The operations manager of a bank in Abuja has been apprehended by the Economic Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) for allegedly hoarding the new naira notes in the custody of the bank he manages.

The manager whose action has been termed as deliberately obstructing the law and causing economic sabotage was immediately whisked away by the EFCC officials for further investigation after the latter ensured the release of new naira notes to customers who had long been on queue for cash withdrawal.

The EFCC spokesman, Wilson Uwujaren, announced on Monday that the agency had sent its men across banks in Abuja and the manager of bank was arrested for refusing to allow loading of new notes into the bank’s ATM despite having N29million of the new notes in the bank.

Mr Uwujaren also noted that when the discovery was made, EFCC officials ensured that the money was circulated among customers who had spent hours in queues without getting the new notes, while the manager was arrested. According to the EFCC spokesperson:

“This discovery, which indicates a sabotage of the government’s monetary policy by some banks, was made by the EFCC in continuation of the ongoing surveillance and visit to banks across the country to access their vaults and verify whether they were deliberately refusing to dispense the redesigned Naira notes.

“More than five bank branches were covered today by the operatives in Abuja. Similar exercises were ongoing in Zonal Commands across the country. The operation will continue until normalcy is restored to the banking system.

“Nigerians finding it difficult to access their funds at any bank and suspects foul play should contact the commission, for immediate intervention”.

The Central Bank Governor, Godwin Emefielele, had earlier decried the actions of some economic saboteurs in the country who have been bent on frustrating the implementation of the naira redesign policy, hence, he noted that the apex bank had enlisted the services of anti-graft agencies to checkmate these saboteurs.

In a ruling made by an Abuja High Court on Monday, bank heads, chief executive officers, managing directors and/or alter egos are directed to forthwith show cause as to why they shall not be arrested and prosecuted for the economic and financial sabotage of the Federal Republic of Nigeria by their illegal act of hoarding, withholding, not paying or disbursing the new N200, N500 and N1000 bank note, being the legal tender of the federal republic of Nigeria to their respective customers, despite supplies of each such currency note by the CBN and Federal Government, thereby leading to the present scarcity of currency notes in circulation.

It is all about perception until it becomes about results. Yes, IBM went to the mountain, trumpeting the new age of exponential computing, as IBM Watson touched the face of the future when it won Jeopardy! Fast forward today, no one remembers IBM as Big Tech enters an injury time on who wins the race of natural language computing.

OpenAI opened the race, gaining a lot of meters. But Google understands that its future is imperiled if it does not respond. And the company is responding, promising a ChatGPT rival, in the next few weeks: “AI is the most profound technology we are working on today…people are turning to Google for deeper insights and understanding”. Google named the chatbot Bard!

People, what happens in the next 18 months will determine many things on the future of consumer technology. The winner of this competition will win in the near future because if it bakes these AI systems into cloud computing solutions, a new basis of competition will emerge. In other words, Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, etc are in the race of the operating system for modern digital empires.

Yet, Google does not need to win this race to thrive. And Microsoft does not need to win outright to thrive. The key is making sure you can keep your tribe by having an optimal product that ensures they do not leave.

Indeed, I left Dropbox when Microsoft unveiled OneDrive, not because OneDrive was better, but largely because I already use Microsoft for many things – and could easily bundle my Microsoft 365 with the OneDrive. That means Google has to make its Bard, not bad, to keep its tribes; it may not need to be super-great.

AI is the most profound technology we are working on today. Whether it’s helping doctors detect diseases earlier or enabling people to access information in their own language, AI helps people, businesses and communities unlock their potential. And it opens up new opportunities that could significantly improve billions of lives. That’s why we re-oriented the company around AI six years ago — and why we see it as the most important way we can deliver on our mission: to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

Since then we’ve continued to make investments in AI across the board, and Google AI and DeepMind are advancing the state of the art. Today, the scale of the largest AI computations is doubling every six months, far outpacing Moore’s Law. At the same time, advanced generative AI and large language models are capturing the imaginations of people around the world. In fact, our Transformer research project and our field-defining paper in 2017, as well as our important advances in diffusion models, are now the basis of many of the generative AI applications you’re starting to see today.