The amount of time Reddit reports that users spend with its service hasn’t significantly budged either. In September 2021, the company said that US users on average engaged for 28 minutes a day. It ticked up to 30 minutes that December. In December of 2023, the company specified a figure only for “logged-in” US users, … Read more
When Michael Seibel lost his position at the startup incubator Y Combinator, he didn’t find out in typical tech industry fashion, which might entail an email calling him to a Zoom meeting where the bad news would be delivered. He did it to himself. Today Seibel is announcing that he’s stepping down as YC’s managing … Read more
The US economy is showing remarkable health, but in the tech industry, layoffs keep coming. For those out of work, finding a new position can become a full-time job. And in tech—a sector notoriously always looking for the next hot, new thing—some people whose days as fresh-faced coders are long gone say that having decades … Read more
Sam Altman is back—again. The entrepreneur who was suddenly fired as OpenAI CEO and from the ChatGPT developer’s board last November, before regaining his CEO position days later, is now getting his director seat back, too. Altman and three veteran business executives, all women, were named to OpenAI’s board on Friday, OpenAI announced in a … Read more
More than 600 Google workers and counting have signed a letter addressed to Google marketing leadership demanding that it drop its sponsorship of Mind the Tech, an annual conference promoting the Israeli tech industry taking place in New York this week. “Please withdraw from Mind the Tech, issue an apology, and stand with Googlers and … Read more
“Having someone who’s 54 years old, like Dean Phillips, trying to address the challenges of AI would actually help me sleep more soundly at night,” Yang said. “As opposed to the folks that are currently in office who, frankly, think they’re going to be there whether they solve our problems or not.” But it’s unclear … Read more
WIRED’s request for the documents promised in OpenAI’s IRS filings fell to the counsel for its nonprofit to decide on. Their denial and new policy of withholding those documents extends an existing trend of dwindling openness at a project founded on transparency. OpenAI once published extensive detail about its AI inventions but has more recently … Read more
Photo: Reshetnikov_art / Shutterstock.com (Shutterstock) Don’t ring the funeral bells just yet, but the self-checkout kiosk horror show could be nearing its end. So far, the grand experiment in robot cashiers is an abject failure. Stores across the country are reversing course on the machines, and consensus is growing among analysts and insiders that self-checkout … Read more
Unlike OpenAI, Mozilla’s nonprofit cannot fire executives in charge of for-profit work. Each for-profit unit has its own board, with members annually selected by the nonprofit foundation’s board. “It’s different jobs, it’s a different mix of skills,” Surman says. “If you have different functions, it makes sense to have a separation of powers.” The different … Read more
Yet on Monday those theories too appeared to be put to rest. In a post on X in the early hours of the morning, the board’s new interim CEO Emmett Shear wrote that before he accepted the job he’d asked why Altman was removed. “The board did *not* remove Sam over any specific disagreement on … Read more