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Adam Mosseri, Facebook
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Facebook announced Monday morning it’s pausing its work on Instagram for kids after the company faced a slew of backlash from users and lawmakers.

“While we believe building ‘Instagram Kids’ is the right thing to do, Instagram, and its parent company Facebook, will re-evaluate the project at a later date. In the interim Instagram will continue to focus on teen safety and expanding parental supervision features for teens,” the company said in a statement.

Instagram head Adam Mosseri said the app is meant for children aged 10 to 12.

The pause comes after an explosive Wall Street Journal report showed Facebook repeatedly found its Instagram app is harmful to a number of teenagers. The Journal cited Facebook studies over the past three years that examined how Instagram affects its young user base, with teenage girls being most notably harmed.

One internal Facebook presentation said that among teens who reported suicidal thoughts, 13% of British users and 6% of American users traced the issue to Instagram.

The report led lawmakers to readdress their concerns over the social media app. Just after the news broke, representatives on both sides of the aisle demanded answers from Facebook. Rep. Lori Trahan, D-Mass., also called on Facebook to abandon its Instagram for kids efforts.

Antigone Davis, Facebook’s global head of safety, will testify before the Senate Commerce subcommittee on consumer protection on Thursday.

Facebook has repeatedly defended its efforts to draw more kids to the app. Mosseri argued in a blog post early Monday that children are already online.

“Critics of ‘Instagram Kids’ will see this as an acknowledgment that the project is a bad idea. That’s not the case. The reality is that kids are already online, and we believe that developing age-appropriate experiences designed specifically for them is far better for parents than where we are today,” he said. Instagram will pause its work to address concerns with parents, experts, policymakers and regulators.

Instagram will also work on expanding its parental controls to teen accounts.

“These new features, which parents and teens can opt into, will give parents the tools to meaningfully shape their teen’s experience,” Mosseri said.

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ChatGPT outage: OpenAI’s chatbot is down for some users

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ChatGPT outage: OpenAI's chatbot is down for some users

OpenAI’s EMEA startups head Laura Modiano spoke at the Sifted Summit on Wednesday, 8 October.

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OpenAI’s artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT is down for some users.

The company said it is “currently experiencing issues,” including “increased ChatGPT error rates,” according to an update on OpenAI’s status page.

“We have applied the mitigation and are monitoring the recovery,” the status page said.

OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Roughly 3,000 people reported issues with the chatbot on Tuesday, according to Downdetector, a website that tracks outages.

The outage comes days after OpenAI disclosed a security breach at Mixpanel one of OpenAI’s data analytics providers.

The breach compromised user information, such as names, emails and other details tied to the OpenAI API.

OpenAI did not disclose how many users were affected, saying in a blog post that an attacker “exported a dataset containing limited customer identifiable information and analytics information.”

OpenAI kickstarted the AI boom with the launch of ChatGPT three years ago. As of October, OpenAI said more than 800 million people use the chatbot each week.

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Beta stock jumps 9% on $1 billion motor deal with air taxi maker Eve Air Mobility

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Beta stock jumps 9% on  billion motor deal with air taxi maker Eve Air Mobility

Beta Technologies strikes $1B electric motor manufacturing deal with Eve Air Mobility

Beta Technologies shares surged more than 9% after air taxi maker Eve Air Mobility announced an up to $1 billion deal to buy motors from the Vermont-based company.

Eve, which was started by Brazilian airplane maker Embraer and is now under Eve Holding, said the manufacturing deal could equal as much as $1 billion over 10 years. The Florida-based company said it has a backlog of 2,800 vehicles.

Shares of Eve Holding gained 14%.

Eve CEO Johann Bordais called the deal a “pivotal milestone” in the advancement of the company’s electric vertical takeoff and landing, or eVTOL, technology.

“Their electric motor technology will play a critical role in powering our aircraft during cruise, supporting the maturity of our propulsion architecture as we progress toward entry into service,” he said in a release.

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Amazon launches cloud AI tool to help engineers recover from outages faster

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Amazon launches cloud AI tool to help engineers recover from outages faster

Mateusz Slodkowski | SOPA Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images

Amazon’s cloud unit on Tuesday announced AI-enabled software designed to help clients better understand and recover from outages.

DevOps Agent, as the artificial intelligence tool from Amazon Web Services is called, predicts the cause of technical hiccups using input from third-party tools such as Datadog and Dynatrace. AWS said customers can sign up to use the tool Tuesday in a preview, before Amazon starts charging for the service.

The AI outage tool from AWS is intended to help companies more quickly figure out what caused an outage and implement fixes, Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of agentic AI at AWS, told CNBC. It’s what site reliability engineers, or SREs, do at many companies that provide online services.

SREs try to prevent downtime and jump into action during live incidents. Startups such as Resolve and Traversal have started marketing AI assistants for these experts. Microsoft’s Azure cloud group introduced an SRE Agent in May.

Rather than waiting for on-call staff members to figure out what happened, the AWS DevOps Agent automatically assigns work to agents that look into different hypotheses, Sivasubramanian said.

“By the time the on-call ops team member dials in, they have an incident report with preliminary investigation of what could be the likely outcome, and then suggest what could be the remediation as well,” Sivasubramanian told CNBC ahead of AWS’ Reinvent conference in Las Vegas this week.

Commonwealth Bank of Australia has tested the AWS DevOps Agent. In under 15 minutes, the software found the root cause of an issue that would have taken a veteran engineer hours, AWS said in a statement.

The tool relies on Amazon’s in-house AI models and those from other providers, a spokesperson said.

AWS has been selling software in addition to raw infrastructure for many years. Amazon was early to start renting out server space and storage to developers since the mid-2000s, and technology companies such as Google, Microsoft and Oracle have followed.

Since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, these cloud infrastructure providers have been trying to demonstrate how generative AI models, which are often training in large cloud computing data centers, can speed up work for software developers.

Over the summer, Amazon announced Kiro, a so-called vibe coding tool that produces and modifies source code based on user text prompts. In November, Google debuted similar software for individual software developers called Antigravity, and Microsoft sells subscriptions to GitHub Copilot.

WATCH: Amazon rolls out AI-powered tools to help big AWS customers update old software

Amazon rolls out AI-powered tools to help big AWS customers update old software

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