Snap says its $400M deal with Perplexity ‘amicably ended’
The deal, announced last November, would have seen Perplexity's AI search engine integrated directly into Snapchat.
AI Insider·
Snap has quietly terminated its $400 million partnership with AI search startup Perplexity, revealing the split as part of its first-quarter earnings report. The deal, announced last November, would have embedded Perplexity’s conversational AI search engine directly into Snapchat’s Chat interface. Despite limited testing with select users, the companies failed to agree on a path […]
Read full articleThe deal, announced last November, would have seen Perplexity's AI search engine integrated directly into Snapchat.
Airline customer service is one of the toughest real-world environments for AI. Customers rarely contact an airline when things are going smoothly. They reach out when a flight is delayed, a connection is missed, baggage is lost, or a last-minute change becomes urgent. In these moments, they do not want a maze of phone menus […]
The company, which owns the social media app Snapchat, said it was laying off about 1,000 employees as it increases its reliance on artificial intelligence.
Cuts by Snapchat’s parent company come in response to a declining stock price and pressure from an activist investor Snapchat’s parent company plans to lay off 16% of its employees, around 1,000 people, citing “rapid advancements in artificial intelligence”, the social media company told staff on Wednesday in an internal memo. The staff reduction is part of a wave of tech industry layoffs in the past year, with many firms blaming AI for the cuts. Snap Inc’s layoffs follow demands last month from Irenic Capital Management, an activist investor whose portfolio manager wrote a letter to the Snap Inc CEO, Evan Spiegel, calling on him to reduce costs and headcount while criticizing the company’s current strategy. In Spiegel’s memo to staff, he claimed that the layoffs would move Snap towards profitability and suggested that artificial intelligence could fill the lack of human labor. Continue reading...
You don’t need to understand any fancy editing terms — just describe what changes you want to make. | Image: Adobe Adobe is fully embracing AI tools that enable creators to edit their work using descriptive prompts, instead of manually using specific Creative Cloud apps. The software giant's new Firefly AI Assistant allows users to describe what they want to change by typing their own words into a conversational interface. Adobe says this marks a "fundamental shift in how creative work is done" by removing skill barriers and laborious tasks, while still giving creatives full control over their work. It'll be "available soon" on the Firefly AI studio platform according to Adobe, though no specific launch date was provided in the announcement. The unifi … Read the full story at The Verge.
Anthropic’s Claude Mythos AI is said to be frighteningly capable, but we shouldn’t get carried away by the hype Hello, and welcome to TechScape. I’m your host, Blake Montgomery, the Guardian’s US tech editor, writing to you from my happy village in Pokopia. Tech companies are cutting jobs and betting on AI. The payoff is far from guaranteed ‘There’s a lot of desperation’: skilled older workers turn to AI training to stay afloat ‘It has your name on it, but I don’t think it’s you’: how AI is impersonating musicians on Spotify ‘It feels as if I’ve made a new best friend’: my experiment with AI journalling ‘Irresponsible failure’: Google, Meta, Snap and Microsoft slam EU over child sexual abuse law lapse ‘Abhorrent’: the inside story of the Polymarket gamblers betting millions on war OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s home targeted with molotov cocktail Continue reading...