Amazon will end its charity donation program, AmazonSmile, as it seeks new ways to cut costs. The tech giant has donated $377M to charities since it first launched the program in 2013. More: - AmazonSmile, which donated 0.5% of the price of eligible purchases to charities, will now wind down and officially close by Feb. 20.
- In a blog post, Amazon said the program had "not grown to create the impact that we had originally hoped," adding that its ability to have an influence was "often spread too thin" with over 1 million organizations eligible.
- The average donation to charities came in at under $230, the company noted.
- Instead, Amazon plans to shift its investment toward areas that it says "can make meaningful change," such as affordable housing, natural disaster assistance, and education for underserved communities.
Zoom Out: - This is the latest effort by Amazon to cut its expenses after its lost a record $1T in market value in November.
- That month, it announced widespread job cuts now totaling 18,000. The company has instituted a hiring freeze among its corporate workers, shuttered its Amazon Care telehealth service, and discontinued its interactive video-calling device for children.
TECHCRUNCH 
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More than 500 top advertisers at Twitter have paused spending on the platform since Elon Musk took over in October, according to a manager overseeing engineers in its ad business. Twitter's daily revenue on Tuesday was 40% lower than the same day a year before, another senior manager said. More: - The figures were first reported by The Information, which detailed the extent of the drop in Twitter's ad revenue since Musk acquired the company for $44B on Oct. 27.
- According to its report, Twitter's Q4 revenue was 35% lower YoY, reaching only 72% of its internal goal for that quarter.
- In the first three months of 2023, Twitter is aiming to generate $732M, a decrease of 39% from Q1 2022.
- Musk has been working to diversify the company's revenue sources away from advertising, including by introducing a paid subscription service for verification.
- The company also has new content sponsorship deals with multiple news outlets, including Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal, as well as sports leagues such as the NFL and NBA.
THE INFORMATION
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 Layoffs at tech companies have surpassed 37,000 so far this year, according to data from Layoffs.fyi. Technology companies laid off more than 154,000 employees during 2022. Amazon and Microsoft are the latest companies to institute major staffing cuts as of this week. More: - So far in 2023, 122 tech companies have laid off a total of 37,526 employees.
- This includes Microsoft, which announced yesterday that it's laying off 10,000 employees, or about 4.5% of its total workforce.
- Also yesterday, Amazon began notifying workers about a new round of layoffs, which is part of an ongoing workforce reduction that will affect more than 18,000 people.
- In early January, Salesforce said it is letting go of 8,000 workers, while Coinbase said it was cutting 950 positions.
- Meanwhile, open jobs in the tech industry fell by nearly 30% from January to December 2022. New hires in tech were down 23%.
USA TODAY
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Google officially shut down its Stadia cloud-gaming service on Wednesday after it failed to gain the user traction the company had hoped for. Google first announced the shutdown in September and has since provided refunds to users who made Stadia purchases over the years. More: - The Google servers that host the service were officially shut down as of 11:59 p.m. Pacific Time on Wednesday.
- Google said it had processed most of the refunds, including for games and downloadable content, by the end of that day.
- The company first launched Stadia in November 2019. By 2021, it was reported that the service was underperforming, and Google announced the closure of its Stadia Games & Entertainment Studio.
- Stadia employees at Google have since been moved to other units. The company said it could still apply Stadia’s technology to YouTube, Google Play, and its augmented reality initiatives.
- Meanwhile, Google announced that all Stadia controllers can now connect to devices such as PCs using Bluetooth Low Energy.
BBC
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 Apple is developing a range of new smart home devices to further compete with Google and Amazon, according to Bloomberg. This includes a smart tablet — described as “essentially a low-end iPad” — that would be used to control smart home devices and support videos and FaceTime calls. More: - Using magnetic fasteners, the iPad-like product will be able to be mounted on walls or elsewhere for easier access.
- Apple has also internally discussed developing other larger displays for the smart home, though more details were not released.
- Meanwhile, the company is updating its Apple TV with a faster processor, which could launch in the first half of 2024.
- On Wednesday, Apple debuted a second-gen version of its HomePod, which has improved Siri integration and audio. The speaker has temperature and humidity sensors as well as sound recognition to identify smoke and carbon monoxide alarms.
BLOOMBERG
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A chatbot powered by artificial intelligence has successfully passed a university exam. George Mason University professor Alex Tabarrok says the conversational bot, developed by the startup Anthropic, marginally passed the blind-graded exam covering law and economics. More: - Anthropic, a startup founded by two former OpenAI researchers, has been offering the Claude bot in a closed beta via a Slack integration.
- Tabarrok called Claude "a competitor" and "improvement" to OpenAI's GPT-3, the AI model powering the latter's ChatGPT.
- However, there are some differences. Stanford AI Lab A Ph.D. student Yann Dubois found that Claude is "less concise" but appears to follow the question more closely than ChatGPT. He also said Claude appears worse at math and programming. TechCrunch found that Claude was better at telling jokes.
BUSINESS INSIDER
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- DeepL debuted Write, a free Grammarly-style writing app.
- Microsoft is ending sales of Windows 10 Home and Windows 10 Pro licenses on Jan. 31.
- Ubisoft says it has canceled the development of the online battle arena game, Project Q, in order to focus on "priority projects."
- The U.S. Department of Justice arrested Anatoly Legkodymov, a Russian national and founder of Bitzlato. The DOJ laid charges against Legkodymov for crypto money laundering valued at $700M.
- Eli Roth, best known for directing the horror film "Hostel," announced he would be producing a VR horror film for Meta Quest headsets. The upcoming movie, "Be Mine: A VR Valentine's Slasher," will be his second VR production for the company, after "Haunted House: Trick VR Treat."
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 |  | Beth is a writer and editor at Inside.com covering artificial intelligence and daily technology news. You can reach her at Beth.Duckett@inside.com. |   | | Editor | Eduardo Garcia is a writer and editor based in New York. He is the author of "Things You Can Do," an illustrated book about climate action. Bylines in The New York Times, The Guardian, Slate, Scientific American, and others. In one of his previous lives, Eduardo worked as a Reuters correspondent in Latin America for nearly a decade. | |
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