q1 to 0.9% in Q4), soft data has weakened sharply in the US – much more…

[ad_1] Shares of coffee giant Starbucks (SBUX) have rallied about 20% from a closing low in early April. Now the stock is facing perhaps its biggest hurdle on the road to recovery: the 200-day moving average. Based on our review of the daily and weekly charts, we see a likely pullback scenario before the uptrend phase propels SBUX to even greater heights. Starbucks peaked in early March, making a new swing high even after the S & P 500 and Nasdaq 100 had already pulled back from their own peaks. Over the subsequent weeks, SBUX cratered from a peak around…

[ad_1] Last year, Apple’s WWDC keynote highlighted the company’s ambitious strides in AI. This year, the company toned down its emphasis on Apple Intelligence and concentrated on updates to its operating systems, services, and software, introducing a new aesthetic it calls “Liquid Glass” along with a new naming convention.  Nevertheless, Apple still attempted to appease the crowd with a few AI-related announcements, such as an image analysis tool, a workout coach, a live translation feature, and more. Visual Intelligence Visual Intelligence is Apple’s AI-powered image analysis technology that allows you to gather information about your surroundings. For example, it can…