I think this is a huge underestimation of the total...

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/jul/24/crowdstrike-outage-companies-cost

CrowdStrike global outage to cost US Fortune 500 companies $5.4bn

Banking and healthcare firms, major airlines expected to suffer most losses, according to insurer Parametrix

… Companies in banking and healthcare are expected to be hit the hardest, according to the insurer Parametrix, as well as major airlines. The total insured losses for the non-Microsoft Fortune 500 companies could be between $540m and $1.08bn.

A variety of industries are still struggling to rectify the damage from CrowdStrike’s outage, which grounded thousands of flights, caused turmoil at hospitals and crashed payment systems in what experts have described as the largest IT failure in history. The outage exposed how modern tech systems are built on precarious ground, with faulty code in a single update able to bring down operations around the world.

… CrowdStrike – a Texas-based, multibillion-dollar company that has lost about 22% of its stock market value since the outage – has repeatedly apologized for causing the international tech crisis. The company issued a report on Wednesday detailing what went wrong in the update.

The primary cause of the failure stemmed from an update that CrowdStrike pushed to its flagship Falcon platform, which functions as a cloud-based service intended to protect businesses from cyber-attacks and disruptions. The update contained a bug which caused 8.5m Windows machines to crash en masse.

CrowdStrike stated in its postmortem that it plans to increase software testing before issuing updates in the future, and only roll out those updates gradually to prevent the widespread, simultaneous failures that took place last week. The company also plans to issue a more in-depth report on the causes of the outage in the coming weeks.

CrowdStrike is one of the world’s most prominent cybersecurity firms, and was valued at around $83bn before the outage. [83bn x .22 = 18.26bn Bob] It services about 538 of the Fortune 1000 companies, according to its website, and operates around the world. That ubiquity made the consequences of its botched update particularly severe, showcasing how many companies are reliant on the same products to keep operations running.

I thought this would have been obvious…

https://www.bespacific.com/ai-trained-on-ai-garbage-spits-out-ai-garbage/

AI trained on AI garbage spits out AI garbage

MIT Technology Review: “AI models work by training on huge swaths of data from the internet. But as AI is increasingly being used to pump out web pages filled with junk content, that process is in danger of being undermined. New research published in Nature shows that the quality of the model’s output gradually degrades when AI trains on AI-generated data. As subsequent models produce output that is then used as training data for future models, the effect gets worse. Ilia Shumailov, a computer scientist from the University of Oxford, who led the study, likens the process to taking photos of photos. “If you take a picture and you scan it, and then you print it, and you repeat this process over time, basically the noise overwhelms the whole process,” he says. “You’re left with a dark square.” The equivalent of the dark square for AI is called “model collapse,” he says, meaning the model just produces incoherent garbage. This research may have serious implications for the largest AI models of today, because they use the internet as their database. GPT-3, for example, was trained in part on data from Common Crawl, an online repository of over 3 billion web pages. And the problem is likely to get worse as an increasing number of AI-generated junk websites start cluttering up the internet…”

Tools & Techniques. (Could be a useful improvement.)

https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/microsoft-unveils-bing-generative-search-enhanced-with-ai-its-a-complete-overhaul-of-traditional-search

Microsoft unveils Bing Generative Search — enhanced with AI, it's a complete overhaul of traditional search

Microsoft has announced a major update to Bing Search that overhauls the search results page with AI at the heart of its experience. Currently available to a small subset of users, Bing Search now incorporates AI-generated answers in addition to traditional search results directly on the search page.

At the very top of the page will be an AI-generated answer created by large and small language models that have reviewed millions of sources to provide the most accurate answer. It will break down that answer into a document index that can provide more information about particular subjects within that search query if you'd like to learn more.

… The search page will also list the sources that the AI-generated text was created from below the answer, and will even present traditional search results in a sidebar on the right for those who are uninterested in Bing's curated AI experience.