Techmeme
March 20, 2023, 11:30 AM

Top News

Annie Palmer / CNBC:
Andy Jassy says Amazon plans to lay off an additional 9,000 employees, mostly in AWS, PXT, Advertising, and Twitch, after cutting 18,000 jobs in January  —  - Amazon will lay off 9,000 more employees in the coming weeks, CEO Andy Jassy said in a memo to staff on Monday.
ABC News:
An interview with Sam Altman on OpenAI's GPT-4, how “people should be happy” that OpenAI is a “little bit scared of” its tools, misinformation, rivals, and more  —  “This will be the greatest technology humanity has yet developed,” he said.  —  OpenAI CEO Sam Altman speaks with ABC News, Mar. 15, 2023.
Faiz Siddiqui / Washington Post:
As concerns over Tesla's Full Self-Driving rise, former employees blame Elon Musk's erratic leadership, cost-cutting measures like removing radar, and more  —  Tesla's campaign to deliver a fully autonomous vehicle has suffered amid mounting safety concerns — and the boss's Twitter distraction
Tim Bradshaw / Financial Times:
Microsoft plans to launch a mobile app store for games as soon as 2024 if the Activision bid is cleared and the EU's DMA rules for app stores come into effect  —  Xbox boss Phil Spencer says store could launch as soon as next year if regulators clear Activision Blizzard deal
Pete Schroeder / Reuters:
The FDIC plans to sell Signature Bank's deposits to Flagstar Bank, excluding those in its digital banking business, some loans, and Signature's 40 branches  —  A subsidiary of New York Community Bancorp (NYCB.N) has entered into an agreement with U.S. regulators to purchase deposits and loans …
Carol E. Lee / NBC News:
Source: in his upcoming testimony to Congress on March 23, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew plans to reveal TikTok has 150M MAUs in the US, up from 100M in August 2020  —  When TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew testifies before Congress on Thursday, he plans to unveil new internal data that suggests …
Rachel Metz / Bloomberg:
Runway, which helped create Stable Diffusion, announces its Gen 2 system to generate three second snippets of video from prompt words, available via a waitlist  —  Artificial intelligence has made remarkable progress with still images.  For months, services like Dall-E and Stable Diffusion …
Natasha Lomas / TechCrunch:
Researchers launch Glaze, a free app to help artists prevent AI models from stealing their “artistic IP” by adding nearly imperceptible changes to their art  —  Generative art's style mimicry, interrupted  —  The asymmetry in time and effort it takes human artists …
Abner Li / 9to5Google:
Researchers detail “aCropalypse”, a bug in Google Pixel's Markup fixed in March 2023, where some edited screenshots can be retroactively unredacted or uncropped  —  Besides the Samsung Exynos modem issue, Android 13 QPR2 with the March 2023 security update fixes a vulnerability with the Pixel's Markup screenshot tool.
Inside Higher Ed:
A group of librarians argue the Internet Archive is a library, saying that the four major publishers' lawsuit threatens the development of digital collections  —  A lawsuit against the Internet Archive threatens the most significant specialized library to emerge in decades, say a group of current and former university librarians.
Lucas Shaw / Bloomberg:
Sources: Netflix's ad-supported tier reached ~1M MAUs in the US after its second month, and the company fulfilled its forecasted deliveries to advertisers  —  Good afternoon from Los Angeles.  It's good to be home and I hope your March Madness bracket is doing better than mine.
Anna Tong / Reuters:
Replika and Character.AI now block adult content in their chatbots, angering users who became deeply involved with them, some considering themselves married  —  After temporarily closing his leathermaking business during the pandemic, Travis Butterworth found himself lonely and bored at home.

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More News

Aisha Malik / TechCrunch:

Earlier Picks

Washington Post:
Cameron Kaiser / Ars Technica: