InsureTech Connect (ITC) was bustling with 9,000 attendees, including carriers, agents, brokers, and a whole host of solution and technology providers, both incumbents and startups alike. With over $4 billion in insurtech funding so far this year, the industry is full of inspiring ideas on how to improve insurance. As the industry and the insurtech ecosystem continue to mature, however, there’s still a struggle to connect all the pieces and scale effectively. Here are five key takeaways from the conference. Everyone is talking about AI, but how many are using it? At past conferences, it has felt like attendees were on a hunt to solve problems using AI. Now, we are seeing real implementations of AI in claims, fraud, and internal knowledge management. All these use cases are still standalone solutions focused on operational efficiency and productivity gains. We have a long way to go before AI takes on the challenge of profitable topline growth. But significant advances in the technology and pressure from the C-suite to deliver ROI are leading to more sophisticated conversations about AI. Carriers will need to improve their data postures if they want to scale AI and see some real gains that contribute to operating performance. To have nice things, you first need to have nice data; very few are able to do this at the moment. A refreshing focus on fundamentals has emerged. The industry and the insurtech ecosystem have a renewed focus on insurance expertise as a core competency for building novel solutions. Gone are those outsider buccaneers — the provocative disrupters — that knew little about insurance but were there to revolutionize the industry with the backing of fast and loose venture capital funding. Venture funds now refuse to invest in founders that lack core insurance expertise, bringing a noticeable level of humility to insurtechs, both small and large. The industry now has a better focus on innovation within the realities of the highly regulated, nuanced, and intentionally conservative business of disciplined underwriting and claims management. Offerings containing old-school underwriting and claims along with new-school solutions are now better able to address the reality of the insurance industry. Embedded insurance is poised to make its mark on insurance. Two factors favor embedded insurance in the current climate. First, the hard market is driving carriers to diversify and to a certain degree differentiate through alternative distribution models. Second, changing customer preferences favor embedding insurance seamlessly into customer journeys and making it available at the point of need. Technology providers like Bolt offer a platform that helps insurers provide embedded insurance products by digitally connecting distribution partners and end customers to carriers. These capabilities seamlessly allow insurance products to be part of other existing customer journeys. Hyper personalization is a winning solution for the industry. There is a shift toward customizing life and P&C insurance based on individual customer behaviors and preferences. Distribution partners, including agents and brokers, are increasingly facilitating tailored offerings in both life and P&C lines. This is proving to be a winning solution for customer acquisition and retention. Insureds are very receptive to customized solutions, since they provide transparency into coverages. Driving customer engagement is a rare silver lining in an increasing-rate environment. The question remains: Is personalization the answer to an industry that struggles with customer engagement? Time will tell. In the meantime, strong partnerships among insurers, insurtechs, and other value-chain participants are driving innovation and streamlining policy and claims administration in pursuit of delighting the customer. Carriers are begging to modernize their aging tech stacks. Incumbent insurers continue to maintain aging technology stacks. Some of them are still running business-critical functions on mainframe systems. The industry desperately needs to modernize but has struggled due to expense pressures and risks of impacting existing books of business. Luckily for the industry, new solutions such as InsureMO are now offering carriers middleware infrastructure powered by APIs and microservices that is bringing new life to these old tech stacks. These solutions sit on top of legacy systems and provide a bridge to modernization, but the risks of additional tech debt from these solutions demand that carriers have a deliberate strategy for them. ITC was a packed few days with lots of energy and inspiring ideas. Clients interested in discussing these and other themes can chat with me via an inquiry or guidance session. source

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More OpenAI announced the public release of its hyperrealistic AI video generation software Sora today — nearly 10 months after it was first shown publicly in February 2024. In fact, OpenAI is actually releasing a much upgraded model from the one debuted back then: The new Sora Turbo will be available at sora.com to ChatGPT Plus and Pro paying subscribers ($20/month or $200/month) for those in the U.S. and most countries outside of the EU and UK. OpenAI cofounder and CEO Sam Altman presented the news in a YouTube livestream, part of the company’s “12 Days of OpenAI” series of holiday-themed announcements scheduled for 1 pm ET / 10 am PT. Sora can generate a wide range of videos from text inputs or still images, creating clips between 10 and 20 seconds long, and do so in a range of resolutions from 480p to 1080p, as well as aspect ratios from landscape to square and vertical. OpenAI created a whole new unique interface for the product, which includes a grid or list view the user can toggle within to see their generations. Users can also enter a mode called Storyboarding which lets them generate multiple linked clips in a Timeline view. The model attempts to provide a seamless transition between the clips — users can drag to make cuts more abrupt or make takes longer and more fluid. ChatGPT Plus users can generate up to 50 videos per month at 480p resolution. For professionals and heavy users, the Pro plan offers higher resolutions, longer durations, and unlimited generations at slow speeds. OpenAI also announced plans to release tailored pricing options for diverse user needs by early 2025. News broken by MKBHD Popular tech reviewing YouTuber Marques Brownlee, better known by his handle MKHBD, broke the news of Sora’s release about an hour beforehand. “The rumors are true — SORA, OpenAI’s AI video generator, is launching for the public today…” Brownlee wrote in a post on the social network X. Brownlee also shared a thread of examples of videos he made using the text/image/video-to-video generator, to which he was given early access as one among several dozen early creative partners to whom OpenAI seeded the program before its general release. Brownlee shared that while Sora could produce impressive and sometimes eerily realistic footage such as that of newscasters or a gadget reviewer like himself, it also tends to hallucinate random details and telltale signs of being AI-generated, such as garbled, nonsensical text in news chyrons, unnatural physics, and even adding or removing objects seemingly at random. He also noted that OpenAI imposes fairly strict guardrails against generating likenesses of real people and against violence and explicit themes. Credit: MKBHD/YouTube Still, in his full YouTube review, he also ultimately concluded that “this is a lot for humanity to digest now…[it] is the new baseline, this is once again the worst that it will ever be.” Leaked on Hugging Face in protest by early testers The release follows a leak of Sora onto the AI code sharing community Hugging Face by beta testers roughly two weeks ago in protest of OpenAI’s handling of the beta testing program. As the leakers wrote on their Hugging Face space: “Hundreds of artists provide unpaid labor through bug testing, feedback and experimental work for the program for a $150B valued company. While hundreds contribute for free, a select few will be chosen through a competition to have their Sora-created films screened — offering minimal compensation which pales in comparison to the substantial PR and marketing value OpenAI receives.” Sora also arrives in the midst of an increasingly competitive landscape for realistic, live-action AI video generation. Runway continues to upgrade its AI video generation platform rapidly with new features including, just last week, the ability to re-record dialog in pre-existing footage and have the characters’ faces match. Luma AI and Chinese competitors such as Kling, Hailuo, and recently, Tencent, have all fielded impressive AI video generation tools in the last few weeks alone. So even though OpenAI — by virtue of its success with ChatGPT and early, eye-catching Sora footage — may have strong recognition that can help popularize the launch of this new AI video generator to the masses, there are now many competing options that appear, at least superficially, to offer similar or better video quality. That makes Sora less of a guaranteed success. source

This year has not been quiet for the cybersecurity field. We have seen record-breaking data breaches, huge ransomware payouts, and illuminating studies about the impact of the increasingly complex and ever-evolving threat landscape. As we approach the new year, TechRepublic revisits the biggest cybersecurity stories of 2024. 1.  Midnight Blizzard’s attack on Microsoft In January, Microsoft disclosed that it had been a victim of a nation-state-backed attack beginning in November 2023. The Russian threat actor group Midnight Blizzard accessed some Microsoft corporate emails and documents through compromised email accounts. Later, Microsoft revealed they had also accessed some source code repositories and internal systems. Midnight Blizzard gained access through a successful password spray attack on a legacy test tenant account without multi-factor authorisation. Password spraying is a brute force attack in which threat actors spam or “spray” commonly used passwords against many different accounts in one organisation or application. From there, they could use that account’s permissions to access a small number of Microsoft corporate email accounts—some of those accounts were for senior leadership team members. Midnight Blizzard was particularly active this year. In October, it launched targeted spear-phishing attacks on over 100 organisations worldwide. Spear-phishing emails contained RDP configuration files, allowing the attackers to connect to and potentially compromise the targeted systems. 2.  Record ransomware payouts and active groups In February, Chainalysis announced that global ransomware payments exceeded $1 billion for the first time in 2023. “Big game hunting,” where groups go after large organisations and demand ransoms of over $1 million, is on the rise, and affected organisations are often tempted to pay. Furthermore, in October, it was announced that the second quarter of this year saw the highest number of active ransomware groups on record. This suggests that law enforcement takedowns are proving effective against the more established gangs, opening up new opportunities for smaller groups. Indeed, artificial intelligence could be lowering the barrier to entry to stage ransomware attacks, widening the pool of individuals who might do so. 3.  LockBit’s clash with law enforcement The notorious ransomware group LockBit was subject to a law enforcement takedown in February. The U.K. National Crime Agency’s Cyber Division, the FBI, and international partners cut off their website, which had been used as a large ransomware-as-a-service storefront. The LockBit ransomware was the most common type of ransomware deployed globally in 2023. However, a few days later, the group resumed operations at a different Dark Web address and claimed responsibility for ransomware attacks worldwide. This is despite Britain’s National Crime Agency claiming the ransomware gang was “completely compromised,” according to Reuters. Whether it remained fully or partially operational, the takedown did have positive ripple effects. NCC Group noted a year-over-year decline in ransomware attacks in both June and July this year, which experts linked to the LockBit disruption. A report from Cyberint also said that the third quarter of this year saw the lowest number of quarterly attacks from the group in a year and a half. Research from Malwarebytes also found that the proportion of ransomware attacks LockBit claimed responsibility for decreased from 26% to 20% over the past year despite carrying out more individual attacks. 4.  World’s largest compilation of passwords leaked In July, the world’s largest compilation of leaked passwords, containing 9,948,575,739 unique plaintext entries, was posted on a hacking forum. The credentials were discovered in a file named “rockyou2024.txt,” and many of the passwords had already been leaked in previous data breaches. RockYou is a defunct social application site. In 2009, more than 32 million of its users’ account details were exposed after a hacker accessed the plaintext file where they had been stored. In June 2021, another text file named “rockyou2021.txt ” was posted. This 100GB file contained 8.4 billion passwords, making it the largest-ever password dump at the time. Must-read security coverage 5.  Nearly all AT&T phone numbers exposed In July, AT&T revealed that data from “nearly all” of customers from May to October 2022 and on Jan. 2, 2023, was exfiltrated to a third-party platform in April this year. Threat actors accessed phone call and text message records but not their context or any personally identifiable information. AT&T paid 5.7 Bitcoin — about $374,000 — to a threat actor to delete the stolen data, according to Wired. The threat actor was allegedly part of the ShinyHunters group, which broke into the data warehousing platform Snowflake to get the data. One person was apprehended by law enforcement in connection with the cyberattack, and the access point has since been secured, AT&T said. 6.  CrowdStrike outage caused global disruption In July, about 8.5 million Windows devices were disabled worldwide, causing huge disruption to emergency services, airports, law enforcement, and other critical organisations. This was because an error occurred when cloud security firm CrowdStrike issued an update to the Falcon Sensor. SEE: What is CrowdStrike? Everything You Need to Know Affected organisations saw the infamous “Blue Screen of Death,” the Windows system crash alert. The incident led to CrowdStrike being presented with the “Epic Fail” award at Black Hat U.S.A. 2024 in August. SEE: Most Ransomware Attacks Occur When Security Staff Are Asleep, Study Finds 7.  National Public Data breach one of the biggest in history August saw the 2.7 billion data records, including Social Security numbers, posted on a dark web forum in one of the biggest breaches in history. National Public Data, a background-checking company that owns the data, acknowledged the incident and blamed a “third-party bad actor” who hacked the company in December 2023. Troy Hunt, security expert and creator of the “Have I Been Pwned” breach checking service, investigated the leaked dataset and found it only contained 134 million unique email addresses and 70 million rows from a database of U.S. criminal records. The email addresses were not associated with the SSNs. According to a class-action complaint, National Public Data scrapes the personally identifying information of billions of individuals from non-public sources to create their profiles for its background-checking service. It was also

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More Google has just unveiled Trillium, its sixth-generation artificial intelligence accelerator chip, claiming performance improvements that could fundamentally alter the economics of AI development while pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in machine learning. The custom processor, which powered the training of Google’s newly announced Gemini 2.0 AI model, delivers four times the training performance of its predecessor while using significantly less energy. This breakthrough comes at a crucial moment, as tech companies race to build increasingly sophisticated AI systems that require enormous computational resources. “TPUs powered 100% of Gemini 2.0 training and inference,” Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, explained in an announcement post highlighting the chip’s central role in the company’s AI strategy. The scale of deployment is unprecedented: Google has connected more than 100,000 Trillium chips in a single network fabric, creating what amounts to one of the world’s most powerful AI supercomputers. How Trillium’s 4x performance boost is transforming AI development Trillium’s specifications represent significant advances across multiple dimensions. The chip delivers a 4.7x increase in peak compute performance per chip compared to its predecessor, while doubling both high-bandwidth memory capacity and interchip interconnect bandwidth. Perhaps most importantly, it achieves a 67% increase in energy efficiency — a crucial metric as data centers grapple with the enormous power demands of AI training. “When training the Llama-2-70B model, our tests demonstrate that Trillium achieves near-linear scaling from a 4-slice Trillium-256 chip pod to a 36-slice Trillium-256 chip pod at a 99% scaling efficiency,” said Mark Lohmeyer, VP of compute and AI infrastructure at Google Cloud. This level of scaling efficiency is particularly remarkable given the challenges typically associated with distributed computing at this scale. The economics of innovation: Why Trillium changes the game for AI startups Trillium’s business implications extend beyond raw performance metrics. Google claims the chip provides up to a 2.5x improvement in training performance per dollar compared to its previous generation, potentially reshaping the economics of AI development. This cost efficiency could prove particularly significant for enterprises and startups developing large language models. AI21 Labs, an early Trillium customer, has already reported significant improvements. “The advancements in scale, speed, and cost-efficiency are significant,” noted Barak Lenz, CTO of AI21 Labs, in the announcement. Scaling new heights: Google’s 100,000-chip AI supernetwork Google’s deployment of Trillium within its AI Hypercomputer architecture demonstrates the company’s integrated approach to AI infrastructure. The system combines over 100,000 Trillium chips with a Jupiter network fabric capable of 13 petabits per second of bisectional bandwidth — enabling a single distributed training job to scale across hundreds of thousands of accelerators. “The growth of flash usage has been more than 900% which has been incredible to see,” noted Logan Kilpatrick, a product manager on Google’s AI studio team, during the developer conference, highlighting the rapidly increasing demand for AI computing resources. Beyond Nvidia: Google’s bold move in the AI chip wars The release of Trillium intensifies the competition in AI hardware, where Nvidia has dominated with its GPU-based solutions. While Nvidia’s chips remain the industry standard for many AI applications, Google’s custom silicon approach could provide advantages for specific workloads, particularly in training very large models. Industry analysts suggest that Google’s massive investment in custom chip development reflects a strategic bet on the growing importance of AI infrastructure. The company’s decision to make Trillium available to cloud customers indicates a desire to compete more aggressively in the cloud AI market, where it faces strong competition from Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services. Powering the future: what Trillium means for tomorrow’s AI The implications of Trillium’s capabilities extend beyond immediate performance gains. The chip’s ability to handle mixed workloads efficiently — from training massive models to running inference for production applications — suggests a future where AI computing becomes more accessible and cost-effective. For the broader tech industry, Trillium’s release signals that the race for AI hardware supremacy is entering a new phase. As companies push the boundaries of what’s possible with artificial intelligence, the ability to design and deploy specialized hardware at scale could become an increasingly critical competitive advantage. “We’re still in the early stages of what’s possible with AI,” Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, wrote in the company blog post. “Having the right infrastructure — both hardware and software — will be crucial as we continue to push the boundaries of what AI can do.” As the industry moves toward more sophisticated AI models that can act autonomously and reason across multiple modes of information, the demands on the underlying hardware will only increase. With Trillium, Google has demonstrated that it intends to remain at the forefront of this evolution, investing in the infrastructure that will power the next generation of AI advancement. source

TL;DR: Get a powerful grade-A refurbished MacBook Air M1 for just $514.99 during this limited pre-holiday sale. Start 2025 strong with the powerful yet affordable Apple MacBook Air M1. Featuring Apple’s groundbreaking M1 chip, this sleek and lightweight laptop offers impressive performance for professionals, students, and creatives alike. For this pre-holiday sale, you can score a grade-A refurbished MacBook Air for just $514.99 (reg. $1,499). With limited stock, now is an ideal time to upgrade your tech without breaking the bank. Features The MacBook Air M1 redefines what a lightweight laptop can do. Its 8-core CPU delivers up to 3.5x faster performance, ideal for tackling demanding projects and multitasking with ease. Paired with an 8-core GPU, graphics-intensive applications and video editing run smoother than ever. The M1 chip’s 16-core Neural Engine also brings advanced machine learning capabilities to your work, making this laptop a truly professional tool. The 13.3-inch Retina display delivers vivid colors and sharp text, ideal for editing photos, designing presentations, or working on spreadsheets. With up to 18 hours of battery life, you can power through long days without constantly reaching for the charger. And thanks to its fanless design, the MacBook Air operates in complete silence—no distractions during your video calls or focused work sessions. This refurbished model is from 2020 and is graded A, meaning it should arrive in near-mint condition with minimal or no visible wear. It’s the ultimate combination of premium Apple performance and terrific value. Head to TechRepublic Academy to get the powerful MacBook Air M1 for just $514.99 during this pre-holiday sale while supplies last. Prices and availability subject to change. source

By Gina Kim ( December 10, 2024, 7:18 PM EST) — A split Ninth Circuit refused to revive a terminated Tesla worker’s Sarbanes-Oxley whistleblower claim alleging he was retaliated against for reporting unlawful activity, ruling on Tuesday the worker is precluded from re-litigating in district court whether he engaged in protected activity, since an arbitrator already decided that he did not…. Law360 is on it, so you are, too. A Law360 subscription puts you at the center of fast-moving legal issues, trends and developments so you can act with speed and confidence. Over 200 articles are published daily across more than 60 topics, industries, practice areas and jurisdictions. A Law360 subscription includes features such as Daily newsletters Expert analysis Mobile app Advanced search Judge information Real-time alerts 450K+ searchable archived articles And more! Experience Law360 today with a free 7-day trial. source

When we asked workers how they see their job, half say they consider their current job as a career, while 15% say it is a stepping stone to a career. About a third (35%) say it’s just a job to get them by. Young workers are less likely than older workers to see their jobs as a career. Some 28% of workers ages 18 to 29 say this, while about half or more of those in older age groups say the same. Still, a majority of young workers say their job is either a career or a stepping stone. Workers’ attitudes about their job also differ by education. Most of those with a postgraduate degree (75%) view their job as a career, compared with 59% of those with a bachelor’s degree only, 44% of those with some college education, and 35% of those with a high school diploma or less education. About half of workers with a high school diploma or less (51%) say their job is just something to get them by. There is a moderate gender difference on this question. More than half of men (54%) consider their job a career, compared with 46% of women. How older workers see their jobs Workers ages 65 and older are the most likely age group to say their job is just something to get them by. Half say this is the case, compared with about four-in-ten or fewer in younger age groups. To further explore older workers’ views, we asked those ages 65 and older why they are currently working. The majority (56%) say they work both because they need the money and because they want to work. Another 26% say they work mainly because they want to, while 17% say it’s mainly because they need the money. Older workers’ reasons for working vary by education. Those with at least a bachelor’s degree are more likely than those with some college or less education to say they work mainly because they want to (33% vs. 21%). In turn, older workers with some college or less education are more likely than those with at least a bachelor’s degree to say they work mainly because they need the money (20% vs. 12%). Meeting expectations at work Most workers (76%) say they do more than what’s expected of them at their job. Some 23% say they do only what’s expected, while 2% say they do less than what’s expected of them. Older workers are more likely than younger workers to say they do more than what’s expected of them. The vast majority of workers ages 50 and older (84%) say this, compared with 75% of workers ages 30 to 49, and 64% of workers 18 to 29. In turn, workers ages 18 to 29 are the most likely to say they do only what’s expected of them (33%) when compared with all older groups. For the most part, there are no significant differences by gender or education. Are workers being monitored – and how do they feel about it? More than half (54%) of workers who are not self-employed say their employer monitors the time they start and finish working. About a third or more also say their employer monitors: Messages they send through employer-provided email accounts or messaging platforms (44%) How quickly they complete their tasks (43%) Their location while they are working (37%) How they use their work computer, such as the time they spend using apps or the websites they visit (35%) A much smaller share (12%) says their employer monitors their activity on social media. The shares of workers who say they are monitored by their employer vary widely by workers’ educational attainment. For example, workers with some college or less education are more likely than those with at least a bachelor’s degree to say that their employer monitors the time they start and finish working (64% vs. 40%), how quickly they complete tasks (48% vs. 34%), and their location while working (41% vs. 32%). For the most part, workers feel the amount of monitoring from their employer is appropriate: 69% say they think their employer monitors what they are doing about the right amount. Some 12% think their employer monitors them too closely, while 6% say their employer doesn’t monitor them closely enough; 13% aren’t sure. Perhaps unsurprisingly, workers who say their employer monitors each of the activities listed above are more likely than those who say their employer is not tracking them to think their employer monitors them too closely. Those who say their employer monitors their social media use are especially likely to say they are tracked too closely (28% hold this view, compared with 20% or fewer among those who say their employer monitors other aspects of their work). Still, even among those who say their employer monitors them, majorities describe it as the right amount. source

全球領先的開源解決方案供應商Red Hat 宣佈，憑藉其OpenShift 雲服務，在  Gartner® 雲應用平台魔力象限™ 中獲評為領導者。 Gartner稱，雲應用平台不僅僅是運行應用程式的平台，它們對追求軟體工程、生產力和市場響應力的企業至關重要。 Red Hat OpenShift雲服務是管理超大規模雲端的應用程式平台，旨在從開發到交付簡化整個應用生命週期。透過安全性和合規性功能提供更一致的跨雲端體驗，為雲原生、AI、虛擬和傳統工作負載提供了一整套集成工具和服務。 Red Hat OpenShift雲服務包含與超大規模雲服務商共同架構的解決方案，包括AWS上的Red Hat OpenShift服務、微軟Azure Red Hat OpenShift、IBM Cloud上的Red Hat OpenShift、Google雲端平台上的Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated。 Gartner雲應用平台魔力象限對12家供應商的解決方案進行了評估，並根據特定標準對其願景完整性和執行能力進行了分析。Gartner指出，領導者不僅在執行當前願景方面表現卓越，同時也為未來的發展做好了充分準備。 此前，Gartner亦在最新的2024年Gartner容器管理魔力象限中將Red Hat評為領導者，這充分展示了Red Hat OpenShift的優勢——不僅能夠為用戶提供一個全面的應用程式平台來加速應用程式開發和部署，而且還提供完全託管或自我管理兩種選擇，能夠靈活應對客戶在不同地點和場景下的需求。 請在此處下載Gartner 魔力象限報告的免費副本，以詳細了解Red Hat的優勢和注意事項，以及其他提供者的產品。 Red Hat 副總裁暨雲端平台總經理Mike Barrett表示： 「我們很榮幸成為有史以來第一個雲應用平台魔力象限的領導者。無論客戶是要開發人工智能（AI） 應用程式來實現其人工智能策略，或是要將其虛擬機器與傳統應用程式現代化，Red Hat OpenShift 都能提供以彈性與選擇為核心，值得信賴、一致的混合雲應用程式平台。我們相信，這份認可證明了 Red Hat OpenShift 有能力幫助企業利用最貼合其獨特需求的基礎設施，將雲原生應用更快推向市場。」 Red Hat 香港管理層。 LinkedIn Email Facebook Twitter WhatsApp source