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Nestle dismisses chief executive after probe into relationship with employee

The maker of Nescafe drinks and Purina pet food said in a statement that the dismissal was effective immediately.
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Public’s help sought in review of murder of 10-year-old boy in Belfast in 1973

Schoolboy Brian McDermott’s remains were recovered from the River Lagan after he disappeared from Ormeau Park on Sunday, September 2nd, 1973.
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Gardaí begin search for missing presumed dead boy in Dublin

Concerns for the boy were raised by Tusla, the child and family agency, and reported to gardaí on Friday, August 29th.
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Nestle dismisses chief executive after probe into relationship with employee

The maker of Nescafe drinks and Purina pet food said in a statement that the dismissal was effective immediately.
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Lyft’s CEO says these 3 companies are getting business right

David Risher takes a selfie with Lyft bikes
David Risher.

  • Lyft CEO David Risher said there were three companies he thought were successful in their businesses.
  • He touted them for many reasons, from nailing customer experience to maintaining a consistent product.
  • He said the companies were Oura Ring, Starbucks, and Microsoft.

Lyft’s CEO has a leaderboard of his favorite companies, and it includes Starbucks.

Speaking in an interview with Sherwood News, released on August 28, CEO David Risher said there were three companies he thought were doing interesting things and getting business right.

Risher joined the ride-hailing company’s board in 2021 and became its chief executive in 2023. The 60-year-old leader was a general manager at Microsoft in the 90s, and also did a stint at Amazon as the senior vice president of US retail.

In the interview with Sherwood News, Risher listed three companies, from small to large, that he admires.

Oura Ring
Oura ring
Risher said Oura Ring had “nailed the customer experience.”

Sherwood News wrote that when talking about a small company he admired, Risher pointed to the Oura Ring on his finger. He told the outlet that Oura Ring had “nailed the customer experience.”

Oura Ring is a health technology company founded in Finland. It makes smart rings ranging from $199 to $499 that track heart health, sleep patterns, activity, and stress levels, per the company’s website.

“It gives me enough information, and it doesn’t feel naggy,” he said to the outlet. “The technology is super slick and easy.”

Risher added, “They started with a clear idea, they’ve not tried to add 20 different things, and it’s a really good example of a focused and customer-obsessed product.”

Speaking to Business Insider in June, Risher revealed that his Oura Ring was part of his morning routine.

He said he checked the ring’s report every morning after brushing his teeth to get insights into how well he had slept the night before.

Starbucks
Woman drinking a Starbucks drink
Starbucks is adding extra charges for extra ingredients, like pumps of syrup or scoops of matcha. I say, it’s about time!

Risher said Starbucks was a medium-sized company he thought was doing a good job.

He said to Sherwood News that it was hard to be “consistent across so many geographies” while juggling other facets like their app, loyalty program, and drive-thrus.

Starbucks has outlets in about 80 countries, per its website. The bulk of the stores are in the US and China, with 17,230 and 7,828 stores respectively, per an earnings report released in July.

“Then their beverages change. They go through their cycles, of course, but I think they’ve done a very good job,” Risher said.

Risher’s comments on Starbucks come as the Seattle-based coffee chain is turning around several quarters of weak performance. It saw business slide due to operational problems like long wait times and issues with its mobile ordering system.

Starbucks’ CEO, Brian Niccol, is nearly a year into his work to turn around the brand.

Risher said to Business Insider in June that he’s a coffee addict. He always has a cup of joe in the morning, but he said he’s a Nespresso person.

Microsoft
Satya Nadella presenting onstage with the Microsoft logo behind him.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella

Risher said Microsoft, and its CEO Satya Nadella in particular, was a big company he thought was doing good business.

Risher, who worked as a general manager for Microsoft from 1991 to 1997, per his LinkedIn, said to Sherwood News, “I think Microsoft went through a period of stasis and a little bit of confusion.”

“I think Satya Nadella has done such a good job of both being a purpose-driven leader, but also showing that he can make incredibly tough, very strategic business decisions that make your company one of the most valuable in the world,” he added.

He said that when he worked for Microsoft in the 90s, it was a “fierce competitor,” and “laser-focused on increasing market share of its products.”

Risher said that with Lyft, he didn’t focus so much on market share, but took pointers from Microsoft on “really understanding what your competitors are good at and really understanding how you can do better.”

Read the original article on Business Insider
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Villagers mourn for their loved ones after devastating earthquake in eastern Afghanistan

Villagers mourn for their loved ones after devastating earthquake in eastern Afghanistan
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North-east of England is best region in Great Britain for allotments, report finds

Redcar and Cleveland tops rankings for most allotment land per person, while there is a dearth of supply in Scotland

The north-east of England is Great Britain’s allotment heartland, with Redcar and Cleveland and County Durham the two councils with the highest rate of allotment provision per person, an analysis has found.

It also revealed that Scotland on average has just a quarter of the space per person that is available in England.

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Landslide kills over 1,000 people and levels entire village in Sudan’s Central Darfur

Devastating landslide completely levels Tarasin Village in Sudan’s Central Darfur, with rebel group reporting over 1,000 deaths and only one survivor.
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Cohere’s cofounder says the $6.8 billion company is not making its AI model ‘an amazing conversationalist’

Cohere cofounders Ivan Zhang, Nick Frosst, and Aidan Gomez.
Cohere cofounders Ivan Zhang, Nick Frosst, and Aidan Gomez.

  • Cohere focuses on AI for business day to day, not personal tasks, said cofounder Nick Frosst.
  • Founded in 2019, Cohere is a Canadian enterprise-focused LLM startup.
  • Unlike Meta and Google, Cohere is not prioritizing making its AI chatty or human-like.

One AI company cares little about being your digital best friend.

On an episode of the “20 VC” podcast published on Monday, Cohere cofounder Nick Frosst said that he’s not aiming to make the company’s large language model chatty and interesting.

“When we train our model, we’re not training it to be an amazing conversationalist with you,” Frosst said. “We’re not training it to keep you interested and keep you engaged and occupied. We don’t have like engagement metrics or things like that.”

The Canadian AI startup was founded in 2019 and focuses on building for other businesses, not for consumers. It competes with other foundational model providers such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Mistral and counts Dell, SAP, and Salesforce among customers.

“One of the reasons why we’re focused on the enterprise is because that’s really where I think large language models are useful,” the cofounder said. “If I look at my personal life, there’s not a ton that I want to automate. I actually don’t want to respond to text messages from my mom faster. I want to do it more often, but I want to be writing those.”

Given its business focus, Frosst said that Cohere trains its model on very different data sets than other model providers.

“We generate a whole bunch of data to create like fake companies and fake emails between people at these fake companies and fake APIs within those fake companies,” he said, referring to synthetic training data.

The company was valued at $6.8 billion in a fundraise last month led by Radical Ventures and Inovia Capital. Cohere did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

Other LLM companies, such as Meta, Google, xAI, and OpenAI, have been pouring resources into making their models smarter, funnier, and more human-like as they race to monetize their chatbots.

In July, Business Insider reported that Meta is training chatbots that can be built in its AI studio to be more proactive and message users unprompted to follow up on past conversations. The idea is to interact with users a number of times, store conversations in memory, and reach out with an engaging prompt to restart a chat.

AI companies are also avoiding making their bots sound arrogant, which could drive users to a competitor or raise questions about bias.

Google and Meta have a list of internal guidelines for training their chatbots to avoid sounding annoying or “preachy,” Business Insider reported in July. Freelancers for Alignerr and Scale AI’s Outlier have been instructed to spot and remove any hint of a lecturing or nudging tone from chatbot answers, including in conversations about sensitive or controversial topics.

Read the original article on Business Insider
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Tuesday briefing: It’s a new school year, but the same old problems persist for Britain’s schools

In today’s newsletter: Poor teacher recruitment and retainment puts children on the back foot before they barely step in the classroom

Good morning. It’s back-to-school week, and the daily ritual (or, perhaps, panic) begins as uniforms are being donned and lunchboxes packed across the UK to start a new year. My sympathies to you teachers setting early morning alarms, and parents dragging children out of bed after six weeks of lie-ins.

Last year, Keir Starmer promised to leave “no stone unturned to give every child the very best start at life”, but how is that going? More than half a million GCSE students in England will start the year with no physics teacher, while many kids from poorer families feel they cannot afford to have their children study geography or languages, new Guardian reporting shows.

Afghanistan | The Taliban has called for international aid as Afghanistan reels from an earthquake that killed more than 800 people and left thousands injured.

Israel-Gaza war | A plan circulating in the White House to develop the “Gaza Riviera” as a string of high-tech megacities has been dismissed as an “insane” attempt to provide cover for the large-scale ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian territory’s population.

Politics | Darren Jones, the chief secretary to the Treasury, has been moved to a new senior role in Downing Street as Keir Starmer attempts to get a grip on delivery before what is likely to be a tumultuous autumn for the government.

Health | A three-minute brainwave test can detect memory problems linked to Alzheimer’s disease long before people are typically diagnosed, raising hopes that the approach could help identify those most likely to benefit from new drugs for the condition.

UK news | Prominent women including cultural figures, politicians and campaigners have signed a letter criticising rightwing attempts to link sexual violence in Britain to asylum seekers. Signatories include the musicians Paloma Faith, Charlotte Church and Anoushka Shankar.

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