Shell directors sued over climate strategy; TCS wins $726 mln Phoenix order; Sequoia Surge backs Hatica

Shell’s board of directors are being personally sued over their alleged failure to properly manage risks associated with the climate crisis, Euronews reports. The lawsuit, brought by Environmental law charity ClientEarth says the British oil giant’s 11 directors have breached their legal duties under the UK’s Companies Act by failing to bring their climate strategy in line with the Paris Agreement. Also in this brief, a US lawmaker wants children to be 16 before they can access social media, and how some strange words are breaking ChatGPT.

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Tata Consultancy Services has won a new mega order from its long-standing customer Phoenix Group, UK’s largest long-term savings and retirements provider, India’s biggest IT services company said in a press release earlier this week.

The 600-million-pound order (or about $726 million) involves the digital transformation of Phoenix Group’s ReAssure business using a platform based on TCS’s BaNCS, the company’s core banking software platform.

A US lawmaker wants to introduce legislation to protect children online and reduce the influence of big tech companies on children, NBC reports. Josh Hawley, a senator in the US Congress wants to establish laws including setting the age threshold to be on social media at 16.

Senator Hawley’s agenda will include mandating social media companies verify the age of their users, providing parents with a right to demand that tech companies delete their kids' data and commissioning a wide-ranging congressional mental-health study on the impact social media has on children.

ChatGPT, the AI chatbot from OpenAI that can turn out poems and essays, fix code and clear MBA exams, is flummoxed by a cluster of keywords, two researchers have discovered, but they don’t know why, yet, Vice reports.

These keywords — or “tokens,” which serve as ChatGPT’s base vocabulary — include Reddit usernames and at least one participant of a Twitch-based Pokémon game.

When ChatGPT was asked about “SolidGoldMagikarp,” it was repeated back as “distribute.” The issue affected earlier versions of the GPT model as well. When an earlier model was asked to repeat “StreamerBot,” for example, it said, “You’re a jerk.”

Fossil-fuel giant Shell’s board of directors are being personally sued over their alleged failure to properly manage risks associated with the climate crisis, Euronews reports.

The lawsuit says the British oil giant’s 11 directors have breached their legal duties under the UK’s Companies Act by failing to bring their climate strategy in line with the Paris Agreement.

Environmental law charity ClientEarth, which filed the lawsuit, says it is the first case in the world that looks to hold corporate directors personally responsible for failing to prepare for the energy transition.

And in some SaaS startup news, Hatica, an engineering analytics software provider, has raised $3.7 million in seed funding led by Sequoia Capital India and Southeast Asia’s Surge programme, with participation from existing investor Kae Capital and several angel investors.

Hatica, based in San Francisco and Bengaluru, was started in 2019 by former Uber engineers Naomi Chopra and Haritabh Singh. Today, it has 20,000 users, according to a press release from the company. The latest funding brings Hatica’s total funding to $6.55 million, according to Tracxn, a private-markets intelligence provider.