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Ericsson announced it is planning to cut jobs as part of its cost-cutting measures.

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Ericsson announced on Monday that it will lay off about 1,200 employees in Sweden as the telecommunications company faces slowed demand for its 5G equipment.

The company said the downsizing is part of a broader cost-cutting plan this year that will include more efforts to boost efficiency. Last year, the company laid off 8,500 staffers, or about 8% of its workforce, to cut costs.

“The cost saving initiatives cover various areas such as reduction of consultants, streamlining of processes, and reduced facilities,” Ericsson said in a statement on Monday, adding that it had begun negotiations with unions.

Ericsson had 99,950 employees, including 10,744 workers in North America, at the end of 2023, according to a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing.

Monday’s announcement comes as companies across the tech industry continue to slash jobs in large numbers. More than 50,000 workers have been laid off from over 200 tech companies since the start of the year, according to Layoffs.fyi. In 2023, more than 260,000 workers were let go from almost 1,200 tech companies.

Industry giants Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft have all contributed to the flurry of job cuts this year, along with companies including Cisco, DocuSign, Snap and Zoom, in hopes of raising profits through focused spending and efficiency fueled by artificial intelligence.

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Google rolls out its most powerful AI models as competition from OpenAI heats up

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Google rolls out its most powerful AI models as competition from OpenAI heats up

The logo of the Google I/O developer conference can be seen at the venue in Mountain View, Calif. on May 14th, 2024. 

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Google is using its annual developer conference to showcase what the company is calling its lightest and most efficient artificial intelligence models.

At Google I/O on Tuesday, the company announced Gemini 1.5 Flash, the newest addition to the Gemini model series.

“We heard from developers that they wanted something faster and even more cost effective,” said Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, in a press briefing.

The unveiling comes as tech companies increasingly refocus their product development and rollouts around generative AI, which is of particular importance to Google because the new tools give consumers more advanced and creative ways to access online information compared to traditional web search.

OpenAI on Monday launched a new AI model and desktop version of ChatGPT, along with a new user interface. The new model, GPT-4o, is twice as fast as GPT-4 Turbo and half the cost, the company said.

Google also announced an improved Gemini 1.5 Pro model, which has the ability to make sense of multiple large documents — 1,500-pages total — or summarize 100 emails, according to a vice president working on Gemini.

Gemini 1.5 Pro will soon be able to handle an hour of video content, or codebases with more than 30,000 lines, Hsiao said.

“You can quickly get answers and insights about dense documents, like figuring out the details of the pet policy in your rental agreement or comparing key arguments of multiple long research papers,” Hsiao said.

OpenAI’s latest upgrade, announced this week, brings with it improved quality and speed of ChatGPT for 50 different languages. It will also be available via OpenAI’s application programming interface (API), allowing developers to begin building applications using the new model immediately, executives said.

With 35 languages, Google says Gemini 1.5 Pro has a 2 million token window, which measures context and indicates how much information the model is able to process at once. The new model has improved local reasoning, planning and image understanding, company executives said.

“It offers the longest context window of any foundational model yet,” Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said in the press briefing. At the event, he gave an example of a parent asking Gemini to summarize all recent emails from their child’s school. 

Gemini 1.5 Pro will initially be available for testing in Workspace Labs. Gemini 1.5 Flash will be available for testing and in Vertex AI, which is Google’s machine learning platform that lets developers train and deploy AI applications.

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What to expect for Tesla’s Supercharger network now that the team is dismantled

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What to expect for Tesla's Supercharger network now that the team is dismantled

The future of Tesla Supercharging is uncertain following CEO Elon Musk’s disbanding of the Supercharging team as part of a broader restructuring. The roughly 500 layoffs included senior director of EV charging Rebecca Tinucci and Daniel Ho, director of vehicle programs.

Musk’s abrupt decision has raised concerns about the future of Tesla’s EV charging system, which has grown to be one of the largest EV charging networks in the world, with more than 55,000 charging ports, according to the company.

I would describe the Supercharger network as one of the crown jewels of Tesla,” said Andres Pinter, co-CEO of Bullet EV Charging Solutions. “Instead of doing victory laps and building the Supercharger network and reaping the benefits of this asset, suddenly there’s this pause.”

Bloomberg reported on Monday that Tesla has started hiring back some of the laid-off employees in the group, citing people familiar with the matter.

It’s been a difficult stretch for Tesla, as the EV maker grapples with market pressures and heightened competition in the sector.

Tesla formed a partnership with Ford Motor, General Motors and others last year, opening up some of the Supercharging network to non-Tesla drivers.

Musk said in a post that Tesla still plans to grow the Supercharger network, just at a slower pace. He also said it will invest $500 million in a network expansion and create thousands of new chargers this year. Still, experts question how the recent cuts will affect the overall EV charging landscape.

“We have really relied on Tesla’s leadership here in North America,” said Matt Teske, the founder and CEO of Chargeway. “I think to all of a sudden have the sensation of that leadership seemingly paused or stopped or halted, it brings into question, where do we go from here and who will step up?”

As Tesla navigates its next steps, stakeholders and EV buyers are waiting to see how the decision will affect not just the charging landscape but also the broader adoption of electric cars.

Watch the video for the full story and to learn how the cuts might shape the future of electric car charging and possibly impact Tesla’s position in the market. Tesla didn’t respond to a request for a comment.

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Amazon Web Services CEO Adam Selipsky to step down

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Amazon Web Services CEO Adam Selipsky to step down

Amazon Web Services CEO Adam Selipsky to step down on June 3

Adam Selipsky, CEO of Amazon‘s cloud computing business, will step down from his role next month, the company announced Tuesday.

Matt Garman, senior vice president of sales and marketing at Amazon Web Services, will succeed Selipsky after he exits the company on June 3, Amazon said.

In a memo to employees, Selipsky said he was leaving AWS after about 14 years to spend more time with his family, and said “the future is bright” for the juggernaut cloud business.

“Given the state of the business and the leadership team, now is an appropriate moment for me to make this transition, and to take the opportunity to spend more time with family for a while, recharge a bit, and create some mental free space to reflect and consider the possibilities,” Selipsky wrote.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy wrote in a separate memo that Selipsky has “deftly led the business” and said Garman, an 18-year veteran of the company, has “an unusually strong set of skills and experiences for his new role.”

In 2021, after Amazon announced that Jassy would take the helm from Jeff Bezos as Amazon’s CEO, many people speculated that it was Garman who would replace Jassy as the head of AWS. Instead, Amazon tapped Selipsky, then the CEO of Salesforce-owned data visualization software maker Tableau, for the role.

During Selipsky’s three years as CEO, AWS has confronted numerous challenges with its business, including a marked deceleration in revenue growth as rising interest rates caused companies to trim their cloud spend. Since last year, AWS has undergone at least two rounds of layoffs as part of broader cuts at the company that resulted in more than 27,000 employees being let go.

At the same time, it has had to respond to a surge in demand for generative artificial intelligence services, spurred largely by Microsoft-backed OpenAI. Under Selipsky, Amazon invested $4 billion Anthropic, a startup established by former OpenAI employees. As part of the arrangement, Anthropic agreed to designate AWS as its “primary” cloud provider and use AWS’ custom-built AI chips.

Its dominant cloud position has also been threatened by Microsoft’s fast-growing Azure cloud business. When Selipsky took over for Jassy in 2021, analysts estimated that Azure was about 61% of AWS. Now, it’s approaching 77%. Microsoft invested billions in OpenAI and its Azure cloud supplies the startup with computing resources.

AWS is still the cloud leader, and it remains one of Amazon’s most profitable business units. It generated $9.42 billion in operating income, or about 62% of Amazon’s total, in the most recent quarter.

Selipsky’s compensation for 2022 was $41.1 million, with $40.7 million generated in stock awards, according to a securities filing. He didn’t receive stock grants this year.

For Jassy, it marks the latest high-profile exec exit.. Amazon’s devices chief Dave Limp left the company last August to join Bezos’ rocket venture Blue Origin. Chris Vonderhaar, an AWS VP, announced his departure last May, while executives overseeing Amazon’s Alexa and hardware research and development groups retired in October 2022.

— CNBC’s Jordan Novet contributed to this report.

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