Byrd’s mistake cost Google shareholders $100 billion, Github and GoDaddy had to lay off thousands of people, and the Twitter chaos continued.
Welcome to Trending Hashtags for Friday, February 10thth2023. I’m your host, Jim Love.
Google has undeniably had a tough week. Tech giant’s AI Prasad was overshadowed With a mistake we covered yesterday.
Google desperately needed a win as Open AI integration into Microsoft’s Bing search engine captured public attention and gave Google a credible competitor for the first time.
Google generates an average annual revenue of approximately US$250 billion. The vast majority of that revenue comes from search ads. That revenue is at risk from AI changing the nature of how search appears, potentially making profitable search ads irrelevant. Then the other shoe dropped with Microsoft’s AI powered search.
These threats forced Google to issue a ‘Code Red’ to fast-track AI innovation. But did he make a grave mistake in the rush of the market?
Google’s AI chatbot Bard, which was supposed to help restore Google’s AI credentials, answered a simple factual question incorrectly in its Google promotional piece. That one wrong answer, publicly, would have wiped out $100 billion in Alphabet’s market value, with the company’s shares plunging 9 percent.
Mistakes with AI language models are not unique to Bard. Bing has also acknowledged that there will be factually incorrect information with the nascent technology, but the search giant was dealt a hard blow for the error that appeared in Google’s own ad right after Google’s launch event.
Source: reuters
Another day, another sorry CEO apology for layoffs
The reasons are repeating – sorry we over-hired during the pandemic, you were essential to help us build the company, but we don’t need you anymore.
Github and GoDaddy are the latest tech companies to announce thousands of layoffs. Github cut its workforce by 10 percent and GoDaddy by 8 percent.
GoDaddy said affected employees will receive a meeting invitation to learn the details of their transition, in accordance with local employment procedures.
Github also announced other cost-cutting measures, It won’t renew its office leases to go fully remote. Not surprisingly, it’s turning to Microsoft Teams for all of its videoconferencing needs.
Source: techcrunch And go Daddy
Yahoo also today announced plans to cut 1,600 employees, but not because of economic conditions, but for change.
Plus, Yahoo, in general, is profitable with annual revenue of around $8 billion. But its advertising business, where it had hoped to compete with rivals such as Google and Meta, never took off as the company had hoped, so the company has decided to spin off that part of its business.
The resulting layoffs would affect more than 50% of Yahoo’s ad technical staff.
These changes “will be highly beneficial to Yahoo’s profitability”. overall, “That, Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzon said, would allow the company to “go on offense” and invest more in other parts of its business that are profitable.
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There are low profits and a bleak economic outlook has become synonymous with retrenchment. But not all companies react the same. Nintendo, the Japanese video game company, announced that it would give employees a 10 percent raise, despite a drop in profits.
“It is critical to our long-term growth to secure our employees,” Nintendo President Shuntaro Furukawa said during an earnings call this week, according to Reuters.
Nintendo’s net profit was 346 billion yen ($2.6 billion US) in the first nine months of the fiscal year through March, down 5.8 percent from 367 billion yen in the same period last year.
Source: techcrunch, axios And global news
The crypto market has seen better days. Cryptocurrency enthusiasts, fanatics, miners, lending platforms are all feeling the pressure as their altcoins drop in value.
It turns out that crypto ATMs can also be hit.
Unlike regular ATM machines linked to bank accounts, these kiosks take cash and then transfer bitcoin to digital purse. Anything Allow the customer to sell their bitcoin.
These crypto access points have appeared in bars, corner stores and truck stops around the world between September 2020 and September 2022 following the rise of the crypto craze.
They had fun, enjoying hefty profit margins at the height of the market while charging exorbitant fees, sometimes up to 20 percent per transaction.
According to howmanybitcoinatms.com, a site run by academic researchers and volunteers interested in measuring bitcoin After adoption, there were about 63,000 of them in the US. September 2022.
But, in the midst of the market crash, they have now become worthless in a way.
As a matter of fact, top-5 bitcoin ATM operator CoinCloud filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in Nevada on Tuesday, just a few steps behind its lender Genesis Global. They have also cut down on their workforce and will essentially reduce their ATM operations.
Source: axios
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So-called direct messages have always been less private than people might have thought they were.
Direct messages on Twitter are not end-to-end encrypted which puts personal messages and information at risk if Twitter suffers a data breach. Company employees, with the right permissions, can also access your DMs.
With the departure of key security and data staff following Musk’s acquisition, the security outlook of Twitter’s messages was even more uncertain.
To make matters worse, it appears that you can’t even delete your direct messages from Twitter’s servers.
This puts Twitter under European privacy law, the GDPR, which seeks to give users rights over how their information is collected, stored and used, including the right to have their data deleted. One of the fundamental rights under the GDPR is the right to be forgotten.
People have complained and Twitter seems to be ignoring users’ requests, pointing them to a general guidance that fails to explain whether Twitter deletes your DMs from its servers.
Twitter’s help center says that messages and conversations are “deleted only from your account.” They do not say that the messages are removed from its system or servers.
Previous research has shown that deleted DMs are kept within Twitter’s servers for years. In 2022, Twitter whistleblower and former head of security peter “mud”Zatko claimed that in some cases it was not possible for Twitter to delete the data.
Source: Ars Technica
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