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| Here's a look at today's Tech briefing: - GM will cut spending on Cruise self-driving unit after San Francisco accident.
- Unity announces layoffs and office closures.
- Apple seeks to end Goldman Sachs credit card partnership.
Beth
p/beth-duckett | |
| 1 | | General Motors will slash spending on its self-driving division, Cruise, following a recent pedestrian accident. After the incident, California's DMV suspended Cruise's permits and GM issued a recall for Cruise's entire 950-robotaxi fleet. More: - Once operations resume, GM expects its plans for Cruise to be more "deliberate," GM CEO Mary Barra told shareholders during a conference call on Wednesday.
- The move will result in "substantially" reduced spending at Cruise, including plans to cut hundreds of millions of dollars next year, she said.
- Barra stressed a need to rebuild trust with regulators, shareholders, and communities where Cruise operates.
- Specifics about the new Cruise will be provided in the coming weeks, pending the outcomes of two ongoing safety reviews.
- Cruise incurred a $1.9B loss in the first nine months of the year.
Zoom out: - An Oct. 2 incident in San Francisco heightened safety concerns about Cruise's self-driving vehicles.
- A company car unintentionally dragged a woman 20 feet, causing serious injuries, after she was struck by a human-driven vehicle and ended up in the path of the Cruise car.
- Cruise later paused all its U.S. supervised and manual car trips and expanded a safety review.
- Soon after, CEO Kyle Vogt and co-founder Dan Kan resigned.
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| 2 | Game software platform Unity is cutting 3.8% of its workforce and shutting down offices in 14 locations globally. Unity is also ending its agreement with Weta FX, the VFX studio responsible for "The Lord of the Rings." More: - Unity acquired Weta Digital's technology, pipeline, and engineering teams in 2021 for $1.6B.
- Around 265 employees, primarily linked to the Weta acquisition, will now be laid off.
- The gaming engine provider is terminating a professional services agreement with Weta FX.
- Weta said it will try to hire "as many of the team as possible." Unity will still keep the tools acquired in 2021.
Zoom out: - Unity described the announcements as a company "reset" as it deals with challenges.
- Last month, CEO John Riccitiello resigned after a controversy involving a new runtime fee for Unity's game engine.
- Former IBM president James Whitehurst is now serving as interim CEO.
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| 3 | | Apple has proposed ending its credit card and savings account partnership with Goldman Sachs within the next 12 to 15 months. The move would end their entire consumer partnership and require Apple to seek a new financial partner for its Apple Card and high-yield savings account. More: - While the companies last year extended the partnership through 2029, Apple has sent a proposal to Goldman to end the contract within 15 months, according to The Wall Street Journal.
- The request comes as Goldman is considering exiting the consumer lending business.
- Initially, the Apple savings account drew attention with a 4.15% APY, but it has since lost favor among Goldman executives, who view it as a distraction from the bank's core business.
- Recently, Synchrony Financial, the largest store credit card issuer, has explored the possibility of acquiring the Apple Card.
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| 4 | | Cybersecurity firm Okta revealed that hackers stole data on all users of its customer support network in a breach two months ago. The hack was significantly bigger than Okta's initial estimate of 1% of its customers. More: - Okta offers identity services to safeguard online applications and website logins for businesses, including OpenAI, T-Mobile, and Sonos.
- On Wednesday, the firm disclosed that hackers downloaded a report containing data including full names and emails of all clients using its customer support system.
- Okta said there's no "direct evidence" that the unidentified hackers are using the data to target customers.
- However, with names and emails exposed, there's a higher risk of phishing and social engineering attacks on these users, it said.
- The hack impacted all Okta Workforce Identity Cloud and Customer Identity Solution customers, with the exception of government customers.
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| 5 | | Nearly 4,000 U.S. auto dealers are urging the Biden administration to slow down federal rules that will require two-thirds of U.S. vehicle sales to be battery-electric in 2032. The dealerships said most U.S. car buyers aren't interested in buying EVs right now, even with incentives, and this is leading to an oversupply of the cars on their lots. More: - The group, called "EV Voice of the Consumer," wrote that the administration's proposed EV mandate is impractical given current and projected customer demand.
- The group pointed to EVs' high cost, lower range in extreme temperatures, insufficient charging infrastructure, and lengthy charging times.
- "Last year, there was a lot of hope and hype about EVs," they wrote. "But that enthusiasm has stalled."
Zoom out: - In September, consumers paid an average of $50,683 for an EV, down from $65,000 a year ago.
- Despite reduced prices and more discounts, EV sales are slower than automakers have expected, prompting General Motors, Ford Motor, and Tesla to delay their EV investments.
- Sales of EVs in the U.S. are inching up, though they may be plateauing. They reached 111,000 in August (8.3% of the total market) to just under 106,000 in September (7.9% of the market).
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| 6 | | Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced two next-gen chips, Graviton4 and Trainium2, for cloud workloads and AI training, respectively. Amazon also revealed an extended partnership with Nvidia, with plans to incorporate Nvidia's most advanced H200 GPUs into its cloud computing service. More: - The general-purpose Graviton4 processor offers up to 30% more computing power, 50% more cores, and 75% greater memory bandwidth than Graviton3.
- Trainium2 is designed for faster training of models with up to trillions of parameters, delivering up to 4x faster training performance and 3x more memory capacity than the first-gen chip.
- The latter can be deployed in Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) UltraClusters with up to 100,000 chips, speeding up the training of high-performance foundation models and large language models.
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| 7 | | Quick Hits: *This is sponsored content. | | | |
 | AI and technology writer | | Beth is a contributing editor and writer of Inside's AI and Tech newsletters. With a career in journalism since 2007, she has written for publications including USA Today and the Arizona Business Gazette. As a public policy and investigative reporter at The Arizona Republic, she earned a Pulitzer Prize nomination and a First Amendment Award for co-reporting on pension cost increases. She authored a book on the solar photovoltaic industry in 2016. Reach her at Beth.Duckett@yahoo.com. | | This newsletter was edited by Eduardo Garcia | |
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