Beyond Layoff

US authorities are pursuing the revocation of citizenship from Gurmeet Singh, an Indian-origin taxi driver, after discovering he concealed a violent rape and kidnapping conviction during his naturalization application. In 2011, Singh picked up a young female passenger in his Brooklyn taxi late at night; she fell asleep in the backseat during the ride. He diverted to a secluded side street, where she awoke to him on top of her with a knife to her throat, threatening her life if she resisted. Singh bound, gagged, blindfolded, and raped her before releasing her. A Brooklyn jury convicted Singh on May 2, 2014, of first-degree rape and second-degree kidnapping as a sexually motivated felony, following a trial in Brooklyn Supreme Court under Judge Miriam Cyrulnik. On May 12, 2014, he received a 20-year prison sentence from Kings County District Attorney Kenneth P. Thompson, who highlighted Singh's betrayal of his duty to safely transport the victim. Singh naturalized as a US citizen on O...

  AI’s Billion-Dollar Hustle — Endless Grunt Work at the Long Tail in the Gig Economy A couple of weeks ago, I read a New York Times article titled “ The New Billionaires of the A.I. Boom .” It profiled 8–10 companies whose young founders — mostly in their 20s — had built ventures valued at billions of dollars by capitalizing on AI innovations. These entrepreneurs are riding the wave of massive infrastructure investments in data centres by companies like Nvidia, Google, and Microsoft. The eclectic list of AI startups targets niche areas: some, like Perplexity, develop advanced chatbots and search engines building on ChatGPT-style applications; others, like Figure AI, focus on hardware such as humanoid robots. A standout group includes Mercor and Scale AI, which extend the traditional business-services model into “AI model training services.” These platforms help companies and startups create domain-specific AI models and large language models (LLMs). Gig Work’s Familiar Echo D...