Technology
Google lays off employees, Tesla fires its Supercharger team, and UnitedHealthcare reveals security flaws
Welcome, folks, to Week in Review (WiR), JS’s regular newsletter that recaps the week in tech. This edition is a bit bittersweet for me; it will be my last (at least for a while). I’ll soon be shifting my focus to a new AI-focused newsletter, which I’m super excited about. Stay tuned!
Now on to the news: This week, Google laid off staff from its Flutter, Dart, and Python teams, weeks before the annual I/O developer conference. A total of 200 people were laid off from Google’s core teams, including those working on app platforms and other tech roles.
Elsewhere, Tesla CEO Elon Musk dismantled the company’s team responsible for overseeing the Supercharger network in a new round of layoffs — despite recently winning over major automakers like Ford and General Motors. The cuts are so complete that Musk suggested in an email that they will force Tesla to slow the expansion of the Supercharger network.
And UnitedHealthcare CEO Andrew Witty told a House subcommittee that the ransomware gang that hacked US health tech giant Change Healthcare – UnitedHealthcare’s subsidiary – had used a set of stolen credentials to gain access to Change Healthcare systems that were not protected by multi-factor authentication. Last week, UnitedHealthcare said the hackers had stolen health data from a “substantial portion of people in America.”
Much more happened. We’ll recap it all in this edition of WiR – but first a reminder to sign up to receive the WiR newsletter in your inbox every Saturday.
News
Hallucinations, hallucinations: OpenAI is facing a new privacy complaint in the EU. This one – filed by a privacy rights nonprofit nob on behalf of an individual complainant – focuses on the inability of its AI chatbot ChatGPT to correct misinformation it generates about individuals.
Just walk out…Sam’s Club: Sam’s Club customers who pay at the cash register or via the Scan & Go mobile app can now walk out of the store without having their purchases double-checked. The technology, revealed at the Consumer Electronics Show in January, has now been deployed at 20% of Sam’s Club locations.
TikTok bypasses Apple rules: TikTok offers some users a link to a website where they can purchase the coins used to tip digital creators on the platform. Normally, these coins must be purchased through in-app purchases – which pay a 30% commission to Apple – suggesting TikTok may be trying to circumvent Apple’s App Store rules.
NIST’s GenAI platform: The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the U.S. Department of Commerce that develops and tests technology for the U.S. government, businesses, and the broader public, has launched NIST GenAI, a new program to assess generative AI technologies, including text – and image-generating AI.
Getir retreats: Getir, the fast-trading giant, has pulled out of the US, UK and Europe to focus on Turkey, its home country. The company – once valued at nearly $12 billion – said the move would impact thousands of gig and full-time workers.
Analysis
A look into Techstars’ ‘cold war’: Brilliant reporting from Dom lifts the curtains on a year of financial losses and staff cuts at startup accelerator Techstars, whose CEO, Maëlle Gavet, has been a controversial force for change.
AI-powered encryption: Yours truly takes a look at Copilot Workspace, a bit of an evolution of GitHub’s AI-powered coding assistant Copilot into a more general-purpose tool – building on recently introduced capabilities like Copilot Chat, which lets developers ask questions about code in natural language.
