This week could easily be dubbed as merger week with the much-awaited $26 billion unification of T-Mobile/Sprint, leading to consolidation in the wireless sector. Microsoft plays catch-up with Google in the NLP game, with the release of deep learning NLP model Turing-NLG, (this will “supposedly pave the way for fluent chatbots and digital assistants), and Big TechOpens a new window draws more scrutiny into unreported acquisitions from FTC. Meanwhile, NSA made the headline for its PythonOpens a new window giveaway while the all-powerful Amazon trounced Apple Opens a new window and Google to lead the smart speaker market.
Here are This Week’s Top Stories:
- NSA’s Python Training Course Now Available to Everyone
- Microsoft Unveils Turing-NLG: Deep Learning Language Model
Cloud Computing
Privacy Concerns Won’t Impact Cloud Adoption: Security Pros
Concerns around data securityOpens a new window and data privacyOpens a new window won’t impact the robust adoption of cloud solutions by companies, a majority of security professionals said in a survey commissioned by Microsoft, adding that moving to the cloud will actually help companies address such concerns.
Big Picture: SaaS applications have enjoyed a decent adoption rate so far and according to market statisticsOpens a new window , all applications used by 73% of companiesOpens a new window worldwide will be SaaS by 2021 and 93% of CIOs across the globe are planning to adopt cloud SaaS in the near future. According to 54% of security professionals, the adoption of cloud solutions could help companies mitigate data privacy concerns as many cloud services and solutions are compliant with data security laws such as the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA).Opens a new window
However, the level of confidence of security professionals in SaaS applications is higher than the trust they wish to place in PaaS platforms. While 53% of professionals are satisfied that SaaS applications meet privacy and data protection requirements, 60% of them believe PaaS applications don’t meet these thresholds. That being said, there is still great hope for the future with 53% security geeks believing that PaaS applications will be critical towards addressing security and privacy concerns.
Our Take: What works in favor of cloud-based applications is that they make tasks like identifying and segmenting data, conducting privacy assessments, tagging sensitive customer data, and ensuring GDPR Opens a new window compliance more seamless and less complex for security professionals. However, the confidence of security professionals in SaaS and PaaS applications is not yet overwhelming as far as data privacy is concerned, indicating that cloud solutions providers will need to add more granular controls to their offerings to earn unanimous trust from security professionals in the future.
Learn more: Are You Prepared for California’s Privacy Laws?
Artificial Intelligence
NSA’s Python Training Course Now Available to Everyone
Software engineer Chris Swenson was in for a pleasant surprise after he filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the NSA Opens a new window to see if he could access the agency’s Python programming training materials. To his surprise, NSA promptly sent over its 400-page COMP 3321 Python training manual which Swenson circulatedOpens a new window without delay.
Free Python course materials!
I put in a FOIA request to the NSA for their Python training materials and got back a 400-page printout of their COMP 3321 training course.So, I scanned and OCR’d it. Here is a PDF (warning: 118 MB) pic.twitter.com/jty7Q4PaBKOpens a new window
— Cupcake ✨ 🧠(@chris_swenson) February 7, 2020Opens a new window
The training course has been designed in a way that it can be completed in two weeks by covering lessons or modules in individual sessions spanning from 45 to 90 minutes. According to NSAOpens a new window , the course requires learners to write Python programs on Jupyter notebooks based on their personal interests and implement them to fully understand the programming language’s practical utility.
Big Picture: While NSA sharing its Python training courseOpens a new window with developers is a welcome move, this isn’t the first time that developers have enjoyed access to programming language courses run by major corporations. In September, Microsoft released a new video seriesOpens a new window called Python for Beginners on YouTube that, according to Microsoft’s Senior Program Manager Christopher Harrison, allowed beginners to learn about “common everyday code and scenarios†around Python.
Similarly, Google also offers free “Python Class†for beginners who know a little bit about programming to begin with. The course contains code exercises, written materials, videos, lectures to help beginners practice Python concepts like strings and lists.
Our Take: The NSA course introduces learners to Python and its various aspects, differences between Python 3.x and 2.x lines, variables and functions, various modules and packages, flow control, visualization, and HTML processing among others. This is the first time that NSA has open-sourced its internal training material on programming, joining the likes of Microsoft and Google in sharing free online courses and modules to aspiring developers and data scientists.
Learn more: Top 10 Python Libraries for Machine LearningOpens a new window
Microsoft Unveils Turing-NLG: Deep Learning Language Model
This week, Microsoft finally removed the wraps from its Turing Natural Language Generation (T-NLG) — a deep learning language model which, as per the Redmond-based tech giant, comes with 17 billion parameters — making it the largest model ever published. Microsoft claims it outperforms Google’s BERT Opens a new window and OpenAI’s GPT-2 when it comes to practical applications and setting language modeling benchmarks.
“We have observed that the bigger the model and the more diverse and comprehensive the pretraining data, the better it performs at generalizing to multiple downstream tasks even with fewer training examples. Therefore, we believe it is more efficient to train a large centralized multi-task model and share its capabilities across numerous tasks rather than train a new model for every task individually,†Microsoft said in a blog postOpens a new window .
The company says that T-NLG can summarize documents and emails, offer writing assistance to authors, answer questions that readers ask about a document and in the future, it will help create more fluent chatbots and digital assistants that will take automated interactions with customers to new levels.
Big Picture: Modern natural language processing models now contain hundreds of millions, or even billions of parameters that enable them to generate answers to questions, compose emails, or converse with people just like a human would. Over the past decade, companies like Google, NVIDIAOpens a new window , and OpenAI have invested deeply in NLP language models to “humanize†automated tasks like chatbots, over-the-phone services, etc.
The arrival of Microsoft’s deep learning language model containing 17 billion parameters now throws the field open to greater competition in the future as there is a rising demand for automated solutions for tasks like customer service interactions and travel bookings.
Our Take: Surprisingly, Microsoft isn’t too excited about sharing this transformer-based model. This is not a public release, however the company plans to integrate it into its core products such as Microsoft Office, XBox and Bing. For starters, it will set up a private demo of T-NLG with “a small set of users within the academic community†to let them test and offer feedback on the model’s freeform generation, question answering, and summarization capabilities.
Learn more: What is Natural Language Processing? Opens a new window
Internet of Things
Hello Alexa: Amazon Leads the U.S. Smart Speaker Market
The adoption of Google-branded smart home speakers in the U.S. is expected to rise steadily to 32% of all speakers sold in the country by 2021 from just 25.7% in 2017, but not enough to significantly dent Amazon’s absolute lead in the domain.
Big Picture: Amazon’s smart home speakersOpens a new window have traditionally dominated the U.S. consumer market ever since mass adoption of these gadgets gained ground. Even though the likes of Google and Apple have thrown their hats in the ring as well and backed them up by investing millions in the technology, the rising profile of Alexa as a versatile digital assistant and the convenience offered by Amazon’s speakers have ensured the company’s dominance in the field.
Even though Amazon’s smart home speakers — led by Echo and Echo Dot will continue to remain the most-purchased products till the end of next year — Amazon’s overall market share is expected to decline from 82.4% in 2017 to 68.4% in 2021, eMarketer estimatesOpens a new window . The share of other smart speakers like Apple HomePod, Harman Kardon Invoke and Sonos One will also double from 9.7% in 2017 to 18.8% in 2021 at the expense of Amazon.
“We had previously expected Google and Apple to make more inroads in this market, but Amazon has remained aggressive. By offering affordable devices and building out the number of Alexa skills, the company has maintained Echo’s appeal,†said Victoria Petrock, a principal analyst at eMarketer. According to the firm, while the number of users of smart speakers in the U.S. will rise from 28.9% at present to 30.5% next year, the growth in the number of speakers will decline from 13.7% at present to single digits next year.
Our Take: While US smart speaker users will continue to rise in absolute numbers, overall growth will slow down over the next few years, as Alexa and other voice assistants migrate into other devices, including vehicles, appliances and other smart-home components, eMarketer report revealed.
Learn more: State of the Smart Speaker Market, Part 1Opens a new window
Big Tech
FTC Opens Probe Into Big Tech Acquisitions
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has decided it will probe all acquisitions completed by Alphabet, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon that were completed between Jan. 1, 2010 and Dec. 31, 2019 but were not reported to the antitrust agencies under the Hart-Scott-Rodino (HSR) Act.
Big Picture: FTC says it intends to deeply investigate acquisitions made by Big Tech titansOpens a new window to verify if previously-unreported deals that have gone under the radar so far were not conducted with an aim to restrict competition and ensure monopoly in the long run. The watchdog said the investigation will help it determine whether the Big Tech giants have been making “potentially anticompetitive acquisitions of nascent or potential competitors that fall below HSR filing thresholds and therefore do not need to be reported to the antitrust agencies.â€
FTC Chairman Joe Simons said that the investigation into Big TechOpens a new window acquisitions will enable FTC to take a closer look at acquisitions and evaluate whether the federal agencies are getting adequate notice of transactions that might harm competition. The top five tech titans will be asked to share information about their acquisition strategies, voting and board appointments, post-employment covenants not to compete, and hiring of key personnel from other companies.
Our Take: Through the wide-ranging probe, FTC aims to sniff outOpens a new window acquisitions that might have raised competitive concerns or other agreements that were designed to restrict competition. It will also study how smaller firms have performed post their acquisition by the big fish and will use the lessons from the exercise to determine if additional acquisitions and agreements should be made subject to premerger notification requirements.
Learn more: 10 Years Of Tech Acquisitions: Which Tech Giant is Leading The Way?Opens a new window
Telecom
U.S. Court Greenlights T-Mobile-Sprint Deal
The keenly-awaited $26.5 billion acquisition of Sprint by the number three telecom giant T-Mobile this week was greenlighted by a federal judge. The mergerOpens a new window may accelerate the 5G wars among the top wireless service providers, including Verizon and AT&T. According to Zacks Equity Research, T-Mobile plans to roll out 5G servicesOpens a new window by 2024 and “will deliver 100-plus mbps speedsOpens a new window for wireless broadband to 90% of the population and in-home service to more than half the country’s households by 2024.â€
Big Picture: The proposed acquisition was taken to court by the New York Attorney General and Attorneys General of thirteen other states who alleged that the deal would drive up prices of cellular services and would impact competition even though the deal was greenlighted by the Federal Communications Commission and Department of Justice last year.
The acquisition, if completed formally, will herald the arrival of a new player in the U.S. telecom market- Dish. The satellite TV company is buying Sprint’s Boost MobileOpens a new window sub-brand and will also inherit Sprint’s wireless spectrum which it will use to expand its offerings. “We are eager to begin serving Boost customers while aggressively growing the business as a new competitor, bringing lower prices, greater choice and more innovation to consumers,†said Dish’s co-founder and chairman Charlie Ergen. Much of this success is attributed to T-Mobile chief Legere who scripted the spectacular turnaround of the telecom player, now dubbed as a “disruptive innovator†by industry analysts.
“Today was a huge victory for this merger … and now we are FINALLY able to focus on the last steps to get this merger done! We’ve said it all along: The new T-Mobile will be a supercharged Un-carrier that is great for consumers and great for competition,†T-Mobile CEO John Legere shared reportedly.
Our Take: As part of the merger agreement, T-Mobile has pledged that it will implement a three-year freeze on its prices for cellular services. Meanwhile, the telecom industry’s labor group- the Communications Workers of America, has voiced its opposition to the deal, stating that the deal will put as many as 30,000 jobs at risk. With the California Public Utilities Commission yet to accord its final approval to the merger, we could see the workers group upping the storm around the merger and the NY Attorney General filing an appeal in the coming days.
Learn more: T-Mobile Boosts 5G Network in Florida Ahead of Miami Super Bowl Opens a new window
What did you think of this week’s tech news roundup? Let us know on TwitterOpens a new window , FacebookOpens a new window , and LinkedInOpens a new window . We’d love to hear from you!