Reflecting on the 2024 presidential campaign, a large majority of voters say it was interesting rather than dull (74% vs. 24%). But evaluations of the campaign are more negative than positive on other dimensions. Roughly three-quarters of voters (74%) say the 2024 campaign was too negative, similar to the share of registered voters who said this in an October preelection survey. More than six-in-ten voters (64%) say the 2024 campaign was not focused on important policy debates. In October, a nearly identical 62% of registered voters said this. Seven-in-ten voters say the 2024 campaign did not make them feel proud of the country, while 29% say it did. These views are somewhat more positive than they were in October, when 19% of registered voters said the campaign made them feel proud of the country. How Trump and Harris voters view the campaign Trump voters are more likely than Harris voters to describe the 2024 campaign in positive terms. This reflects a shift from before the election: In October, there were only slight differences between Trump and Harris supporters’ views of the campaign. Was the campaign focused on policy debates? About half of Trump voters (52%) now say the 2024 campaign was focused on important policy debates. Just 18% of Harris voters share this view. In October, 37% of Trump supporters and 38% of Harris supporters said the campaign was focused on important policy debates. Did the campaign make you feel proud of the U.S.? Half of Trump voters now say the 2024 campaign made them feel proud of the country, while only 8% of Harris voters say the same. Last month, the same percentage of both Trump and Harris supporters (20%) said the campaign made them proud. Was the campaign too negative? While majorities of both candidates’ voters say the 2024 campaign was too negative, Harris voters (81%) are more likely than Trump voters (68%) to say this. Before the election, about seven-in-ten in both groups said this. Was the 2024 campaign interesting or dull? Majorities of both Harris (66%) and Trump supporters (83%) say the campaign was interesting. But Harris supporters are twice as likely as Trump supporters (32% vs. 16%) to say the campaign was dull, a reversal from before Election Day. In October, Trump supporters (34%) were more likely than Harris supporters (24%) to say the campaign was dull. Satisfaction with the presidential candidates About half of voters (53%) say they were very or fairly satisfied with the choice of presidential candidates this year, while 47% say they were not too or not at all satisfied with the choice of presidential candidates. A slightly smaller share of voters say they were satisfied with the choice of presidential candidates compared with four years ago, when 57% said they were very or fairly satisfied. As in prior election years, supporters of the winning candidate express more satisfaction with the choice of candidates than supporters of the losing candidate. More than eight-in-ten Trump voters (85%) say they were very or fairly satisfied with the choice of presidential candidates, compared with 22% of Harris voters. Trump voters in 2024 are 11 percentage points more likely than Biden voters were in 2020 to say they were satisfied with the choice of candidates (85% vs. 74%). The share of Harris supporters who express satisfaction with the candidates is lower than the share of Trump supporters who did so four years ago. When did voters make up their minds about who to vote for? About eight-in-ten voters (81%) say they made up their mind about who they were going to vote for in the 2024 presidential election before September. This is similar to the share who said this in 2020 (84%), and higher than the share who reported having made up their minds before September in 2016 (67%). This year, 7% of voters say they made up their mind about their vote in the last week before Election Day. In 2020, 5% said they had made their mind up in the last week. Similar shares of Trump (7%) and Harris voters (6%) say they decided about their vote in the last week before Election Day. Trump voters are slightly more likely than Harris voters to report having made up their mind before September (84% vs. 79%). source

Holiday offers started some time ago, but the US holiday shopping season has now launched in earnest. The National Retail Federation and Prosper Insights & Analytics estimate that the five-day period from Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday saw 197 million shoppers — the second-highest number since 2017. Adobe Analytics reports that US consumers spent $41.1 billion online during that time. We forecast that the season overall (November and December) will see $257 billion in US online sales. In Forrester’s annual review of 116 US websites during Black Friday and Cyber Monday, we saw that retailers and brands across sectors went all out to entice customers: Black Friday offers ran the gamut from sitewide to members-only perks. Fully 91% of the 116 retail and brand websites mentioned “Black Friday” on their home page, with most offering discounts. One-third offered a sitewide discount, including Ann Taylor, J.Crew, OLAY, Petco, and The Vitamin Shoppe. Other offers included gift cards on eligible purchases (e.g., Apple), while one in 10 sites provided additional perks for loyalty members (e.g., Brooks Brothers and The North Face). Free shipping offers were often based on minimum order values and/or reserved for loyalty program members. REI continued its long-standing “Opt Outside” tradition as it gave its “15,000 employees the day off.” Cyber Monday offers encouraged further spending. Similarly, 91% of the 116 retail and brand websites participated in Cyber Monday on their home page, and almost all of those had discounts and offers (yes, including REI). Across these sites, 35 offered a sitewide discount, including Estée Lauder, Gap, and Urban Outfitters. The Container Store offered online customers a sitewide 30% discount if they selected store pickup at checkout, which dropped to 25% off for orders that they had shipped. Some discounts were available only to members, including Academy Sports and Victoria’s Secret. Several retailers offered tiered discounts based on spend, including Bloomingdale’s and Disney, while others offered gifts with purchase, such as Aveda and Owlet. What’s Next? With three weeks to go before December 25, take a look at our 2024 holiday preparation blog series. This series features a treasure trove of advice from Forrester analysts to help you make the most of the coming weeks. You’ll learn how influencers are this year’s gift guides and how zero-party data gives you insights into your customers, plus smart tactics to protect your customers (and your brand) from phishing. And, further, learn how to bolster customer experience and sales by improving your website accessibility, site search, personalization, compelling creative, and customer confidence. If you’re a Forrester client, you can also schedule time with Forrester analysts via a guidance session or inquiry. source

navigating-genai-early-years-qadir LinkedIn Email Facebook Twitter WhatsApp The post 行業研究報告: 引領新一代人工智能早期發展（華頓商學院） appeared first on VeriMedia. source

By Rachel Riley ( December 4, 2024, 7:54 PM EST) — An independent bookstore association can’t join the government’s antitrust lawsuit against Amazon, the Ninth Circuit said Wednesday, with the panel’s majority agreeing with the Federal Trade Commission and e-commerce giant that the trade group’s allegations involve different anticompetitive conduct in different markets…. 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

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More As AI systems achieve superhuman performance in increasingly complex tasks, the industry is grappling with whether bigger models are even possible — or if innovation must take a different path. The general approach to large language model (LLM) development has been that bigger is better, and that performance scales with more data and more computing power. However, recent media discussions have focused on how LLMs are approaching their limits. “Is AI hitting a wall?” The Verge questioned, while Reuters reported that “OpenAI and others seek new path to smarter AI as current methods hit limitations.”  The concern is that scaling, which has driven advances for years, may not extend to the next generation of models. Reporting suggests that the development of frontier models like GPT-5, which push the current limits of AI, may face challenges due to diminishing performance gains during pre-training. The Information reported on these challenges at OpenAI and Bloomberg covered similar news at Google and Anthropic.  This issue has led to concerns that these systems may be subject to the law of diminishing returns — where each added unit of input yields progressively smaller gains. As LLMs grow larger, the costs of getting high-quality training data and scaling infrastructure increase exponentially, reducing the returns on performance improvement in new models. Compounding this challenge is the limited availability of high-quality new data, as much of the accessible information has already been incorporated into existing training datasets.  This does not mean the end of performance gains for AI. It simply means that to sustain progress, further engineering is needed through innovation in model architecture, optimization techniques and data use. Learning from Moore’s Law A similar pattern of diminishing returns appeared in the semiconductor industry. For decades, the industry had benefited from Moore’s Law, which predicted that the number of transistors would double every 18 to 24 months, driving dramatic performance improvements through smaller and more efficient designs. This too eventually hit diminishing returns, beginning somewhere between 2005 and 2007 due to Dennard Scaling — the principle that shrinking transistors also reduces power consumption— having hit its limits which fueled predictions of the death of Moore’s Law. I had a close up view of this issue when I worked with AMD from 2012-2022. This problem did not mean that semiconductors — and by extension computer processors — stopped achieving performance improvements from one generation to the next. It did mean that improvements came more from chiplet designs, high-bandwidth memory, optical switches, more cache memory and accelerated computing architecture rather than the scaling down of transistors. New paths to progress Similar phenomena are already being observed with current LLMs. Multimodal AI models like GPT-4o, Claude 3.5 and Gemini 1.5 have proven the power of integrating text and image understanding, enabling advancements in complex tasks like video analysis and contextual image captioning. More tuning of algorithms for both training and inference will lead to further performance gains. Agent technologies, which enable LLMs to perform tasks autonomously and coordinate seamlessly with other systems, will soon significantly expand their practical applications. Future model breakthroughs might arise from one or more hybrid AI architecture designs combining symbolic reasoning with neural networks. Already, the o1 reasoning model from OpenAI shows the potential for model integration and performance extension. While only now emerging from its early stage of development, quantum computing holds promise for accelerating AI training and inference by addressing current computational bottlenecks. The perceived scaling wall is unlikely to end future gains, as the AI research community has consistently proven its ingenuity in overcoming challenges and unlocking new capabilities and performance advances.  In fact, not everyone agrees that there even is a scaling wall. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was succinct in his views: “There is no wall.” Source: X https://x.com/sama/status/1856941766915641580  Speaking on the “Diary of a CEO” podcast, ex-Google CEO and co-author of Genesis Eric Schmidt essentially agreed with Altman, saying he does not believe there is a scaling wall — at least there won’t be one over the next five years. “In five years, you’ll have two or three more turns of the crank of these LLMs. Each one of these cranks looks like it’s a factor of two, factor of three, factor of four of capability, so let’s just say turning the crank on all these systems will get 50 times or 100 times more powerful,” he said. Leading AI innovators are still optimistic about the pace of progress, as well as the potential for new methodologies. This optimism is evident in a recent conversation on “Lenny’s Podcast” with OpenAI’s CPO Kevin Weil and Anthropic CPO Mike Krieger. Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxkvVZua28k  In this discussion, Krieger described that what OpenAI and Anthropic are working on today “feels like magic,” but acknowledged that in just 12 months, “we’ll look back and say, can you believe we used that garbage? … That’s how fast [AI development] is moving.”  It’s true — it does feel like magic, as I recently experienced when using OpenAI’s Advanced Voice Mode. Speaking with ‘Juniper’ felt entirely natural and seamless, showcasing how AI is evolving to understand and respond with emotion and nuance in real-time conversations. Krieger also discusses the recent o1 model, referring to this as “a new way to scale intelligence, and we feel like we’re just at the very beginning.” He added: “The models are going to get smarter at an accelerating rate.”  These expected advancements suggest that while traditional scaling approaches may or may not face diminishing returns in the near-term, the AI field is poised for continued breakthroughs through new methodologies and creative engineering. Does scaling even matter? While scaling challenges dominate much of the current discourse around LLMs, recent studies suggest that current models are already capable of extraordinary results, raising a provocative question of whether more scaling even matters. A recent study forecasted that ChatGPT would help doctors make diagnoses when presented with complicated patient cases. Conducted with an

TorGuard VPN’s fast facts Starting price: $9.99 per user per monthKey features: Unlimited bandwidth. Stealth proxy. 3,000+ servers in 50+ countries. TorGuard, as its name implies, is a solid choice VPN, especially for those looking for a fast torrenting VPN speed. The VPN has strong security features and an extensive server suite in 50+ countries. However, accessing the free trial involves jumping through many hoops, and the refund process is similarly complicated. It made me question whether this fast VPN is worth the investment. Here is a TorGuard review covering everything you need to know about the VPN, including the good, the bad, and the ugly side, so you can decide if it’s the best VPN for your business or personal use. 1 Semperis Employees per Company Size Micro (0-49), Small (50-249), Medium (250-999), Large (1,000-4,999), Enterprise (5,000+) Large (1,000-4,999 Employees), Enterprise (5,000+ Employees) Large, Enterprise Features Advanced Attacks Detection, Advanced Automation, Anywhere Recovery, and more 2 ESET PROTECT Advanced Employees per Company Size Micro (0-49), Small (50-249), Medium (250-999), Large (1,000-4,999), Enterprise (5,000+) Any Company Size Any Company Size Features Advanced Threat Defense, Full Disk Encryption , Modern Endpoint Protection, and more 3 NordLayer Employees per Company Size Micro (0-49), Small (50-249), Medium (250-999), Large (1,000-4,999), Enterprise (5,000+) Small (50-249 Employees), Medium (250-999 Employees), Large (1,000-4,999 Employees), Enterprise (5,000+ Employees) Small, Medium, Large, Enterprise Is TorGuard a good VPN for streaming? While TorGuard offers maximum VPN security and speed in all its plans, the ability to stream geo-restricted content with the VPN depends on your chosen plan. When I tested the VPN, TorGuard’s regular servers were unreliable for streaming Netflix or Amazon Prime Video in certain regions. Fortunately, the VPN’s Pro plan offers a free dedicated IP address as an add-on, which you can use to obtain a streaming IP address to unblock streaming content in any specific region. SEE: 5 Best VPNs for Streaming in 2024 (TechRepublic) But, if you want a VPN that works out-of-the-box for streaming services, other options like ExpressVPN, NordVPN, or Surfshark VPN might offer a more seamless experience. TorGuard VPN’s pricing TorGuard VPN pricing is divided into two plans, Standard and Pro. Each has monthly and annual billing options. Below is a table summarizing how the pricing plans compare to each other. TorGuard VPN plans Anonymous VPN (Standard) Anonymous VPN (Pro) Monthly $9.99 per month $12.99 per month Annual $59.99 per year $69.99 per year Feature differences x8 Devices, Static IP Pool, Maximum Security, Maximum Speed x12 Devices, x1 Streaming IP, Maximum Security, Maximum Speed Regardless of which TorGuard VPN plan you choose, you’ll receive almost the same maximum security features. Features like access to 3,000 servers across 50 countries, and unlimited speeds and bandwidth are available in all plans. Some differences still exist between the TorGuard pricing plans. TorGuard VPN Pro plan offers a free dedicated IP and streaming option and can simultaneously connect to up to 12 devices, whereas the Standard plan falls short in those offerings and only allows eight simultaneous device connections. SEE: How to Create an Effective Cybersecurity Awareness Program (TechRepublic Premium) Also, as with most VPNs, the longer the billing plan you pick, the more money you will save on subscriptions. If you select the annual billing option in the TorGuard Standard plan, you will save up to 50% of the cost. That will amount to you paying $60 instead of $120 when calculated on a $10 monthly billing basis. The Pro plan, on the other hand, saves you about 42% of the subscription cost when you choose the annual billing option. I recommend the annual billing option if TorGuard is the right VPN service for your needs. That way, you can save substantial billing costs. Otherwise, go for the monthly payment option if you’re only testing the waters. SEE: The 5 Best VPNs with Free Trials in 2024 (TechRepublic) I advise you to use the seven-day money-back guarantee available in all the plans to test the product first before any long-term commitment. TorGuard VPN’s key features TorGuard VPN is known to have one of the fastest torrenting capabilities with no capped download speed. It also offers other useful VPN features like Stealth Protocol and Port Forwarding. TorGuard Stealth protocol Stealth VPN protocol makes it nearly impossible to block VPN usage, and this enables you to bypass deep packet inspection and overcome the toughest firewalls, even in countries that restrict VPN ports. TorGuard offers multiple Stealth VPN protocols for censored and strict countries or firewalls which include — SSTP protocols, OpenVPN obfuscation, and OpenConnect/AnyConnect. SEE: How Much Does a VPN Cost? + Savings Tips (TechRepublic) During testing, TorGuard’s Stealth protocol allowed me to bypass firewalls in China, Russia, and Turkey when I paired it with the Stealth proxy. Figure A: TorGuard Stealth connection Port forwarding Port forwarding allows you to open a port to the internet while connected to a VPN, so you can have remote access to software hosted on your network. This functionality is found in TorGuard’s member’s area, which allows you to quickly enable various port forward rules and apply whitelisted firewall settings to your port forward requests. SEE: 6 Best Anonymous (No-Log) VPNs for 2024 (TechRepublic) However, it is important to note that when exposing a port to the internet, make sure you secure the login to your software and allow only specific IPs to access the port remotely over the VPN. Figure B: TorGuard Remote IP TorGuard VPN ad blocking Ad blocking protects your privacy and plays a key role in strengthening your overall online security. By default, TorGuard VPN’s DNS relies on its internal VPN server DNS, but you can choose the “Ad Blocking DNS” option in the VPN client settings for added protection. TorGuard claims that this feature is regularly updated to ensure ongoing effectiveness. SEE: The 6 Best Small Business VPNs for 2024 (TechRepublic) While TorGuard’s ad blocking is an excellent privacy tool, pairing it with other strategies enhances your security even more. I recommend using privacy-focused browsers

Amsterdam-headquartered Nebius, which builds full-stack AI infrastructure for tech firms, has secured $700mn in a private equity deal led by Nvidia, Accel, and asset manager Orbis.  The funding comes in the form of a private placement — when a company sells stocks directly to a private investor instead of on the public market. The deal will see Nebius issue 33.3 million Class A shares at $21 apiece.   Nebius, which is the rebranded European arm of “Russia’s Google,” Yandex, is investing more than $1bn across Europe by mid-2025 as it seeks to cash in on booming demand for AI computing power. It also recently announced plans to build its first GPU cluster in the US.    “We have demonstrated the scale of our ambitions, initiating an AI infrastructure build-out across two continents,” said Arkady Volozh, founder and CEO of Nebius. “This strategic financing gives us additional firepower to do it faster and on a larger scale.” What day is today? It’s CYBER MONDAY! TNW Conference is offering an exclusive 30% discount on their startup and scaleup programs this week only. This is the best deal you’ll get before prices change in January. Nebius’ expansion strategy includes constructing new custom data centres and expanding existing facilities, like its data centre in Finland which we visited in October. It will also deploy additional capacity through colocation.  Volozh aims for Nebius to be a Phoenix rising from the ashes of what remained of Yandex following the company’s divestment from Russia earlier this year. The $5.4bn deal constituted the largest corporate exit from the country since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine over two years ago.  Nebius’ core product is an AI-centric cloud platform for intense AI workloads. The company is also one of the launch partners for Nvidia’s fabled Blackwell GPUs, however, this investment does not guarantee that. “The deal is not about the GPUs,” Volozh told Bloomberg. “But, of course, it shows our close relationship, which we hope will influence our pipeline.” Investors are pouring huge sums of money into AI compute. The global AI infrastructure market size is projected to grow from $46.15bn in 2024 to $356.14bn by 2032, according to Fortune Business Insights. One competitor to Nebius, US firm CoreWeave, is preparing for an IPO that could put the company, founded in 2017, at a $35bn valuation.  source

Over the past several decades, organizations in both the private and public sectors have turned to shared services. Sometimes, the goal was reducing operational costs or improving efficiency. Other times, it was more about consolidating functions and improving service. In most cases, the shared services concept focused on a single back-office function like human resources (HR), finance and accounting, facilities management, procurement, and IT. In the IT realm, that might mean troubleshooting, help desk, datacenter management, and maintenance. In procurement, it might focus on sourcing, negotiation, contract management, and spending. While the shared services model can provide real benefits, cracks in the seams began to show about 10 years ago, fueled by changing customer demands, new supply chain realities, and a push toward full digitization. In the Asia/Pacific region, for example, companies are facing challenges in shared services implementation ranging from inaccuracies in outcomes to prolonged request completion times (IDC Survey: Shared Services Automation for Business Optimization, March 2024). These issues can impact operational efficiency and hamper both customer satisfaction and agility for organizations across the globe. More importantly, it points to a misalignment between shared services delivery and organizational needs. Factors like these are just some of the reasons why shared services has morphed into a more comprehensive service called global business services (GBS). While the goals are similar, GBS takes a completely different approach; GBS entities operate as strategic business partners that actively contribute to an organization’s shared objectives. As explained in IDC’s recent Growth and Transformation of Global Business Services (September 2024), while shared services typically pertain to a single function that can serve multiple business units, GBS can serve every unit or person in an enterprise and can execute the processes for any function anywhere in the world centrally and at scale. Typically, they provide a single point of services for combined process flows. Enterprises move to the GBS model for many reasons, including better process execution; lower cycle time; continuous visibility of process status; continually optimized workloads; flexibility; and better-balanced teams based on skills, availability, and SLAs. Over the past several years, many large organizations have benefitted from the GBS approach. IDC’s Evolution of Global Business Services (May 2023) describes several successes with this approach. For example, Siemens operates a large GBS organization that services Siemens while providing services to other firms. HSBC’s GBS organization consists of 27,000 staff in 53 countries and supports 2 trillion transactions per year. Amazon operates a large GBS organization to support its finance processes, with large teams in India, Slovakia, and the Philippines. Yet GBS growth may still be in its infancy. The model continues to evolve to embrace higher levels of technology and automation like artificial intelligence, robotic process automation (RPA), process mining, and process discovery. These advances will bring much-needed transparency, customization, and efficiency. At the same time, it has become more functional and all-encompassing. For example, KPMG has partnered with ServiceNow to provide not only comprehensive GBS services for IT, procurement, finance, HR, risk, cybersecurity, and ESG but also new solutions that will incorporate AI, low-code development capabilities, and industry-specific knowledge. These types of partnerships, in concert with new capabilities, can lead to greater transparency — which may tempt enterprises on the fence to finally lean in. Business today demands full transparency into process status and execution. While higher-level technology like RPA and process mining are critical, the centerpiece of next-generation GBS is artificial intelligence, especially generative AI, which has already begun to deliver greater automation and efficiencies that result in new capabilities at lower costs. IDC research predicts that GenAI will revolutionize the way GBS serves customers. Next-generation GBS will embrace AI in a big way, with the ultimate goal of providing more customized, transparent, and efficient services. For example, AI tools may be able to answer a query in minutes that may have taken an employee several hours or days to find. More specifically, GenAI-powered automation can improve every step in the service optimization process. It can: Automate routine and repetitive tasks like data entry, document processing, and basic customer queries Analyze service workflows, identify bottlenecks, and suggest improvements Personalize customer and user interactions Ensure that data is accurate, standardized, and readily available Analyze historical data to predict future workloads Continually learn from data and user interactions, enabling service organizations to adapt and improve over time All of these factors together present great opportunities for organizations that choose to embrace the GBS model. Next-generation GBS models will be more able to bring process acceleration and visibility to the table, better connect the front and back office to enhance the customer experience, keep pushing the envelope in terms of efficiency, change processes quickly to respond to changing market and business dynamics, and remain resilient in the face of disruption. Over time, IDC expects the GBS model to mature further, with more intelligent and adaptive operating models; higher levels of process, inefficiency, and anomaly analysis; and more evolved end-to-end orchestration. Organizations considering the GBS model should keep in mind that going the GBS route is pretty much a one-way street; it’s very hard to reverse. Also, carefully evaluate up-front costs, which can be significant even though cost savings are a big driver for GBS. Learn more about IDC’s research for technology leaders OR subscribe today to receive industry-leading research directly to your inbox. International Data Corporation (IDC) is the premier global provider of market intelligence, advisory services, and events for the technology markets. IDC is a wholly owned subsidiary of International Data Group (IDG Inc.), the world’s leading tech media, data, and marketing services company. Recently voted Analyst Firm of the Year for the third consecutive time, IDC’s Technology Leader Solutions provide you with expert guidance backed by our industry-leading research and advisory services, robust leadership and development programs, and best-in-class benchmarking and sourcing intelligence data from the industry’s most experienced advisors. Contact us today to learn more. Karen D. Schwartz is an adjunct research advisor with IDC’s IT Executive Programs (IEP), focusing on IT

By Parker Quinlan ( December 4, 2024, 5:16 PM EST) — The Federal Trade Commission has ordered artificial intelligence facial recognition software maker IntelliVision Technologies to stop misrepresenting that its software was free of racial and gender bias…. 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