Tech Digest daily roundup: Google to cut 12,000 jobs worldwide
Google’s parent company Alphabet will cut 12,000 jobs, in the latest staff redundancies to hit the tech industry. Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said he took “full responsibility” for the cuts, in an internal email. The cuts will affect 6% of Alphabet’s workforce worldwide, in teams including recruitment and engineering. This comes days after Microsoft announced 10,000 jobs would be lost, and weeks after Amazon announced 18,000 job cuts. Mr Pichai thanked staff for “working so hard” in their roles, adding that their “contributions have been invaluable”. BBC
We’ve all been there: you’re on track to win a match of Call Of Duty or Fortnite, only to be outgunned at the last minute by a teenager with Spider-Man-esque reaction speeds. Should you throw your PlayStation controller out the window in anger, you may want to replace it with one of the increasing number of “pro” controllers on the market. Their rise in the gaming hardware world has been meteoric, with the range of high-tech alternatives to default gamepads growing year-on-year. Sky News
Netflix’s long-trailed crackdown on shared accounts is coming – and it predicts that people might stop watching. The company made the announcement in its latest results, which showed that it had managed to grow again after a difficult period. Part of that growth may have been the result of efforts such as its new, cheaper ad-free tier, as well as the threat of a ban on password sharing. Now that password sharing crackdown will roll out “more broadly”, it said, following a limited test in Latin America. Independent
Samsung has announced another round of updates for recent Galaxy Watch series smartwatches that will bring new smart home controls through the SmartThings app. Available to the Galaxy Watch4 and Galaxy Watch5 series, the updates will allow people to control and monitor connected devices like cameras, doorbells, lights and thermostats without needing to consult them directly or look at a paired smartphone. Notebookcheck
The launch of ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence chatbot, late last year marked a new era in AI – and sparked widespread fears over the effect of artificial intelligence on the job market. Its abilities to write poems, screenplays, take exams and simulate entire chat rooms have led some to suggest it could rapidly take over jobs in customer service, copywriting and even the legal profession… ‘I believe that ChatGPT could replace 20 percent of the workforce as is,’ AI expert Richard DeVere, Head of Social Engineering for Ultima, told DailyMail.com.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk sold almost $3.6 billion of his shares in the EV maker in December — just before the company revealed disappointing fourth-quarter results to investors, The Wall Street Journal reports. It has to make you wonder: did Musk know the company’s stock price was about to tank, something that could be of interest to financial regulatory authorites?”This should be of great interest to the [Securities and Exchange Commission],” James Cox, a securities-law professor at Duke University, told the WSJ. The Byte
