TechNews

Businesses in China are willing to pay big bucks to virtual employees. Tech Company Baidu told that the virtual people projects it has worked on for its clients has been doubled since previous year, with a huge price range of $2,800 to a $14,300 per year. Virtual employees are a combination of animation, machine learning, and sound tech that create digitized persons who can sing or interact on a live stream. While these digitized persons have popped up on the fringes of the USA internet, they’ve been appearing more often in China’s cyberspace. Baidu’s virtual people and robotics business head Li Shiyan…

The CEO of SAP said that the world is entering into the next stage of globalization and he is largely positive regarding the outlook for technology even though there are challenges like supply chain disruptions and higher interest rates. SAP CEO Christian Klein expressed at the World Economic Forum, “We are entering from my perspective the next phase of globalization. In this era of change, companies will want to shift their focus toward building up resilient supply chains and improving their sustainability credentials.” Klein added that companies are coming together to resolve supply chains and corporate social responsibility issues with the…

An often-overlooked but crucially important environmental issue—Big Tech's growing water footprint—is coming under more public scrutiny as a result of a global rush to capitalize on the next wave of generative artificial intelligence. Researchers say the race to profit from the next wave of AI is one of the main causes of the significant increase in water consumption that tech giants, like Microsoft and Alphabet-owned Google, have recently reported. Shaolei Ren, a researcher at the University of California, Riverside, published a study in April investigating the resources needed to run buzzy generative AI models, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Depending on…