Cisco reports Q1 revenues of $13.16B, up 1% YoY, and Infrastructure Platforms revenue of $7.54B, down 1% YoY; stock down ~5% after hours on weak Q2 guidance — Cisco shares fell as much as 6% after the close of trading on Wednesday after the company gave fiscal second-quarter earnings that came in below analysts' estimates.
Legendary coder John Carmack is leaving Facebook’s Oculus after 6 years to focus on a personal project — no less than the creation of Artificial General Intelligence, or “Strong AI.” He’ll remain attached to the company in a “Consulting CTO” position, but will be spending all his time working on, perhaps, the AI that finally surpasses and destroys humanity.
AGI or strong AI is the concept of an AI that learns much the way humans do, and as such is not as limited as the extremely narrow machine learning algorithms we refer to as AI today. AGI is the science fiction version of AI — HAL 9000, Replicants, and of course the Terminator. There are some good ones out there, too — Data and R2D2, for instance.
So far AGI has yet to be even defined in any serious way, let alone approached by researchers. It’s an open question whether such a thing is even possible, and if it is, whether we can accomplish it — and if we can, whether we should.
Carmack announced the move on Facebook, where he explained that the uncertainty about such a fascinating and exciting topic is exactly what attracted him to it.
When I think back over everything I have done across games, aerospace, and VR, I have always felt that I had at least a vague “line of sight” to the solutions, even if they were unconventional or unproven. I have sometimes wondered how I would fare with a problem where the solution really isn’t in sight. I decided that I should give it a try before I get too old.
His plan is to pursue it from home, “Victorian Gentleman Scientist” style, and make his kid help. It’s a bit like someone retiring early to dedicate their life full-time to the perpetual motion machine they’ve almost got working… except Carmack may actually have a chance to create something remarkable.
His is the rare combination of a technical mind combined with vision and creativity, leading him to skim the bleeding edge of technology and sometimes give it a serious push in some direction or another.
Unlike his work at Oculus, however, we won’t be able to buy the result of his expert touch, so we’ll just have to wait for whatever comes out of it, if anything. I wish him good luck — but I also wish he’d be careful.
Big changes are afoot for Wire, an enterprise-focused end-to-end encrypted messaging app and service that advertises itself as “the most secure collaboration platform”. In February, Wire quietly raised $8.2 million from Morpheus Ventures and others, we’ve confirmed — the first funding amount it has ever disclosed — and alongside that external financing, it moved its holding company in the same month to the US from Luxembourg, a switch that Wire’s CEO Morten Brogger described in an interview as “simple and pragmatic.”
He also said that Wire is planning to introduce a freemium tier to its existing consumer service — which itself has half a million users — while working on a larger round of funding to fuel more growth of its enterprise business — a key reason for moving to the US, he added: There is more money to be raised there.
“We knew we needed this funding and additional to support continued growth. We made the decision that at some point in time it will be easier to get funding in North America, where there’s six times the amount of venture capital,” he said.
While Wire has moved its holding company to the US, it is keeping the rest of its operations as is. Customers are licensed and serviced from Wire Switzerland; the software development team is in Berlin, Germany; and hosting remains in Europe.
The news of Wire’s US move and the basics of its February funding — sans value, date or backers — came out this week via a blog post that raises questions about whether a company that trades on the idea of data privacy should itself be more transparent about its activities.
The changes to Wire’s financing and legal structure had not been communicated to users until news started to leak out, which brings up questions not just about transparency, but about how secure Wire’s privacy policy will play out, given the company’s ownership now being on US soil.
It was an issue picked up and amplified by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. Via Twitter, he described the move to the US as “not appropriate for a company claiming to provide a secure messenger — claims a large number of human rights defenders relied on.”
The key question is whether Wire’s shift to the US puts users’ data at risk — a question that Brogger claims is straightforward to answer: “We are in Switzerland, which has the best privacy laws in the world” — it’s subject to Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation framework (GDPR) on top of its own local laws — “and Wire now belongs to a new group holding, but there no change in control.”
In its blog post published in the wake of blowback from privacy advocates, Wire also claims it “stands by its mission to best protect communication data with state-of-the-art technology and practice” — listing several items in its defence:
But where data privacy and US law are concerned, it’s complicated. Snowden famously leaked scores of classified documents disclosing the extent of US government mass surveillance programs in 2013, including how data-harvesting was embedded in US-based messaging and technology platforms.
Six years on, the political and legal ramifications of that disclosure are still playing out — with a key judgement pending from Europe’s top court which could yet unseat the current data transfer arrangement between the EU and the US.
Wire launched at a time when interest in messaging apps was at a high watermark. The company made its debut in the middle of February 2014, and it was only one week later that Facebook acquired WhatsApp for the princely sum of $19 billion. We described Wire’s primary selling point at the time as a “reimagining of how a communications tool like Skype should operate had it been built today” rather than in in 2003.
That meant encryption and privacy protection, but also better audio tools and file compression and more. It was a pitch that seemed especially compelling considering the background of the company. Skype co-founder Janus Friis and funds connected to him were the startup’s first backers (and they remain the largest shareholders); Wire was co-founded in by Skype alums Jonathan Christensen and Alan Duric (no longer with the company); and even new investor Morpheus has Skype roots.
Even with the Skype pedigree, the strategy faced a big challenge.
“The consumer messaging market is lost to the Facebooks of the world, which dominate it,” Brogger said today. “However, we made a clear insight, which is the core strength of Wire: security and privacy.”
That, combined with trend around the consumerization of IT that’s brought new tools to business users, is what led Wire to the enterprise market in 2017.
But fast forward to today, and it seems that even as security and privacy are two sides of the same coin, it may not be so simple when deciding what to optimise in terms of features and future development, which is part of the question now and what critics are concerned with.
“Wire was always for profit and planned to follow the typical venture backed route of raising rounds to accelerate growth,” one source familiar with the company told us. “However, it took time to find its niche (B2B, enterprise secure comms).
“It needed money to keep the operations going and growing. [But] the new CEO, who joined late 2017, didn’t really care about the free users, and the way I read it now, the transformation is complete: ‘If Wire works for you, fine, but we don’t really care about what you think about our ownership or funding structure as our corporate clients care about security, not about privacy.'”
And that is the message you get from Brogger, too, who describes individual consumers as “not part of our strategy”, but also not entirely removed from it, either, as the focus shifts to enterprises and their security needs.
Brogger said there are still half a million individuals on the platform, and they will come up with ways to continue to serve them under the same privacy policies and with the same kind of service as the enterprise users. “We want to give them all the same features with no limits,” he added. “We are looking to switch it into a freemium model.”
On the other side, “We are having a lot of inbound requests on how Wire can replace Skype for Business,” he said. “We are the only one who can do that with our level of security. It’s become a very interesting journey and we are super excited.”
Part of the company’s push into enterprise has also seen it make a number of hires. This has included bringing in two former Huddle C-suite execs, Brogger as CEO and Rasmus Holst as chief revenue officer — a bench that Wire expanded this week with three new hires from three other B2B businesses: a VP of EMEA sales from New Relic, a VP of finance from Contentful; and a VP of Americas sales from Xeebi.
Such growth comes with a price-tag attached to it, clearly. Which is why Wire is opening itself to more funding and more exposure in the US, but also more scrutiny and questions from those who counted on its services before the change.
Brogger said inbound interest has been strong and he expects the startup’s next round to close in the next two to three months.
Oculus CTO John Carmack says he is stepping down but will remain as a “consulting CTO”, will work on an artificial general intelligence, as a personal project — One of the driving forces behind Facebook's virtual reality efforts is leaving his post: Oculus CTO John Carmack …
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Redmi Note 8 Pro is all set to go on sale in India. The latest 64MP camera smartphone from Redmi will go on sale through Amazon, Mi.com, and Mi Home Stores. The Note 8 Pro is priced at Rs 14,999 for the base variant. It goes up against the likes of the Realme 5 Pro, Realme XT and other smartphones in the same price range.
Redmi Note 8 Pro specificationsThe Redmi Note 8 Pro features a 6.53-inch FHD+ LCD display. It has a waterdrop notch and gets a curved Gorilla Glass 5 protected panel on the back. It is powered by the MediaTek Helio G90T chipset and it comes in three variants: 6GB RAM + 64GB, 6GB RAM + 128GB storage and an 8GB RAM + 128GB storage version. The smartphone comes equipped with liquid cooling that is said to enable a better gaming experience. You can read our gaming performance review of the Redmi Note 8 Pro here.
In the optics department, Redmi Note 8 Pro sports a quad rear camera setup: a 64MP sensor by Samsung + an 8MP sensor with an ultra-wide lens + a 2MP depth sensor + a 2MP sensor with a macro lens. On the front lies a 20MP selfie shooter.
The handset packs a 4500mAh battery that supports 18W fast charging and it runs on MIUI 10 based on Android 9 Pie.
Redmi Note 8 Pro price and offersRedmi Note 8 Pro costs Rs 14,999 for the base, 6GB RAM + 64GB storage variant. The smartphone is priced at Rs 15,999 and Rs 17,999 for the 6GB RAM + 128GB storage and 8GB RAM + 128GB storage models respectively.
Redmi Note 8 Pro sale will commence at 12 noon. Sale offers include 10 percent instant discount for purchases made using Axis Bank debit and credit cards, double data benefits for Airtel customers who opt for the Rs. 249 and Rs. 349 prepaid plans, and no-cost EMI plans.
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