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Meta is laying off several hundred employees across multiple teams, including sales, recruiting, and the Reality Labs division, as reported by The Information and Bloomberg. The cuts will impact employees in the U.S. and other international markets. Some of those employees will be offered other jobs or the opportunity to relocate to remain with the company, Bloomberg reported. “Teams across Meta regularly restructure or implement changes to ensure they’re in the best position to achieve their goals,” a Meta spokesperson said in an email to TechCrunch. “Where possible, we are finding other opportunities for employees whose positions may be impacted.”…

Like other popular services like Netflix and Max, Hulu is a streaming service that has exclusive series, current-season episodes, hit movies, Hulu Originals, kids shows, and more. There’s also a Hulu plan for nearly every kind of watcher, including streaming content with ads for a service on the cheap, or bundles for additional platforms like Disney+ and ESPN+ to get even more content at reduced prices. I have a Hulu plan to watch some of my favorite shows like critically-acclaimed Atlanta or my current fave wholesome comedy, Abbott Elementary. We at WIRED stay glued to our devices and round up…

The number of med-spas, weight-loss clinics, and concierge practices where patients pay a membership fee for direct, often same-day access to physicians, has exploded in recent years. But while patients pay for these services out-of-pocket, providers still often rely on software built for traditional, insurance-based care. VITL, an 18-month-old startup, claims to be solving one of the sector’s biggest tech bottlenecks by building an e-prescribing platform — a digital tool for sending and managing prescriptions — tailored for cash-pay medical businesses. On Wednesday, VITL announced a $7.5 million Series A funding round led by SignalFire. Founder and CEO Charlie Jordan…

The keyboard shortcuts, sadly, aren’t exactly the same as the ones used by Twitter a decade and a half ago, but they’re easy enough to learn if you check the menu bar. (Command-R for reply, Command-L to like, and Command-T to repost are just a few.)Aeronaut also supports notifications, which is useful if you’ve been regularly finding replies to your posts days after the fact, like I’ve been. I appreciate that you can configure which kinds of notifications you want—I generally only want to be notified if someone says something to me and not when they quickly press the like…

Okay, so the U.S. and China are locked in an all-out race to build the most powerful AI on the planet. Beijing is throwing billions at homegrown models, tightening its grip on the tech sector, and watching nervously as its best AI talent gravitates to U.S. companies. Yet Manus — one of China’s most buzzed-about AI startups — quietly relocated to Singapore and sold itself to Meta for $2 billion. Did anyone think there would not be a reckoning over this tie-up? As industry watchers know, Manus burst onto the scene in the spring of last year with a demo…

I won’t lie to you: I hated the first digital wall calendar I tried.I tried the Hearth Display last year and was left unimpressed, but to my surprise, digital wall calendars as a whole have only picked up in popularity and options. Digital wall calendars take your online calendar—think your Google Calendar, the Calendar app on your iPhone, or your corporate Microsoft calendar account—and put it on a digital screen that you can mount on the wall or prop up on a stand on a countertop or table.These devices usually also double as digital yet physical chore charts, meal planners,…

This is one of those Silicon Valley real-life episodes that seems pulled from the HBO satire show. This week, some really atrocious malware was discovered in an open source project developed by Y Combinator graduate LiteLLM. LiteLLM gives developers easy access to hundreds of AI models and provides features like spend management. It’s a breakout hit, downloaded as often as 3.4 million times per day, according to Snyk, one of the many security researchers monitoring the incident. The project had 40K stars on GitHub and thousands of forks (those who used it as a base to alter and make it…

OpenAI said Tuesday it would discontinue Sora, its AI video app, roughly six months after launch. The company also said it would shutter the Sora API that allowed developers and Hollywood studios to access the text-to-video model.The move shows how the ChatGPT-maker is trying to focus its efforts ahead of a planned IPO. OpenAI’s chief financial officer, Sarah Friar, said in an interview with CNBC Tuesday that OpenAI needs to be “ready to be a public company.”Since ChatGPT’s launch, CEO Sam Altman has run the company like Y Combinator, the Silicon Valley incubator he used to lead, placing bets on…

As demand grows for training and refining AI models, Deccan AI — a startup supplying post-training data and evaluation work — has raised $25 million in its first major funding round, with much of that work carried out by an India-based workforce of experts. The all-equity Series A round was led by A91 Partners, with participation from Susquehanna International Group and Prosus Ventures. While frontier AI labs including OpenAI and Anthropic build core models in-house, much of the post-training work — from data generation to evaluation and reinforcement learning — is increasingly being outsourced as companies push to make systems…

After testing smart bird feeders year-round for WIRED for almost two years, I’ve discovered many things I don’t like: models that consist of a basic security camera—and a security camera app—in a generic smart feeder shell. The ability to only collect still photos without paying for a yearly subscription. No indication of a required subscription in the online description or on the box. AI identification that seems calibrated to other countries. Solar charging panels that don’t work. There are a lot of smart bird feeders out there, and many are great, but if you aren’t familiar with them, it’s not…

Last August, a fire ripped through 10 acres of grass on either side of California’s I-280 near Redwood City. Traffic backed up as firefighters extinguished the blaze, and California Highway Patrol (CHP) officers directed drivers to turn around and travel the wrong way to exit the freeway.  Some of those drivers encountered a new obstacle: a Waymo robotaxi.   Footage of the incident shows the Waymo AV tried to pass stopped traffic by traveling on the shoulder, only to wind up reversing away from the oncoming wrong-way cars, before stopping altogether.  The robotaxi wouldn’t budge, despite efforts from the company’s remote…

If you’re looking for a Dyson on sale, the better deal right now between my two favorite Dyson stick vacuums is the Gen5 Detect. It’s been marked down many times this year, and this is also not the lowest price I’ve seen, so you don’t necessarily need to hustle. There are new Dyson stick vacuums due out this year, though, so you might want to see if you like those models instead (or if those releases lower the price of this model further).BissellPowerClean Cordless Stick VacuumIf you’re looking for something truly cheap but still good, the Bissell PowerClean is the…

This story was originally published in On Background with Mark Stenberg, a free, weekly newsletter that explores the key themes shaping the media industry. You can sign up for it here.Amazon and Dax, the digital audio arm of the U.K. media firm Global Media Group, plan to unveil an audio advertising partnership in the U.K. next month, according to a deck obtained by ADWEEK.The tie-up, shared earlier this month at a closed-door presentation for media buyers, would let brands layer Amazon’s first-party retail signals onto Global’s audio inventory, including its network of radio stations and streaming properties.An Amazon Ads spokesperson declined…

The founder of spyware maker Intellexa has said he is planning to appeal a conviction handed down by a Greek court on charges that he and three other executives illegally obtained personal data as part of a mass-wiretapping campaign in the country. The spying scandal, sometimes referred to as “Greek Watergate,” involved the hacking of dozens of phones belonging to senior Greek government ministers, opposition leaders, military officials, and journalists using the Intellexa’s Predator spyware. The tool is capable of breaking into iPhones and Android devices to steal call logs, text messages, emails, and location data, typically by tricking a…

Are you sick of that thin, tinny sound blasting from the back of your television while you’re watching your favorite action flick? Any dedicated sound system would be an upgrade, but the JBL Bar 500MK2, one of our favorite soundbar and subwoofer kits, will turn your next movie night into a proper theater night with Dolby Atmos, profound bass, and a compact design that fits anywhere. It’s currently marked down to just $550 on Amazon, a $100 discount from the usual price.For such a small soundbar, the Bar 500MK2 puts out quite a lot of sound. Between the soundbar and…

Before marketers learn AI, or the language of the boardroom, or purpose, or storytelling, or any of the other things we keep telling them they need to master, many of them need to learn something more basic. They need to learn marketing.There, I said it. I know it sounds provocative. It isn’t meant to be. It’s just what the data says.I think many American marketers would be even better if they had a basic, up-to-date, operating model of marketing. And I can prove it. Earlier this year I worked with the global market research firm Ipsos to measure marketing knowledge in…