Gadgets
Amazon CEO Unveils 55,000 Tech Jobs in First Hiring Push Under His Watch
That’s equal to more than a third of Google’s headcount as of June 30, and close to all of Facebook’s.
Jassy, in his first press interview since he ascended to Amazon’s top post in July, said the company needed more firepower to keep up with demand in retail, the cloud, and advertising, among other businesses. He said the company’s new bet to launch satellites into orbit to widen broadband access, called Project Kuiper, would require a lot of new hires, too.
With Amazon’s annual job fair scheduled to begin September 15, Jassy hopes now is a good time for recruiting. “There are so many jobs during the pandemic that have been displaced or have been altered, and there are so many people who are thinking about different and new jobs,” said Jassy, who cited a US survey from PwC that 65 percent of workers wanted a new gig.
“It’s part of what we think makes ‘Career Day’ so timely and so useful,” he said. The new hires would represent a 20 percent increase in Amazon’s tech and corporate staff, who currently number around 275,000 globally, the company said.
Amazon’s move, only the latest hiring spree on which it has embarked, follows a period of heightened scrutiny of its labour practices and opposition by the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. Earlier this year, a failed effort by some staff in Alabama to organise put on display Amazon’s taxing warehouse work and its aggressive stance against unions. In that battle’s aftermath, Jeff Bezos, the CEO whom Jassy succeeded, said Amazon needed a better vision for employees.
Asked how he might change Amazon’s demanding workplace culture, Jassy said its heavy focus on customers and inventiveness set it up for improvements.
“Everybody at the company has the freedom – and really, the expectation – to critically look at how it can be better and then invent ways to make it better.”
The positions Amazon is marketing include engineering, research science, and robotics roles, postings that are largely new to the company rather than jobs others quit, it said.
In a reopening US economy, and tightening labour market, some companies have struggled to fill vacancies and balance remote and in-person work. It was unclear how many of the Amazon jobs – such as for competitive engineering hires – have been open for some time.
Amazon, which earlier touted an “office-centric culture,” later dialed back its vision and offered workers the opportunity to spend just three days a week at its offices in person starting next year.
Already the second-biggest private employer in the United States, Amazon brought on more than 500,000 people in 2020, largely in warehouse and delivery operations. That area has had significant turnover.
The company is investing heavily in building more warehouses and boosting pay to attract workers, in order to catch up to strong demand from shoppers seeking products delivered to their homes. Jassy said Amazon has been “very competitive on the compensation side.” He said, “We’ve led the way in the $15 (roughly Rs. 1,100) minimum wage,” and for some states on average that “really, the starting salary is $17 (roughly Rs. 1,240) an hour.”
Of the more than 55,000 jobs Jassy announced, over 40,000 will be in the United States, while others will be in countries such as India, Germany, and Japan.
Amazon previously promised a big tech hiring binge in 2017, when it sought a location for its second headquarters. Officials at cities and states across North America fawned on the company for its jobs and tax dollars.
Arlington, Virginia, the “HQ2” contest winner that so far has a small fraction of the 25,000 roles Amazon has promised it over a decade, currently has about 2,800 openings. The city of Bellevue where Amazon is growing near its hometown Seattle has another 2,000.
The career fair will be global. That’s after Amazon saw 22,000 people tune in last year from India, among other locales outside the United States, Jassy said.
© Thomson Reuters 2021
“At Xbox, we believe that with better tools, creators can make even more extraordinary games,” Haiyan Zhang, GM, Xbox Gaming AI, said in a blog post. “This partnership will bring together: Inworld’s expertise in working with generative AI models for character development, Microsoft’s cutting-edge cloud-based AI solutions including Azure OpenAI Service, Microsoft Research’s technical insights into the future of play, and Team Xbox’s strengths in revolutionizing accessible and responsible creator tools for all developers.”
The aforementioned AI design copilot is a toolset that will help game designers turn prompts into scripts and dialogue trees. In contrast, the character runtime will enable dynamically generated plot beats and quests. We’ve already seen heavy AI integration in games by way of procedural generation — a more recent example being the 1000+ planets in Starfield. Not to mention, enemy AI has been around for way longer.
Inworld made headlines in August when it launched a modded story mode for Grand Theft Auto V, Sentient Streets, in which players had to investigate the rise of a bizarre AI-worshipping cult — a segment loaded with characters that spoke in AI-generated dialogue, on the fly. The mod was later taken down by publisher Take-Two, leaving a permanent strike on the creator Bloc’s YouTube channel. As per The Verge, Inworld’s AI technology can also be used for narration in top-down RPGs to warn players about any events awaiting off-screen and respond to questions like we’ve seen in the past year with AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Bing Chat. Microsoft has also been heavily banking on artificial intelligence, having made a $10 billion (about Rs. 83,254 crore) investment in OpenAI. The company has also integrated AI tools into its popular suite of services and also added an AI copilot to Windows.
Despite being a Microsoft-affiliated AI toolset, it would be interesting to see whether titles using them will be allowed to thrive on other platforms. In July, Valve claimed that it would be cracking down on games that included AI-generated assets if the developer didn’t own the copyright to the piece of art. For the uninitiated, when you insert a prompt to create something in AI, the software simply repurposes existing assets found online and mushes them together — basically stealing from other artists and writers without appropriate commercial licenses. Infringing them would lead to the game not being distributed on Steam, forcing the developers to seek proper licenses for the asset by reaching out to the AI companies involved. It’s unclear how Microsoft’s partnership will play out — as long as AI content is being used as a catalyst to innovate and create something new, it should be fine.
In a post on X shared by BSNL’s Andhra Pradesh (@bsnl_ap_circle) unit, the company confirmed that BSNL users can upgrade their older 2G or 3G SIMs to a 4G SIM for free. Not only will the upgrade be free, but a promotional image shared with the post suggests that users who opt for the upgrade will also receive 4GB of free data that will be valid for three months. It is speculated that BSNL is aiming to boost its upcoming 4G services with this offer. The announcement was first spotted by Telecom Talk.
To access the free data offer and the free upgrade, BSNL users are requested to get in touch with executives at BSNL’s Customer Service Centre, franchisee or retailer stores, or contact one of their Direct Selling Agents (DSA). The promo image also adds in a finer print that the offer is available with certain terms and conditions, but hasn’t detailed any, so far.
Reliance’s Jio recently launched the 4G-supported Bharat B1 feature phone in India. The handset is priced at Rs. 1,299 in India. Alongside 4G connectivity, the phone comes with JioCinema and JioSaavn applications pre-installed.
The Jio Bharat B1 is equipped with the JioPay application, which is said to allow users to make UPI payments. Aiming to increase accessibility, the phone supports 23 languages overall, including multiple regional languages.
Realme, via Weibo, announced the arrival of the Realme GT 5 Pro in China. The display of the handset is confirmed to offer 3000 nits peak brightness. It has also been teased to offer heat dissipation with a surface area of around 10,000mm2. It is confirmed to ship with Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 SoC. The post doesn’t specify the exact launch date of the smartphone, however, given the release of the teasers, the launch could be just around the corner.
The Realme GT 5 Pro has been in the news a lot lately. It is expected to feature a 6.78-inch (1,264×2,780 pixels) AMOLED display and is tipped to come in 8GB, 12GB, and 16GB RAM options along with 128GB, 256GB, 512GB, and 1TB inbuilt storage options.
For optics, the Realme GT 5 Pro is said to have a triple rear camera unit comprising two 50-megapixel sensors and an 8-megapixel shooter at the rear. The camera setup might include a Sony LYTIA LYT808 sensor, an OmniVision OV08D10 secondary sensor, and a Sony IMX890 telephoto sensor. For selfies, there could be a 32-megapixel sensor at the front. It is said to carry a 5,400mAh battery with support for 100W wired charging and 50W wireless charging.
The Realme GT 5 Pro is expected to come with upgrades over Realme GT 5. The latter was launched in China in August with a price tag of CNY 2,999 for the base model with 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage.
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