https://www.digiteex.com Digitex Solutions Thu, 09 Oct 2025 09:36:02 +0000 en-US hourly 1 224764844 https://www.digiteex.com/google-adds-limits-to-work-from-anywhere-policy-that-began-in-covid/ https://www.digiteex.com/google-adds-limits-to-work-from-anywhere-policy-that-began-in-covid/#respond Thu, 09 Oct 2025 09:36:00 +0000 https://www.digiteex.com/google-adds-limits-to-work-from-anywhere-policy-that-began-in-covid/ Sundar Pichai, chief executive officer of Alphabet Inc., during the Bloomberg Tech conference in San Francisco, California, US, on Wednesday, June 4, 2025. David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty ImagesGoogle is continuing to put restrictions on remote work, this time with a popular policy called “Work from Anywhere” that was established during the Covid pandemic.The policy has allowed employees to work from a location outside of their main office for up to four weeks per calendar year. According to internal documents viewed by CNBC, working remotely for even a single day will now count for a full week.”Whether you log 1 WFA day or 5 WFA days in a given standard work week, 1 WFA week will be deducted from your WFA weekly balance,” according to a document that was circulated over the summer, shortly before the change went into effect. Google isn’t altering its current hybrid schedule, which was also put in place during the pandemic, allowing employees to work from home two days a week. WFA days are distinct from that policy, giving staffers the flexibility to work remotely, but not at home.”WFA weeks cannot be used to work from home or nearby,” the document says.Google didn’t immediately respond to request for comment.Tech companies are increasingly forcing employees to spend more time in the office, with the peak of Covid now about five years in the past. Microsoft said last month that employees will be expected to work in an office three days a week starting next year, switching from a policy that allowed most of them to work from home 50% of the time or more with manager approval. Amazon went further, instructing corporate staffers to spend five days a week in the office.Google began offering some U.S. full-time employees voluntary buyouts at the beginning of 2025, and has notified remote workers from several units their jobs would be considered for layoffs if they didn’t return to offices to work a hybrid schedule.According to the latest changes, employees can’t work from a Google office in a separate state or country during their WFA time due to “legal and financial implications of cross border work.” If in a different location, employees may be required to work during the business hours that align with that time zone, the rules state.The WFA update doesn’t apply to all Google staffers and may exclude data center workers, and those who are required to be in physical offices. Violations of the policy will result in disciplinary action or termination, the document says.The issue came up at a recent all-hands meeting.A top-rated question that was submitted on Google’s internal system described the update as “confusing.””Why does even one day of WFA count as a whole week, and can we reconsider the restriction on using WFA weeks to work from home?” the question said.John Casey, Google’s vice president of performance and rewards, said at the meeting that WFA “was meant to meet Googlers where they were during the pandemic,” according to audio obtained by CNBC.”The policy was always intended to be taken in increments of a week and not be used as a substitute for working from home in a regular hybrid work week,” Casey said.WATCH: Google adds Gemini to Chrome for all users in push to bolster AI search


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]]> https://www.digiteex.com/google-adds-limits-to-work-from-anywhere-policy-that-began-in-covid/feed/ 0 5282 https://www.digiteex.com/were-buying-the-dip-in-an-ai-data-center-play-still-under-pressure-post-deepseek/ https://www.digiteex.com/were-buying-the-dip-in-an-ai-data-center-play-still-under-pressure-post-deepseek/#respond Fri, 21 Feb 2025 20:36:13 +0000 https://www.digiteex.com/were-buying-the-dip-in-an-ai-data-center-play-still-under-pressure-post-deepseek/ We’re buying 25 shares of Eaton just below $300 each. Following Friday’s trade, Jim Cramer’s Charitable Trust will own 325 shares of ETN, increasing its weighting to about 2.7% from about 2.5%. Friday’s market losses picked up steam in the afternoon with momentum stocks continuing to roll over and cyclical stocks falling on weakening economic data. Fortunately, we have limited the impact of these losses by building up a huge war chest of cash. It’s no secret that the economy has slowed over the past few weeks. Using the Atlanta Fed GDPNow forecast as a guide, the latest estimate of first-quarter economic growth is 2.3%, down from a 3.9% estimate on Feb. 3. We’re not surprised to see consumer discretionary and industrials as two of the worst-performing sectors this month. However, we do expect the economic slowdown to be short-lived. So, we’re dipping into our cash hoard to beef up one of those beaten-down industrial names, which makes electrical components and power management systems used to run energy-intensive AI data centers. With Eaton shares trading below their DeepSeek freakout levels, we see this as an opportunity to buy more. ETN 1Y mountain Eaton 1 year The first instinct when the Chinese startup claimed that it made a more efficient, lower-cost large language model was that the world wouldn’t need as many data centers to power artificial intelligence. Since data centers are one of Eaton’s largest end markets and one of the company’s fastest-growing, the DeepSeek news on Jan. 27 caused shares to fall 15% to about $311 each. Unlike Club AI chip king Nvidia , whose stock has recovered most of its DeepSeek losses, Eaton shares have a longer road to recovery. However, as we’ve learned in recent weeks, there has been zero change in the spending habits of the big tech hyperscalers building out these data centers. In fact, these titans plan to invest more money in their AI infrastructure in 2025 versus last year Club names Amazon , Microsoft , Meta Platforms , and Alphabet all raised their capital expenditure outlooks for this year, erasing concerns that one would break ranks and slow down their investments. We also heard Eaton’s thoughts on the subject when the company reported strong earnings on Jan. 31. During the quarterly conference call, management explained that a shift toward more inferencing data centers and away from training specialized data centers would be a positive development for the business because it would speed up construction times without a change in the amount of electrical needed. In short, DeepSeek’s impact on the pace of AI infrastructure investment has been overblown. And, that’s why we are buyers of Eaton, a stock we believe in for the long haul. (Jim Cramer’s Charitable Trust is long ENT, AMZN, MSFT, META, GOOGL, NVDA. See here for a full list of the stocks.) As a subscriber to the CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer, you will receive a trade alert before Jim makes a trade. Jim waits 45 minutes after sending a trade alert before buying or selling a stock in his charitable trust’s portfolio. If Jim has talked about a stock on CNBC TV, he waits 72 hours after issuing the trade alert before executing the trade. THE ABOVE INVESTING CLUB INFORMATION IS SUBJECT TO OUR TERMS AND CONDITIONS AND PRIVACY POLICY , TOGETHER WITH OUR DISCLAIMER . NO FIDUCIARY OBLIGATION OR DUTY EXISTS, OR IS CREATED, BY VIRTUE OF YOUR RECEIPT OF ANY INFORMATION PROVIDED IN CONNECTION WITH THE INVESTING CLUB. NO SPECIFIC OUTCOME OR PROFIT IS GUARANTEED.


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]]> https://www.digiteex.com/were-buying-the-dip-in-an-ai-data-center-play-still-under-pressure-post-deepseek/feed/ 0 4998 https://www.digiteex.com/microsoft-joins-quantum-computing-battle-with-majorana-1-challenging-google-nvidias-advances/ https://www.digiteex.com/microsoft-joins-quantum-computing-battle-with-majorana-1-challenging-google-nvidias-advances/#respond Wed, 19 Feb 2025 22:13:09 +0000 https://www.digiteex.com/microsoft-joins-quantum-computing-battle-with-majorana-1-challenging-google-nvidias-advances/ Microsoft Joins Quantum Computing Battle with Majorana 1, Challenging Google, Nvidia’s Advances On Wednesday, Microsoft Corp (NASDAQ:MSFT) launched Majorana 1, making its quantum chip debut powered by a new Topological Core architecture that it expects to realize quantum computers capable of solving meaningful, industrial-scale problems in years. The chip leverages topoconductor, a material which can observe and control Majorana particles to produce more reliable and scalable qubits, which are the building blocks for quantum computers. Topoconductors and Microsoft’s new type of chip offer a path to developing quantum systems that can scale to a million qubits and tackle the most complex industrial and societal problems. Also Read: Muddy Waters’ Carson Block Warns Against Chinese Stocks Despite Recent Market Surge: Report This new architecture offers a clear path to fit a million qubits on a single chip that can fit in the palm of one’s hand, delivering solutions like breaking down microplastics into harmless byproducts or inventing self-healing materials for construction, manufacturing, or healthcare. The topoconductor, or topological superconductor, is a unique material category that can create a topological state that can produce a more stable qubit that is fast, small, and digitally controlled. The topoconductor required developing an entirely new materials stack made of indium arsenide and aluminum, much of which Microsoft designed and fabricated atom by atom. Microsoft aimed to coax new quantum particles called Majoranas into existence and take advantage of their unique properties to reach the next horizon of quantum computing. The world’s first Topological Core, powering the Majorana 1, is reliable by design. It incorporates error resistance at the hardware level, making it more stable. The Microsoft team’s new measurement approach enables qubits to be controlled digitally. Microsoft has placed eight topological qubits on a chip designed to scale to one million. That approach led the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to include Microsoft in a program to evaluate innovative quantum computing technologies. In addition to making its quantum hardware, Microsoft has partnered with Quantinuum and Atom Computing to reach scientific and engineering breakthroughs with today’s qubits. Now, Azure Quantum offers a suite of integrated solutions that allow customers to leverage these leading AI, high-performance computing, and quantum platforms in Azure to advance scientific discovery. Last December, Alphabet Inc’s (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL) Google announced its quantum chip Willow. The company said Willow could reduce errors exponentially as it scaled up using more qubits. Story Continues


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]]> https://www.digiteex.com/microsoft-joins-quantum-computing-battle-with-majorana-1-challenging-google-nvidias-advances/feed/ 0 4890 https://www.digiteex.com/deepseek-next-generation-ai-agents-may-erode-value-of-large-models/ https://www.digiteex.com/deepseek-next-generation-ai-agents-may-erode-value-of-large-models/#respond Fri, 31 Jan 2025 07:09:50 +0000 https://www.digiteex.com/deepseek-next-generation-ai-agents-may-erode-value-of-large-models/ Jaap Arriens | NurPhoto via Getty ImagesLarge language models like those developed by Microsoft-backed firm OpenAI are set to become commoditized this year amid rapid advances toward next-generation artificial intelligence agents and more nimble, open-source rivals, according to top tech executives.Last week, Chinese AI firm DeepSeek released R1, an open-source reasoning model that claims to rival OpenAI’s o1 model on both cost and performance. Open-source refers to software whose source code is made freely available on the open web for possible modification and redistribution.This week, growing awareness of DeepSeek’s new model led to a severe slump in shares of Nvidia and other tech giants, as investors feared a possible retrenchment in spending on the powerful graphics processing units required to train and run advanced AI workloads.Nvidia lost close to $600 billion in market capitalization on Monday — the biggest single-day drop for any company in U.S. history.Meanwhile, executives and scientists at leading AI labs are all talking up a shift from large language models to so-called “AI agents” that can carry out actions on your behalf.LLMs are the foundational technology behind today’s generative AI apps. However, experts believe a push toward agentic AI systems — which incorporate LLM technology — this year will erode the value of these models.Commoditization of LLMsLLMs are expected to become more of a commodity in the near future as the tech becomes increasingly advanced and the costs involved in training and running them continue to drop.Thomas Wolf, co-founder and chief science officer of Hugging Face, suggested LLMs will become more integrated into intelligent systems linked to the company’s own databases.”I think people are moving from this craziness around the model, understanding that, thanks to open-source … a lot of these models are going to be free and freely available,” Wolf told CNBC. Hugging Face is a popular code repository for open-source AI projects.”In the internet revolution, we’re moving from building websites as the main business to actually building internet-native companies — so, the Airbnb of AI, the Stripe of AI,” he added. “They are not about the model. They are about the system and how you make the model useful for tasks.”The arrival of DeepSeek’s R1 model last week is viewed by some tech CEOs as a further indicator LLMs are becoming increasingly commoditized.R1 incorporates some key aspects that differentiate it from other models on the market. For example, the model incorporates a “mixed precision” framework that uses a combination of full-precision 32-bit floating point (FP32) numbers and low-precision 8-bit floating point (FP8) numbers.The latter is faster to process but can be less accurate. However, rather than rely on one or the other, DeepSeek uses FP8 for most calculations and switches to FP32 for certain tasks where a higher degree of accuracy is required.”As AI gets more efficient and accessible, we will see its use skyrocket, turning it into a commodity we just can’t get enough of,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella wrote on social media platform X, in an apparent reference to DeepSeek.Meanwhile, Matt Calkins, CEO of U.S. software firm Appian, told CNBC that DeepSeek’s success simply shows that AI models are going to become more of a commodity in the future.”In my opinion, we’re going to see a commoditization of AI. Many companies will achieve competitive AI, and a lack of differentiation will be bad for high-spending first-movers,” Calkins said via email.What are AI agents?In the last two years, much of the focus has been on LLM-powered products, from generative AI chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT to tools that can produce images and video content.LLM-based generative apps like ChatGPT rely on a certain amount of handholding from users to continuously prompt them for outputs, whereas in contrast, AI agents are designed to be more action-oriented.If you wanted to book a doctor’s appointment, for example, you could ask ChatGPT for information on your nearest GP practices — similar to how you’d query the web using Google’s search engine.In future, tech execs predict the next generation AI will involve agents that can find out where your nearest GP is, provide available times for your doctor, and book you an appointment — all directly within a single platform. This is expected to transform the way that we interact with the web.”Over the decades since the web was invented, the standard interface of webpages and menus hasn’t really changed very much,” Bobby Blumofe, chief technology officer of Akamai, told CNBC previously.”We’re sort of living in this tyranny of being tethered to a screen and being tethered to web pages and menus you have to remember how to navigate.”The shift from models to agentsLast week, Arthur Mensch, the CEO of Mistral said that he thinks the “focus should shift to systems” that integrate both language models and contextual business data.”That’s that’s where this is shifting,” Mensch told CNBC’s Arjun Kharpal at the World Economic Forum’s annual gathering in Davos, Switzerland.”It also means that the industry that is adopting it, is going to distill its expertise into those systems — and that’s where that’s going to be necessary to actually drive the value of AI into those industries.”Mistral, which is backed by Microsoft, has swiftly become one of Europe’s buzziest AI firms. Founded only two years ago, it was last valued by investors at around $6 billion in June 2024.The trend of agents has already gained considerable traction. Last week, OpenAI launched its own agent, called Operator. OpenAI describes it as “an agent that can go to the web to perform tasks for you,” adding it’s trained to interact with “the buttons, menus, and text fields that people use daily” on the web.Microsoft, which has invested billions of dollars in OpenAI, rolled out AI agents itself in November.Anthropic, an Amazon-backed AI startup founded by ex-OpenAI research executives, last year introduced “computer use,” which is a capability that allows its AI agents to use computers like humans to complete complex tasks.Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, told CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin in Davos last week that Computer Use should be thought of as a precursor to a “broader vision” that integrates these agents with commonly used applications.”We are planning this year in 2025 to build something that we call the ‘virtual collaborator,'” Amodei said, describing it as “an agent that operates on your computer.””You can give it tasks. You can say, write this feature for this app, and it’ll write some code, it’ll compile the code, it’ll check the code, it’ll talk to its coworkers on Slack, or on Google Docs, or on some other platform,” Anthropic’s chief explained.Anthropic plans to gradually build out pieces of this vision over the next year — while still ensuring it’s “safe and controllable,” Amodei added.Paul O’Sullivan, Salesforce’s chief technology officer for U.K. and Ireland, predicts verbal communication will become more important in the new world of AI agents. Salesforce was arguably early to the agentic AI game, having launched its own Agentforce system in September before Microsoft, OpenAI or Anthropic.”We will converse more,” he told CNBC in a recent interview. “The screens will get smaller, our eyes will get worse. But they’ll probably be replaced with mobile devices that are more powerful than laptops anyway.”

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