Who needs 50 billion parameters in a large language model (LLM), when 3 billion or so will do just fine?

Market intelligence firm Gartner sees security benefits in “small language models”—computational machine learners with fewer than 10 billion parameters, or training variables.

“You don’t need your language model to write a poem about cats and dogs eating spaghetti under a bridge. You need it to answer an HR-related question,” Birgi Tamersoy, Gartner’s senior director analyst for AI technologies, said in a live presentation on September 12.

Known, domain-specific data—that HR-related info, for example—can be embedded into a small language model to solve a specific task, Tamersoy said.

A July 2024 survey from another market intel firm, IDC, found that 20% of IT pro respondents said they “don’t expect to use small models”; 25% have deployed them; and 26% characterize their current use of small models as “learning.” (A further 17% said “evaluating,” and 13% said “testing.”)

Read the rest here.—BH

Watch out: Threat actors security researchers say are likely linked to the North Korean government are continuing to try and lure developers into downloading malware during hoax job interviews.

That’s according to a recent report by supply-chain security firm ReversingLabs, which discovered new occurrences of a campaign dubbed “VMConnect” that it first identified in August 2023. According to ReversingLabs, the hackers behind the effort are luring developers with fake job offers and instructing them to download PyPI packages with obfuscated malware from GitHub repositories as part of coding tests.

ReversingLabs researchers detected malware signatures in compiled Python files, which they were able to link to “several top-level open-source containers” that contained archives with names like “Python_Skill_Assessment.zip.” They also discovered Readme files explaining to developers the files were part of important coding assessments.

“They aren’t doing mass phishing,” Karlo Zanki, reverse engineer at ReversingLabs, told IT Brew. “They are doing targeted attacks. They are approaching targeted people.”

Read more here.—TM

Thousands of workers were laid off by Cisco early this month, prompting frustrated staffers to take to online forums.

“This is the worst layoff handling in…history by Cisco leaders,” one user posted to Blind, a popular site for anonymous commentary on internal company issues, primarily in the tech industry.

This most recent round of cuts comes just over three months after the company’s Cisco Live! event in Las Vegas where Cisco detailed its plans to invest in AI and celebrated its recent purchase of the data processing company Splunk. One Blind user reported observing the layoffs disproportionately impacted the company’s AppDynamics full-stack observability and application performance monitoring system.

Cisco reportedly cut 5,600 positions across a number of sectors of the company. According to commenters at Blind and similar site The Layoff, the layoffs appeared to be driven by cost cutting—not the talent of those who lost their jobs.

Keep reading here.—EH

The world of cybersecurity is shifting fast. Emerging tech like quantum computing and AI is reshaping how we approach threats. On Oct. 31, we are hosting a live event (in New York or online) that will bring together experts to explore how you can balance new tech, proactive security policies, and the people behind the systems. Come network and gain actionable insights on vendor vetting, closing security gaps, and safeguarding your organization in a rapidly changing landscape. See you there.