Author: GT

An Amazon device is displayed at an Amazon Devices launch event in New York City, U.S., Feb. 26, 2025.Brendan McDermid | ReutersAmazon is laying off roughly 100 employees in its devices and services division, the company confirmed on Wednesday.The devices and services unit includes a wide range of businesses, such as the Alexa voice assistant, Echo hardware, Ring video doorbells and Zoox robotaxis.”As part of our ongoing work to make our teams and programs operate more efficiently, and to better align with our product roadmap, we’ve made the difficult decision to eliminate a small number of roles,” Amazon spokesperson Kristy…

Three years ago, I wrote about the Amazonification of Uber, an evolution of the transportation company into a closed business loop that feeds customers back into other Uber channels. At the time, the focus was on how Uber creates customer stickiness by, for example, actively cross-selling food delivery customers into grocery, and grocery into alcohol, and then alcohol back into mobility.  Today, Uber appears to be moving beyond its focus on transportation and working to become a convenient super app, an aggregator of services, a daily-use lifestyle platform with its best offerings tucked behind a paywall.  Case in point: Uber…

Ride-hail and delivery giant Uber is introducing cheap, fixed-route rides along busy corridors during weekday commute hours in major U.S. cities — one solution to a world that feels, for most people, more expensive every day.  Starting Wednesday, riders in Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, New York City, Philadelphia, and San Francisco will be able to save 50% off the price of an UberX trip by booking with Uber’s new “Route Share” feature.  The company announced Route Share and other new features and discounts designed to help customers save money on rides and deliveries at its annual Go-Get event. The aim…

Pedestrians walk by an advertisement for Klarna.Daniel Harvey Gonzalez | In Pictures via Getty ImagesKlarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski said the company has managed to shrink its headcount by about 40%, in part due to investments in artificial intelligence and natural attrition in its workforce.”The truth is, the company has shrunk from about 5,000 to now almost 3,000 employees,” Siemiatkowski told CNBC’s “Power Lunch” on Wednesday. “If you go to LinkedIn and look at the jobs, you’ll see how we’re shrinking.”The Swedish fintech provider has been outspoken about its aggressive adoption of AI tools across the company, while touting the productivity…

TikTok announced on Wednesday that it’s expanding its suite of accessibility tools by rolling out AI-generated ALT text for photos, a high-contrast mode, and support for device-level bold text preferences. TikTok introduced support for ALT text for photos a few weeks ago, allowing creators to provide descriptive text for photos to help users with screen readers understand the visual content through spoken descriptions. Now, the company is testing AI-generated ALT text to automatically describe photos out loud when creators don’t add alt text manually. The company says AI-generated ALT text will make TikTok more accessible for people with visual impairments. The…

Jonathan Raa | Nurphoto | Getty ImagesThe Grok chatbot from Elon Musk’s xAI startup is responding to user queries with unrelated comments about the controversial topic of “white genocide” and South Africa.CNBC on Wednesday found numerous instances of Grok discussing the topic in response to unrelated user prompts. Screenshots of examples were also posted by users across X.When an X user asked Grok to fact-check the salary information of Toronto Blue Jays pitcher Max Scherzer, Grok responded with a non-sequitur that touched on Musk’s controversial views about South Africa, where he was born and raised.”The claim of ‘white genocide’ in…

Google’s AI R&D lab DeepMind says it has developed a new AI system to tackle problems with “machine-gradable” solutions. In experiments, the system, called AlphaEvolve, could help optimize some of the infrastructure Google uses to train its AI models, DeepMind said. The company says it’s building a user interface for interacting with AlphaEvolve, and plans to launch an early access program for selected academics ahead of a possible broader rollout. Most AI models hallucinate. Owing to their probabilistic architectures, they confidently make things up sometimes. In fact, newer AI models like OpenAI’s o3 hallucinate more than their predecessors, illustrating the…

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — A former food delivery driver pleaded guilty to conspiring with others to steal more than $2.5 million from DoorDash by getting the company to pay for deliveries that never occurred, federal prosecutors said.Sayee Chaitanya Reddy Devagiri pleaded guilty Tuesday in federal court in San Jose to a single count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said.Devagiri, 30, of Newport Beach, California, admitted to working with three others in 2020 and 2021 to defraud the San Francisco-based delivery company, federal prosecutors said.Prosecutors said Devagiri used customer accounts to place high-value orders and then…

U.S. lawmakers introduced Wednesday the Supersonic Aviation Modernization Act in a bid to revise the FAA’s 52-year ban on supersonic flight over U.S. soil. The bipartisan legislation — introduced by Senator Ted Budd (R-NC), Aviation Subcommittee Chair Troy Nehls (R-TX), and Representative Sharice Davids (D-KS) — would allow supersonic travel, provided no audible sonic boom reaches the ground. Dubbed the “Boom” bill, the move comes as Colorado-based Boom Supersonic makes progress in developing next-generation supersonic aircraft. Boom’s XB-1 demonstrator aircraft made history in January when it became the first privately developed civil aircraft to break the sound barrier over the…

Saudi Arabia’s new state subsidiary, HUMAIN, is collaborating with NVIDIA to build AI infrastructure, nurture talent, and launch large-scale digital systems.The effort includes plans to set up AI “factories” powered by up to 500 megawatts of energy. The sites will be filled with NVIDIA GPUs, including the Grace Blackwell GB300 supercomputers connected via NVIDIA’s InfiniBand network. The goal is to create a base for training models, running simulations, and managing complex AI deployments.A major part of the push is about control. Saudi Arabia wants to build sovereign AI – models trained using local data, language, and systems. By building its…