(This article is part of Today’s Cache, The Hindu’s newsletter on emerging themes at the intersection of technology, innovation and policy. To get it in your inbox, subscribe here.)
Intel shareholders sue company
Intel has been sued by its shareholders who believe that the company hid problems that have led to weak earnings, massive job cuts and no dividend. The tech giant’s market value fell by more than $32 billion in a day since these quarterly results were announced. The class action lawsuit was filed against Intel, CEO Patrick Gelsinger and CFO David Zinsner in San Francisco federal court.
Shareholders said that the company’s false and misleading statements about its foundry business had pushed up its stock price from between January till August, blindsiding them from the fact that their manufacturing business was “floundering,” even as costs were growing. The company announced job cuts of 15,000 people and suspended its dividend as cost cutting. This would save $10 billion for restructuring the company in 2025. The company has been losing market share as rival chipmakers like Nvidia and AMD have capitalised on the AI boom.
CrowdStrike report shows reason for IT outage
Almost three weeks since the IT outage caused by CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity firm has released an in-depth analysis of their investigation around what the root cause was for the Falcon sensor crash. The sensor which was meant to protect customer systems by anticipating advanced threats using AI/ML, was updated earlier this year in February. While the update was tested under the company’s standard software development processes, it couldn’t catch the issue.
On July 19, an update was delivered to some Windows hosts that would evolve the earlier capability but a mismatch due to an out-of-bounds memory read caused the system to crash. CrowdStrike has noted that they will adding additional deployment layers and more checks to address automated updates while also giving their customers more control around deployment. Besides, they will also be working with two independent third-party software security vendors to review the Falcon sensor even further. CrowdStrike’s shareholders have filed a lawsuit against the company for the losses from the outage while Delta Airlines is threatening to sue them.
YouTube Shorts has trillion views in India
YouTube Shorts has reached trillions of views in India after four years of being launched in India, CEO Neal Mohan said at an event. Shorts now has more than 11,000 Indian creators with over a million subscribers, 50% higher than last year. He added that viewership for the platform had grown by more four times over the past three years and cricket videos had more than 50 billion views over the past year.
YouTube has also started to roll out Dream Screen in India which will allow users to create AI-generated backgrounds for Shorts by just typing in an idea as a prompt. The platform will continue to integrate AI while expanding the boundaries of creativity. The platform has also launched a new suite of ad formats built to push engagement and amp up results for brands. Shorts also has interactive stickers in ads to push traction on the platform.