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| Here's a look at today's Tech briefing: - IBM suspended advertising on X after its ads ran next to pro-Nazi content.
- Amazon is cutting jobs in its Alexa division.
- SpaceX has scheduled its second test flight of Starship on Saturday.
- Apple is challenging its "gatekeeper" status under the EU's new tech law.
Beth
p/beth-duckett | |
| 1 | | IBM announced that it will pause all advertising on X, formerly Twitter, after a report found its ads had appeared next to pro-Nazi posts. A Media Matters for America report showed that ads for IBM, Apple, Bravo, Oracle, and Xfinity ran alongside X posts promoting Hitler and the Nazi Party. More: - In a statement, IBM said it "has zero tolerance for hate speech and discrimination" and has immediately halted advertising on X while it investigates the "entirely unacceptable situation."
- An X executive told Axios that the platform has addressed the issue by deeming the accounts Media Matters flagged as non-monetizable and marking the highlighted posts as "sensitive media."
- The executive clarified that X's system doesn't intentionally position brands alongside such content, and brands don't actively seek to support it through their ad placements.
Related: - IBM's move came a day after X owner Elon Musk agreed with an antisemitic post on X claiming that Jewish communities support "dialectical hatred against whites."
- "You have said the actual truth," Musk wrote.
- On Friday, a White House spokesperson responded that it was "unacceptable to repeat the hideous lie behind the most fatal act of Antisemitism in American history at any time."
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| 2 | Amazon is cutting hundreds of jobs and discontinuing certain projects in its Alexa division. The company is realigning its efforts toward other business priorities, including generative artificial intelligence, according to Daniel Rausch, Amazon's VP of Alexa and Fire TV. More: - In a memo to employees today, Rausch said Amazon will discontinue some initiatives in the Alexa smart assistant unit, leading to the elimination of "several hundred" roles.
- The changes mean "maximizing our resources and efforts focused on generative AI," he wrote.
- The layoffs will impact employees in the U.S., Canada, India, and possibly other regions.
Zoom out: - Amazon recently cut jobs in its music and video games divisions and closed its physical clothing stores.
- The company has cut over 27,000 corporate positions in the past year after mass hiring during the pandemic.
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| 3 | SpaceX has rescheduled the launch of its Starship rocket system to Saturday, delaying it by one day. CEO Elon Musk said the launch was delayed to provide time to replace a small rocket part, known as a grid fin actuator. More: - The Starship spacecraft is set to liftoff during a 20-minute window starting at 7 a.m. Nov. 18, from SpaceX's Starbase launch site in Boca Chica, Texas.
- SpaceX will show a live stream of the launch, its second test flight after a failed attempt in April, when the rocket exploded several minutes after liftoff.
- Starship and Super Heavy, its massive booster, are set to separate about 2.5 minutes into the flight, taking Starship on a near-orbital partial trip around the Earth before splashing down near the island of Kauai.
Zoom out: - Starship, the largest and most powerful rocket ever built, will be responsible for launching SpaceX's next-gen Starlink satellites.
- The reusable rocket serves as NASA's future moon lander under the Artemis missions and is central to Musk's vision of transporting people to Mars.
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| 4 | | Apple has joined TikTok and Meta in appealing its classification under the EU's Digital Markets Act (DMA). While Apple hasn't disclosed details of its legal challenge, Bloomberg reported that the company planned to dispute the App Store's status as a "gatekeeper" under the law. More: - On Friday, the EU Court of Justice reported that Apple, alongside Meta and TikTok parent ByteDance, had formally objected to the law.
- The DMA, which comes into full force next year, aims to promote fair competition and prevent businesses from imposing unfair terms on consumers.
- Under the terms, companies will have to make many of their services interoperable with other platforms.
- The EU has identified 22 gatekeeper services operated big tech companies, including Apple's App Store, browsers like Chrome and Safari, WhatsApp, and Google Maps.
Zoom out: - Apple announced this week that it will soon add support for RCS messaging on iPhones, potentially addressing one of the EU's concerns about iMessage lock-in.
- Apple said RCS Universal Profile "will offer a better interoperability experience when compared to SMS or MMS."
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| 5 | Bluesky, the decentralized social media app positioned as an alternative to Twitter/X, announced reaching 2 million users. Bluesky, an invite-only microblogging app conceived by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, was developed alongside Twitter before Elon Musk acquired it last year. 
What the numbers show: Bluesky, first introduced in February, saw 194,000 Android app downloads and 251,300 iOS app downloads in September. That same month, the platform reached 1 million users, suggesting that it may have sent out more invites lately to reach 2 million users by November. Zoom out: In a post announcing the milestone, the Bluesky team disclosed plans to launch a public web interface by the end of this month. Bluesky's major hurdle is that post links are currently inaccessible without signing in, which could be resolved by the public web interface. Meanwhile, Bluesky plans to enable federation early next year. While technically decentralized, users currently need to sign up through the invite-only bsky.social network. Federation will allow users to post through different providers, moving away from the central platform model used by most major social media companies. | | | |
| 6 | | Meta announced new AI tools that can edit photos as well as generate video clips from text prompts. According to Mark Zuckerberg, Meta is working to integrate the "creative editing capabilities" into Instagram and Facebook, though he hasn't shared a timeline or release date. More: - The AI-powered tools are based on Meta's Expressive Media Universe (Emu) foundational model, which generates images.
- With the new Emu Video, users can input a text, image, or a combination of both to create a four-second-long animated clip.
- Meanwhile, the new Emu Edit lets users "precisely" edit and alter photos — like removing or replacing objects — using only text prompts.
- According to The Verge, it doesn't appear Emu Edit users need to manually select the image section that they want to modify.
- Emu Video clips can also be edited with Emu Edit using natural language descriptions.
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- China's VR market experienced a significant downturn in Q3 2023, with VR headset sales dropping nearly 30% year-over-year.
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- Microsoft will launch its AI Copilot for Windows 10 to preview testers soon. Copilot was recently rolled out to all Windows 11 users via an update.
- Google is introducing new AI tools for YouTube that allow users to create music tracks using text prompts or hummed melodies. One of the experimental tools, Dream Track, can generate 30-second music clips in the style of nine different artists, including Charli XCX, Demi Lovato, and John Legend.
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Term of the Day Editorial calendar: An editorial calendar is a plan or schedule outlining which content a company intends to create, publish, and promote online Question of the Week What perks would convince you to return to the office? Join the conversation |
 | AI and technology writer | | Beth is an editor and writer of Inside's AI and Tech newsletters, with a career spanning journalism since 2007. She has written for publications including The Arizona Republic and USA Today and authored a book on the solar industry in 2016. Reach her at Beth.Duckett@yahoo.com. | | This newsletter was edited by Eduardo Garcia | |
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