Google has been busy making friends in Singapore. On 7 October, its AI Futures Fund teamed up with Granite Asia to write cheques of up to US$2 million into Asian AI startups. Eight days later, the same fund has walked into Sea Limited’s office carrying something different: not a term sheet, but a key to […] The post Sea and Google open chapter two of their AI pact before chapter one ships appeared first on e27.

In August 2024, Google wrote Character.ai a cheque for roughly US$2.7 billion. On Monday, Disney offered US$20 million. Both were for a licence to the same company’s technology. Allowing for the fine print, that is a fall of more than 99 per cent in a little over two years. Character.ai filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy […] The post Character.ai was worth US$2.7B to Google. Disney just offered US$20M appeared first on e27.

A South Korean manufacturing company owner accused of severely injuring a migrant worker by firing high-pressure air from an industrial air gun into his body has been sentenced to three years in prison. Judge Koo Na-young of the Suwon district court on Thursday sentenced the owner of a metal-cleaning company, a man in his 60s identified only as A, to three years in prison on charges of aggravated bodily injury and violations of the Labour Standards Act. The court dismissed the case against A’s...

A South Korean manufacturing company owner accused of severely injuring a migrant worker by firing high-pressure air from an industrial air gun into his body has been sentenced to three years in prison. Judge Koo Na-young of the Suwon district court on Thursday sentenced the owner of a metal-cleaning company, a man in his 60s identified only as A, to three years in prison on charges of aggravated bodily injury and violations of the Labour Standards Act. The court dismissed the case against A’s...

We may be using AI to save hours of work, only to fill those hours with more work. This is something I have been thinking about as organisations accelerate their investment in AI. The productivity opportunity is undeniable. Generative AI can draft in seconds, analyse large volumes of information, automate administrative work and give leaders […] The post AI can increase productivity. It can’t increase human capacity appeared first on e27.

Most Singapore office workers know the ritual. A message lands at 10.47pm. It is not urgent. You answer it within 90 seconds anyway, not because the work demands it, but because you want someone to notice that you answered it within 90 seconds. It turns out that performance is playing to a near-empty theatre. The […] The post AI and inflation are driving Singapore’s workplace anxiety. Employers are spending on the wrong fix appeared first on e27.

Human rights are getting diluted or ignored in the oft-neglected “S” (social) of ESG, even though the rules for protecting them have been clear for a decade and a half. The 2011 UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights make every company responsible for respecting human rights and for finding, preventing, and repairing the harm […] The post Human rights: Lost in the “S” of ESG? appeared first on e27.

Lorelai Jacinto had worked as a domestic helper in Riyadh for two and a half years before she flew home to the Philippines on September 19, increasingly worried that the conflict in the Middle East was making it unsafe to stay. “When the conflict with Iran happened, I started feeling like it wasn’t safe there any more because I was right there in Riyadh myself, so the bombing, the missiles, were closer to us,” Jacinto told This Week in Asia. “I got worried, I got scared that maybe I wouldn’t be...