 | Jan 09, 2025 | | | | | | Welcome back! Microsoft is planning layoffs, the Biden Administration plans a last set of sweeping restrictions on the sale of Nvidia chips and Meta faced a backlash from some employees and European regulators over its decision to abandon its use of external fact-checkers.
| | | | Microsoft is planning to cut less than 1% of its 228,000 employees in the coming months, according to someone briefed on the plans. The layoffs will be based on performance and are likely to affect divisions across the company, this person said. The news of the layoffs were first reported by Business Insider. "At Microsoft we focus on high performance talent," a Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement. "When people are not performing, we take the appropriate action." Microsoft frequently cuts small numbers of employees on a rolling basis, typically either due to employee performance or shifting company strategy. Before this month, Microsoft had cut roughly 1,000 people last June, when it downsized its augmented reality unit, and last February laid off 1,900 employees in its gaming unit following its acquisition of Activision. The last time Microsoft did a larger round of layoffs was in early 2023, when the company cut more than 10,000 roles across the company. | | | | President Joe Biden's administration is planning to make one last set of sweeping restrictions on the sale of Nvidia's vaunted artificial intelligence chips before Biden leaves office later this month, Bloomberg reported. The new rules may aim to block sales to adversary countries such as China and Russia and to companies that are based there but operate globally, the report suggested, without providing details. The administration has struggled to prevent Chinese companies like ByteDance from access advanced artificial intelligence chips, The Information reported, ratcheting up the pressure on U.S. officials to issue new restrictions. The report said allies like Canada, Japan, Australia and numerous western European countries would have unfettered access to Nvidia chip purchases, but hundreds of other countries would need to agree to certain human rights and data center security requirements to get the same treatment. | | | | Employees of Meta Platforms and European regulators criticized changes to the company's content policies announced Tuesday. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Meta would end its third-party fact-checking program in the U.S., take less action on content that might violate its policies and recommend more political content on its social media apps. The European Commission on Wednesday disputed Zuckerberg's claim that Europe's rules amount to censorship, Reuters reported. The commission said it would assess the effectiveness of Meta's plan to rely on community notes, as X does, to moderate content. In internal posts, employees have criticized Meta's changes—as well as the addition of Dana White, CEO of mixed martial arts company Ultimate Fighting Championship and a supporter of President-elect Donald Trump, to its board—CNBC reported. Meta's human resources team has deleted some posts about White, 404 Media reported. Some Republican lawmakers have questioned the motivation for Meta's changes. "Now that President Trump is about to take office, Meta has allegedly decided to stop censoring conservatives," Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) said in a post on X on Tuesday. "This is a ploy to avoid being regulated. We will not be fooled." Blackburn is a co-sponsor of the Kids Online Safety Act. | | | | The livestreaming e-commerce platform Whatnot raised $265 million in new funding, boosting its valuation to $4.97 billion. Greycroft Partners, DST Global and Avra, the investment firm founded by former Y Combinator growth investor Anu Hariharan, led the funding round. The company was last valued at $3.7 billion in 2022. The new funding adds to Whatnot's momentum just as its main competitor, TikTok Shop, faces a U.S. ban that's set to take effect on Jan. 19. Whatnot, founded in 2019, has been around for longer than TikTok Shop, which launched in the fall of 2023, but has quickly been dwarfed by the social media giant. TikTok Shop was on track for $17.5 billion in gross U.S. sales for 2024, The Information previously reported, while Whatnot says its sellers sold more than $3 billion worth of goods last year. Whatnot said it will use the funding to hire more engineers and expand into new countries and categories like art. The company is also planning a tender offer to repurchase up to $72 million in shares. | | | | Google Cloud has appointed Francis deSouza, a software industry veteran and former senior executive at cybersecurity provider Symantec, to serve as its chief operating officer, he announced in a LinkedIn post. This is the latest sign of both the growing maturity of Google Cloud's business and its increasing importance within Alphabet. Buoyed by adoption of its generative AI products, Google Cloud reported 35% revenue growth in its September quarter compared to the previous year as well as its best-ever quarterly operating profit. deSouza becomes Google Cloud's first COO since Diane Bryant, a longtime Intel executive who was hired in 2017, departed a year later. After working at IBM and Microsoft early in his career, deSouza joined Symantec in 2006 when it acquired IMlogic, the cybersecurity startup he founded. He worked his way up to president of products and services before leaving Symantec in 2013 to join biotechnology firm Illumina, where he later served as CEO for seven years before departing in 2023. | | | | Bluesky, an alternative to Elon Musk's X, is in talks to raise money at a $700 million valuation in a round led by Bain Capital Ventures, Business Insider reported. The new funding, if completed, would follow a jump in users after Musk successfully campaigned for Donald Trump in last year's presidential election, turning off some X users. Three-year-old Bluesky, started as a side project of Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey in 2019, launched to the public in early 2024 with 3 million users. It had reached nearly 26 million users by December. In October, it announced it had raised a $15 million Series A from investors including Blockchain Capital. Representatives for Bluesky and Bain didn't immediately respond to requests for comment. | | | Popular articles
By Cory Weinberg and Michael Roddan
| | | | | Opportunities Empower your teams to stay ahead of market trends with the most trusted tech journalism.
Learn more
Reach The Information's influential audience with your message. Connect with our team | | | | | |
0 comentários:
Postar um comentário