Microsoft takes the gloves off as it battles Sony for its Activision acquisition

Table of Content

• Voters’ Views on November’s Propositions
• Congressional Elections
• Video: Californians and Their Government
• Katherine Carroll, Global Head of Policy and Regulation, Stripe
• What does it mean to be unbanked?
• Microsoft says a Sony deal with Activision stops Call of Duty coming to Game Pass
• The FTC is suing Microsoft to block its Activision Blizzard purchase
• AWS CEO: The cloud isn’t just about technology

Roughly 45% of households that received a stimulus payment, jobless benefits or other government assistance after the start of the pandemic in March, 2020 said those funds helped compel them to open an account, according to the biennial report which has been conducted since 2009. “A lot of these places that are attempting to do this are just not tech-native or tech-first companies,” BCG’s Gupta said. For one thing, smaller companies are competing for talent against big tech firms that offer higher salaries and better resources.

Among white households for instance, 2% didn't have a bank account last year as compared to 11% and 9% of their Black and Hispanic counterparts. For companies that have been forced to go DIY, building these platforms themselves does not always require forging parts from raw materials. DBS has incorporated open-source tools for coding and application security purposes such as Nexus, Jenkins, Bitbucket, and Confluence to ensure the smooth integration and delivery of ML models, Gupta said. “That is the biggest gap in the tech industry right now,” said Nicola Morini Bianzino, global chief client technology officer at EY.

Voters’ Views on November’s Propositions

Cell phone interviews were conducted with adults who have cell phone service only and with those who have both cell phone and landline service in the household. With about two weeks to go before Governor Newsom’s bid for reelection, a majority of Californians (54%) and likely voters (52%) approve of the way he is handling his job, while fewer disapprove (33% adults, 45% likely voters). Approval was nearly identical in September (52% adults, 55% likely voters) and has been 50 percent or more since January 2020.

Part of that is because of the size of datasets and because of the machine learning capabilities which are now being created. They require vast amounts of compute, but nobody will be able to do that compute unless we keep dramatically improving the price performance. There's so much data in the world, and the amount of it continues to explode. A lot of people are drowning in their data and don't know how to use it to make decisions. Other organizations have figured out how to use these very powerful technologies to really gain insights rapidly from their data. Additionally, personalized portfolio management will become available to more people with the implementation and advancement of AI.

Congressional Elections

The share supporting the reelection of the governor was similar a month ago (58% Newsom, 31% Dahle). Today, Newsom enjoys the support of most Democrats (91%), while most Republicans (86%) support Dahle; Newsom has an edge over Dahle among independent likely voters (47% Newsom, 37% Dahle). Across the state’s regions, two in three in the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles support Newsom, as do nearly half in the Inland Empire and Orange/San Diego; likely voters in the Central Valley are split.

Many of those who are unbanked say they can't afford to have an account because of the fees for insufficient funds and overdrafts that are tacked on when account balances fall short. Roughly 29% said fees or not having the required minimum balance were the primary reasons they didn't have a checking or savings account, as compared to 38% who cited those obstacles in 2019. The FDIC initiated an educational campaign to get more Americans to open an account to enable the direct deposit of those funds.

Video: Californians and Their Government

Newsom leads in all demographic groups, with the exception of men (45% Newsom, 44% Dahle) and those with a high school diploma only (46% Newsom, 49% Dahle). The share supporting Newsom grows as educational attainment increases (46% high school only, 56% some college, 60% college graduates), while it decreases with rising income (64% less than $40,000, 56% $40,000 to $79,999, 52% $80,000 or more). A household is deemed unbanked when no one in the home has an account with a bank or credit union. And since 2011, when 8% of U.S. households were unbanked, the highest since the start of the survey, and the record low reached in 2021, roughly half of the drop was due to a shift in the financial circumstances of American households the FDIC says. Intuit also has constructed its own systems for building and monitoring the immense number of ML models it has in production, including models that are customized for each of its QuickBooks software customers.

We present results for non-Hispanic whites, who account for 41 percent of the state’s adult population, and also for Latinos, who account for about a third of the state’s adult population and constitute one of the fastest-growing voter groups. We also present results for non-Hispanic Asian Americans, who make up about 16 percent of the state’s adult population, and non-Hispanic African Americans, who comprise about 6 percent. Results for other racial/ethnic groups—such as Native Americans—are included in the results reported for all adults, registered voters, and likely voters, but sample sizes are not large enough for separate analysis. Results for African American and Asian American likely voters are combined with those of other racial/ethnic groups because sample sizes for African American and Asian American likely voters are too small for separate analysis. We compare the opinions of those who report they are registered Democrats, registered Republicans, and no party preference or decline-to-state or independent voters; the results for those who say they are registered to vote in other parties are not large enough for separate analysis. We also analyze the responses of likely voters—so designated per their responses to survey questions about voter registration, previous election participation, intentions to vote this year, attention to election news, and current interest in politics.

Katherine Carroll, Global Head of Policy and Regulation, Stripe

Today, when it comes to the importance of the outcome of Prop 26, one in four or fewer across partisan groups say it is very important to them. About one in three across partisan groups say the outcome of Prop 27 is very important to them. Fewer than half across partisan groups say the outcome of Prop 30 is very important to them. Democratic incumbent Gavin Newsom is ahead of Republican Brian Dahle (55% to 36%) among likely voters, while few say they would not vote, would vote for neither, or don’t know who they would vote for in the governor’s race.

And banks such as Capital One and Ally Financial ended overdraft and other fees that have been a key barrier to some Americans accessing the banking system. A lack of banking options delayed some households from getting federal payments aimed at helping the country weather the economic fallout from the COVID-19 health crisis. Despite the obstacles, Intuit’s Hollman said it makes sense for companies that have graduated to more sophisticated ML efforts to build for themselves.

What does it mean to be unbanked?

There have been analyst reports done showing that…for typical enterprise workloads that move over, customers save an average of 30% running those workloads in AWS compared to running them by themselves. But every customer is welcome to purely “pay by the drink” and to use our services completely on demand. But of course, many of our larger customers want to make longer-term commitments, want to have a deeper relationship with us, want the economics that come with that commitment. These kinds of challenging times are exactly when you want to prepare yourself to be the innovators … to reinvigorate and reinvest and drive growth forward again.

The number of customers who are now deeply deployed on AWS, deployed in the cloud, in a way that's fundamental to their business and fundamental to their success surprised me. You can see it on paper and say, “Oh, the business has grown bigger, and that must mean there are more customers,” but the cloud and our relationship with these enterprises is now very much a C-suite agenda. The lawyer's fundamental job is to take super complex and technical things and boil them down to very easily digestible arguments for a judge, for a jury, or whoever it might be.

You can only imagine if a company was in their own data centers, how hard that would have been to grow that quickly. The ability to dramatically grow or dramatically shrink your IT spend essentially is a unique feature of the cloud. It is interesting, and I will say somewhat surprising to me, how much basic capabilities, such as price performance of compute, are still absolutely vital to our customers. If you'd asked me 15 years ago, “hey in 2022, how much of the cutting edge of innovation do you think would be around raw performance or price performance of a unit of compute,” I wouldn't have necessarily guessed that was still as important as it is.

The auditing firm has thousands of models in deployment that are used for its customers’ tax returns and other purposes, but has not come across a suitable system for managing various MLops modules, he said. On any given day, Lily AI runs hundreds of machine learning models using computer vision and natural language processing that are customized for its retail and ecommerce clients to make website product recommendations, forecast demand, and plan merchandising. But this spring when the company was in the market for a machine learning operations platform to manage its expanding model roster, it wasn’t easy to find a suitable off-the-shelf system that could handle such a large number of models in deployment while also meeting other criteria. Jamie Condliffe (@jme_c) is the executive editor at Protocol, based in London. Prior to joining Protocol in 2019, he worked on the business desk at The New York Times, where he edited the DealBook newsletter and wrote Bits, the weekly tech newsletter.

By expanding credit availability to historically underserved communities, AI enables them to gain credit and build wealth. By providing access to banking services such as fee-free savings and checking accounts, remittances, credit services, and mobile payments, fintech companies can help the under/unbanked population to achieve greater financial stability and wellbeing. When we look across the Intuit QuickBooks platform and the overall fintech ecosystem, we see a variety of innovations fueled by AI and data science that are helping small businesses succeed. By efficiently embedding and connecting financial services like banking, payments, and lending to help small businesses, we can reinvent how SMBs get paid and enable greater access to the vital funds they need at critical points in their journey.

Fewer than half of likely voters say the outcome of each of these state propositions is very important to them. Today, 21 percent of likely voters say the outcome of Prop 26 is very important, 31 percent say the outcome of Prop 27 is very important, and 42 percent say the outcome of Prop 30 is very important. The shares saying the outcomes are very important to them have remained similar to a month ago for Prop 27 (29%) and Prop 30 (42%).