Victoria Fox's Blog, page 168

How To Set Up Quiet Hours On Your Android Device

While you can toggle Android’s Do Not Disturb mode on and off whenever you want, if you have a daily routine you follow, automating quiet hours on your Android device is the best option. Doing so means you won’t have to worry about forgetting to silence your phone, and can enjoy your peace and quiet when needed.

Follow these steps to set up quiet hours on your Android device: 

Open the Settings app on your Android device.Scroll down and tap Sound & Vibration.Choose the Do Not Disturb option.Tap on Turn on automatically to set up a new schedule.Select Add rule and then choose “Time” for a time-based rule.Name your rule, e.g., “Nighttime” or “Work Hours.”Set the start and end times for your quiet hours.Check the top of the screen to confirm the rule has been turned on.

Keep in mind that these steps will vary based on the type of phone you’re using, and some older versions of Android may not have a Do Not Disturb mode, or the options could be in a different location.

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EU lawmakers bag late night deal on ‘global first’ AI rules

After marathon ‘final’ talks which stretched to almost three days European Union lawmakers have tonight clinched a political deal on a risk-based framework for regulating artificial intelligence. The file was originally proposed back in April 2021 but it’s taken months of tricky three-way negotiations to get a deal over the line. The development means a pan-EU AI law is definitively on the way.

Giving a triumphant but exhausted press conference in the small hours of Friday night/Saturday morning local time key representatives for the European Parliament, Council and the Commission — the bloc’s co-legislators — hailed the agreement as hard fought, a milestone achievement and historic, respectively.

Taking to X to tweet the news, the EU’s president, Ursula von der Leyen — who made delivering an AI law a key priority of her term when she took up the post in late 2019 — also lauded the political agreement as a “global first”.

The AI Act is a global first.

A unique legal framework for the development of AI you can trust.

And for the safety and fundamental rights of people and businesses.

A commitment we took in our political guidelines – and we delivered.

I welcome today’s political agreement.

— Ursula von der Leyen (@vonderleyen) December 8, 2023

Full details of what’s been agreed won’t be entirely confirmed until a final text is compiled and made public, which may take some weeks. But a press release put out by the European Parliament confirms the deal reached with the Council includes a total prohibition on the use of AI for:

biometric categorisation systems that use sensitive characteristics (e.g. political, religious, philosophical beliefs, sexual orientation, race);untargeted scraping of facial images from the internet or CCTV footage to create facial recognition databases;emotion recognition in the workplace and educational institutions;social scoring based on social behaviour or personal characteristics;AI systems that manipulate human behaviour to circumvent their free will;AI used to exploit the vulnerabilities of people (due to their age, disability, social or economic situation).

The use of remote biometric identification technology in public places by law enforcement has not been completely banned — but the parliament said negotiators had agreed on a series of safeguards and narrow exceptions to limit use of technologies such as facial recognition. This includes a requirement for prior judicial authorisation — and with uses limited to a “strictly defined” lists of crime.

Retrospective (non-real-time) use of remote biometric ID AIs will be limited to “the targeted search of a person convicted or suspected of having committed a serious crime”. While real-time use of this intrusive AI tech will be limited in time and location, and can only be used for the following purposes:

targeted searches of victims (abduction, trafficking, sexual exploitation),prevention of a specific and present terrorist threat, orthe localisation or identification of a person suspected of having committed one of the specific crimes mentioned in the regulation (e.g. terrorism, trafficking, sexual exploitation, murder, kidnapping, rape, armed robbery, participation in a criminal organisation, environmental crime).

The package agreed also includes obligations for AI systems that are classified as “high risk” owing to having “significant potential harm to health, safety, fundamental rights, environment, democracy and the rule of law”.

“MEPs successfully managed to include a mandatory fundamental rights impact assessment, among other requirements, applicable also to the insurance and banking sectors. AI systems used to influence the outcome of elections and voter behaviour, are also classified as high-risk,” the parliament wrote. “Citizens will have a right to launch complaints about AI systems and receive explanations about decisions based on high-risk AI systems that impact their rights.”

There was also agreement on a “two-tier” system of guardrails to be applied to “general” AI systems, such as the so-called foundational models underpinning the viral boom in generative AI applications like ChatGPT.

As we reported earlier the deal reached on foundational models/general purpose AIs (GPAIs) includes some transparency requirements for what co-legislators referred to as “low tier” AIs — meaning model makers must draw up technical documentation and produce (and publish) detailed summaries about the content used for training in order to support compliance with EU copyright law.

For “high-impact” GPAIs (defined as the cumulative amount of compute used for their training measured in floating point operations is greater than 10^25) with so-called “systemic risk” there are more stringent obligations.

“If these models meet certain criteria they will have to conduct model evaluations, assess and mitigate systemic risks, conduct adversarial testing, report to the Commission on serious incidents, ensure cybersecurity and report on their energy efficiency,” the parliament wrote. “MEPs also insisted that, until harmonised EU standards are published, GPAIs with systemic risk may rely on codes of practice to comply with the regulation.”

The Commission has been working with industry on a stop-gap AI Pact for some months — and it confirmed today this is intended to plug the practice gap until the AI Act comes into force.

While foundational models/GPAIs that have been commercialized face regulation under the Act, R&D is not intended to be in scope of the law — and fully open sourced models will have lighter regulatory requirements than closed source, per today’s pronouncements.

The package agreed also promotes regulatory sandboxes and real-world-testing being established by national authorities to support startups and SMEs to develop and train AIs before placement on the market.

Penalties for non-compliance can lead to fines ranging from €35 million or 7% of global turnover to €7.5 million or 1.5 % of turnover, depending on the infringement and size of the company.

The deal agreed today also allows for a phased entry into force after the law is adopted — with six months allowed until rules on prohibited use cases kick in; 12 months for transparency and governance requirements; and 24 months for all other requirements. So the full force of the EU’s AI Act may not be felt until 2026.

Carme Artigas, Spain’s secretary of state for digital and AI issues, who led the Council’s negotiations on the file as the country has held the rotating Council presidency since the summer, hailed the agreement on the heavily contested file as “the biggest milestone in the history of digital information in Europe”; both for the bloc’s single digital market — but also, she suggested, “for the world”.

“We have achieved the first international regulation for artificial intelligence in the world,” she announced during a post-midnight press conference to confirm the political agreement, adding: “We feel very proud.”

The law will support European developers, startups and future scale-ups by giving them “legal certainty with technical certainty”, she predicted.

Speaking on behalf of the European Parliament, co-rapporteurs Dragoș Tudorache and Brando Benifei said their objective had been to deliver AI legislation that would ensure the ecosystem developed with a “human centric approach” which respects fundamental rights and European values. Their assessment of the outcome was equally upbeat — citing the inclusion in the agreed text of a total ban on the use of AI for predictive policing and for biometric categorization as major wins.

“Finally we got in the right track, defending fundamental rights to the necessity that is there for our democracies to endure such incredible changes,” said Benifei. “We are the first ones in the world to have a horizontal legislation that has this direction on fundamental rights, that supports the development of AI in our continent, and that is up to date to the frontier of the artificial intelligence with the most powerful models under clear obligation. So I think we delivered.”

“We have always been questioned whether there is enough protection, whether there is enough stimulant for innovation in this text, and I can say, this balance is there,” added Tudorache. “We have safeguards, we have all the provisions that we need, the redress that we need in giving trust to our citizens in the interaction with AI, in the products in the services that they will interact with from now on.

“We now have to use this blueprint to seek now global convergence because this is a global challenge for everyone. And I think that with the work that we’ve done, as difficult as it was — and it was difficult, this was a marathon negotiation by all standards, looking at all precedents so far — but I think we delivered.”

The EU’s internal market commissioner, Thierry Breton, also chipped in with his two euro-cents — describing the agreement clinched a little before midnight Brussels’ time as “historic”. “It is a full package. It is a complete deal. And this is why we spent so much time,” he intoned. “This is balancing user safety, innovation for startups, while also respecting… our fundamental rights and our European values.”

Despite the EU very visibly patting itself on the back tonight on securing a deal on ‘world-first’ AI rules, it’s not quite yet the end of the road for the bloc’s lawmaking process as there are still some formal steps to go — not least the final text will face votes in the parliament and the Council to adopt it. But given how much division and disagreement there has been over how (or even whether) to regulate AI the biggest obstacles have been dismantled with this political deal and the path to passing the EU AI Act in the coming months looks clear.

The Commission is certainly projecting confidence. Per Breton, work to implement the agreement starts immediately with the set up of an AI Office within the EU’s executive — which will have the job of coordinating with the Member State oversight bodies that will need to enforce the rules on AI firms. “We will welcome new colleagues… a lot of them,” he said. “We will work — starting tomorrow — to get ready.”

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Mass warrantless surveillance runs rampant, thanks to Section 702. Key Democrats want to make the problem even worse

Under Section 702, agencies are allowed to pull up Americans’ private messages, effectively morphing the provision into a tool for domestic spying.

[image error]Senator Mark Warner of Virginia speaks during the Senate Democrats’ weekly news conference in the Capitol on Tuesday, December 5, 2023. [Photo: Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images]By Evan Greer4 minute Read

With less than a year to go before the 2024 election, Democratic leaders and pundits are constantly telling us that we are facing unprecedented threats to our democracy. They frame the stakes of the election as a last stand against authoritarian takeover. 

They’re not wrong about the threat. But some Democrats in Congress are recklessly pushing into the hands of the next president the renewal of dangerous spying powers that even the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court admits are already abused on a “persistent and widespread” basis. This type of mass surveillance power is dangerous in the hands of any president—but they would be a nightmare in the hands of someone like Donald Trump.

Congress is currently debating whether to extend or rein in a highly controversial warrantless surveillance authority—FISA Section 702—that is set to expire in just a few weeks.  It authorizes surveillance of international communications on a massive scale, populating a database of billions of conversations, including with an unknown number of Americans (the government refuses to admit how many). And it doesn’t stop there.

The FBI, CIA, and NSA are also allowed, under Section 702, to conduct “U.S. person queries” to pull up Americans’ private messages and other information, effectively morphing the provision into a tool for domestic spying. This all occurs without any warrant or court approval—and it happens over 200,000 times per year.

The lack of judicial oversight has caused misconduct to fester. In recent years, these warrantless backdoor searches have been abused to deliberately seek out the communications of over 100 of Black Lives Matter protesters, a batch of 19,000 donors to a political campaign, journalists, members of Congress, and even online dating matches. There are thousands of these violations every year. 

Fortunately, the law’s scheduled sunset provides a crucial opportunity for major reform. Millions of Americans from across the political landscape are calling for strong privacy protections for Americans against government surveillance, and Congress has focused, in particular, on a number of key reforms, most notably closing this backdoor search loophole and stopping the government from buying sensitive information about people in the United States through data brokers, which circumvents our Constitutional and statutory rights. 

Two bills are worthy of their overwhelming, bipartisan support: the Government Surveillance Reform Act and the House Judiciary Committee-passed Protect Liberty and End Warrantless Surveillance Act, which are led by long-time privacy champions, including Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon and Representatives Pramila Jayapal of Washington State, Zoe Lofgren of California, and New York State’s Jerry Nadler, all Democrats. Both bills give the government the spying powers it’s demanding that Congress reauthorize, but both also protect Americans’ privacy.

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But some Democrats are actively working to stymie this effort: Senate Intelligence Chair Mark Warner of Virginia and House Intelligence ranking member Jim Himes of Connecticut. In a mind-bending dereliction of duty, the “widespread” abuses of Section 702, which even the government admits to, are specifically excluded from their legislation, the misleadingly named FISA Reform and Reauthorization Act. By their logic, these abuses are tolerable and don’t merit an independent check before agents search for our most sensitive information. They’re wrong, and they’re trying to make the problem a lot worse: In turns out that the House’s FISA Reform and Reauthorization Act would actually dramatically expand, not rein in, Section 702: 

According to one of the small number of hand-picked expert advisors to the FISA Court, this bill would turn “business landlords, shared workspaces, or even hotels” into brand-new vectors for this mass warrantless surveillance. This is a shocking dereliction of duty from the House Intelligence Committee and it’s Democratic leader, ranking member Himes.  

A lot of people of a lot of stripes, including members of Congress, want reform and see this as a once-in-a-generation opportunity to get something done. What the handful of powerful Democrats who oppose privacy protections don’t seem to realize, or at least won’t admit, is that they are paving the way for those same abuses to occur in the future, thousands of times, without any court oversight. Or, somehow, they believe the government’s opposition—that it’s hard to justify to a court how often it spies on Americans, even though it does more to support the need for reform than anything else.

If either the FISA Reform and Reauthorization Act or this cynical NDAA play become law, it will guarantee that the next president—whomever that may be—has control over a wildly invasive mass surveillance apparatus that reaches into Americans’ most sensitive information and is, as we well know, ripe for abuse. 

It is a betrayal for any Democrat to support reauthorizing Section 702 without demanding reforms that end mass warrantless surveillance. Considering this powerful law has already been abused for spying on protestors, journalists, and even agents’ romantic interests, reauthorizing it without major reform is an intolerable risk—the kind that brings down democracies. 

Evan Greer is an activist, writer, and musician based in Boston. She’s the director of digital rights group Fight for the Future, and writes regularly for outlets like the Washington Post, Wired, and Time.

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Beeper Mini’s iMessage For Android Offline For Some As Apple Reportedly Pulls The Plug

The extent of the Beeper Mini outage is unclear. In response to the company’s post on X about the ongoing issues, users gave conflicting reports regarding their ability to use the service, but it appears that some of those users are not using Beeper Mini, but rather Beeper Cloud, which uses a different method of accessing iMessage. Internally at SlashGear, some staff are experiencing the reported Beeper Mini outage while others remain able to use the service.

According to a statement obtained by TechCrunch from Beeper CEO Eric Migicovsky, “all data indicates” that the outage is the result of Apple finding a way to cut Beeper Mini off from its services. Apple, which has long seen iMessage as a strong form of platform lock-in for iOS, has likely been working to unplug Beeper Mini from iMessage since the service went live. Cutting the Android app off on Friday may also have been a strategic play since Beeper staff will now need to scramble as the weekend begins if they hope to engineer a new way to keep the service running.

Apple has announced RCS chat support for iPhone will be coming at some time in 2024, but as of now, Beeper Mini was the only way for Android users to send rich messages and high-resolution media to iPhone users without a third-party service like WhatsApp.

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A note on the issue: When it is dark enough

The Dark-Sky Movement, which aims to prevent light pollution and preserve existing dark zones, is slowly gathering steam in India

The first time I truly understood the meaning of the term light pollution was also the first time I saw the stunning whorls of the Milky Way spiralling outwards clearly—and almost endlessly. That was more than 15 years ago, and I was standing in a field in Patangarh, a village that’s home to some of India’s finest Gond artists, in Madhya Pradesh, and which was then fairly remote. It’s likely those skies aren’t as clear anymore, but stars have always inspired curiosity as well as awe—oracles looked to the stars as did early astronomers, both trying, in their own ways, to make sense of the world.

Looking up to the sky comes naturally to most of us, but in the light-polluted cities in which we live, it’s rare to see more than some sparkly twinkles. To see part of a galaxy in such clarity is to marvel at the symmetry, beauty and complexity of the world we live in. It’s this desire to discover and be amazed that is driving India’s nascent interest in astrotourism, or travelling to dark sky spots in order to observe stars.

Our cover story tracks these travelling stargazers, whose interest ranges from pure admiration to scientific discovery to astrophotography. Oddly enough the pandemic—a time when people had little to do but look up and hope for better days—is one of the triggers for this newfound love for night skies. The Dark-Sky Movement, which aims to prevent light pollution and preserve existing dark zones, is slowly gathering steam in India. Members of astronomy clubs, online groups and curated travel clubs cross the length and breadth of the country—from Hanle in Ladakh, India’s only dark sky reserve, to Sakleshpur in Karnataka—to stare at the skies. Even if you are not an avid skywatcher, signing up for one of these trips can make for a truly immersive and unusual holiday. These are travellers who crave darkness.

Other stories in our issue also feed a spirit of curiosity and discovery—a detailed profile of artist K.S. Radhakrishnan, who is having his first retrospective in Delhi; a contemplation on the literature born of the Babri Masjid demolition in 1992; a charming piece on two British-era libraries in the Nilgiris; and a story on the agave-based drinks that are fuelling an appetite for Mexican food.

Write to the Lounge editor at shalini.umachandran@htlive.com 

@shalinimb

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Gag City is a viral win for Nicki Minaj

Welcome to Gag City, the pink metropolis inhabited by stans and brands alike.

In the days leading up to the release of “Pink Friday 2,” Nicki Minaj’s fifth studio album and sequel to her debut record “Pink Friday” that dropped on Friday, Twitter was flooded with AI-generated images of pink-toned cityscapes. Gag City, the dreamy false utopia ruled by Minaj and her Barbz, broke through stan Twitter and became a viral meme that brand accounts immediately used for their own marketing — promoting Minaj’s album for free.

Is it an authentic stan-led campaign to build hype for Minaj? Is it a plant to game engagement for both the album and brands? What’s clear is that the viral moment is a win for Minaj, manufactured or not.

It started in September, when Minaj teased the album’s cover art online. The image features Minaj on a pink subway car, drifting through pink clouds with a futuristic (and obviously, pink) city skyline in the background.

She and her Barbz started referring to the album’s release as “Gag City,” NBC News reports, referencing gay slang for being so amazed that you’re at a loss for words. One might be gagged by witnessing a stunning outfit change, or by listening to a perfect record, like “Pink Friday 2.” Leading up to the release, stans started posted AI-generated images of a pink concrete jungle, joking that fictional characters and celebrities were arriving to Gag City in anticipation of Minaj’s album. In one of the first, posted on Dec. 1 according to Know Your Meme, a fan account shared an image of a pink plane labeled “Gagg City” flying over a similarly pink skyline.

In the days before the release, Minaj told fans to “prepare for landing” and teased a description of her pink utopia. Barbz replied with AI-generated renditions of the descent into Gag City.

X (formerly Twitter) users began crafting elaborate narratives about Gag City’s inhabitants and government. One posted an image of Barbz storming the Pink House, which another user described as the fandom’s own January 6th. Another posted an image of pink-clad citizens protesting in the streets of Gag City, calling for Minaj to release the album’s track list. Though some may believe that Gag City is a utopia, one account posted an image of a matronly Minaj handing out CDs of her album to impoverished children “on the outskirts of Gag City,” implying that the pink society also has a class divide problem.

Gag City is also riddled with stan wars, as fans of rival pop stars posted images of their faves vying for Minaj’s seat at the head of her city’s government. In a nod to Greek mythology, one account posted an image of a Trojan horse decorated in Beyoncé’s “Renaissance” disco motif.

BREAKING: The Barbz have discovered a mysterious, metallic horse at the front gates of Gag City.

An inscription reads “For their return home, the Hive dedicate this offering to Onika.” pic.twitter.com/64SKkWuGoc

— uncle gworl (@_uncle_gworl) December 8, 2023

Never one to miss out on an easy trend, brand accounts started joining in on the Gag City hype. Chili’s posted an image of rosy smoke billowing from its restaurant, which makes me wonder if air pollution exists in Gag City. Wheat Thins, Baskin-Robbins, Dunkin’ Donuts, Pizza Hut, Red Lobster, Oreo, Bing (??), the Empire State Building and countless others posted their versions of Gag City.

On one hand, memes tend to die the minute brand accounts start co-opting them — nothing is more tiresome than seeing a fun joke turn into a corporate-friendly marketing ploy. AI-generated images are already ethically fraught, and critics have raised concerns over AI generators trained on artwork without the consent of the work’s artists. Artists have also criticized brands for using AI-generated art instead of commissioning work from a real, human artist. Though using AI-generated art for commercial use is legal, as copyright laws pertaining to AI are virtually non-existent, it’s generally seen as a shitty move by many in the art world.

On the other, it’s free promotion for Minaj, and as a lifelong Barb who spent her adolescence running a stan account for “Pink Friday,” I consider it a win.

Nicki Minaj is an artist who’s been embroiled in controversy throughout her career, from posting bad takes about Covid vaccines to defending her husband Kenneth Petty, a convicted sex offender. She may be a brilliant artist, but her problematic history makes her far from the family-friendly public figure that brands are more likely to endorse.

But with Gag City, Minaj has brands doing all of her marketing for her. “Pink Friday 2” is an artistic marvel in itself (though I am probably biased), but the free promotion that it’s been getting as a viral meme is particularly astounding. Artists have spent the last few years trying to drum up engagement for their work by making their songs trend on TikTok, which audiences have started to resist. Gag City doesn’t bank on being the viral song of the summer to drive streaming numbers — the bit is removed enough for non-stans to enjoy it, while still revolving around the album it’s promoting.

Brand Twitter tends to turn fun trends into advertising opportunities, taking organic community interactions and spitting out contrived versions clearly made to go viral. It may be grating, but in this case, it’s working in Minaj’s favor. This week, everyone wants to go to Gag City.

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How AI can cut two hours of work into 15 minutes with SAP CTO Juergen Mueller

Many of us in the technology and business worlds have been thinking a lot more about artificial intelligence (AI) in the past year since OpenAI released ChatGPT, catapulting generative AI into the mainstream.

But for Juergen Mueller, the chief technology officer of German enterprise software giant SAP — the third largest software company in the world by annual revenue, according to Investopedia — the journey towards enabling AI for business processes began nearly a decade ago, he told VentureBeat recently in an exclusive sit-down interview at SAP’s under-renovation slick Hudson Yard office space in New York City.

“Back then of course, it was machine learning, one model per use case,” Mueller said. “Pre-trained, and we did a lot of retraining. We worked in such a mode for quite a while. We have more than 130 use cases [of AI models] embedded in SAP software.”

And throughout this year, even as companies such as OpenAI, Cohere and Anthropic were making headlines for their new AI models for enterprises, SAP was steadily plugging away with new releases, including its own cross-platform, cross-application AI assistant Joule — which lives throughout SAP’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) software suite (ERP refers to software used by businesses to plan their workforces, supply chains, and other resources — human and capital alike) — as well as announcing its own SAP HANA Cloud Vector Engine, a search engine for enterprises that combs through their data privately using the power of SAP’s AI vector database architecture.

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Now that nearly every company with a software presence is rushing to figure out how to make AI work for them and/or their customers, Mueller is in the enviable position of having been ahead of the curve. As 2023 winds down as the biggest year for AI’s adoption as a technology yet, read Mueller’s thoughts about how he thinks about the tech and what enterprises can do to futureproof themselves as it continues to evolve.

The following interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

VentureBeat: I’m curious about SAP’s AI journey but I’m here to listen to whatever you guys want to want to talk about.

Juergen Mueller: If you’re asking about the broader AI story, this issue started roughly eight and a half years ago. Then, of course, it was machine learning — one model per use case. Pre-trained and we did a lot of retraining. We worked in such a mode for quite a while. We have more than 130 AI use cases embedded in SAP software.

And that was all prior to generative AI?

Yeah. And now, of course, interest has exploded in the past 12 months. Since then, we have screened through hundreds of ideas of where to apply gen AI in all for our portfolio and now we up to two dozen or so concrete announcements that we made or already delivered to market.

We really look at end-to-end processes from to hiring to retiring, procurement, everything in finance, supply chain management, in customer experience, so all these end-to-end business processes we cover for 26 different industries

And the AI uses are very different dependent on the industry: if you do that in marketing and B2C communication or if you do that HR to write a job posting. If you are in higher education as a university, you will talk to students, if you’re a retailer, and you will have another audience. If you’re having discrete manufacturing, things run a little different. That’s why we all had to relearn, even though I had seven and a half years under my belt in that area.

We’ve trained more than 50,000 people in SAP in gen AI, on the engineering and product side of the house. And that helps to getting things done quickly.

Now, of course, we have one gen AI strategy, one digital copilot experience — Joule — then we are infusing generative AI into all those solutions, into our customers’ HR departments, customer experience, finance. We are infusing generative AI where it makes sense.

Our high level strategy we have across all of these solutions is to enable applications that help implementing business processes as efficiently as possible. So if you are, hypothetically, [SAP customer] UBS (the financial services giant), they have their processes that they care about. They could come to SAP and say, ‘hey what are your 50 years of experience that you codified in your systems to run our company the best way possible?’

You’ve done a lot in a short amount of time since ChatGPT was released.

Yes, and we also had a few important announcements without gen AI. But most of the topics really focus on the key point: ‘does that make a difference?’

And on our internal learnings we put out in our generative AI hub online — which provide externals for customers partners what we also use internally, including access to natural language models, security and governance capabilities. And we learned that grounding and retrieval augmented generation (RAG) is extremely important.

We announced that we enhanced our industry-leading database SAP HANA Cloud by adding a vector engine. What is special about it is, usually you have a vector engine on the side you.

You have all your company data here in one place, and the vector engine for documents, for example is on the side. Okay. And, of course, that means more complexity in your IT landscape.

Let’s say you want to embed documentation of your company’s policies into a Q&A bot that employees can ask questions about.

You can’t just ask a plain language model — it would need SAP-specific information in there.

But HANA Cloud already has that information that our customers have put into it, and so now it can surface and suggest the correct information.

So take the example of UBS again — they post 6 to 10 million job postings a year, all using SAP.

That’s so many.

Yeah, so if you can have AI suggest language for those job postings, even in cases like that, you can cut like two hours into 15 minutes, 10 million times, that’s an immense value savings.

So they say we want to create a job post. And then actually, the engine would pick basically all the job postings the company in last three years for example.

But if it’s for a specific job — the HR Department — the vector database can pull those previous job listings and language, specific to that category, and provide a template for a new post.

Given that information that we have in the operational systems, we can be much more precise and by doing that you reduce hallucinations and wrong information.

Is it a large vector database for everybody? Or is everybody having their own vectorized database, all your customers?

So with HANA Cloud, it’s a database that we use for our applications.

So it has a relation with engines like [Microsoft] Excel. But in order to build an HR system, for example, you do not just have one, Excel sheet or run tab, but you have many, many different database tables.

So if you’re wanting to run analytics on top of your HR information, you can do it also geospatial information, texts, information, JSON documents, and now also vector so it is all in one engine.

Because what is the vector database? I mean, it sounds super fancy. But if you go down to like, what do you need to build? The team was a little underwhelmed. It’s a representation of numbers between zero and one showing the differences between objects in the same space. Humans use embedding functions, too.

So if it was ultimately underwhelming to your developers to build a vector database for HANA Cloud, why haven’t we seen more companies building their own?

In a B2B context, we know the industry, we know the company, we know the customer, we know the industry they are in, and then even the business context — be it marketing or research, we know what kind of documents they need. It all starts with the data, which we have. If you don’t have that structured information in that context, it actually doesn’t make sense to build a vector database.

87% of the world’s goods and transactions are being done by SAP customers, so with many customers, we have a very significant part of the value chain.

We also have a super scalable cloud database, so everything you asked, every customer will have their own tenant.

We want to make AI as simple and easy to use compared to what was before as Google Maps was to paper road atlases. This is AI for business users. We help you get your job done and shine as a superstar.

We’re quickly reaching a point where generative AI is becoming very widespread. Do you feel like that saturation is advantageous or not? Are people going to say, ‘ok, I know how this AI works’ whether it’s ChatGPT or Microsoft Copilot, and ‘my SAP Joule isn’t working the same way, so I’m angry at it.’ Are you concerned that all these different AI assistants will conflict with each other?

Much of the AI that is being deployed right now is in preview. Bringing that into production is much harder. The demo is always easy. So the hype will continue — because on the one hand, the technology is amazing, and there is lots of value to be had there if it is executed properly. On the other hand, you will see that many, many AI assistants and copilots won’t ship, or they will ship in poor quality, and poor user experience.

We saw a lot of that when we started our AI journey eight-and-a-half years ago. We had to build a lot of muscle memory of how to do things right. Data is important. Good AI only works with good data. There are a lot of things that need to be addressed, including customer consent. So there are many hurdles that people must jump when building an AI product.

And why would customers want to use SAP instead of these newer AI-native startups?

CIOS are getting inundated with product offerings from AI startups. It’s like they’re being swarmed by 1,000 mosquitoes. But they understand the complexity of that, and they don’t want that. They want to partner with one or only a few trusted partners.

We also advise them on what to use, and what we use. That’s why we launched our own gen AI hub earlier this year to provide knowledge sharing and recommendations. There we recommend them to look at their most important value drivers and cost drivers that are not covered by SAP.

And you have all their data?

Well, the data is the customers’, but in many cases we enrich it, because we have metadata, we know the structures, we know the business processes, we know the industries, so there’s a lot happening behind the scenes to help organize their data.

How often is legal getting involved as you’re building out these AI tools and features?

I mentioned we trained more than 50,000 developers on AI. And part of their training is of course on safety, security, responsibility, legality. Five years ago, we established our own AI ethics council, before gen AI. They have been consulted for every use case since. And they have veto power over any potential use case for AI. You could have the idea to automate hiring and firing with AI — it’s technically possible. But from our value perspective, and how we define responsible AI, we don’t.

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Who will be the CMs of Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh? BJP announces ‘Observers’. Details here

As suspense looms over the Chief Ministerial posts of Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Chhattisgarh, the BJP on Friday announced the names of the observers. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which smoothly stumped out its rivals in three of the four states in the recently held assembly elections, has not announced the names of the Chief Ministers yet.

BJP to appoint new faces as Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh CM

On Friday, the saffron party announced a total of nine observers for the three states. Union Defence Minister Rajnath Singh, Rajya Sabha MP Saroj Pandey, and senior BJP leader Vinod Tawde have been named as observers for Rajasthan. On the other hand, Manohar Lal Khattar, Dr K Lakshman, and Asha Lakra are the observers of Madhya Pradesh. Chhattishgarh’s observers are Minister of Tribal Affairs of India Arjun Munda, Former Assam CM Sarbananda Sonowal, and Former Rajya Sabha MP Dushyant Kumar Gautam.

A media report claimed that all three states will have new faces on the CM’s post but Mint could not officially verify the claim.

Suspense will be over…: BJP’s Kailash Vijayvargiya claim on new CM face

Yesterday, BJP national general secretary Kailash Vijayvargiya, while speaking to the media, refrained from disclosing whether the party will select leaders from among the newly elected MLAs or bring in outsiders.

Vijayvargiya added that the suspense and speculation over the CM choices in the three states would end on December 10.

‘Suspense over CM in 3 states would end on…’, says BJP’s Kailash Vijayvargiya

While the BJP kept its cards close to its chest with regard to its CM choices for Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, its top leaders gathered for a crucial Parliamentary Party meeting at the Balayogi Auditorium in the Parliament House complex yesterday. Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union Ministers S Jaishankar, Amit Shah, and Ashwani Vaishanaw, along with other BJP MPs, were in attendance at the meeting.

In the recently held assembly polls, the BJP won a resounding mandate bagging 163 seats while the Congress finished a distant second at 66 seats.

Who’s the CM? Rajasthan, MP, Chhattisgarh, Telangana and Mizoram

In Rajasthan, BJP won 115 seats and the Congress trailed by winning only 69 seats out of the 199. In Chhattisgarh, the BJP bagged 54 while the Congress won 35.

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Published: 08 Dec 2023, 11:53 AM IST

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Veteran Bollywood actor Naaem Sayyed, known as Junior Mehmood, dies of stomach cancer at 68

Veteran character actor Junior Mehmood, known for his roles in iconic Bollywood films such as Caravan, Haathi Mere Saathi, and Mera Naam Joker, passed away today on December 8 after battling stomach cancer, his son Hasnain Sayyed confirmed to PTI.

Junior Mehmood, whose real name was Naeem Sayyed, was 68. He is survived by his wife and two sons.

“My father passed away at 2.00 am following his battle with stomach cancer. He was in a critical condition for the last 17 days. He had lost 35-40 kgs in a month,” Hasnain, Junior Mehmood’s younger son, told PTI.

Also Read: Former Telangana CM KCR falls in farmhouse, admitted to a hospital in Hyderabad

Sayyed’s burial ceremony is scheduled at the Santacruz cemetery later today, where close friend Salaam Kazi told PTI that he would be laid to rest beside his mother. The cemetery also houses the remains of Mohammed Rafi and Dilip Kumar.

Deteriorating Health

Close friend Salaam Kazi told PTI that the deceased actor initially sought treatment for stomach pain from a local physician. However, due to drastic weight loss, his family shifted his case to Tata Memorial Hospital, where diagnoses revealed cancer in his lung and liver, along with a stomach tumour and jaundice.

Earlier this week on December 5, fellow veteran actors such as Jeetendra, Johhny Lever, and Sachin Pilgaonkar visited Junior Mehmood. Jeetendra, who shared screen space with him in multiple movies such as Suhaag Raat and Caravan, expressed his respect.

Also Read: Delhi’s air quality continues to be ‘very poor’; AQI at 349

Pilgaonkar had in an Instagram post also urged fans to pray for Sayyed’s health, writing: “I request you all to pray for my childhood friend Jr Mehmood who’s suffering with a fatal illness. I had a video conversation with him a couple of days ago and went to see him today but he was sleeping as he was under medication. I am in touch with his son and Johnny Lever regarding his health. May god bless him.”

An Illustrious Career

Starting as a child artiste in movies such as Mohabbat Zindagi Hai (1966) and Naunihal (1967), Junior Mehmood earned his alias, bestowed by the late comedy legend Mehmood, after they collaborated in the 1968 film Suhag Raat.

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In a career spanning more than four decades, Junior Mehmood featured in over 260 films in seven languages. These included hits such as Brahmachari, Kati Patang, Hare Raama Hare Krishna, Geet Gaata Chal, Imaandaar, Baap Numbri Beta Dus Numbri, Aaj Ka Arjun, Gurudev, Chhote Sarkar, and Judaai.

He also featured on television shows such as Pyaar Ka Dard Hai Meetha Meetha Pyaara Pyaara and Ek Rishta Saajhedari Ka.

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Published: 08 Dec 2023, 09:46 AM IST

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Indian-American Amit Patel swindles $22 mn from football team, buys Tesla car, Nissan pickup truck, a condo near Florida

Indian-American Amit Patel has been accused of stealing more than $22 million from the National Football League team to fund his luxury lifestyle.

Patel, a former manager of Jacksonville Jaguars executive, processed fraudulent credit card transactions from September 2019 until he was fired in February. He’s charged with wire fraud and engaging in an illegal financial transaction.

Patel’s lawyer, Alex King, said an out-of-control addiction to online sports betting was the main motive for the embezzlement.

Government suspends 70 lakh mobile numbers. Here’s what you should know

The lawyer said Patel used 99% of the Jaguars’ funds were used for betting on the FanDuel and DraftKings sites.

The football team said that Patel took advantage of his job to “covertly and intentionally commit significant fraudulent financial activity at the team’s expense for personal benefit”.

Online payment fraud: Beware of these five most common scams in India

King said Patel has cooperated with the Jaguars, the FBI, and federal prosecutors and is in treatment for gambling addiction.

‘The big fraud’

According to the Prosecutors, Patel oversaw the team’s virtual credit card program, which allowed some employees to charge business expenses without a physical credit card. Each month it was Patel’s job to create a file accounting for the charges from the past month. He did so with fraudulent entries, inventing phony transactions, moving up legitimate charges from future months, and inflating some charges, including for catering, airfare, and hotels.

Patel spent the millions he stole from the team on internet gambling, a condominium near Florida’s Ponte Vedra Beach, and private jet travel and luxury accommodation for himself and friends.

He bought a new Tesla Model 3 sedan and a Nissan pickup truck, cryptocurrency and non-fungible tokens, sports memorabilia, a country club membership, tickets to sporting events, and high-end watches, including the Patek Philippe, prosecutors said.

Patel also allegedly used stolen money to hire a personal trainer and a criminal defense lawyer.

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Published: 08 Dec 2023, 11:15 AM IST

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