Category: News

Enterprises spent about $19.4 billion worldwide on generative artificial intelligence (genAI) technologies in 2023 — and that amount is expected to double this year, according to research by IDC.

Organizations are spending on genAI software as well as related infrastructure hardware and IT/business services. By 2027, spending is expected to reach $151.1 billion, representing a compound annual growth rate of 85.9% over the 2023-27 period.

“Despite IT headwinds in 2023, businesses accelerated their exploration of genAI to boost business transformation,” Rick Villars, IDC group vice president, said in a statement. “In 2024, the shift to AI everywhere will enter a critical buildout phase as enterprises make major new investments with the goal of drastically reducing the time and costs associated with customer and employee productivity use cases. From there, the focus will shift to investments that boost revenue and business outcomes.”

IDC expects genAI investments to follow a natural progression over the next several years as organizations move from early experimentation to aggressive infrastructure and trained data model building to widespread adoption with extensions to the edge of all business activities.

Generative AI’s meteoric rise can be compared to the launch of social media, the smartphone, and the internet, according to research firm Forrester Group, which estimated the spend on genAI will grow 36% annually through 2030. GenAI is expected to capture 55% of the total AI software market, according to Forrester.

IDC’s expectation is that by the end of 2027, genAI spending will account for 29% of overall AI spending, up significantly from 10.8% in 2023.

“GenAI spending will remain strong well beyond the build out phase, as these solutions become a foundational element in enterprises’ digital business control platforms,” IDC said.

By 2030, $42 billion will be spent annually on genAI for generalized use cases, such as research, writing, and summarizing tools. And organizations will collectively spend $79 billion a year on specialized applications designed to boost automation and productivity, especially in the security, health, and content marketing industries, according to an earlier Forrester study.

For example, AI-based software augmentation tools such as GitHub Copilot and Replit, are making software development more accessible for engineers and citizen developers alike, according to Forrester.

More than half of spending on generalized use cases will focus on chatbot and communications platforms, which is likely to drive substantial improvements in customer and employee experience.

While companies of all kinds will see a shift in their tech spending toward AI implementation and the adoption of AI-enhanced products and services, the IT industry will make a bigger, faster shift to genAI during the same period.

“This is because every company will race to introduce AI-enhanced products and services and to assist their customers with AI implementations. For most, AI will replace cloud as the lead motivator of innovation,” IDC said.

Two-thirds (66%) of business leaders say their company has deployed private, secure generative AI tools to the workforce, and a similar number (65%) say their department has been tasked to identify use cases for their organization, according to research by solutions integrator service provider Insight Enterprises.

GenAI Infrastructure, including hardware, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), and system infrastructure software (SIS), will represent the largest area of investment during the build-out phase, according to IDC. But genAI Platform and Application Software will gradually overtake infrastructure by the end of 2027 with a five-year CAGR of 99.1%.

Similarly, GenAI Services, including IT and business services, will nearly equal infrastructure spending by the end of the period with a five-year CAGR of 94.6%.

“Generative AI has served as a catalyst for investments in traditional AI solutions. The synergy between traditional and generative AI opens up a world of possibilities across industries,” said Ritu Jyoti, IDC’s group vice president for Worldwide Artificial Intelligence and Automation services. “As we look ahead to the future of AI, embracing a holistic approach that merges traditional AI with generative creativity will enable more versatile AI systems capable of adapting to evolving challenges, while fostering disruptive innovation.”

IDC

More than any other platform, Google’s ChromeOS is in a constant state of evolution — and if you blink for a minute, you’re bound to miss some promising new possibility or progression.

For those of us who rely on Chromebooks for work, that’s fantastic. It means there’s always something new to learn, uncover, and consider and always some intriguing new way to get stuff accomplished.

So behold: the most useful ChromeOS-related tips and tidbits from these Googley-scented quarters in recent months. Catch up while you can and make sure you’re making the most of your work and/or personal technology for the coming year — and if you’re still hungry for even more one-of-a-kind knowledge, come check out my Android Intelligence newsletter next to get three bonus tips this second and gooey Googley goodness in your inbox all year round.

Master the Chromebook basics

Chromebook cheat sheet: How to get started

Got a new Chromebook? Or maybe just still learning your way around your old one? This guide will help you navigate the ever-expanding world of Chromebook apps and figure out how to get around ChromeOS like a pro.

11 smart steps for managing files on a Chromebook

Prepare for some surprises. These are the efficiency-enhancing ChromeOS file tricks you’ve been missing.

The smart worker’s guide to using a Chromebook offline

ChromeOS may be cloud-centric at its core, but you can get plenty accomplished offline on a Chromebook — if you set things up thoughtfully in advance.

Teach yourself some advanced ChromeOS tricks

50 Chromebook tips for maximum productivity

The mother lode! Supercharge your ChromeOS experience with these time-saving tricks and techniques.

11 tips for wicked-fast Chromebook web browsing

Zoom around your browser like nobody’s business with these easy-to-miss Chrome OS maneuvers.

10 easy steps to make Chrome faster and more secure

Looking to speed up Chrome? This guide will give you a noticeably better browsing experience — on a Chromebook or on any other computer where the Chrome browser is installed.

Expand your ChromeOS horizons

How to enable Google’s clever new Chrome Reading Mode right now

Google’s got a great way to enhance your online reading experience, but you’ve really gotta work to find it.

5 smart secrets for a better Google Tasks experience

If you aren’t yet using these Google Tasks power tools, good golly: You’re missing out.

The killer calendar app your Chromebook’s been missing

Massive productivity upgrade, anyone?

The best multiplatform productivity apps

These top-notch tools will help you get down to business consistently — no matter which device or platform you’re using at any given moment.

And a bonus bit of ChromeOS thinking…

The line-blurring brilliance of Google’s new ChromeOS-Windows connection

Google’s latest ChromeOS improvement brings Windows apps even closer to the heart of the operating system — with a very Googley twist.

And with that, we’ve reached the end of our 2023 ChromeOS coverage. What a ride it’s been, eh? Don’t unbuckle yet, though: If there’s one surefire prediction for 2024, it’s that we’ll have plenty more to discuss here in the ever-overlapping areas of ChromeOS and Android.

Enjoy the brief bout of quiet — ’cause it won’t stay that way for long.

Don’t forget to sign up for my weekly newsletter to get three things to know and three things to try in your inbox every Friday!

The biggest innovations are sometimes borne from seemingly small advancements. Developments such as finding ways to compress computer files, creating a practical phone battery, crafting an unassuming text editor, and filing a software patent sent shockwaves through the IT industry, leaving indelible marks on the modern world.

As Computerworld looks back on the lives of 13 scientists, authors, advocates, and entrepreneurs we lost this year who hailed from Israel, Lebanon, the Netherlands, Ukraine, and the United States, we remember their contributions and legacies that are felt worldwide.

Nabil Bukhalid: The father of Lebanon’s internet

1957 – January 4, 2023

ImaginingtheInternet (CC BY 3.0)

In 1988, Nabil Bukhalid was working as a biomedical engineer in a hospital in Beirut, capital of his native Lebanon. As the Lebanese civil war raged outside, Bukhalid hunkered inside, experimenting with the hospital’s computers. Wanting to reach the world beyond the war, Bukhalid took his hospital experience and led a team that connected his alma mater, the American University of Beirut, to the nascent internet.

Bukhalid maintained his momentum beyond that initial connection: he founded the Lebanese Domain Registry and administered the .lb top-level domain; he co-founded both the Internet Society Lebanon Chapter and the Lebanese Internet Center; and he led the computing and networking services department at AUB, where he later earned an executive master of business administration. These contributions to his country’s infrastructure earned Bukhalid the nickname “Father of the Internet” in Lebanon, and he was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame in 2017.

Bukhalid died at 65 from a heart attack.

Jerome R. Cox Jr.: Work hard, be kind

May 24, 1925 – January 17, 2023

Nbattersby2001 (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Jerome Cox Jr. may be best remembered for his contribution to the Laboratory INstrument Computer, often considered the first personal computer. LINC, first conceived by Wesley Clark, was developed at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory, but the team felt a different sponsor would allow them to develop it further. Cox, the founding chairman of the computer science department at Washington University in St. Louis, brought the LINC team and their computer to his school in 1964. LINC development continued and thrived in the school’s newly founded Biomedical Computing Laboratory, founded by Cox.

But Cox was not only an administrator and academic; he pioneered many advancements in biomedical research himself. Cox co-developed a computer for detecting deafness, leading to the standardization of hearing tests in infants; he conducted research into hearing loss in employees in industrial environments; and his work with CT and PET scanners improved the diagnosis of cancers and heart rhythm irregularities.

A graduate of MIT, where he earned his bachelor’s, master’s, and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering, Cox later co-founded Growth Networks, which was acquired by Cisco; Blendics, which provided system-on-chip design tools and services; and cybersecurity firm Q-Net Security.

Cox had 12 patents and more than 150 publications, including his 2022 memoir, Work Hard, Be Kind. He was 97 when he died.

Bernie Newcomb: Taking stock

November 10, 1943 – January 29, 2023

Bernie Newcomb was born with congenital cataracts that left him with such limited vision, he was legally blind. But he insisted on going to a traditional public school in his hometown of Scio, Oregon, where he graduated as valedictorian. Despite his academic accomplishments — including being the first in his family to graduate from college — few employers were willing to give him a chance. He eventually landed at General Electric, where he taught himself programming.

After meeting fellow Apple II user William A. Porter at a party in 1980, the two in 1982 founded the company Trade*Plus, which provided brokerage software for investment firms such as Fidelity. “It was popular with the discount brokers, but it was a test for them,” Newcomb told Oregon’s Corvallis Gazette-Times. “As soon as they saw that it worked, they’d create their own system and take all our customers.”

Morgan Stanley

So Newcomb and Porter pivoted, cut out the middleman and, in 1992, founded the online trading platform E*TRADE, enabling consumers to trade stocks directly without a broker. E*TRADE went public in 1996 and doubled its value by 1997, at which point Newcomb left to pursue philanthropy. He founded the Bernard A Newcomb Foundation and received the American Foundation for the Blind’s Helen Keller Achievement Award in 2006.

Newcomb was proud not only of E*TRADE’s role in the financial industry — the company was acquired by Morgan Stanley in 2020 for $13 billion — but also for its name. “We were the first ‘e,’” he claimed. “If we were ‘G-Trade,’ I figure there would be ‘g-commerce’ and ‘G-Bay.’”

Newcomb died at 79 from congestive heart failure.

Abraham Lempel and Jacob Ziv: A collaboration in compression

Abraham Lempel: February 10, 1936 – February 4, 2023
Jacob Ziv: November 27, 1931 – March 25, 2023

Staelin (CC BY 3.0)

Jacob Ziv was born in 1931 in Palestine and earned his doctor of science degree from MIT before joining the faculty at the Israel Institute of Technology in 1970.

Abraham Lempel was born in 1936 in what is now Ukraine. He too earned a doctor of science degree, but from the Israel Institute of Technology, whose faculty he joined in 1977.

In 1977, the two IIT colleagues co-authored a landmark paper, “A Universal Algorithm for Sequential Data Compression.” The Lempel-Ziv lossless compression algorithm, or LZ as it became known, was the first to use a “sliding window,” a concept that spawned an entire family of later algorithms, including LZW, a 1984 compression algorithm co-developed with Terry Welch and used in the GIF image format.

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The development of the LZ algorithm was so monumental that the Institute of Electrical and mobile Engineers named it an IEEE Milestone, joining the ranks of Benjamin Franklin’s experiments with electricity, the development of NASA’s Apollo guidance computer, and the laying of the first transatlantic fiber-optic cable.

For their work in compression algorithms, Lempel earned the IEEE’s Richard W. Hamming Medal in 2007, and Ziv was awarded the IEEE’s Medal of Honor in 2021.

Lempel was 87 when he died this past February; Ziv was 91 when he died exactly seven weeks later.

Gordon Moore: Lawmaker

January 3, 1929 – March 24, 2023

Intel

After earning a Ph.D. in chemistry in 1954, Gordon Moore found himself unemployed. “I couldn’t find a good technical job in California, so I had to go east for my first job out of school,” Moore said during his 2001 commencement speech to his alma mater, Caltech. He landed in Maryland at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.

An invitation from William Shockley, former Bell Labs manager, brought Moore back west to work at Shockley Semiconductor in Mountain View, California. But eventually, Moore joined seven other Shockley employees to form the “traitorous eight“ that founded Fairchild Semiconductor.

“Fairchild turned out to be the mother company of many Fairchildren,” Moore said. “Several dozen — I wouldn’t be surprised if it went into the hundreds — of companies can trace their formation back to Fairchild and its spinoffs.”

In 1968, Moore co-founded one of those companies: Intel, whose Pentium processor powered generations of personal computers, from the chip’s debut in 1993 to its retirement in 2023.

Moore may be best known for his 1965 prediction that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit would double every year, which he revised to every two years in 1975. His prediction has to date held true, giving rise to the name Moore’s Law.

Moore died at his home in Hawaii at the age of 94. His legacy includes the nonprofit Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.

Edward Fredkin: Renaissance man

October 2, 1934 – June 13, 2023

Computer History Museum

Despite an underwhelming academic start, Edward Fredkin’s career soared. He attended Caltech with some of the worst high-school grades the school had ever admitted. He dropped out to serve as a pilot in the United States Air Force, which, in 1956, assigned him to MIT Lincoln Laboratory, where he worked with the SAGE computer. From there, Fredkin moved to Bolt, Beranek & Newton, where he wrote an assembler language and operating system for the PDP-1 computer, adapting the hardware to support BBN’s time-sharing system.

After a few years of founding and running the company Information International Inc., Fredkin joined the faculty of MIT — despite not having even a bachelor’s degree. At MIT, he directed the Project on Mathematics and Computation (Project MAC), a DARPA-funded initiative that paired Fredkin with Marvin Minksy in the field of artificial intelligence.

To incentivize further developments in AI, in 1980, Fredkin funded Carnegie Mellon University’s Fredkin Prize, which offered $100,000 to whoever developed a computer capable of defeating a chess grandmaster. It was 17 years before IBM claimed that prize when Deep Blue won a match against Garry Kasparov.

Fredkin held many interests: he coined Fredkin’s paradox, invented a computational circuit known as the Fredkin gate, and was rumored to be the inspiration for the character of Dr. Falken in the iconic 1983 film WarGames. He saw the universe as one giant computer, consistent with his model of digital philosophy. And he chaired the Computer History Museum’s PDP-1 restoration project, successfully reactivating a 45-year-old machine in 2004.

Fredkin died in Massachusetts at the age of 88.

John Goodenough: Powering the future

July 25, 1922 – June 25, 2023

US Embassy Sweden (CC BY 2.0)

As a child, John Goodenough struggled with undiagnosed dyslexia. Yet he still graduated top of his high school class in Massachusetts and went on to Yale, to serve in the US Army, and then to earn a master’s degree and Ph.D. at the University of Chicago. He spent the next two dozen years at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory, where he helped develop the materials for random access memory (RAM).

His next act was just as profound: while a professor at the University of Oxford, he developed a usable lithium-ion rechargeable battery. These small, powerful batteries now power everything from smartphones to Teslas, enabling a miniaturization of devices and an independence from fossil fuels. Yet he still saw room for improvement, continuing to work on new battery types well into his 90s.

Goodenough earned no royalties from his work, which may have informed his sardonic view of capitalism. “I’m probably most proud of the fundamental studies I’ve done — but I’ve gotten recognition for the batteries that I did, because people made money on it,” he said. “And when people make money on it, well, then you become important.”

Goodenough received the National Medal of Science in 2011 and the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2019. Goodenough died at 100, at which time he was the oldest living Nobel Prize winner.

Kevin Mitnick: Most wanted

August 6, 1963 – July 16, 2023

Campus Party México (CC BY 2.0)

Kevin Mitnick started exploiting systems before he was a teenager, learning how to ride the Los Angeles bus system for free. At 16, he hacked into Digital Equipment Corporation, a crime that earned him a year in prison. He violated the terms of his release by hacking into voicemail computers, infiltrating email accounts, and stealing credit card numbers (which there is no evidence he ever used, according to the Associated Press).

His continued criminal activity earned him the attention of the FBI. A fugitive for over two years, Mitnick was eventually arrested in 1995 — a hunt that was dramatized in the 2000 film Takedown. Although sentenced to five years in prison, his fans perceived Mitnick’s hacking to lack consequential damage, leading magazines such as 2600: The Hacker Quarterly to promote a “FREE KEVIN” movement and encourage leniency for his crimes.

“I [was] a hacker — not a hacker for profit, like we see today, but more a hacker for intellectual curiosity,” said Mitnick.

After being released from prison, Mitnick founded Mitnick Security Consulting and was the “chief hacking officer” at security firm KnowBe4. His YouTube channel offered consumer tips on how to avoid being the victim of digital crimes. In 2011, he published his autobiography, Ghost in the Wires, and was a guest on The Colbert Report, where host Stephen Colbert introduced him as being “once considered the world’s most famous hacker, the most wanted man in computer crime.”

Mitnick died at 59 from pancreatic cancer.

Bram Moolenaar: Vim and vigor

1961– August 3, 2023

Sebastian Bergmann (CC BY-SA 2.0)

In 1988, Dutch software engineer Bram Moolenaar wanted to broaden access to Vi, the powerful yet complex text editor. Necessity was the mother of Moolenaar’s invention: “I had an Amiga computer at home, I wanted to have a similar editor there too, and the only option was to write it myself,” he told LinuxEXPRES.

Moolenaar took the Atari ST port of Vi, dubbed Stevie, and adapted and enhanced it. Released in 1991, Vim (short for Vi Imitation; later, Vi Improved) built upon the original by adding an advanced scripting language, multi-level undo, mouse support, and more.

Vim saw broad adoption and approval: today it is included with most Linux distributions as well as macOS, and it was voted the favorite text editor of readers of Linux Journal for five consecutive years, 2001–2005. Moolenaar’s work was recognized in 2008 with an award from The Netherlands Local Unix User Group (NLUUG).

Since Vim was released as free, open-source software, Moolenaar never profited off his tool. He instead asked users to send donations to ICCF Holland, an organization he founded to help children in Uganda affected by AIDS. The proceeds amounted to about €30,000, helping students complete both primary and college education.

After working at Google for 15 years, Moolenaar retired in 2021. He continued developing Vim, with v9.0 released in 2022. “These days, now that I am retired, it gives me something interesting, joyful, and useful to do,” he said in an interview with Evrone. “Vim is a very important part of my life.”

Moolenaar died at 62.

John Warnock: Making documents truly portable

October 6, 1940 – August 19, 2023

Adobe

While studying at the University of Utah, John Warnock was presented with the “hidden surface problem,” one of many the school’s ARPA-funded computer graphics research center was tackling. Warnock solved it handily, developing what became known as the Warnock algorithm.

After earning his Ph.D. in mathematics, Warnock made his way to Xerox PARC, where he partnered with fellow employee Charles Geschke to develop InterPress, a standard for printing digital images. When Xerox did not pursue its implementation, Warnock and Geschke left to form Adobe in 1982. They licensed their newest printing technology, PostScript, to Apple, which embedded it into the LaserWriter printer, kicking off a revolution in desktop publishing.

Warnock was actively involved in the development of further products that put Adobe on the map. After creating Adobe Illustrator in 1986, he founded the development team “Camelot,” tasked with solving the problem “that most programs print to a wide range of printers, but there is no universal way to communicate and view this printed information electronically.” The solution: the Portable Document Format, or PDF, which heralded a new era of the promised “paperless office.”

Yet Warnock never abandoned the print medium himself: he loved old books and founded the Rare Book Room, an online archive to digitize and preserve classics.

Warnock and Geschke, who passed in 2021, shared many awards, including the American mobile Association’s Annual Medal of Achievement Award, the IEEE Computer Society’s Computer Entrepreneur Award, the National Medal of Technology and Innovation, and the Marconi Prize.

Warnock served as Adobe CEO until 2000, a co-chair on the board of directors until 2017, and board member until 2023. He died at 82.

Molly Holzschlag: The web’s fairy godmother

January 15, 1963 – September 5, 2023

Jake Przespo (CC BY 2.0)

“If Tim Berners-Lee is the father of the web, then Molly is its fairy godmother,” said a friend of Molly Holzschlag.

An American teacher and author, Holzschlag devoted her life to web standards and accessibility online, in print, and in person. Holzschlag wrote or co-wrote 35 books, from 1996’s Professional Web Design to 2005’s The Zen of CSS Design and more. She founded and ran the first five years of Open Web Camp, an event that was held from 2009–2015, and she led the Web Standards Project from 2004 to 2006.

Holzschlag was indefatigable in her advocacy for accessibility, said Jeffrey Zeldman, publisher and talent chief content officer at Automattic. “Molly was a warrior for web standards,” he told Computerworld. “She tirelessly shared the benefits of accessible, semantic markup to all who would listen. There was no web development conference to which Molly would not travel, no user question she would not answer thoughtfully, no web person she would not happily mentor and support if asked.”

Holzschlag didn’t always get her way, but that didn’t deter her. “There were so many things about what the web became that she hated, that she’d spent so much time and energy fighting to avert,” wrote author, event organizer, and early CSS advocate Eric A. Meyer. “But she still loved it for what it could be and what it had been originally designed to be.”

Holzschlag battled numerous health issues over the past decade. She was 60 when she died.

Martin Goetz: Father of the software industry

April 22, 1930 – October 10, 2023

Well before Apple and Microsoft were tried as monopolies, IBM was the computer industry’s 800-pound gorilla. Since software wasn’t being patented, IBM was free to copy code and ideas to bundle whatever software they wanted with their hardware, exploiting third-party developers. “Trying to sell against free software is very difficult,” observed programmer Martin Goetz.

He and the company he co-founded, Applied Data Research (ADR), decided to change that. Goetz filed for — and received — the first software patent in the United States, for a mainframe data-sorting algorithm (“Sorting System”). Computerworld covered the story in its June 19, 1968 edition, with a front-page headline: “First Patent Issued for Software, Full Implications Are Not Yet Known.”

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The implications proved to be the birth of the software industry, driving competition and innovation, starting with ADR’s own Autodesk, often considered the first patented commercial software program. Protecting these patents involved an antitrust lawsuit against IBM — one by the US Department of Justice, another by ADR. By 1969, IBM had agreed to “unbundle” software from its mainframe, creating further opportunities for independent software developers.

In later years, Goetz sometimes found the precedent he had set to be abused by the likes of Apple and Amazon. “The patent wars go on… It’s a little bit of a mess, I would have to say,” he admitted.

Goetz was 93 when he died.

Want your Windows 10 PC to run faster? We’re here to help. By tweaking some of the operating settings, your machine will be zippier and less prone to performance and system issues.

And if you’re already running Windows 11, we’ve got you covered there. Check out our top ways to keep Windows 11 devices chugging along smoothly.

Here’s our list of tips for Windows 10.

The top ways to speed up Windows 10

• Change your power settings

• Disable programs that run on startup

• Go to a previous restore point

• Use ReadyBoost to speed up disk caching

• Shut off Windows tips and tricks

• Stop OneDrive from syncing

• Use OneDrive files on-Demand

• Turn off search indexing

• Clean out your hard disk

• Clean out your Registry

• Disable shadows, animations and visual effects

• Disable transparency

• Update your device drivers

• Turn on automated Windows maintenance

• Kill bloatware

• Defrag your hard disk

• Disable Game Mode

• Shut down and restart Windows

You may notice that that last tip is the most tried-and-true way of (hopefully) smoothing out any problems in Windows 10. There’s a reason it’s effectively an internet meme.

1. Change your power settings

If you’re using Windows 10’s “Power saver” plan, you’re slowing down your PC. That plan reduces your PC’s performance in order to save energy. (Even desktop PCs typically have a “Power saver” plan.) Changing your power plan from “Power saver” to “High performance” or “Balanced” will give you an instant performance boost.

To do it, launch the Control Panel app, then select Hardware and Sound > Power Options. You’ll typically see two options: Balanced (recommended) and Power saver. (Depending on your make and model, you might see other plans here as well, including some branded by the manufacturer.) To see the High performance setting, click the down arrow by Show additional plans.

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To change your power setting, simply choose the one you want, then exit Control Panel. “High performance” gives you the most oomph, but uses the most power; “Balanced” finds a happy medium between power use and better performance; and “Power saver” does everything it can to give you as much battery life as possible. Desktop users have no reason to choose “Power saver,” and even laptop users should consider the “Balanced” option when unplugged — and “High performance” when connected to a power source.

2. Disable programs that run on startup

One reason your Windows 10 PC may feel sluggish is that you’ve got too many programs running in the background — programs that you rarely or never use. Stop them from running, and your PC will run more smoothly.

Start by launching the Task Manager: Press Ctrl-Shift-Esc, right-click the lower-right corner of your screen and select Task Manager, or type task manager into the Windows 10 search box and press Enter. If the Task Manager launches as a compact app with no tabs, click More details at the bottom of your screen. The Task Manager will then appear in its full-tabbed glory. There’s plenty you can do with it, but we’re going to focus only on killing unnecessary programs that run at startup.

Click the Startup tab. You’ll see a list of the programs and services that launch when you start Windows. Included on the list is each program’s name as well as its publisher, whether it’s enabled to run on startup, and its “Startup impact,” which is how much it slows down Windows 10 when the system starts up.

To stop a program or service from launching at startup, right-click it and select Disable. This doesn’t disable the program entirely; it only prevents it from launching at startup — you can always run the application after launch. Also, if you later decide you want it to launch at startup, you can just return to this area of the Task Manager, right-click the application and select Enable.

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Many of the programs and services that run on startup may be familiar to you, like OneDrive or Evernote Clipper. But you may not recognize many of them. (Anyone who immediately knows what “bzbui.exe” is, please raise your hand. No fair Googling it first.)

The Task Manager helps you get information about unfamiliar programs. Right-click an item and select Properties for more information about it, including its location on your hard disk, whether it has a digital signature, and other information such as the version number, the file size and the last time it was modified.

You can also right-click the item and select Open file location. That opens File Explorer and takes it to the folder where the file is located, which may give you another clue about the program’s purpose.

Finally, and most helpfully, you can select Search online after you right-click. Bing will then launch with links to sites with information about the program or service.

If you’re really nervous about one of the listed applications, you can go to a site run by Reason Software called Should I Block It? and search for the file name. You’ll usually find very solid information about the program or service.

Now that you’ve selected all the programs that you want to disable at startup, the next time you restart your computer, the system will be a lot less concerned with unnecessary programs.

3. Go to a previous restore point

As you use Windows 10, it automatically creates restore points that are essentially snapshots of your system at specific moments in time, including installed software, drivers, and updates. Restore points are a kind of safety net so if something goes wrong, you can always restore your PC to a previous state.

They can also be used to speed up your PC if you notice — for no reason you can fathom — it’s started to slow down. Recently installed problematic drivers, software, or updates could be to blame, so going back to a previous restore point could speed things up again because the system will be returned to the state it was in before the problems started. Keep in mind, though, that you’ll only be able to restore your system to the state it was in during the last seven to 10 days. (Restore points don’t affect your files, so you won’t lose any files by going to a restore point.)

To go to a previous restore point:

1. Save any open files and close all your programs.
2. In the search box type advanced system and then click View advanced system settings. You’ll be sent to the Advanced tab of System Properties in the Control Panel.
3. Click the System Protection tab.
4. In the System Restore area, click System Restore.
5. On the screen that pops up, the “Recommended restore” option will be chosen for you. Click Next if you want to go that restore point. To see others, click Choose a different restore point. Highlight the one you want to use and click Next.
6. Click Finish from the screen that appears.
7. Your system will restore to the restore point you chose and shut down. Restart your PC.

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Note: there’s a chance System Restore isn’t turned on, meaning you won’t be able to use this tip. If that’s the case, you should turn it on to solve any future problems. To do so:

1. In the search box, type create a restore point, then click Create a restore point.
2. On the System Protection tab, select Configure.
3. Select Turn on system protection. Leave the other settings on the page as they are.
4. Click OK. From now on, your PC will automatically create restore points.

4. Use ReadyBoost to speed up disk caching

Windows 10 regularly stores cached data on your hard disk, and then when it needs the data, fetches it from there. The time it takes to fetch cached data depends on the speed of your hard disk. If you have a traditional hard disk instead of an SSD, there’s a trick that can help speed up your cache: use Windows’ ReadyBoost feature. It tells Windows to cache data to a USB flash drive, which is faster than a hard disk. Fetching data from that speedier cache should speed up Windows.

First, plug a USB flash drive into one of your PC’s USB ports. The flash drive needs to support at least USB 2.0, and preferably USB 3 or faster. The faster your flash drive, the more of a speed boost you should see. Also, look for a flash drive that is at least double the size of your PC’s RAM for maximum performance.

After you plug in in the drive, open File Explorer and click This PC. Look for the flash drive. It may have an odd name, like UDISK 28X, or something even less obvious. Right-click it, choose Properties, and click the ReadyBoost tab.

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You’ll come to a screen that asks whether you want to use the flash drive as a cache and recommends a cache size. Leave the cache size as is or change it if you like. Then select Dedicate this device to ReadyBoost and click Apply and then OK.

(Note that if you see the message, “This device cannot be used for ReadyBoost” when you click the ReadyBoost tab, it means your flash drive doesn’t meet ReadyBoost’s minimum performance standards, so you’ll have to insert a new one.)

As you use your computer, ReadyBoost will start filling the cache with files, so you may notice an increase in disk activity. Depending on how much you use your PC, it can take a few days for your cache to fill and offer maximum improved performance. If you don’t see an increase in performance, try a flash disk with more capacity.

Note: If you have an SSD, you won’t get any extra speed from ReadyBoost, and it might even hurt performance. So don’t use this on a system with an SSD.

5. Shut off Windows tips and tricks

As you use your Windows 10 PC, Windows keeps an eye on what you’re doing and offers tips about things you might want to do with the operating system. In my experience, I’ve rarely if ever found these “tips” helpful. I also don’t like the privacy implications of Windows constantly taking a virtual look over my shoulder.

Windows watching what you’re doing and offering advice can also make your PC run more sluggishly. So if you want to speed things up, tell Windows to stop giving you advice. To do so, click the Start button, select the Settings icon and then go to System > Notifications & actions. Scroll down to the Notifications section and uncheck the box marked “Get tips, tricks, and suggestions as you use Windows.”

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That’ll do the trick.

6. Stop OneDrive from syncing

Microsoft’s cloud-based OneDrive file storage, built into Windows 10, keeps files synced and up to date on all of your PCs. It’s also a useful backup tool so that if your PC or its hard disk dies, you still have all your files intact, waiting for you to restore them.

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It does this by constantly syncing files between your PC and cloud storage — something that can also slow down your PC. That’s why one way to speed up your PC is to stop the syncing. Before you turn it off permanently, though, you’ll want to check whether it is actually slowing down your PC.

To do so, right-click the OneDrive icon (it looks like a cloud) in the notification area on the right side of the taskbar. (Note: In order to see the OneDrive icon, you may need to click an upward facing arrow.) From the pop-up screen that appears, click Pause syncing and select either 2 hours, 8 hours, or 24 hours, depending upon how long you want it paused. During that time, gauge whether you’re seeing a noticeable speed boost.

If so, and you decide you do indeed want to turn off syncing, right-click the OneDrive icon, and from the pop-up, select Settings > Account. Click Unlink this PC, and then from the screen that appears, click Unlink account. When you do that, you’ll still be able to save your files to your local OneDrive folder, but it won’t sync with the cloud.

If you find that OneDrive slows down your PC but prefer to keep using it, you can try to troubleshoot OneDrive problems. For info on how to do that, check out Microsoft’s “Fix OneDrive sync problems” page.

7. Use OneDrive Files On-Demand

Some users may not want to stop OneDrive from syncing; doing so defeats its purpose of making sure you have the latest files on whatever device you use. And it would also mean you won’t be able to use OneDrive as a way to safely back up files.

But there’s a way to get the best of both worlds: You can keep syncing to an absolute minimum and only do it when absolutely necessary. You’ll speed up performance, and still get the best of what OneDrive has to offer.

To do this, you use Windows’ OneDrive Files On-Demand feature. With it, you can choose to keep only certain files on your PC, but still have access to all your other OneDrive files in the cloud. When you want to use one of those online files, you open it directly from the cloud. With fewer files on your PC syncing, you should see a performance boost.

Right-click the OneDrive icon on the right side of the Taskbar and select Settings. Click Advanced settings and scroll down to the Files On-Demand section. Click Free up disk space and select Continue. When you do that, all the files on your PC will be set to online-only, which means they’re only available from OneDrive in the cloud not on your PC. From now on, the first time you want to open one of your files, you’ll have to be online – that is, unless you use the following instructions to make some files available on your PC as well as in the cloud, while you leave others available only in the cloud.

After you click the Continue button, you’ll see OneDrive in a File Explorer window.  For every folder whose files you want kept on your PC, right-click the folder and select Always keep on this device. You can do the same thing for subfolders and individual files.

Later, if you want to have folders, subfolders, or files stored only in OneDrive in the cloud, right-click it in File Explorer, and uncheck the box next to Always keep on this device. You can change the status of folders, subfolders, and files like this whenever you like.

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If you change your mind and want all your files stored locally and kept in sync via OneDrive, go back to the “Advanced settings” section of OneDrive settings page, scroll down to the Files On-Demand section and click Download all files.

Note that OneDrive Files On-Demand is available only on Windows 10 version 1709 and higher.

8. Turn off search indexing

Windows 10 indexes your hard disk in the background, allowing you — in theory — to search your PC more quickly than if no indexing were being done. But slower PCs that use indexing can see a performance hit, and you can give them a speed boost by turning off indexing. Even if you have an SSD disk, turning off indexing can improve your speed, because the constant writing to disk that indexing does can eventually slow down SSDs.

To get the maximum benefit in Windows 10, you need to turn indexing off completely. To do so, type services.msc in the Windows search box and press Enter. The Services app appears. Scroll down to either Indexing Service or Windows Search in the list of services. Double-click it, and from the screen that appears, click Stop. Then reboot your machine. Your searches may be slightly slower, although you may not notice the difference. But you should get an overall performance boost.

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If you’d like, you can turn off indexing only for files in certain locations. To do this, type index in the Windows search box and click the Indexing Options result that appears. The Indexing Options page of the Control Panel appears. Click the Modify button, and you’ll see a list of locations that are being indexed, including Microsoft Outlook, Internet Explorer History, and your hard drive or drives. Uncheck the box next to any location, and it will no longer be indexed. If you’d like to customize what gets indexed and what doesn’t on individual drives, click the down arrow next to any drive and check the box next to what you want indexed and uncheck the box of what you don’t.

Though technology companies announced massive layoffs last year, 2023 has been  much worse. Layoffs have far outpaced last year’s cuts, as tech giants including Amazon, Cisco, Facebook parent company Meta, Microsoft, Google, IBM, SAP, and Salesforce — as well as many smaller companies — announce sweeping job cuts.

The problem: Big Tech went on a hiring binge during the pandemic when lockdowns sparked a tech buying spree to support remote work and an uptick in e-commerce, and now they face revenue declines.

According to data compiled by Layoffs.fyi, the online tracker keeping tabs on job losses in the technology sector, 1,169 tech companies have laid off about 260,238 staff in 2023, compared to 164,969 layoffs in 2022.

Here is a list — to be updated regularly — of some of the most prominent technology layoffs the industry has experienced recently.

December 2023

Twilo’s third significant staff reduction in the past year saw the likely loss of 300-400 workers at the cloud communications company. The most heavily affected were workers in the sales teams for the company’s contact center software and consumer data products. Twilo said in a statement that the layoffs were necessary to “optimize” the company’s technology, data and analytics business for growth. The employees affected were given 12 weeks of salary as a severance package, plus additional pay for every year worked at the company. The costs of the layoffs and associated severance payments were estimated by Twilo at between $25 million and $35 million.

Mere days after the final closing of Broadcom’s mammoth $69 billion acquisition of VMware, Broadcom laid off 1,267 VMware employees. The move had been long feared among VMware workers, according to multiple reports. The affected employees mostly worked at VMware’s Palo Alto offices, and a filing with the California Employment Development Department detailed that further job cuts were on the table. Stephen Elliot, a group vice president at IDC, said that the layoffs were likely to be greeted with approval by VMware’s customers and partners, and viewed as a refocusing of the company’s efforts.

November 2023

Amazon confirmed that it is planning to lay off several hundred workers at its Alexa division as part of a shift in focus to generative AI. “As we continue to invent, we’re shifting some of our efforts to better align with our business priorities, and what we know matters most to customers—which includes maximizing our resources and efforts focused on generative AI,” the company said in a statement. Amazon has already undertaken multiple rounds of layoffs in the last 12 months and this is not the first time Amazon’s devices and services team, which includes those working on the company’s Echo devices and Alexa, has been cut back. Employees in this department were part of 18,000 jobs Amazon axed at the start of 2023.

Network management and visualization vendor Splunk announced it would be cutting about 560 jobs as part of a global restructuring. The announcement comes after Splunk announced a first wave of 325 job cuts in February. “The overall market has retracted and we expect the macro environment will continue to be unpredictable for the foreseeable future,” said Splunk president and CEO Gary Steele in message to employees. He added that the job cuts are unrelated to the company’s pending $28 billion acquisition by networking giant Cisco, which was initially announced in September of this year, stating that the changes were simply the continuation of “important initiatives” Splunk has undertaken to align its resources and operating structure.

October 2023

Telecom giant Nokia announced it will be cutting up to 14,000 jobs, a decision it blamed on the slowing demand for 5G equipment. The news comes after the company reported that its third-quarter net sales declined by 20% year-on-year, with profit over the same period dropping by 69%. Nokia said that as a result, it will be implementing cost-cutting measures to try and save between $842 million and $1.2 billion by 2026, eliminating $422 million worth of costs in 2024 and a further $316 million in 2025.

Stack Overflow said it was laying off nearly a third of its workforce to replace it with generative AI-driven coding assistants, such as Microsoft Copilot, Amazon CodeWhisperer, and Google Bard. The downsizing activity, which impacted the go-to-market and support teams, was a result of the company’s strategy to focus on its products and move toward profitability, especially at a time when macroeconomic conditions are uncertain, company CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar wrote in a blog post.

Qualcomm is set to cut 1,258 employees by December this year, according to filings made to the state’s Employment Development Department. Layoffs at the chipmaking giant will affect its San Diego and Santa Clara offices and encompass roles such as engineers, analysts, software developers, and employees in finance, legal, and human resources. These job reductions are a response to the company’s recent financial struggles, with revenue down 23% year-on-year and net income down 52% for the quarter ending June.

Facebook’s parent, Meta, laid off employees from its metaverse custom silicon unit, affecting Facebook’s Agile Silicon Team or FAST, according to a Reuters report. FAST is home to nearly 600 Facebook employees, according to the report. The job cuts at FAST come just days after the company released its Quest 3 mixed reality headsets, which are expected to offer a metaverse play.

September 2023

Airtable, a low-code software company, underwent its second round of layoffs within nine months, cutting around 237 employees, equivalent to 27% of its workforce. CEO Howie Liu explained that these measures aim to target large enterprise clients and regain control over spending. This move follows a similar downsizing effort in December 2022, which affected 254 employees. Airtable anticipates achieving cash-flow positivity after these layoffs. The decision reflects a post-pandemic shift from hypergrowth to a more sustainable business model.

Alphabet, the parent company of Google, initiated another round of layoffs, this time affecting hundreds of employees within its recruiting team. The move is part of Alphabet’s ongoing efforts to streamline its operations and increase efficiency amid economic uncertainties. The tech giant is grappling with fierce competition from industry rivals like Microsoft, AWS, IBM, and Oracle, particularly in the field of generative AI and artificial intelligence. In a strategic shift, Alphabet is focusing its workforce toward engineering and technical roles, reflecting a broader trend in the tech industry.

August 2023

Cybersecurity company SecureWorks announced it is laying off 15% of its workforce, around 300 employees. This constitutes the second round of layoffs enacted by company this year, with the company announcing a 9% reduction in the size of its workforce in February. In a regulatory filing, SecureWorks said that it would incur about $14.2 million in expenses due to the layoffs, mostly related to employee termination benefits and real-estate costs. “We are announcing actions to simplify and scale our business and to deliver profitable growth,” wrote CEO Wendy Thomas in an email to employees on August 14, adding that the company would be “continuing to invest in the growth of our business, aligned to our strategic priorities.”

US cybersecurity firm Rapid7 announced plans to lay off 18% of its workforce, approximately 400 global employees. “As we accelerate our delivery of the leading security operations solution and service platform experience to customers, we have determined it is necessary to restructure our operations, including the difficult decision to reduce our team in the near term,” CEO Corey Thomas said in a letter to staff. In a regulatory filing with the SEC, Boston-based Rapid7 estimated that the restructuring plan will incur costs of between $24 million-$32 million in charges and will be “substantially complete” by the end of the fourth quarter of 2023. The company added that it also plans to permanently close a number of undisclosed office locations as a result of the restructuring, which will cost an additional $4 million. The announcement was made in tandem with Rapid7’s 2023 second quarter financial results, where the company reported a loss of $66.8 million during the three-months ending June 30.

Networking giant Cisco Systems announced another round of layoffs. Despite employees viewing the move as fresh cuts, the company clarified that these layoffs were part of the restructuring plan announced in November 2022, which included eliminating around 5% of its 83,000 workforce. The reduction aims to rebalance the organization and prioritize investments in key areas, Cisco said. Cisco reiterated that the layoffs aren’t solely driven by cost savings, but by the need to adapt to the changing technology landscape. The company plans to support affected employees with generous severance packages and assistance in finding new roles. However, disgruntled employees expressed dismay, highlighting the impact of losing jobs regardless of whether they were previously announced.

Evernote, the maker of the note-taking app of the same name, is laying off most of its staff in the US and Chile and moving to Italy, the home of its corporate parent, Bending Spoons. “Going forward, a dedicated (and growing) team based in Europe will continue to assume ownership of the Evernote product,” company CEO Francesco Patarnello said in a message to employees. He did not specify the number of staff to be laid off, but said that affected employees in most cases will receive 16 weeks of salary, up to one year of health insurance coverage, and a performance bonus. Bending Spoons, which acquired Evernote in November last year, had enacted a round of layoffs in February that affected more than 100 employees.

June 2023

Oracle laid off hundreds of employees and rescinded job offers for its Cerner healthcare unit, acquired earlier this year for $28 billion, according to a report by Insider. The layoffs were reportedly due to problems with Cerner’s project for the US Department of Veterans Affairs Office. The VA has raised concerns about technical glitches and patient safety issues with its new electronic health record system, and the layoffs cast a shadow over Oracle’s optimistic outlook for Cerner. Company executives expect Cerner to be a crucial factor in future growth, considering the healthcare industry’s ongoing digital transformation as the sector adopts electronic healthcare records. Just days before the Cerner layoffs came to light, Oracle announced that quarterly cloud revenue experienced a significant surge, increasing 54% year-over-year and contributing to record sales for the fiscal year.

CRM software provider Zendesk implemented a new round of layoffs, reducing its workforce by a further 8% due to ongoing macroeconomic uncertainty and increased competition from rivals. The move came just six months after the company laid off 300 employees for similar reasons. CEO Tom Eggemeier announced the decision in an email to all employees, which was later posted as a blog. Eggemeier highlighted the need to align the company’s employee structure with customer goals, as enterprise customers consider adopting newer technologies like generative AI. Eggemeier said he believes Zendesk has an opportunity to lead in the new era of intelligent customer experience (CX), with solutions such as Zendesk AI and Conversational Commerce.

May 2023

Stack Overflow, the question-and-answer portal for developers, announced that it will lay off 10% of its workforce, affecting at least 58 employees. The job cuts come as the company shifts its focus to profitability amid macroeconomic concerns, according to a blog post by CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar. Affected employees include UX designers, HR professionals, product designers, and senior software developers. To improve profitability, Stack Overflow plans to launch AI and ML-based offerings in the coming months. This move is likely in response to demand from enterprises for generative AI and natural language processing capabilities, as vendors like AWS, IBM, and Google have launched new product offerings in this space.

Employment-focused social media platform LinkedIn on Tuesday said it would let go of 716 staffers as it shuts down a job search app in China and prepares for tapering revenue growth.  According to a letter to employees from CEO Ryan Roslansky, the layoffs were designed to reorganize the company and become more agile. He noted that the company had experienced shifts in customer behavior and slower revenue growth in recent months. In addition to the layoffs, the company will spin up 250 new roles in specific segments of its operations, new business, and account management teams starting May 15. The company will also phase out the local job app InCareer by August 9, 2023, as part of its business strategy changes in China.

Technology services and consulting company Cognizant is set to cut around 1% of its global workforce, or approximately 3,500 employees, in a bid to reduce costs. Despite posting a 3% increase in net profit year-on-year for its most recent quarter, Cognizant CEO Ravi Kumar said the company was monitoring an uncertain macroeconomic environment and potential shifts in client priorities. The job cuts are part of the company’s NextGen program, which aims to simplify its operating model and realign office space. Cognizant has not confirmed where the affected workers are based, but it did say the cuts would mostly affect non-billable roles. In a statement, Cognizant said the changes reflect the post-pandemic hybrid work environment, and its drive for simplification includes operating with fewer layers to enhance agility and enable faster decision-making.

April 2023

Facing a slowdown in revenue growth, cloud storage company Dropbox announced that it is laying off 500 employees, or 16% of its workforce, mainly in order to be able to hire staff with AI expertise. Although revenue for the fourth quarter last year — the last quarter for which Dropbox reported earnings — was up by 5.8% year over year to $598.8 million, the company has experienced a slowdown in sales recently. Meanwhile, in order to stay competive, the company needs to ramp up its AI capabilities, CEO Drew Houston said in note to employees.

Enterprise Linux giant Red Hat announced it will lay off almost 4% of its global staff, or about 800 workers, noting that the cuts will affect general administrative staff, not technical workers or sales people. The company has helped boost sales for corporate parent IBM, which reported that in the first quarter of the year, Red Hat revenue jumped 8% year over year. Despite the sales growth Red Hat CEO Matt Hicks said that a staff restructuring was necessary to ramp up efforts to bolster the company’s open hybrid cloud strategy, particularly for the industries including  telecommunications and automotive.

Facebook’s parent company, Meta, initiated another round of  layoffs. These were previosuly announced — the difference this time is that many of the cuts reportedly affect technical employees. The latest wave of job cuts will see approximately 4,000 employees laid off from the company, including those in user experience, software engineering, graphics programming, and gameplay programming. The timeline for the cuts may differ, depending on the locations employees, Meta said. Instagram, a Meta subsidiary, is also downsizing or relocating UK-based staff, with the app’s head, Adam Mosseri, moving back to the US.

March 2023

Kyndryl, the managed IT services provider that spun out of IBM, announced layoffs affecting its internal IT services to streamline operations and become more competitive. The exact number of affected employees was not disclosed, but anonymous comments on job-loss monitoring website The Layoff.com suggested that staff in IT asset management roles and Kyndryl’s own CIO organization were among those let go. Kyndryl, which employs 90,000 globally, has been facing declining revenue and slow growth since its separation from IBM.

IT services and consultancy firm Accenture announced it would lay off 19,000 employees, or 2.5% of its workforce, over the next 18 months to reduce costs amid uncertain economic conditions. Tech workers were expected to be largely spared though, as the company said the cuts would primarily affect non-billable corporate functions. The decision came as demand for services stabilized following post-pandemic growth, and Accenture also lowered its fiscal year 2023 revenue growth forecast. Despite the reduced forecast, Accenture’s diversified business and industry mix is expected to provide stability for the tech services giant.

Amazon said it plans to lay off about 9,000 more workers from several business units, including AWS, PXT (People Experience and Technology, the company’s HR arm), Advertising, and Twitch. The announcement came two months after Amazon unveiled plans to lay off 18,000 employees. AWS is a big revenue generator for Amazon but has not been immune to current macroeconomic conditions. Revenue growth slowed sharply in the fourth quarter of 2022, to 20% in year-on-year terms. That’s well below the 27.5% and 33% figures seen in the previous two quarters. 

Four months after social media giant Meta confirmed that it would cut 13% of its global workforce — amounting to 11,000 jobs — the company announced a further 10,000 layoffs. Additionally, Meta said that it would leave 5,000 currently empty roles unfilled. Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg cited difficult macroeconomic conditions and a focus on “flattening” the company’s organizational structure as key factors in the decision to cut more staff.

Collaboration software company Atlassian said that it plans to fire 500 employees, or around 5% of its overall workforce. The Australia-based company said that the job losses were organizational, and not driven by a need to cut costs — despite posting a net loss in its February financials, Atlassian saw its revenue grow 27%, to $873 million in the last quarter.

February 2023

This round of Twitter layoffs saw the embattled social media platform lose 10% of its remaining workers, as about 200 were fired. The layoffs included startup founders whose companies had been absorbed by Twitter, including Esther Crawford, most recently the head of Twitter Blue. Twitter has fewer than 2,000 workers left on staff, down from about 7,500 just before Elon Musk bought the company in late October 2022.

Twilio announced that it would slash its workforce by roughly 1,400, months after laying off an additional 816 during the fourth quarter of 2022. The cloud communications company said also that it would reorganize internally, creating two new business units, Twilio Communications and Twilio Data & Applications, in an official blog post. Before these two recent rounds of layoffs, the company employed nearly 9,000 workers.

Microsoft confirmed that it is cutting employees working on its HoloLens, Surface laptop and Xbox products, as reports surfaced that the tech giant will be laying off 100 employees working for its industrial metaverse team and closing that unit. The move to cut staff working on HoloLens and in its industrial metaverse team came as a surprise since the the company had made recent moves to expand efforts to move its augmented reality,  virtual reality and metaverse initiatves from the consumer to the enterprise side. In a statement, though, Microsoft said it was committed to the industrial metaverse. The company did not specify how many jobs it would cut in those areas, though a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) from Washington state Friday noted that Microsoft had reported that 617 employees would be laid off in Redmond, Bellevue and Issaquah.

Yahoo said it will lay off about 20% of its staff, or apporximately 1,600 workers, by the end of year, according to media reports confirmed by the company. The move is aimed at restructuring the company’s advertising technology business unit and reallocating its finances more efficiently. The layoffs mark the end of Yahoo’s attempts to be a direct competitor to Google and Meta in the digital advertising market.

Microsoft-owned software development and version control service provider GitHubowned by Microsoft said it would be cutting 10% of its workforce, or about 300 employees, and moving  the remaining staff to remote work in order to safeguard the company’s immediate financial stability.

The layoffs came about a month after the company enacted a hiring freeze.

Cloud-based videoconferencing service provider Zoom said that it was laying off 15% of its workforce, fearing uncertain macroeconomic conditions. The move came after the company went on a hiring spree during the pandemic.

In addition, Zoom said it is also making changes in team structure and several members of its leadership team will take pay cuts.

 Due to declining PC sales and infrastructure requirements, Dell Technologies said it would lay off 6,650 workers, or about 5% of its total workforce. In addition to the downsizing, Co-Chief Operating Officer Jeff Clarke said the company would introduce changes that include changing the structure of its sales team and integrating the services division of its consumer and infrastructure businesses.

In a company filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Splunk said it would be laying off 4% of its workforce as part of broader measures to optimize costs and processes ahead of uncertain macroeconomic conditions. The decision to downsize will affect 325 employees at the company, mostly in the North America region.

In a message shared with PayPal employees and posted on the company’s online newsroom, PayPal President and CEO Dan Schulman said the company was set to cut 2,000 jobs, about 7% of its workforce.

Although the company beat analyst expectations in November when it reported its third quarter financial results, PayPal downgraded its forecast for the fourth quarter, citing a challenging macro environment and slowing e-commerce trends.

January 2023

Despite revenue rising 11% in 2022, during an announcement about its fourth quarter financial results, SAP said that due to net income dropping by 68%, the company would be undertaking some restructuring, resulting in layoffs.

Whereas companies such as Google or Salesforce announced across-the-board layoffs based on performance review criteria to reverse over-hiring during the pandemic period, CEO Christian Klein said that the job cuts are part of “a targeted restructuring” and not performance-based.

“We definitely didn’t over-hire,” Klein said, noting that revenue grew faster than SAP employee growth in 2022.

After spinning off most of its infrastructure management division as a new business, Kyndryl, in November 2021, and selling some assets of its Watson Health business in January 2022, on the same day as IBM’s Q4 2022 results were announced, the company said it was eliminating 3,900 job roles, or 1.5% of its global workforce.

On a conference call with analysts to discuss the results, CFO Jim Kavanaugh didn’t directly mention the job cuts, instead alluding vaguely to the situation by acknowledging the business would have some “stranded costs” to address in early 2023, resulting in a “modest” charge of about $300 million

Later that day, in an interview with Bloomberg, Kavanaugh explained that those stranded costs related to staff left with nothing to do following the asset disposals and as a result, they would be laid off from the company.

In a statement, a spokesperson for IBM said it was important to note the charge is entirely related to the Kyndryl spinoff and healthcare divestiture.

Google’s parent company Alphabet announced it was cutting 12,000 jobs, around 6% of its global workforce. An internal memo from Sundar Pichai said that he takes “full responsibility for the decisions that led us here.”

The company will be paying affected employees at least 16 weeks of severance and six months of health benefits in the US, with other regions receiving packages based on local laws and practices.

The news comes four months after Alphabet posted lower-than-expected numbers for its third financial quarter, where it fell behind both revenue and profit expectations. However, while overall revenue growth slowed to 6% in the quarter for Alphabet, Google Cloud grew 38% year-on-year to $6.9 billion.

On Jan. 18, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella confirmed in a blog post that the company would be cutting almost 5% of its workforce, impacting 10,000 employees. 

The chief executive chalked up the downsizing maneuver to aligning its cost structure with its revenue structure while investing in areas that the company predicts will show long-term growth.

The Seattle-based tech giant reported its slowest growth in five years for the first quarter of its fiscal 2023, due largely to a strong US dollar and an ongoing decline in personal computer sales, causing net income to fall by 14% to $17.56 billion from this time last year. Rising cloud revenue helped to soften Microsoft’s growth slowdown.

Google-backed, India-based social media startup ShareChat said it is laying off 20% of its workforce to prepare for oncoming economic headwinds.

“The decision to reduce employee costs was taken after much deliberation and in light of the growing market consensus that investment sentiments will remain very cautious throughout this year,” a spokesperson said.

The move is expected to impact over 400 employees out of the company’s approximately 2,200 staffers. The company did not disclose the roles and the exact number of workers affected by the decision.

Alphabet, Google’s corporate parent, also announced there would be layoffs at its Mountain View, California-based robotics subsidiary Intrinsic AI, eliminating around 20% of its workforce or roughly 40 employees.

“This (downsizing) decision was made in light of shifts in prioritization and our longer-term strategic direction. It will ensure Intrinsic can continue to allocate resources to our highest priority initiatives, such as building our software and AI platform, integrating the recent strategic acquisitions of Vicarious and OSRC (commercial arm Open Robotics), and working with key industry partners,” according to a company statement.

Verily — a life sciences firm also owned by Alphabet and headquartered in San Francisco — is downsizing its workforce by 15% to simplify its operating model. The move comes just months after the company raised $1 billion.

According to an email sent by CEO Stephen Gillett to all its employees, the downsizing is part of the company’s One Verily program, which aims to reduce redundancy and simplify operational aspects within the company.

As part of the new One Verily program, the company said it will move from multiple lines of business to one centralized product organization with increasingly connected healthcare systems.

Enterprise data management firm Informatica announced plans to lay off 7% of its total workforce through the first quarter of 2023, the company said in a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

The move by Informatica, headquartered in Redwood City, California, will incur nonrecurring charges of approximately $25 million to $35 million in the form of cash expenditures for employee transition, notice period, severance payments and employee benefits, the company filing showed.

The company said it expects the layoffs to be completed by the first quarter of 2023 but added that there might be limited exceptions.

At the beginning of 2023, San-Francisco based Salesforce announced it will lay off about 10% of its workforce, roughly 8,000 employees, and close some offices as part of a restructuring plan.

In a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the company disclosed that its restructuring plan calls for charges between $1.4 billion and $2.1 billion, with up to $1 billion of those costs being shouldered by the company in the fourth quarter of 2023.

In a letter sent by Salesforce’s co-CEO Marc Benioff and attached to the SEC filing, he told employees that as Salesforce’s revenue accelerated through the pandemic, the company over-hired and can no longer sustain its current workforce size due to the ongoing economic downturn. “I take responsibility for that,” Benioff said.

Seattle-based tech behemoth Amazon said it would be laying off more than 18,000 staff, with the bulk of job cuts coming later this month. The news confirmed a December Computerworld article reporting that Amazon layoffs were expected to mount to about 20,000 people at all levels While several teams are impacted, the majority of the job cuts will be in the Amazon Stores and People, Experience, and Technology (PXT) organizations.

According to a note from CEO Andy Jassy, the layoffs are a result of “the uncertain economy.” He also said that Amazon had “hired rapidly over the last several years,” but added that the layoffs will help the company pursue more long-term opportunities with a stronger cost structure.

Rite Aid has agreed to a five-year ban on using facial recognition technology for surveillance as part of a settlement with the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC).

The decision follows charges by the FTC that the technology was misused, harming consumers. From 2012 to 2020, Rite Aid implemented AI-driven facial recognition to detect shoplifters. However, the FTC said the system wrongly identified specific customers as previous shoplifters and “disproportionately impacted people of color.”

Rite Aid used AI-powered, face-scanning technology in hundreds of its stores to identify individuals on surveillance footage, aiming to reduce shoplifting and address other customer-related issues. The FTC said that due to the lack of proper safeguards and the technology’s history of inaccuracies and racial bias, Rite Aid staff often wrongfully accused customers of theft.

“Rite Aid’s reckless use of facial surveillance systems left its customers facing humiliation and other harms, and its order violations put consumers’ sensitive information at risk,” Samuel Levine, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, said in a news release. “Today’s groundbreaking order makes clear that the Commission will be vigilant in protecting the public from unfair biometric surveillance and unfair data security practices.”

According to the FTC, Rite Aid’s system used facial recognition to scan customers as they entered the store, comparing their faces with an extensive database of individuals suspected or confirmed as shoplifters. If the system found a match, it alerted staff to monitor that shopper closely. The photo database was filled with low-quality images from grainy surveillance footage and cell phones, leading to unreliable matches. The problems with the pictures resulted in staff following customers or calling the police without witnessing any crime.

Federal officials also pointed out that Rite Aid did not inform its customers about the use of facial recognition technology and instructed its employees to keep its usage confidential from both customers and the media. The FTC claimed that Rite Aid collaborated with two unnamed companies to build its “persons of interest” database containing tens of thousands of images.

Rite Aid said that its deal with the FTC must be approved by the court overseeing its ongoing bankruptcy case. The company filed for bankruptcy protection in October.

“The allegations relate to a facial recognition technology pilot program the company deployed in a limited number of stores,” the company said in a statement. “Rite Aid stopped using the technology in this small group of stores more than three years ago, before the FTC’s investigation regarding the Company’s use of the technology began.”

The FTC ban exemplifies the decentralized nature of AI regulation in the US, said Kjell Carlsson, head of data science strategy and evangelism at Domino Data Lab.

“Unlike in the EU, where the EU AI Act promises consistent regulations backed by draconian fines focused on AI, in the US, companies face an evolving patchwork of regulations by federal agencies, state and municipal lawmakers, with comparatively minor penalties, mostly focused on the misuse of data rather than AI itself,” he added.

Adobe and collaborative interface design tool provider Figma will not complete their planned $20 billion merger, as pressure from US and European regulators made the deal’s path to completion too treacherous.

The companies, in a joint statement issued Monday, said that the deal would have been a boon to both parties, but that the regulatory climate made it impossible.

“Adobe and Figma strongly disagree with the recent regulatory findings, but we believe it is in our respective best interests to move forward independently,” said Adobe chair and CEO Shantanu Narayen. “While Adobe and Figma shared a vision to jointly redefine the future of creativity and productivity, we continue to be well positioned to capitalize on our massive market opportunity and mission to change the world through personalized digital experiences.”

The EU Commission published a Statement of Objections last month, saying that the potential for the deal to reduce competition in multiple markets, most notably vector- and raster-editing tools and interactive product design applications. In the former market, according to the EU Commission, Figma currently serves as necessary competition to Adobe, which the deal would undermine. The same assertion was made in regard to the interactive product design market, with the combination of the two companies likely to create a dominant position.

The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority said much the same thing as the EU Commission last month, saying that the deal would result in “a substantial lessening of competition” in the aforementioned markets, and that it would remove the impetus for Adobe to develop certain types of products independently, stifling innovation.

“Our provisional conclusion is therefore that the Merger would remove competition between close competitors and an important competitive constraint on Figma, in a market in which Figma is already the strongest player by far and there are few other competitive constraints,” the regulator’s report said.

The U.S. Department of Justice was rumored to be on the point of filing an antitrust lawsuit under the Clayton Act, and a meeting between the companies and the DoJ days before the announcement that the deal was off was widely interpreted as one of the final steps before such a suit would have been filed, according to a report from Politico.

Under the terms of the deal, which was initially announced in September 2022, Adobe will pay a termination fee of $1 billion to Figma. Neither company could be reached for additional comment on the matter.

Over the past year, we’ve seen Microsoft make radical improvements in its browser stability and significant positive changes to its Windows update communication and telemetry strategies.  And this month’s Patch Tuesday release brings with it an incredibly light set of updates — maybe the fewest number of updates I have ever seen.

There are no zero-days, which is a great finish to 2023, though Windows gets three critical updates and Visual Studio will require immediate attention due to several re-releases of past critical application patches.

The team at Readiness has created a helpful infographic to outline the risks associated with each update in this last release of 2023. One note of caution: we have seen several potential updates to older patches (October/November) potentially coming down the release pipeline from Microsoft. It might be worth checking in during the upcoming holiday break to see whether there are any out-of-band patches for the Windows ecosystem.

Known issues

Each month, Microsoft details the known issues related to the operating system and platforms included in its update cycle.

• Microsoft has raised a reporting-related issue with Microsoft Intune and BitLocker. Using the FixedDrivesEncryptionType or SystemDrivesEncryptionType policy settings in the BitLocker configuration service provider (CSP) node in mobile device management (MDM) apps might incorrectly show a 65000 error in the “Require Device Encryption” setting for some devices in your environment. Microsoft is still working on resolving this issue.
• Windows devices using more than one monitor might experience issues with desktop icons moving unexpectedly between monitors or see other icon alignment issues when attempting to use Copilot in Windows. This was raised last month and it appears Microsoft is still working on the issue.

Though we are not experiencing printer problems with Patch Tuesday as we have in the past, HP Printers are now being displayed on Windows computers, even when HP printers are neither connected nor installed. Symptoms of this can include:

1. Some Windows 10 and Windows 11 devices are installing the HP Smart app.
2. Printers are renamed as HP printers regardless of their manufacturer. Most are being named as the HP LaserJet M101-M106 model. Printer icons might also be changed.
3. Double clicking on a printer displays the on-screen error “No tasks are available for this page.”

Microsoft has confirmed that this is not the result of an HP Printer update and is working on a resolution.

Major revisions

This is an unusual month for Microsoft, as there are normally several “information only” revisions to previous updates. This month, Microsoft has re-published updates for both Microsoft Edge and Microsoft Visual Studio that will require (in the case of Visual Studio, urgent) attention. I have updated these Browser and Development sections accordingly.

Mitigations and workarounds

Following the pattern set this month, Microsoft broke with tradition and has not released any documentation on current vulnerability mitigations or workarounds.

Testing guidance

Each month, the team at Readiness analyses the latest Patch Tuesday updates and provides detailed, actionable testing guidance based on a large application portfolio and a detailed analysis of the Microsoft patches and their potential impact on the Windows platforms and application installations.

For this end-of-year update, we have not seen any high-risk or significant functionality changes for Windows. However, there have been several changes to core functionality that will require some attention, including:

• Windows Networking: Internet Connection Sharing (ICS), the Windows DHCP IP services provider has been updated. We recommend that you progress the following tests:
  1. Ping local/remote devices (include Google.com and Bing.com).
  2. Browse the internet, with both large and small file downloads.
  3. Stream music and video.
  4. Run messaging apps (include Microsoft Teams).
• Windows kernel updates. The Windows kernel lies at the very core of the Windows operating system and any changes should be tested with care. That said, the changes implemented this month have a very low surface area and should present themselves with a simple reboot.
• SQL Clients and OLE: The Microsoft SQL clients for both SQL server and OLE have been updated. We recommend running basic SQL commands to fetch/update data from both a local and remote server.

You might not remember Faxing (showing my age here) but Microsoft has made a minor update to a single discrete function call in the MakeCall API function. If you are using automated faxes in your workflows or rely on a FAX server such as FAXPress, then you will need to perform a complete test that includes sending, receiving, and the administration of existing faxes.

Automated testing will help with these scenarios (especially a testing platform that offers a “delta” or comparison between builds). However, for line of business applications, getting the application owner (doing UAT) to test and approve the testing results is still absolutely essential.

Windows lifecycle update

This section includes important changes to servicing (and most security updates) to Windows desktop and server platforms. There are no major changes or end of support notices for the Windows or Office platforms this month. However, Microsoft has published the end of community support for PHP 8.0. For those affected, Microsoft offers a few steps to assist with updating applications.

Each month, we break down the update cycle into product families (as defined by Microsoft) with the following basic groupings:

• Browsers (Microsoft IE and Edge).
• Microsoft Windows (both desktop and server).
• Microsoft Office.
• Microsoft Exchange Server.
• Microsoft Development platforms (NET Core, .NET Core and Chakra Core).
• Adobe (retired???, maybe next year).

Browsers

The major changes included with this December browser update lie within the Chrome browser components including:

These revisions are relatively minor and should not pose a compatibility problem; add these updates to your standard browser patch release schedule.

Windows

This month, Microsoft released three critical updates and 22 patches rated important to the Windows platform that cover the following key components:

• Windows Networking, ICS, DHCP and DNS;
• Windows Kernel and Win32K drivers;
• Windows Telephony Server (a single API update);
• Microsoft Bluetooth drivers.

Your testing and deployment focus should be on ensuring that  target systems are working as expected with this month’s networking updates. Whenever Microsoft updates the Kernel (far too often), care must be taken with external devices that rely on system level drivers. A good couple of reboots this month should do the trick.

Add this Windows update to your standard release schedule.

Microsoft Office

Microsoft released three relatively minor updates to Microsoft Word. These patches address lowe- risk vulnerabilities, have a low testing profile, and are rated as important. Add these Office updates to your standard release schedule.

Microsoft Exchange Server

Lucky for us — and for those working over the Christmas break — there are no Microsoft Exchange Server updates.

Microsoft development platforms

There were no new development platforms (.NET or Microsoft Visual Studio) updates from Microsoft this month. But there are several critical updates that have been revised outside of the Patch Tuesday calendar including: CVE-2023-36792, CVE-2023-36793, CVE-2023-36794 and CVE-2023-36796.

All of these reported CVE entries relate to a cluster of Visual Studio remote code execution vulnerabilities. Microsoft is rereleasing KB5029365 to address the following known issue: Customers who are using Microsoft Visual Studio 2013 Update 5 might receive a “C2471” error after attempting to compile a build that has precompiled headers (PCH) that use the /Gm and /ZI (Edit and Continue) switches.

These re-releases of these four Visual Studio updates (from September) are rated critical by Microsoft and will need to be added to your “Patch Now” release schedule.

Adobe Reader (still here, but just not this month)

There were no updates from Adobe for Reader or Acrobat this month. And no updates to third-party applications such WinRAR nor deprecations to major system components. Now that we have a bit of time left in the year, we can start talking about the potential compatibility issues in Windows 23H2.

For Patch Tuesday Debugged, that’s a wrap for 2023. It’s been a pleasure and a privilege to help with Patch Tuesday testing and deployment challenges over the past year. I can’t wait to see what 2024 will bring us.

This year saw a 25% rise in global internet traffic, reflecting an increasing reliance on online services, according to a new report by cloud performance and security company Cloudflare.

In its annual Year in Review reports, Cloudflare offers an overview of online trends and security issues. This year, Cloudflare said, Google retained its position as the most popular internet site,  followed by Facebook, Apple, and TikTok. Facebook surpassed 2022’s leader, TikTok, in social media, with Instagram and Twitter/X also ranking highly.

The emerging category of generative AI services saw OpenAI in the lead, followed by Character AI, Quillbot, and Hugging Face.

Financial organizations were the prime targets for cyberattacks. The most common cybersecurity threats were deceptive links and extortion attempts in emails. Internet outages surged to over 180 incidents worldwide, often due to government-imposed shutdowns, a significant increase from the over 150 outages in 2022.

Smartphones lead the way in accessing the internet. In 2023, Cloudflare observed that over 40% of users are doing so via a mobile device – and for those using portable devices to access the Internet, a third of them are doing so from Apple devices, David Belson, head of data and insight at Cloudflare said in an interview. In areas where SpaceX Starlink is available, users appear to be rapidly adopting the service to access the Internet.

“We expect that we will also see strong interest in other consumer-facing satellite internet services becoming available, such as those in development from Amazon and OneWeb,” he added.

Generative AI a standout global trend

Generative AI became a standout trend globally in 2023, starting to catch eyeballs around late November 2022 with OpenAI’s ChatGPT launch. According to the Cloudflare report, the buzz helped OpenAI rise to prominence at the start of the year. As the year progressed, other generative AI services also made their mark. The most notable ones included OpenAI, Character.ai, QuillBot, Hugging Face, Poe, Perplexity, Wordtune, Bard, ProWritingAid, and Voicemod.

The source of this information in the study is Cloudflare Radar, a complimentary service that provides access to worldwide trends and insights on the Internet. The company looked at anonymous data from the popular 1.1.1.1 public DNS resolver. To create their lists of internet services, they used two main methods. First, they put together domains that belonged to the same online service. For example, Twitter/X included domains like twitter.com, t.co, and x.com. Next, the company checked an extensive list of domains to find ones that provided services to people.

Elon Musk’s controversial Twitter (now known as X) was one internet service that did not have a good year.  The service peaked at #8 the previous year during the onset of the war in Ukraine and experienced a downward trend in 2023. It started the year lower than in 2022, fluctuating between the 12th and 16th positions, and by the year’s end, it ranged between 13th and 19th.

In 2023, it was noted that X/Twitter saw increased popularity on weekends, especially between April 15 and June 10, peaking at either 11th or 12th place. This surge was particularly evident before May 14, where it consistently ranked 11th, and then settled at 12th from May 14 to June 10, aligning with key European football events. However, after the European Champions League final on June 10, X/Twitter didn’t reach those heights again.

The report found that internet outages are a growing problem. In 2023, the world experienced over 180 internet outages, an increase from the 150 reported in 2022. Many of these resulted from regional and national shutdowns directed by governments.

“For example, in Iraq, these occurred across multiple days in June, July, August, and September, in both the main part of the country and the Kurdistan region,” Belson said. “In addition to government-directed Internet shutdowns, there were several outages due to cable cuts — both terrestrial and submarine, natural disasters like storms and earthquakes, and power outages.”

Security was also a concern for internet service providers. Belson said that attackers continued to use the exploit Log4j,  a vulnerability first announced in December 2021. Another recently disclosed vulnerability that became a popular target for threat actors was HTTP/2 Rapid Reset, discovered by Cloudflare in October 2023.

“This emerging vulnerability has a large-scale impact, potentially affecting any organization using HTTP/2 for their websites and applications,” he added.

Common security issues that affect internet service are ransomware, malware, and phishing attacks, which disrupt all facets of businesses, said Scott Dowsett, Field CTO at the cybersecurity firm Anomali.

“Outages are increasing with more reliance on centralized management and cloud data centers, and this is exacerbated by a higher volume of more sophisticated attacks enabled by artificial intelligence,” he added.

Meta has introduced Purple Llama, a project dedicated to creating open-source tools for developers to evaluate and boost the trustworthiness and safety of generative AI models before they are used publicly.

Meta emphasized the need for collaborative efforts in ensuring AI safety, stating that AI challenges cannot be tackled in isolation. The company said the goal of Purple Llama is to establish a shared foundation for developing safer genAI as concerns mount about large language models and other AI technologies.

“The people building AI systems can’t address the challenges of AI in a vacuum, which is why we want to level the playing field and create a center of mass for open trust and safety,” Meta wrote in a blog post.

Gareth Lindahl-Wise, Chief Information Security Officer at the cybersecurity firm Ontinue, called Purple Llama “a positive and proactive” step towards safer AI.

“There will undoubtedly be some claims of virtue signaling or ulterior motives in gathering development onto a platform – but in reality, better ‘out of the box’ consumer-level protection is going to be beneficial,” he added. “Entities with stringent internal, customer, or regulatory obligations will, of course, still need to follow robust evaluations, undoubtedly over and above the offering from Meta, but anything that can help reign in the potential Wild West is good for the ecosystem.”

The project involves partnerships with AI developers; cloud services like AWS and Google Cloud; semiconductor companies such as Intel, AMD, and Nvidia; and software firms including Microsoft. The collaboration aims to produce tools for both research and commercial use to test AI models’ capabilities and identify safety risks.

The first set of tools released through Purple Llama includes CyberSecEval, which assesses cybersecurity risks in AI-generated software. It features a language model that identifies inappropriate or harmful text, including discussions of violence or illegal activities. Developers can use CyberSecEval to test if their AI models are prone to creating insecure code or aiding cyberattacks. Meta’s research has found that large language models often suggest vulnerable code, highlighting the importance of continuous testing and improvement for AI security.

Llama Guard is another tool in this suite, a large language model trained to identify potentially harmful or offensive language. Developers can use Llama Guard to test if their models produce or accept unsafe content, helping to filter out prompts that might lead to inappropriate outputs.