Music streaming giant Spotify began 2023 announcing layoffs and it is ending the year in the same way. Today, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek sent a memo to employees saying that an additional 17% of staff would be laid off this week. Seventeen percent of its workforce is about 1,500 personnel.
Spotify laid off roughly 600 people, or 6% of its staff, in January 2023. In June 2023, Spotify laid off an additional 2% of its then-workforce, or about 200 people. The third round of job cuts announc
In the days and weeks before Sam Altman was unceremoniously fired from OpenAI—then reinstated over the course of a long, confusing weekend—the company was flying high. Its first-ever Dev Day, held November 6, saw Altman take to the stage and unveil a slew of new features, including plans to release a GPT store.
The company announced it would open up its GPT store, where users will be able to charge for access to custom-made versions of ChatGPT for tackling specific tas
As drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy become more widespread, an increasing number of employees are asking their insurance to cover them. Recently though, employers including the University of Texas and private healthcare system Ascension have halted coverage saying that they cannot keep up with the rising costs as more people get on GLP-1 medications. In UT’s announcement about the change, it stated that coverage for these medications now cost $5 million per month compared with $1.5 millio
“What if there was a better way to make and deliver pizza to you?” asked CNBC’s Jim Cramer—shirtsleeves rolled up, wagging his finger at the camera—as he passionately set up a segment of his popular Mad Money show in June 2018. “Turns out, there is, which brings me to Zume, Inc., a Silicon Valley–based startup trying to bring this industry to the modern era.” Cramer, on location in Mountain View, California, and standing in front of a sh
Nathan Hubbard has always been on the leading edge of figuring out how to leverage new technologies and music industry ecosystem shifts to turbocharge artists’ careers. After a stint as a musician, he switched gears in the early 2000s and joined the startup Musictoday, which was figuring out how to use the emerging internet to get music and sports merch to fans.
When Hubbard was tapped to run Ticketmaster in the mid-2000s, he did so with the goal of determining how to use the
Consider Christmas. No, really—think about it. What comes to mind is probably something like pine trees and wreaths, family and friends, or high-wattage house lights and commercials with cars wrapped in red ribbon. For anyone in the target demo of the film Jingle Smells, however, Christmas is apparently about one thing above all others: sticking it to the libs.
The first sound that audiences hear in Jingle Smells, a film that manages to be even more juvenile and low-effort th
Look ye, KISS fans, as flesh becomes franchise.
Saturday night was supposed to be the end for rock icons KISS—the final night of the final tour, the end of the End of The Road World Tour, a swan song so long and so deafening that it had reverberated across five continents and hundreds of stadiums, spanning 58 months and nearly killing the band’s frontman, Paul Stanley, in the process.
As midnight neared in Madison Square Garden, the ascending minor chords of
From Taylor Swift and Beyoncé’s historic tours to the launch of the Sphere, 2023 has been the long-awaited comeback year for live events. The resurgence of in-person gatherings has brought with it a sense of euphoria over the simplicity of collectively sharing an experience. At the same time, poor live event etiquette has sparked fraught social media debate over what behavior is acceptable in public.
Attendees have gone so far as to throw items onto stages, including a c
No one hates change like app users, and the latest changes that Google has made to the colors in its Google Maps app are ruffling users’ feathers all over the web. Google Maps users on Reddit have called the new colors “godawful” and expressed how they “hate” the changes. Even Google Maps alum Elizabeth Laraki, who helped design the service in 2007, chimed in on X to say that she believes the new design “feels colder, less accurate and less human.
We used to worry about AI becoming “sentient,” or that something called the “singularity” would occur and AIs would begin creating other AIs on their own. The new goal posts are something called artificial general intelligence, or AGI—a term that’s being subsumed into the realm of AI marketing and influence-pushing.
Here’s what you need to know.
How do we define AGI?
AGI usually describes systems that can learn t