Yahoo will cut about 20% of its workforce, or 1,600 employees, as it seeks to streamline and strengthen its ad tech business. Overall, about half of the employees in the Yahoo for Business ad unit will be affected as the company restructures it into a new division, called Yahoo Advertising. More: - About 1,000 employees are expected to be let go this week, while another 600 workers will be laid off in six months.
- Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzonet told Axios that the job cuts aren't due to the economy but are intended to strengthen the advertising unit, which is unprofitable.
- He said the cuts will enable Yahoo to invest in other profitable areas and focus on its flagship advertising demand side platform, now called Yahoo Advertising.
- As a whole, Yahoo is profitable with around $8B in revenue annually. The company is owned by private equity firm Apollo Global Management, which acquired 90% of Yahoo from Verizon in 2021 for $5B.
Zoom out: - As of today, an estimated 334 tech companies have laid off a total of 101,617 employees in 2023, according to Layoffs.fyi.
AXIOS 
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Meta on Thursday restored the Facebook and Instagram accounts of former President Donald Trump. The company initially suspended Trump from the platforms a day after the U.S. Capitol riots on Jan. 6, 2021, citing a high risk of further violence. More: - Meta said it has reinstated Trump's accounts "with new guardrails in place to deter repeat offenses."
- It comes after Trump's 2024 presidential campaign asked Meta to reinstate his Facebook account, saying that the ban has "dramatically distorted and inhibited the public discourse."
- As of Friday morning, Trump had yet to post on either platform. He has 34 million followers on Facebook and 23 million on Instagram.
- In November, Twitter restored Trump’s account, though the former president has yet to post there either.
Zoom Out: - Shortly after he was banned from multiple social media platforms in 2021, Trump started the alternative social network Truth Social, which is run by the Trump Media & Technology Group.
- He has a “social media exclusivity" deal with the group that requires him to wait six hours after posting on Truth Social before sharing content on other platforms. That commitment reportedly expires in June.
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NASA has chosen Blue Origin's New Glenn orbital rocket for a mission that aims to study Mars' magnetosphere, the area of space that's controlled by the planet's magnetic field. The space agency is targeting a 2024 launch for the Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers, or ESCAPADE, mission. More: - The mission will collect data to better understand space weather and protect satellites and astronauts as they orbit our planet and explore the solar system.
- It is Blue Origin's first major NASA contract for New Glenn, its heavy-lift space launch vehicle, which has yet to take its first flight.
- In the mission, the rocket will send two orbiters out of the Earth's atmosphere and toward Mars, where they will travel for about 11 months before arriving at the Red Planet.
- The small spacecraft will orbit Mars to collect data that could further show how plasma and energy enter and exit the magnetosphere, and how the latter interacts with solar wind.
- Blue Origin, the private rocket company founded by Jeff Bezos, has so far only done suborbital flights to the edge of space using its New Shepard rocket.
TECHCRUNCH
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PayPal CEO Dan Schulman is stepping down from the online payments company at the end of this year. Schulman, PayPal's CEO for nine years, said he will remain on the fintech's board of directors. More: - Schulman, 65, a former American Express executive, became PayPal CEO when the company announced its split from eBay in 2014.
- His departure comes after activist investor Elliott Management began acquiring a stake in PayPal last summer.
- However, the CEO told CNBC that he was not pressured by Elliott to leave the company.
- “I’m at a point in my life where I want to devote more time to my passions outside the workplace,” Schulman said in a statement.
Zoom Out: - PayPal announced Schulman's departure as part of its quarterly financial results released on Thursday.
- In Q4, its revenue rose 7% YoY to $7.4B, roughly on par with analysts' expectations.
- Last week, PayPal said it will cut 7% of if workforce, or 2,000 employees, as it grapples with a challenging economic environment.
- The company's stock has lost about 75% of its value since a high in July 2021.
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 Shipments of x86 CPUs saw a 34% decrease in Q4 compared to a year earlier, according to Mercury Research. Intel and AMD experienced their largest shipment declines in the 30+ years that the research outlet has tracked the data. More: - For all of 2022, CPU shipments came in at 374 million, a 21% decline compared to 2021.
- Revenue was $65B, down 19% from 2021 but still higher than overall processor market revenue from before 2020.
- While the pandemic caused huge market growth in the sector as people purchased more PCs and laptops, that appears to be returning to prior levels.
- Much of the Q4 decline was attributed to excess inventory shipments in prior quarters.
Zoom Out: - Meanwhile, AMD has gained market share for x86 CPUs. In Q4, it had a 31.3% share, up from 28.5% the previous year.
- Intel still had the largest market share at 68.7%, down from 71.5% in Q4 2021.
PCMAG
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Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding said it's testing a ChatGPT-style AI tool. Damo Academy, the company's research institute for cutting-edge technologies, is now doing internal testing of the conversational AI service. More: - Alibaba did not say when it could publicly release the chatbot tool.
- A report claims that the company may merge the AI technology with its workplace communication app, DingTalk.
- Damo, which stands for Academy for Discovery, Adventure, Momentum, and Outlook, has been working in areas like natural language processing and generative AI since its launch in 2017, a spokesperson said.
- In 2021, the Alibaba academy released a 27-billion-parameter language model called Pretraining for Language Understanding and Generation.
Zoom Out: - Since ChatGPT's unveiling in late November, a handful of major Chinese AI tech companies have announced plans for similar AI technologies.
- Chinese search engine giant Baidu said it will finish testing its "Ernie bot" in March. Chinese e-commerce group and Alibaba rival JD.com is also planning to incorporate ChatGPT-like tech into some products.
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- Microsoft will soon demo its GPT-based AI technology in Word, PowerPoint, and Outlook, sources have told The Verge.
- Apple is expected to defend its mobile wallet technology against EU antitrust regulators during a closed hearing on Tuesday, Feb. 14.
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 |  | Beth is a writer and editor at Inside.com covering artificial intelligence and daily technology news. She has written the Inside AI newsletter since 2019. 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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