Tech News
Tech News and Analysis from around the web

Annie Palmer / CNBC:
Andy Jassy says Amazon plans to lay off an additional 9,000 employees, mostly in AWS, PXT, Advertising, and Twitch, after cutting 18,000 jobs in January — KEY POINTS — Amazon will lay off 9,000 more employees, CEO Andy Jassy said in a memo to staff on Monday. — Follow your favorite stocksCREATE FREE ACCOUNT

Aisha Malik / TechCrunch:
Netflix plans to launch 40 games in 2023 and has a further 70 in development, after releasing 55 titles since adding games in November 2021 — Netflix has announced that it has 40 games slated for launch this year and has 70 in development with its partners.

Tim Bradshaw / Financial Times:
Microsoft plans to launch a mobile app store for games as soon as 2024 if the Activision bid is cleared and the EU's DMA rules for app stores come into effect — Xbox boss Phil Spencer says store could launch as soon as next year if regulators clear Activision Blizzard deal


Rachel Metz / Bloomberg:
Runway, which helped create Stable Diffusion, announces its Gen 2 system to generate three second snippets of video from prompt words, available via a waitlist — Artificial intelligence has made remarkable progress with still images. For months, services like Dall-E and Stable Diffusion …

Yoshihiro Sato / Bloomberg:
Taiwan's Ministry of Finance data: chip exports to China and Hong Kong fell 31.3% YoY in February, the worst decline since 2009 and above January's 27.1% fall — Taiwan's exports of integrated circuit chips to China and Hong Kong fell for a fourth month in February as Washington-Beijing tensions simmer …

Bryce Elder / Financial Times:
OpenAI's GPT-4 failed a CFA Institute exam, the finance world's self-styled toughest test, scoring eight out of 24, despite the answers being available online — Artificial intelligence versus arbitrary irrelevance — It's an algorithmic mystery box that inspires fear, awe and derision in equal measure.

ABC News:
An interview with Sam Altman on OpenAI's GPT-4, how “people should be happy” that OpenAI is a “little bit scared of” its tools, misinformation, rivals, and more — “This will be the greatest technology humanity has yet developed,” he said. — OpenAI CEO Sam Altman speaks with ABC News, Mar. 15, 2023.

Matt Burgess / Wired:
How open source intelligence, or OSINT, researchers are using public data to untangle the mystery of the Nord Stream pipeline sabotage, helping debunk claims — Open source intelligence researchers are verifying and debunking opaque claims about who ruptured the gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea.

Bloomberg:
China's anti-graft watchdog begins to investigate ex-Tsinghua Unigroup Chairman Zhao Weiguo, the latest executive to be ensnared in its chip corruption dragnet — China's top anti-graft watchdog has begun an investigation of former Tsinghua Unigroup Chairman Zhao Weiguo …

Raffaele Huang / Wall Street Journal:
Research: ByteDance's video editing app CapCut, launched in 2020, has 200M+ MAUs and 400M+ downloads in 2022, up 43% YoY, surpassing TikTok in recent weeks — CapCut, the video-editing tool from ByteDance, helps users go viral on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube — How TikTok Could Become a U.S. Company

Washington Post:
India cuts mobile internet for a second day in Punjab, a state with ~27M people, as officials try to catch a Sikh separatist and curb “fake news” and unrest — The ban in Punjab state, as officials looked for Sikh separatist Amritpal Singh, is one of the country's broadest shutdowns in recent years

Carol E. Lee / NBC News:
Source: in his upcoming testimony to Congress on March 23, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew plans to reveal TikTok has 150M MAUs in the US, up from 100M in August 2020 — When TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew testifies before Congress on Thursday, he plans to unveil new internal data that suggests …

Pete Schroeder / Reuters:
The FDIC plans to sell Signature Bank's deposits to Flagstar Bank, excluding those in its digital banking business, some loans, and Signature's 40 branches — A subsidiary of New York Community Bancorp (NYCB.N) has entered into an agreement with U.S. regulators to purchase deposits and loans …

Lucas Shaw / Bloomberg:
Sources: Netflix's ad-supported tier reached ~1M MAUs in the US after its second month, and the company fulfilled its forecasted deliveries to advertisers — Good afternoon from Los Angeles. It's good to be home and I hope your March Madness bracket is doing better than mine.

Faiz Siddiqui / Washington Post:
As concerns over Tesla's Full Self-Driving rise, former employees blame Elon Musk's erratic leadership, cost-cutting measures like removing radar, and more — Tesla's campaign to deliver a fully autonomous vehicle has suffered amid mounting safety concerns — and the boss's Twitter distraction

