Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA
Australian productivity software company Atlassian held layoffs as the company looks to funnel more money into AI. Atlassian announced it’s cutting 10% of its workforce, around 1,600 people, on March 11. The company said this decision allows it to spend more funds on AI and enterprise sales and to strengthen its finances. More specifically, Atlassian said that it’s doing well but is choosing to adapt to market conditions. “The bar for what ‘great’ looks like for software companies — on growth, on profitability, on speed, on value creation — has gone up,” Atlassian CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes wrote in a press…
Dating app maker Bumble is venturing into generative AI. During the company’s fourth-quarter earnings on Wednesday, Bumble introduced a new AI assistant it’s calling “Bee,” designed to become a personal matchmaker that learns users’ “values, relationship goals, communication style, lifestyle, and dating intentions” through private chats. It then uses those insights to help find the user more relevant matches. Currently, Bee is in the pilot phase and being tested internally, Bumble founder and CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd told investors, but it’s launching into beta soon. With Bee, the company envisions being able to capture much more information about Bumble users,…
Dating app maker Bumble is venturing into generative AI. During the company’s fourth-quarter earnings on Wednesday, Bumble introduced a new AI assistant it’s calling “Bee,” designed to become a personal matchmaker that learns users’ “values, relationship goals, communication style, lifestyle, and dating intentions” through private chats. It then uses those insights to help find the user more relevant matches. Currently, Bee is in the pilot phase and being tested internally, Bumble founder and CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd told investors, but it’s launching into beta soon. With Bee, the company envisions being able to capture much more information about Bumble users,…
Grammarly released a controversial feature last week that uses AI to simulate editorial feedback, making it seem like you’re getting a critique from novelist Stephen King, the late scientist Carl Sagan, or tech journalist Kara Swisher. But Grammarly did not get permission from the hundreds of experts it included in this feature, called “Expert Review,” to use their names. One of the affected writers, journalist Julia Angwin, has filed a class action lawsuit against Superhuman, the parent company that owns Grammarly, arguing that the company violated the privacy and publicity rights of her and the other writers it impersonated. A…
The exodus of cofounders from Elon Musk’s AI startup continues.Zihang Dai left xAI earlier this week, according to people familiar with the matter. His xAI badge has vanished from his X profile.Meanwhile, Guodong Zhang has told people he plans to leave in the coming days, insiders said. His X profile still has an xAI badge.This follows the recent exits of a string of xAI cofounders, including Toby Pohlen, Jimmy Ba, Tony Wu, and Greg Yang, all of whom have left since January.After Dai and Zhang depart, only two of the 11 people who started the company with Musk in 2023…
I come bearing great news for my kind of people (horrible typists): Typos are the new status symbol. Garbled spelling, a missed space, improper capitalization — those are all the new and best ways to signal to others that you are powerful and elite. Loading audio narration… The Wall Street Journal, a place that employs editors to do more than just catch typos, wrote about how the rich and powerful are, in some cases, abandoning perfect prose. The examples they cite include Jack Dorsey’s all-lowercase memo announcing layoffs at Block and David Ellison texting David Zaslav and somehow writing their…
When Max Brodeur-Urbas co-founded Gumloop in mid-2023, his vision was to help non-technical employees automate repetitive tasks using AI. At that time, the concept of AI agents was still largely experimental and prone to errors. As AI technology has matured, so has Gumloop’s offering. The company claims that it now allows teams at organizations like Shopify, Ramp, Gusto, Samsara, Instacart, and Opendoor to deploy reliable AI agents that autonomously handle complex, multistep tasks, all without ever needing an engineer. Employees can share the agents they build with colleagues, creating a compounding effect that accelerates internal automation. “They get addicted, they…
The biggest new restaurant trend is small.Special menus with petite, less expensive portions are popping up all over, from large chains like Olive Garden and The Cheesecake Factory to trendy urban eateries and farm-to-fork dining rooms.Restaurants hope that offering smaller servings beyond the children’s menu will meet many different diners’ needs. Some people want to spend less when they go out. Others are looking for healthier options or trying to lose weight. Younger consumers tend to snack more throughout the day and eat smaller meals, said Maeve Webster, the president of culinary consulting firm Menu Matters.“These are really driven by,…
Amazon’s AI assistant Alexa+ is getting another new personality. On Thursday, the company announced it’s expanding its lineup of personality styles for users to choose from to include a “Sassy” option, which is for adults only. Notes Amazon, before opting to use the Sassy personality, users will be required to go through additional security checks in the Alexa app. The personality style will also not be available when Amazon Kids is enabled, Amazon says. The new option joins others like Brief, Chill, and Sweet, launched last month. When you toggle on the option for Sassy in the Alexa mobile app,…
Amazon’s AI assistant Alexa+ is getting another new personality. On Thursday, the company announced it’s expanding its lineup of personality styles for users to choose from to include a “Sassy” option, which is for adults only. Notes Amazon, before opting to use the Sassy personality, users will be required to go through additional security checks in the Alexa app. The personality style will also not be available when Amazon Kids is enabled, Amazon says. The new option joins others like Brief, Chill, and Sweet, launched last month. Image Credits:Amazon When you toggle on the option for Sassy in the Alexa…