Technology

SoftBank Group Corp. reported a significant reduction in losses for the fiscal year ending in March 2020, with annual sales rising by 2.8% and losses decreasing to 227.6 billion yen ($1.5 billion). The company attributed this improvement to a decline in investment losses and expects its Vision Fund investments to stabilize and improve performance in the future.

The Upper House approved a bill on May 10 to restrict access to economic security information, requiring background checks for government officials and company employees to handle sensitive data. The legislation aims to protect important economic security information from leaks that could impact national security, with penalties of up to five years in prison or a fine for violations.

SoftBank, Japan's third-largest telecoms provider, is developing an AI-powered solution to address the growing issue of call center worker stress caused by irate customers. The technology, currently in the testing phase, utilizes AI-enabled emotion recognition and voice processing to soften the tone of customers' voices before delivering them to call center workers.

The Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) has raised concerns over critical vulnerabilities in various Microsoft products, including Microsoft Windows, Office, Bing browser, and Azure. These security flaws could potentially lead to unauthorized access to sensitive data, remote code execution, security control bypass, spoofing attacks, tampering attacks, and denial-of-service incidents.

Departures of key figures like Jan Leike and Ilya Sutskever from OpenAI's AI safety team have sparked worries about the company's focus on AI safety versus product development. Concerns have been raised over a potential shift in priorities at OpenAI amidst reports of disbanding the AI-risk team and a series of high-profile departures.