Meta and Amazon team up on new in-app shopping feature on Facebook & Instagram

November 9, 2023

Meta may have abandoned its efforts around live shopping on Facebook and Instagram, but the social networking company still believes in its apps’ potential as a shopping platform. That leads to today’s news that the company is now working with Amazon to allow customers to link their Facebook and Instagram accounts to their Amazon account […]

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ByteDance’s Oculus challenger Pico lays off hundreds, halts aggressive expansion

November 9, 2023

When Pico launched its Oculus Quest challenger in China last year, it did so with great optimism. Light (295 grams) and affordable ($420), the virtual reality headset released by the ByteDance-owned manufacturer was expected to drive adoption in a market inaccessible to Meta. The odds were against Pico. Its sales have been sluggish, and this […]

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Archer Aviation aims to launch all-electric air taxi service in India in 2026

November 9, 2023

Archer Aviation, the electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) vehicle startup, has partnered with India’s travel and hospitality conglomerate InterGlobe Enterprises to launch an all-electric air taxi service in the country in 2026. If successful, it would make the South Asian nation its second international market outside the U.S. to experience its ambitious air taxi […]

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Ghost, now OpenAI-backed, claims LLMs will overcome self-driving setbacks — but experts are skeptical

November 9, 2023

It’s not hyperbolic to say that the self-driving car industry is facing a reckoning. Just this week, Cruise recalled its entire fleet of autonomous cars after a grisly accident involving a pedestrian that led the California DMV to suspend the company from operating driverless robotaxis in the state. Meanwhile, activists in San Francisco have taken […]

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California regulators weigh a do-over for Cruise’s robotaxi permit

November 9, 2023

California regulators have issued an order to halt the implementation of Cruise’s permit to charge for robotaxi rides across San Francisco 24/7 as they consider the city’s request for a redo of the hearing that granted the permit. The action by the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) is in addition to the agency’s October 24 […]

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The Match-Google antitrust settlement netted the dating app maker over $300M

November 9, 2023

Last week, Google and Match reached a settlement in the app store antitrust case where Match had sought the right to offer its users an alternative to Google Billing in an effort to avoid Google’s Play Store commissions on in-app purchases. As a part of the agreement, Match said it would implement Google’s new User […]

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Snap confirms small-scale layoffs as part of product team re-org

November 9, 2023

Snap confirmed that a workforce reorganization has resulted in a small number of layoffs for the app maker, impacting people in product management roles. The layoffs were not directly tied to specific products, however, even though Snap recently shuttered its enterprise services division after less than a year. Instead, the reorganization of the Product team […]

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OpenAI wants to work with organizations to build new AI training data sets

November 9, 2023

It’s an open secret that the data sets used to train AI models are deeply flawed. Image corpora tends to be U.S.- and Western-centric, partly because Western images dominated the internet when the data sets were compiled. And as most recently highlighted by a study out of the Allen Institute for AI, the data used […]

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