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January 11, 2024, 7:55 PM
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Alex Heath / The Verge:
Internal memo: Discord CEO Jason Citron says the company is laying off 17% of its staff, or 170 people, after growing its workforce “by 5x since 2020”  —  Discord is laying off 17 percent of its staff, a move that CEO Jason Citron said is meant to “sharpen our focus and improve …
Louise Matsakis / Semafor:
Google lays off hundreds of staff working on Assistant and says the restructuring would help improve Assistant as the company explores integrating newer AI tech  —  Google is laying off hundreds of people working on its voice-activated Google Assistant software and eliminating a similar number …
Jon Victor / The Information:
Alphabet Union says Wednesday's layoffs at Google impacted more than 1,000 people, making it the largest round of cuts since January 2023  —  A spokesman for a union representing workers at Google's owner, Alphabet, said Wednesday's layoffs at Google impacted more than 1,000 people …
Nico Grant / New York Times:
Sources: several hundred Google engineering employees received notices that their roles were eliminated and lost corporate access; most hardware cuts were in AR
Abner Li / 9to5Google:
Google reorganizes its Devices & Services teams responsible for Pixel, Fitbit, and Nest; Fitbit co-founders James Park and Eric Friedman are leaving Google
Reuters:
LSEG: US bitcoin ETFs saw $4.6B worth of shares traded on January 11, their first day of trading; Grayscale, BlackRock, and Fidelity dominated trading volumes  —  U.S.-listed bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) saw $4.6 billion worth of shares trade hands as of Thursday afternoon …
Matt Levine / Bloomberg:
A look at SEC's hilariously grudging approval of bitcoin ETFs and the likelihood that they will be “physical” ETFs or interest-paying ETFs in the future
Jesse Hamilton / CoinDesk:
US SEC Chair Gary Gensler concedes that losing in court after rejecting Grayscale's spot bitcoin ETF left the agency with little choice but to approve such ETFs
Sandali Handagama / CoinDesk:
Some crypto advocates welcome bitcoin ETFs as an inevitable part of going mainstream, while others worry they threaten the original promise of decentralization
Abner Li / 9to5Google:
Google plans to remove 17 “underutilized” Assistant features in February, including controlling audiobooks, media alarms, recipes, messages, events, and more  —  Bard is the future of Assistant.  Ahead of that happening, Google announced today that Assistant features with low usage will be removed in February.
Carly Page / TechCrunch:
Ivanti confirms hackers are exploiting two critical vulnerabilities in its corporate VPN software, but says patches won't be available until the end of January  —  U.S. software giant Ivanti has confirmed that hackers are exploiting two critical-rated vulnerabilities affecting …
Alanna Durkin Richer / Associated Press:
eBay will pay $3M to resolve charges over a harassment campaign by staffers who sent spiders and other disturbing items to those behind the EcommerceBytes blog  —  Online retailer eBay Inc. will pay a $3 million fine to resolve criminal charges over a harassment campaign waged by employees …
Jordan Novet / CNBC:
Microsoft briefly unseated Apple as the world's most valuable publicly traded company in early trading on Thursday but closed out the day under Apple  —  - Microsoft on Thursday briefly unseated Apple as the world's most valuable publicly traded company in early trading but closed out the day under Apple.
Reuters:
USDC stablecoin issuer Circle confidentially files for a US IPO, without saying the number of shares for sale or a price range; Circle was valued at $9B in 2022  —  Circle Internet Financial, the company behind stablecoin USDC, said on Thursday that it had confidentially filed …
Jason Koebler / 404 Media:
Google formally endorses right to repair and will testify in favor of a law in Oregon, says regulators should ban “parts pairing”, a tactic used by Apple  —  Google says repair should be easy and “parts pairing” should be illegal.  —  Google formally endorsed the concept of right …
Juli Clover / MacRumors:
Apple says Al Gore and James Bell will retire from its board this year, and Wanda Austin, ex-president and CEO of The Aerospace Corporation, will join the board  —  Both Al Gore and James Bell are retiring from Apple's board of directors, Apple announced today.
Charisma Madarang / Rolling Stone:
Dudesy, an AI-driven podcast curated by humans, releases an hour-long comedy special featuring an AI-generated recreation of George Carlin, who died in 2008  —  The hour-long special arrived from Dudesy, a podcast run by artificial intelligence … Following the special's release …
Bloomberg:
Sources describe how AI replaced the metaverse as Mark Zuckerberg's top priority, leading Meta to ruthlessly cut jobs and focus on quickly releasing AI products  —  Meta's founder has become deeply engaged in his company's AI efforts ahead of its 20th anniversary, but his close attention hasn't always proved to be a recipe for success.
Dina Bass / Bloomberg:
Google Cloud eliminates fees for customers who leave for a rival service, effective immediately, which may put pressure on Amazon and Microsoft to do the same  —  Antirust officials have been looking at cloud data-transfer policies  —  The cost of switching between cloud-computing providers …
Matt Burgess / Wired:
A researcher finds 800GB of data online tied to school software maker Raptor, used by 5,300+ US districts, including evacuation plans and student medical files  —  More than 4 million school records, including safety procedures, student medical files, and court documents, were also publicly accessible online.
Emma Roth / The Verge:
After announcing the $199 R1 “Large Action Model” AI handheld at CES, Rabbit sold 10K units in one day; second batch orders are set to ship in April to May 2024  —  In a Wednesday post on X (formerly Twitter), the startup Rabbit announced that it sold through its first 10,000-unit production run in just one day.
Dominic-Madori Davis / TechCrunch:
PitchBook: female-founded US companies raised $44.4B out of $170.59B in VC funding in 2023; companies with all-female founding teams raised ~$3.1B, down 39% YoY  —  Female-founded companies in the U.S. raised $44.4 billion out of the $170.59 billion in venture capital allocated last year.

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This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 7:55 PM ET, January 11, 2024.

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From Mediagazer

Tom McArthur / BBC:
RSF publishes its World Press Freedom Index and places Norway, Denmark, and Sweden in the top three, the US down 10 spots at 55, and Eritrea in last place

Todd Spangler / Variety:
Sources: the expectation at Paramount Global is that neither of the two offers in play, Skydance-RedBird and Sony Pictures-Apollo, will come to fruition

Matt Cooper / University of Oregon:
A group of researchers say Twitch is increasingly becoming a news source, and traditional news outlets could use it for added income and audience engagement

More News

Shubham Sharma / VentureBeat:
1X, an OpenAI-backed developer of humanoid robots with plans to bring its bipedal robot NEO to the market, raised a $100M Series B from EQT Ventures and others
Naman Ramachandran / Variety:
Netflix removes an Indian film depicting a Hindu character eating meat after backlash from Hindu groups; producer Zee apologizes and plans to edit the film

Earlier Picks

John Timmer / Ars Technica:
Harvard spinout QuEra, a quantum computing startup, plans to release an error-corrected quantum computer with 10,000 physical and 100 logical qubits by 2026
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