Welcome to the Techmeme Ride Home for Thursday, January 18, 2024. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, Google's signals more layoffs are in the mail, but what's interesting is what that says about Google specifically. Reddit is probably going to IPO in a few months. How did tying itself to Chatchy PT work out for Bing? Why is Netflix not on the Vision Pro and the fun parlor game that suggests AI spam is a human centipede situation? Here's what you missed today in the world of tech.
Looks like the layoffs are going to continue a pace at Google. This is not so much a case of business stress, so much as business reorg. They've got to reposition themselves to deal with the existential AI threat, so maybe that is a business stress, I suppose. Anyway, on top of the thousand job cuts they've made this month, a new memo suggests there are more to come. We have ambitious goals and we'll be investing in our big priorities
this year. Pitchi wrote in an internal memo that was shared with Alex Heath. The reality is that to create the capacity for this investment, we have to make tough choices. Note where the cuts have come so far. The Pixel and Hardware Division, AdSales, Search, Shopping. This is, as I said, giving a sense of a fundamental structural re-enlightment.
So this is, I would say, not like those other tech layoffs we've seen this month. This is not we're running out of VC money, or we over-hired, or responding to bad macroeconomic conditions. This is re-aligning the company toward a new strategic aim. These role eliminations are not at the scale of last year's reductions and will not touch every team, Pitchi wrote. Google, by the way, cut a full 12,000 jobs a year ago. But I know it's very difficult
to see colleagues and teams impacted. He wrote about, quote, removing layers to simplify execution and drive velocity in some areas. And quote, part of that is coming now. Google plans to cut 100 employees from YouTube's operations and creator management teams, according to another memo that is circulating.
A source says YouTube employees 7,173 people. So this is not huge. But according to Tubefilter, who broke the news, quote, this reorg is following a strategy laid out by Mary Ellen Coe, who took over as YouTube's chief business officer, Win Robert Keinal, left in early 2023. Coe previously led Google customer solutions where she oversaw global ads for mid market and small businesses. And before that, spent 12 years with management
consulting firm McKinsey and Coe. With the restructure, YouTube will bring its content creator management teams, which up till now were spread around the globe and loosely connected. So a partner manager in India may have been reporting to a leader in the Asia Pacific region together under dedicated central leadership in each individual country. People are familiar with the matter, tell Tubefilter that this change will not result in any creators
losing partner manager support. And that in general, YouTube will be able to support more creators since the focus is now on scaling these core country specific teams. And quote, there are changes on the content side, also consolidating music teams into one unit and moving other teams around to focus on things like YouTube TV. They've made a big bet on NFL Sunday ticket, of course. Reuters is reporting that Reddit has drawn up detailed IPO plans to launch in March,
2024 with a public filing in late February. This is notable, not just because it's Reddit. They confidentially filed for an IPO back in December of 2021. So this has been in the works for three years, not just because the IPO window for tech companies has been so iffy, but also because this would be the first major social media IPO since Pinterest. Quoting Reuters, the San Francisco based company, which was valued at about $10 billion
in a funding round in 2021 is seeking to sell about 10% of its shares in the IPO. The sources added it will decide on what IPO valuation it will pursue closer to the time of the listing, according to the sources. The sources caution that Reddit's IPO plans could be pushed back as has happened in the past and asked not to be identified discussing confidential
deliberations and quote, founded in 2005 by Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian. Reddit basically became the default message board on the web by stealing the vote up or down on post-crown from dig. Although the company mainly generates revenue through advertisements, it does have premium services at $5.99 monthly, but it has not yet achieved profitability and never has as far as I know. Historically, this has been blamed on lower user interaction
with ads compared to on other social networks. But the feeling is they're close enough to profitability to try the public markets in 2023. Reddit anticipated over $800 million in ad revenue, a 20% increase from the previous year, according to the information. Also, this could be an attempt to take advantage of the AI moment. How many times have we discussed
a large corpus of content being the new oil when it comes to training language models? Last year, Reddit announced it would start charging companies for using its APIs essential for training AI. This decision faced backlash from users who depend on third party applications for Reddit access, but it indicated this is the direction they plan to be going in to finally break even. Speaking of taking advantage of the AI moment, remember about a year ago
when Microsoft first started to roll out their partnerships with OpenAI. They did so on Bing at first. The thinking was they could take advantage of the excitement around AI bots to maybe steal a couple of points of market share from Google. So how did that turn out? Well, according to stat counter, Bing ended 2023 with 3.4% of global search market share up less than 1% point from before they started integrating chat GPT. Google had 91.6% Yandex 1.6% and Yahoo
1% of the overall search market. But despite that raw data point, maybe it wasn't a total bust. Quoting Bloomberg. A month before Microsoft infused the search engine with generative AI, people were spending 33% less time using it than they had 12 months earlier according to sensor tower. The chat GPT reboot at least helped reverse those declines. In the second quarter of 2023, US monthly active users more than doubled year over year to 3.1 million.
According to a Bloomberg intelligence analysis of sensor tower mobile app data, overall users were spending 84% more time on the search engine the data show. By year and Bing's monthly active users had increased steadily to 4.4 million according to sensor tower. To build on the momentum, Microsoft has been adding more AI tools to Bing in October. The company integrated the latest version of OpenAI's image generating model doll E3. Visitors can use it to
create realistic looking images with simple text prompts. The offering does nothing to enhance Bing's search abilities, but its addition generated a spike in usage according to Jordi Rebus. Microsoft's corporate vice president of search and AI. We noticed an increase in usage by 10 times. And that took us by surprise because if you think about it, doll E2 was already quite good, he said in an interview. It really made a difference in the engagement and the users that came
to our product. So basically, they didn't chip away in search market share, but maybe it wasn't about that. This relates to that previous segment about Google's re-enlightenment efforts. People are thinking, search as we know it will be disrupted by pure answer bots. Why search when you can ask? Why click on links and doing the reading or viewing yourself to get the answer when you can
just get the answer? So maybe the market share right now isn't as important as creating a market share beachhead in the engagement in the search of tomorrow. People got another hands-on with the Vision Pro this week, as you probably saw if you follow any prominent gadget influencer, you probably saw them posting pictures about it. But it was only a 30-minute demo, so folks couldn't get a good sense of anything really. So not worth me talking about. But some other details have dribbled out.
FCC filings seem to indicate that the Apple Vision Pro lacks the chips needed to support ultra-wide band, Wi-Fi 6E and Wi-Fi 7. I guess they had to cut some corners to get the price down to $3,500. Apple also detailed the streaming and sports apps available on Vision Pro at launch, including Disney Plus, ESPN, MLB, PGA, Max and TikTok. Some will have 3D movies, Avatar. Obviously, there's an Alicia Keys concert that will basically just be you and her. There's some 3D dinosaur
thing from John Favreau, all VR platforms love to value with dinosaur stuff. But when I read that list of partners, notice who was absent, Netflix is apparently not planning to launch a native Apple Vision Pro app or allow its iPad app on the platform. And says users can watch Netflix on the web browser, quoting Bloomberg. The Vision Pro will run two main types of apps, new software
written specifically for the device's interface or existing iPad applications. Apple has sought to make it easy to transfer developers current iPad apps over to the new platform, aiming to quickly amass a wide range of Vision Pro software. The fact that Netflix isn't even willing to support the iPad approach suggests that it's taking a wait and see stance with the headset. It's also a bit of a reversal for the company which said in July that it would support its iPad app on the Vision
Pro. Even then though, Netflix didn't plan to release software specifically for the headset's operating system, Vision OS. The approach means it will be harder for users to access Netflix on the Vision Pro and they won't be able to download Netflix content to watch offline, potentially making it more of a pain to use on an airplane. The lack of an app also means Netflix Watchers won't have access to custom environments for streaming. That means Netflix can't create
specialized immersive backdrops for its users to watch videos in. And quote, so I tried to bring this up when we spoke to John Gruber last weekend. While Disney is participating, didn't you sort of expect them to do Apple a solid and maybe produce some sort of special high profile new content offering for the Vision Pro? And also, I totally expected them to announce some whiz bang new
thing that developers had created. That would be something new. But it looks like Apple is basically just going to launch the Vision Pro with just the bare-bones stuff they had when they announced the thing. And that is interesting. There are lots of ways to potentially boost your investments these days and even more options on where to stash them. Make the smart move by transferring your brokerage account over to Robinhood. Whether you're transferring $1,000 or $2 million, don't miss out
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the largest of any sector. But things are not so rosy at the previous hot VC investment sector according to crunch base in 2023. US Metaverse VC funding was around $910 million. The lowest in at least six years and below a $3.11 billion peak in 2021. No consumer metaverse US startup raised more than $100 million. Startup investors have basically fled the metaverse.
Quote, the largest late stage venture round in the space last year was an $82 million series D for Augmetics, a developer of augmented reality image guidance technology for surgery in treating indeed, but hardly a recreational application. Meanwhile, there were no US rounds of $100 million or more in 2023 for consumer facing companies developing virtual worlds. Across brands, US sales of VR headsets and augmented reality glasses have reportedly plummeted.
In the startup sphere, the most heavily funded company is Magic Leap, which has raised $3.5 billion to date, but hasn't shown traction. I guess we could hold out hope that the Vision Pro will reignite interest in the space, but given the muted even promotion of it, Apple is doing as we've discussed. Finally, today, the AI apocalypse is already here, already on us, but not in the SkyNet has become self-aware since I'm talking about it in the
it's flooding the web with garbage and spam sense. Users have been finding and sharing examples of Amazon selling products with titles like, I'm sorry, I cannot fulfill this request as it goes against open AI use policy as sellers are increasingly using chat GPT to write listings. Quoting the verge, fun new game just dropped, go to the internet platform of your choice, type goes against open AI use policy and see what happens on Amazon. I search for open AI policy
and boy did I get results. I'm not entirely sure what this green thing is, but I've been assured that it will quote boost your productivity with our high performance product name, designed to deliver fast results and handle demanding tasks efficiently, ensuring you stay of the competition. Phenomenal, unfortunately, there are no customer reviews yet anyway.
The helllusty I apologize, but I cannot fulfill this request. It violates open AI use policy gray7 8.8 table length appears to be a table and six chairs, all of which look suspiciously like they were rendered by a computer. But the good news is that quote, our product can be used for a variety of tasks such as task one, task two and task three, making it a versatile addition to your household. Wow, I've been looking for someone to handle task one, task two and task three
for me. Sadly, no customer reviews end quote. Look, Amazon is not alone here. Head over to Twitter slash X and search for goes against open AI's content policy. You'll find a bunch of clearly spam replies that people attempted to use, Chatchee PT to generate those replies with. And here's another one, 404 media says Google news is surfacing articles from outlets that turn out AI content. Thanks to Gen AI quote, one example was a news site called worldtimetodays.com,
which is littered with full page and other ads on Wednesday. It published an article about Star Wars fandom. The article was very similar to one published a day earlier on the website, distractify with even the same author photo. One major difference though was that worldtimetodays.com wrote, let's be honest, war of stars fans, rather than Star Wars fans. Another article is a clear ripoff of a piece from heavy.com with worldtimetodays.com not even bothering to replace the heavy.com
watermarked artwork. Gary Graves, the listed author on worldtimestodays.com, has published more than 40 articles in a 24 hour period end quote. Hey, let's not come down on people that turn out a bunch of content every single day. I swear I'm not AI yet. Google says it doesn't focus on whether articles are by humans or AI in Google news. Here's a thought maybe they should. Maybe this is one of the challenges Google is facing that we've been talking about. They're not only not ready
for AI to eat their lunch in search, they're not ready to moderate AI in news or search. I wonder if open AI would break down what percentage of their growing revenue could be traceable back to people automating spam. I wonder if they even have the ability to break that out. I mean, we know sometimes these LLM companies don't even understand how their models work. And they're so new as companies, I wonder if they have processes in place that would even allow them to categorize
various prompts and generate results. But again, the irony here is if everybody uses AI to spam public data and content pools, those data and content pools get poisoned and become unusable for further AI training. Thus, all the AI companies trained to license content from reputable sources with big back catalogs like the New Yorker, thus trainable data is the new oil. It's an Oroboros in the sense that AI is not just a snake eating its own tail. It's almost a human
centipede situation. In case you were unaware, the title of today's episode is sort of a rift on that infamous quote from I think the Vietnam War, the bombings will continue until morale improves, I think it was. Talk to you tomorrow.