PagerDuty’s CEO quotes Martin Luther King when announcing the layoffs and charges $20 per month for OpenAI ChatGPT.
This is all the tech news that is trending right now. Welcome to trending hashtags. It’s Thursday, February 2nd and I’m your host, Asha Pamma.
As layoffs continue in the tech industry, laid-off employees are taking to social media platforms to share their stories, while remaining cautious workers are searching for information to prepare for the cuts. Blind, an anonymous network, has been a haven for many of those employees. Microsoft-owned LinkedIn is not surprisingly, though the employment-focused social media network has also seen its fair share of former employees traversing their professional journeys and resentments after being laid off. Nearly 6,000 Microsoft employees signed up for blind accounts between January 13 and January 18, the day the tech giant announced 10,000 layoffs, according to internal data revealed to news company CNN. Employees used the service to predict when layoffs would happen, which departments might be affected and those who were worried were put to rest. Employees on the platform are verified via their work email address, but remain anonymous, allowing candid conversations about America’s largest employers. Now, Blind is full of posts by employees consoling each other about how to weather the unemployment period.
Source: CNN
In an email to employees announcing the layoffs, PagerDuty CEO Jennifer Tejada turned to a quote from Martin Luther King Jr. [leader] where is not [they] stand in moments of comfort and convenience, but where [they] Stand tall in times of challenge and controversy”. After facing massive backlash for being “tone deaf” and self-aggrandizing, she has now apologized for using the quote in her layoff announcement. She admitted that the quote was inappropriate and insensitive and that she should have been more honest and thoughtful. In this announcement, the number of employees of the company was cut by seven percent.
Source: business Insider
OpenAI announced that it is starting to sell subscriptions to ChatGPT for $20 a month. ChatGPT will still be available for free to users who do not subscribe, but paying customers will get priority access, faster response times and early access to new features. According to experts, ChatGPT wants to monetize because the AI service is taking up a lot of computing power, with OpenAI costing $100,000 or more per day, Axios wrote. Monetizing its technology is especially important for the AI firm, following its $10 billion investment from Microsoft. OpenAI said in a blog post that the company is actively exploring options for low-cost plans, business plans, and data packs for greater availability.
source: axios
In February, the Supreme Court will hear a landmark case on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. This legal provision protects social platforms from lawsuits over harmful user-generated content, while giving them the right to remove posts at their discretion. The provision has been critical to the massive growth of BigTech and, if repealed, would force social media companies to change their content moderation strategy. However, smaller sites like Reddit and Wikipedia that rely on community moderation will also be hit because while moderators are only doing their job, they will be taking legal risks every time they moderate content. Reddit’s lawyers filed an amicus brief claiming that their features like “upvotes” and “downvotes” are protected by Section 230, which Congress drafted to immunize internet ‘users’, not just the platform . Wikimedia, the foundation that manages Wikipedia, is also concerned that a new interpretation of Section 230 could force volunteer editors to go to court over how they deal with user-generated content.
source: MIT Technology Review
Samsung revealed its sustainability efforts at the 2023 Samsung Unpacked event, saying that their Samsung Galaxy S23 series were the company’s most sustainable phones yet. The company said that the new Samsung Galaxy S23 phones are UL Ecologo certified. This certification indicates that a product has a low environmental impact throughout its life cycle based on environmental performance criteria, including energy reduction, materials, health, environment, manufacturing and operation. The Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra is made of 12 internal and external components from recycled materials, compared to the Galaxy S22 Ultra, which was made of six. These recycled materials include pre-consumer recycled aluminum and glass and post-consumer recycled plastics derived from fishing nets, PET bottles and water barrels. The phones also come in 100% recycled packaging that is certified as a sustainable source.
source: ZDNet
This is all the tech news that is trending right now. Hashtag Trending is a part of the ITWC Podcast Network. Add us to your Alexa Flash Briefing or your Google Home Daily Briefing. Be sure to sign up for our Daily IT Wire Newsletter to get important news straight to your inbox every day. Plus, check out the next episode of Hashtag Tendence, our weekly hashtag trending episode in French, which drops every Thursday morning. If you have any suggestion or tip, drop us a line in the comments or via email. Thanks for listening, I’m Aashi Pamma.
