NASA astronomers have made a startling discovery as the team has managed to detect one of the oldest black holes with the help of the James Webb Space Telescope. The details are astonishing as the black hole might be dating back more than 13 billion years to the dawn of the universe. The earliest black holes have major possibilities to unlock a puzzle about the amazing counterparts of the galaxies including the Milky Way, which is a billion times bigger than the mass of the sun.  Now, the latest observations reveal that the galaxy called GN-z11 has pushed the origins of this mystery of the black hole’s infancy and has suggested that these black holes are either constructed big or grow rapidly in their early phase. Black holes are one of the universe’s most questionable and weirdest objects. They are extremely powerful and have an intense gravity with light or matter fighting hard to escape their grip.  The threshold of a black hole is traced out by its horizon, which is a no-point-of-return zone. Therefore, if anything goes beyond that boundary, it’s gone forever.

The ChatGPT company OpenAI also agreed to partially restructure its board. The new board has reached an agreement with Altman to take over his former role. OpenAI said on Wednesday that co-founder Sam Altman will return to his role as CEO. The ChatGPT-maker also agreed to partially restructure its board, the company announced on X, formerly Twitter.  Former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor, ex-US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, and Quora CEO and current director Adam D'Angelo will join the board.  Altman was reinstated after being dismissed by the OpenAI board just days ago. "i'm looking forward to returning to openai," Altman wrote in a post on X. Microsoft supports Altman On Monday, ex-Twitch boss Emmett Shear was announced as the interim CEO by OpenAI in what has been a turbulent week at the artificial intelligence firm. "With the new board and w satya's support, i'm looking forward to returning to openai, and building on our strong partnership with (Microsoft)," Altman wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter, referring to the support he received from Microsoft chief Satya Nadella. Earlier, Microsoft had announced hiring Altman to run a new artificial intelligence research team soon after he was sacked by the artificial intelligence company. The tech giant is the biggest investor in OpenAI.

OpenAI has named Emmett Shear, formerly the CEO of Twitch, as its interim CEO, after surprisingly firing Sam Altman last week. Altman had become something of the public face of the ChatGPT large language model. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced on Monday that ousted OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, along with co-founder Greg Brockman, will be joining Microsoft to lead a new advanced AI research team. Former OpenAI President and co-founder Brockman had quit over Altman's firing on Friday. Meanwhile, tech publication Wired on Monday published what it said was a letter from some of OpenAI's most senior staff members threatening to quit en masse and follow Altman to Microsoft unless the company's board was replaced.  "Your actions have made it obvious that you are incapable of overseeing OpenAI," said the letter.  Signatories included the company's chief scientist, Ilya Sutskever, and even one member of the four-person board that had ousted Altman.  Microsoft is OpenAI's key business partner and has invested billions of dollars into the startup and helped provide the computing power to run its AI systems. "We remain committed to our partnership with OpenAI," Microsoft's Nadella said as she announced Altman would join the company. "We look forward to getting to know Emmett Shear and OAI's new leadership team and working with them."  Former Twitch CEO brought in at OpenAI OpenAI on Monday named Emmett Shear as an interim CEO to take over from Altman. Shear was previously the CEO of social media company Twitch.  The company caused further headlines over the weekend by initially announcing that Mira Murati would take over Altman's role, only to later demote her again and leave the top job open once more.    What does Altman's removal mean? The tech world was shocked by Altman's sacking at OpenAI. He and the company shot to fame last year amid the hype surrounding the release of a new large language model, ChatGPT, and other products like the image-generating AI Dall-E.  Many emplyoees were also blindsided by the abrupt change in management.  Major investors had pushed for reinstating him. However, the board stood by its decision, saying it was "the only path to advance and defend the mission of OpenAI." "Put simply, Sam's behavior and lack of transparency in his interactions with the board undermined the board's ability to effectively supervise the company in the manner it was mandated to do," the board said in the memo. Investors had said Altman's sudden removal could lead to an exodus of talent from the company, and affect an upcoming $86 billion share sale.

TikTok employees in the United States expressed frustration and dismay this week after the company introduced a tool for tracking office attendance and threatened disciplinary action for failing to comply with new in-person mandates, in an unusual effort to get workers back into the office with custom data-collection technology. Employees at TikTok, which is owned by Chinese company ByteDance, received notices this week about the new tool, an app called MyRTO. The app, which is built into the company’s internal software, monitors badge swipes and asks employees to explain “deviations” – absences on days they are meant to be in the office – according to e-mails and screenshots shared with The New York Times. A dashboard with the data is visible to employees, their supervisors and human resource staff members. TikTok requires many of its roughly 7,000 US employees to work in offices three times a week beginning in October. Some teams are expected in five days a week. Employees were told that “any deliberate and consistent disregard may result in disciplinary action” and could have “impact on performance reviews”. TikTok’s workers have been taken aback by the disciplinarian tone of the messaging and the appearance of the MyRTO dashboard, which serves as a reminder that the company is monitoring their daily whereabouts, according to interviews with multiple employees, who would speak only anonymously. One of the employees, who said some in-person work was important, added that the app and threats of punishment were unnecessary and that colleagues were now fearful about the consequences of failing to comply. Mr Zach Dunn, an expert on hybrid work and a founder of the hybrid management company Robin, said it was “exceedingly rare” for companies to monitor badge swipes so closely and to threaten disciplinary action on attendance. “We’ve seen folks say, ‘This will be considered as part of your overall performance evaluation,’” he said. “That’s different from saying, ‘If you don’t do this, you will be disciplined.’” Ms Jodi Seth, a spokesperson for TikTok, said the tool was meant to help set expectations for in-office attendance. “The ultimate goal of MyRTO is to provide greater clarity and context to both employees and leaders regarding their RTO expectations and in-office schedules and help foster more transparent communications,” Ms Seth said. More than three years into the saga of return-to-office planning, many companies have settled into hybrid work arrangements. Just over one-fourth of workdays performed by American workers are done from home, according to research from Stanford, and offices across the country remain under 50 per cent of their pre-pandemic occupancy, according to Kastle, a workplace security firm. Many tech companies, including Zoom and Meta, have asked employees to start reporting to the office this summer and fall. Some of these policies have provoked pushback, including at Amazon, where corporate employees staged a walkout in May. Some companies are tightening their enforcement efforts, indicating that they will monitor badge swipes to ensure that employees are actually showing up. Google, which asked most of its employees to be in the office three days a week, will use badge swipes to identify prolonged absences from the office, which could be incorporated into performance review conversations. But few companies have created custom tools and dashboards with daily logs of that data for employees and their managers. TikTok has employees in US cities including in Los Angeles, Washington and New York. The company grew significantly during the pandemic but has struggled to get its far-flung workforce into its offices. In an e-mail to employees that introduced MyRTO, TikTok described its goals for in-office work and said that “we are now providing the next suite of tools and information for both employees and leaders to better allocate time spent in the office optimising collaboration”. In August, the company told New York employees that a lunch stipend would be linked to an app that required a check-in from the office for access to the funds, according to two of the workers who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The employees said the app felt like another way to check on their location. Mr Dunn said TikTok’s attitude towards in-person work might be influenced by TikTok and ByteDance’s overseas leadership. He cited data from his firm showing that workers in the Asia-Pacific region have largely resumed their pre-pandemic commutes. “For companies, especially where they have leadership based in this region, they probably don’t see what the big deal is because they’ve been doing this for well over a year,” Mr Dunn said. “The expectation is the office.” NYTIMES SOURCE: straitstimes.com

A Russian spacecraft successfully docked with theRussian spacecraft on Friday after launching from Kazakhstan's Baikonur Cosmodrome. On board the Soyuz MS-24 were two Russian cosmonauts and a US astronaut who were undertaking the mission amid heightened tensions between Moscow and Washington. Rare moment of cooperation Russian space agency Roscosmos said earlier on Friday that Oleg Kononenko, Nikolai Chub and Loral O'Hara docked at the ISS three hours after lift-off. The trio are joining three other Russians, two Americans and a European Space Agency representative on the ISS. Kononenko appeared to allude to tensions during a pre-launch press conference and said "unlike on earth" cosmonauts and astronauts took care of one another in space. "We hear each other there, and we understand each other, and we are very sensitive to our relationships," he said. "We always take care of each other." O'Hara was equally upbeat, pointing to the station's "legacy" and said it had been bringing the countries together. "I'm excited to get on board and see the crewmates who are waiting for us," she added. Kononenko and Chub are scheduled to spend a year on the ISS while O'Hara is expected to spend six months aboard. Russia's space program Last month Russia's space program suffered a significant setback when the Luna-25 space module crashed during an attempt to land on the moon. It was Russia's first lunar mission in nearly 50 years. US and Russian cooperation at the station doesn't have much time left. Last year July, the chief of Roscosmos Yury Borisov said that Russia would be leaving the ISS after 2024 with a view to putting together its own orbital station. Russian President Vladimir Putin is also looking to bolster space cooperation with China as the West continues ramping up sanctions in response to Moscow's invasion of Ukraine.