Capgemini, a French company, announced it would sell its subsidiary, Capgemini Government Solutions, which provides technology services to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), amidst global scrutiny of ICE's tactics during the Trump administration's immigration crackdown, according to Fortune. The decision followed pressure from the French government for greater transparency regarding the company's dealings with ICE.
The move came as ICE's actions in Minneapolis raised concerns in France and other countries. Fortune reported that the government's campaign against immigrants in Minneapolis had led to the fatal shootings of two U.S. citizens by federal immigration officers. Capgemini stated it would immediately begin the process of selling off its subsidiary.
In other news, hundreds of archaeologists unearthed 450,000 objects during the construction of the HS2 train line in the UK, now stored in a secret warehouse, the BBC reported via Hacker News. The collection includes a possible Roman gladiator's tag, a hand axe potentially over 40,000 years old, and 19th-century gold dentures. The Centre for British Archaeology described the find as an "unprecedented" amount and array of items that will provide new insights into Britain's past. Major building developments in the UK require archaeological assessments of the land.
Meanwhile, at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), a power struggle over institute directorships deepened as a new presidential administration prepared to fill approximately 4,000 jobs across the federal government, Ars Technica reported. These political appointees are intended to help carry out the president's agenda and make government agencies responsive to elected officials.
In the business world, FedEx CEO Raj Subramaniam navigated the era of "re-globalization," according to Fortune. Subramaniam succeeded Fred Smith, FedEx's founder, as CEO in 2022 and operated with Smith as executive chairman until Smith's death in June at age 80. Smith, who conceived the idea for urgent, overnight deliveries in an economics paper at Yale, launched Federal Express in 1971 and grew it into a global logistics giant with $90.1 billion in revenue in the past 12 months. Subramaniam considered his time working with Smith as attending "CEO school."
Finally, VentureBeat reported that many enterprises deploying Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems are experiencing underwhelming results due to inadequate preprocessing of sophisticated documents. Standard RAG pipelines treat documents as flat strings of text, using fixed-size chunking, which can destroy the logic of technical manuals by slicing tables, severing captions from images, and ignoring the visual hierarchy of the page. The failure, according to VentureBeat, lies in the preprocessing rather than in the Large Language Models (LLMs) themselves.
Discussion
AI Experts & Community
Be the first to comment