Google lays off hundreds as ad division switches to AI-powered sales

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1. Google lays off hundreds as ad division switches to AI-powered sales

Google is laying off hundreds of employees from its ad sales division, primarily in the Large Customer Sales team, which serves the company's biggest advertising clients. The layoffs are expected to come this month, as AI is replacing many of the employees. Google Ads, its most important product, has been packed with generative AI features, such as a natural-language chatbot and a system that can make ad assets based on budget and goals. 

This is the latest in an increasing number of layoffs since last year, with layoffs in hardware, Google Assistant, AR, recruiting, Waze, Waymo, and a robot division. Philipp Schindler, Google's chief business officer, sent a memo to staff announcing the layoffs, suggesting that Googlers are now working to put some of their co-workers out of a job.

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2. Optimus Robot video, gets busted for fakery

Elon Musk posted a video of the company's latest-generation Optimus robot folding a shirt on a table. However, viewers pointed out that the robot needed a substantial amount of help, and Musk admitted this after criticism. The clip showed Optimus pulling a T-shirt from a basket and folding it, but viewers noticed a gloved hand in the bottom right, suggesting it was being directly controlled by an engineer.

Musk admitted that Optimus cannot yet do this autonomously, but will be able to do it fully autonomously and in an arbitrary environment. The contrast between Optimus and competing humanoid robots like Boston Dynamics' Atlas is striking.

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3. OpenAI announces team to build ‘crowdsourced’ governance ideas into its models

OpenAI is forming a new Collective Alignment team of researchers and engineers to create a system for collecting and encoding public input on its models' behaviors into OpenAI products and services. The team is an outgrowth of OpenAI's public program, launched last May, which awarded grants to fund experiments in setting up a "democratic process" for deciding what rules AI systems should follow.

The team's work includes video chat interfaces, platforms for crowdsourced audits of AI models, and approaches to map beliefs to dimensions that can be used to fine-tune model behavior. OpenAI denies attempting to secure regulatory capture of the AI industry by lobbying against open AI R&D. The company is under increasing scrutiny from policymakers, facing a probe in the U.K. over its relationship with Microsoft and is working with organizations to limit the ways in which its technology could be used to sway or influence elections through malicious means.

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4. Stability AI releases Stable Code 3B

Stability AI has released its first commercially licensed AI model, Stable Code 3B, focusing on code completion capabilities for software development. With 3 billion parameters, it can run locally on laptops without dedicated GPUs and provides competitive performance against larger models like Meta's CodeLLaMA 7B. 

Stable Code 3B also offers Fill in the Middle (FIM) and expanded context size using Rotary Position Embeddings (RoPE). The model covers popular languages like Python, Java, JavaScript, Go, Ruby, and C++, and outperforms StarCoder across Python, C++, JavaScript, Java, PHP, and Rust programming languages.

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5. Amazon launches an AI tool to answer shoppers’ questions

Amazon is testing an AI tool that allows shoppers to ask questions about specific products, potentially preventing them from scrolling through reviews or reading through listings. The company is experimenting with AI to summarize reviews and help sellers with tools such as AI-generated images for advertisements. The new feature in Amazon's mobile app prompts users to ask questions about a specific item, and it returns an answer within a few seconds, primarily by summarizing information collected from product reviews and the listing itself.

The tool is designed not to veer off-topic and will return an error message if it can't answer questions such as "Who is Jeff Bezos?" The tool was first spotted by Marketplace Pulse, an e-commerce research firm. Amazon has introduced several AI tools to its site in recent months, including AI-generated summaries of product reviews, AI features for third-party sellers, "Q," an AI chatbot for companies, and Bedrock, a generative AI service for Amazon Web Services customers.

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