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Zhao Changpeng, founder and chief executive officer of Binance, attends a conference at Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris, France June 16, 2022.

Benoit Tessier | Reuters

Binance is planning a hiring spree in 2023, CEO Changpeng Zhao said Wednesday, taking a somewhat contrarian view as crypto firms lay off huge swathes of staff amid continued pressure on coin prices.

Zhao said Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, said the company increased headcount in 2022 from 3,000 people to “almost” 8,000.

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In 2023, Binance plans to increase the number of staff by between 15% and 30%, Zhao said at the Crypto Finance Conference in St. Moritz, Switzerland.

Rival exchanges have been forced to cut large parts of their workforce after nearly $1.4 trillion was wiped off the crypto market in 2022 and major digital currencies including bitcoin and ether saw their prices plunge.

In November, Kraken announced it was laying off 30% of staff, and this year Huobi and Coinbase said it would cut 20% of its workforce. That was the second round of job cuts for Coinbase in the last year.

Zhao said Binance needs to get the company “well-organized” ahead of the next crypto bull run and admitted the exchange is “not super efficient.”

“We will continue to build and hopefully we will ramp up again before the next bull market,” Zhao said.

The industry was plagued last year by collapses of major projects, liquidity issues, bankruptcies and the high-profile failure of crypto exchange FTX. Sam Bankman-Fried who founded FTX has been charged with eight criminal counts by U.S. prosecutors, including fraud.

Binance had a big role to play in FTX’s collapse. In November, Binance offered to buy FTX’s non-U.S. businesses which were facing liquidity issues but then later backed out of the deal. Zhao said publicly that his company was selling its holdings in FTX’s native token FTT, which exacerbated the collapse of that digital coin, adding to FTX’s downward spiral.

Zhao has said that he “did not master plan” the collapse of FTX.

In response to a CNBC question on the sidelines of the CFC St Moritz conference, the Binance CEO said the “actual damage is not that high” on the crypto industry from the FTX collapse. He said FTX “is not a big player, they just make a lot of noise.”

“There’s definitely damage [but] the industry will be fine,” Zhao said.

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Instagram’s map feature spurs user backlash over geolocation privacy concerns

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Instagram's map feature spurs user backlash over geolocation privacy concerns

Nurphoto | Nurphoto | Getty Images

The launch of an Instagram feature that details users’ geolocation data illicited backlash from social media users on Thursday.

Meta debuted the Instagram Map tool on Wednesday, pitching the feature as way to “stay up-to-date with friends” by letting users share their “last active location.”  The tool is akin to Snapchat’s Snap Map feature that lets people see where their friends are posting from.

Although Meta said in a blog post that the feature’s “location sharing is off unless you opt in,” several social media users said in posts that they were worried that was not the case.

“I can’t believe Instagram launched a map feature that exposes everyone’s location without any warning,” said one user who posted on Threads, Meta’s micro-blogging service.

Another Threads user said they were concerned that bad actors could exploit the map feature by spying on others.

“Instagram randomly updating their app to include a maps feature without actually alerting people is so incredibly dangerous to anyone who has a restraining order and actively making sure their abuser can’t stalk their location online…Why,” said the user in a Threads post.

Instagram chief Adam Mosseri responded to the complaints on Threads, disputing the notion that the map feature is exposing people’s locations against their will.

“We’re double checking everything, but so far it looks mostly like people are confused and assume that, because they can see themselves on the map when they open, other people can see them too,” Mosseri wrote on Thursday. “We’re still checking everything though to make sure nobody shares location without explicitly deciding to do so, which, by the way, requires a double consent by design (we ask you to confirm after you say you want to share).”

Still, some Instagram users claimed that that their locations were being shared despite not opting in to using the map feature.

“Mine was set to on and shared with everyone in the app,” said a user in a Threads post. “My location settings on my phone for IG were set to never. So it was not automatically turned off for me.

A Meta spokesperson reiterated Mosseri’s comments in a statement and said “Instagram Map is off by default, and your live location is never shared unless you choose to turn it on.”

“If you do, only people you follow back — or a private, custom list you select — can see your location,” the spokesperson said.

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Tesla exec leading development of chip tech and Dojo supercomputer is leaving company

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Tesla exec leading development of chip tech and Dojo supercomputer is leaving company

Christina Locopo | CNBC

Tesla’s vice president of hardware design engineering, Pete Bannon, is leaving the company after first joining in 2016 from Apple, CNBC has confirmed.

Bannon was leading the development of Tesla’s Dojo supercomputer and reported directly to Musk. Bloomberg first reported on Bannon’s departure, and added that Musk ordered his team to shut down, with engineers in the group getting reassigned to other initiatives.

Tesla didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Since early last year, Musk has been trying to convince shareholders that Tesla, his only publicly traded business, is poised to become an an artificial intelligence and robotics powerhouse, and not just an electric vehicle company.

A centerpiece of the transformation was Dojo, a custom-built supercomputer designed to process and train AI models drawing on the large amounts of video and other data captured by Tesla vehicles.

Tesla’s focus on Dojo and another computing cluster called Cortex were meant to improve the company’s advanced driver assistance systems, and to enable Musk to finally deliver on his promise to turn existing Teslas into robotaxis.

On Tesla’s earnings call in July, Musk said the company expected its newest version of Dojo to be “operating at scale sometime next year, with scale being somewhere around 100,000 H-100 equivalents,” referring to a supercomputer built using Nvidia’s state of the art chips.

Tesla recently struck a $16.5 billion deal with Samsung to produce more of its own A16 chips with the company domestically.

Tesla is running a test Robotaxi service in Austin, Texas, and a related car service in San Francisco. In Austin, the company’s vehicles require a human safety supervisor in the front passenger seat ready to intervene if necessary. In San Francisco, the car service is operated by human drivers, though invited users can hail a ride through a “Tesla Robotaxi” app.

On the earnings call, Musk faced questions about how he sees Tesla and his AI company, xAI, keeping their distance given that they could be competing against one another for AI talent.

Musk said the companies “are doing different things.” He said, “xAI is doing like terabyte scale models and multi-terabyte scale models.” Tesla uses “100x smaller models,” he said, with the automaker focused on “real-world AI,” for its cars and robots and xAI focused on developing software that strives for “artificial super intelligence.”

Musk also said that some engineers wouldn’t join Tesla because “they wanted to work on AGI,” one reason he said he formed a new company.

Tesla has experienced an exodus of top talent this year due to a combination of job terminations and resignations. Milan Kovac, who was Tesla’s head of Optimus robotics engineering, departed, as did David Lau, a vice president of software engineering, and Omead Afshar, Musk’s former chief of staff.

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Omada Health beats on revenue in first earnings report since IPO

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Omada Health beats on revenue in first earnings report since IPO

The Omada Health logo is displayed on a smartphone screen.

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Omada Health reported quarterly results for the first time since its IPO in June.

Here’s how the company did based on average analysts’ estimates compiled by LSEG:

  • Loss: Loss per share of 24 cents.
  • Revenue: $61 million vs. $55.2 million expected

The virtual care company’s revenue increased 49% in its second quarter from $41.21 million a year earlier. The company reported a net loss of $5.31 million, or a 24-cent loss per share, compared to a net loss of $10.69 million, or $1.40 loss per share, during the same period last year.

“We believe our Q2 performance reflects Omada’s ability to capture tailwinds in cardiometabolic care, to effectively commercialize our GLP-1 Care Track, and to leverage advances in artificial intelligence for the benefit of our members,” Omada CEO Sean Duffy said in a release.

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For its full year, Omada expects to report revenue between $235 million to $241 million, while analysts were expecting $222 million. The company said it expects to report an adjusted EBITDA loss of $9 million to $5 million for the full year, while analysts polled by FactSet expected a wider loss of $20.2 million.

Omada, founded in 2012, offers virtual care programs to support patients with chronic conditions like prediabetes, diabetes and hypertension. The company describes its approach as a “between-visit care model” that is complementary to the broader health-care ecosystem.

The stock opened at $23 in its debut on the Nasdaq in June. At market close on Thursday, shares closed at $19.46.

Omada said it finished its second quarter with 752,000 total members, up 52% year over year.

The company will discuss the results during its quarterly call with investors at 4:30 p.m. ET.

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