This Week I Learned - Week #21 2024

This Week I Learned - 

* Azure VMware Solution is available in in 33 Azure regions globally including India Central. 

* Power Automate now brings AI innovation to robotic process automation (RPA) by giving users the option to train the desktop recorder in a more natural and flexible way. Multimodal AI recording for desktop flows uses screen understanding and speech processing to let users teach the desktop recorder how to automate a process. AI flows leverage the simplicity of natural language and the power of rapidly evolving large language model (LLM) abilities to create more intelligent, flexible, and dynamic automation. Instead of building out complex rules-based processes from beginning to end, users work with AI to create an automation plan. When the plan is executed, the LLM considers all the resources available to it and dynamically selects the most appropriate actions to achieve the desired outcome. 

* There are separate Microsoft 365 offerings for home, business, and enterprises.

* Noam Chomsky on Artificial Intelligence:

"The human mind is not, like ChatGPT and its ilk, a lumbering statistical engine for pattern matching, gorging on hundreds of terabytes of data and extrapolating the most likely conversational response or most probable answer to a scientific question. On the contrary, the human mind is a surprisingly efficient and even elegant system that operates with small amounts of information; it seeks not to infer brute correlations among data points but to create explanations..."

"... Let's stop calling it "Artificial Intelligence" then and call it for what it is and makes "plagiarism software" because "It doesn't create anything, but copies existing works, of existing artists, modifying them enough to escape copyright laws...." - Dr. Noam Chomsky, Dr. Ian Roberts, Dr. Jeffrey Watumull, New York Times, March 8 2023

* Jensen Huang co-founded Santa Clara, California-based Nvidia in 1993 with friends Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem and has been leading as chief executive officer since then. The company created the first so-called graphics processing unit in 1999 and went public in the same year. Huang’s wealth is derived from his 3.5% stake in Nvidia. Huang’s net worth jumped to $91.3 billion in May 2024, bumping him up three spots on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index to become the 17th-richest person in the world. Nearly all his wealth is in Nvidia stock, which rose 9.3% after a bullish sales forecast that reinforced the company’s status as the biggest beneficiary of artificial intelligence-related spending. Huang, 61, in his signature black leather jacket, has become a celebrity in the AI era. His company started as a provider of graphics cards for computer gamers. But he recognized that Nvidia’s chips were well-suited to developing AI software and that helped open a new market — and gave him a jump on competitors.  - Bloomberg

* Mobile number spoofing, also referred to as caller ID spoofing or voice phishing, is a fraudulent practice where a scammer deliberately alters the phone number or name displayed on the caller ID. The objective is to deceive recipients into thinking the call is coming from a known number, thereby coaxing them to reveal personal and financial details. This caller ID spoofing may happen when some banks have separate numbers for customer support and WhatsApp and a WhatsApp call with a spoofed called id may be mistaken for a call from the bank. 

* "Best Friends Forever," commonly abbreviated as BFF, epitomizes a deep bond of friendship. This term gained popularity as a convenient sign-off between friends during instant messaging (IM) or texting on mobile phones, symbolizing the expression of their affection for each other. The timeless notion of a "best friend" has been embraced by brands such as Coca-Cola, which has featured the phrase on its products, inviting consumers to "Share a Diet Coke with your BFF."

* "When you are dead, you don't know you are dead. It's pain only for others. It's the same thing when you are stupid." - Richard Feynman

* "...research is immersion in the unknown.  We just don’t know what we’re doing. people once discovered to making your own discoveries. 

The more comfortable we become with being stupid, the deeper we will wade into the unknown and the more likely we are to make big discoveries." - Martin A Schwartz