Good morning. Are you caught up yet on the NBA poker scandal?
The U.S. Department of Justice has charged 31 people with rigging poker games, but the best details pertain to the tech involved: $10,000 card shuffling machines that were illegally altered to read all the cards in a deck and specially designed contact lenses and sunglasses to read the backs of playing cards—plus “chip tray analyzers” and an x-ray table that can read cards facing down.
It’s as if a generative AI model were fed nothing but Philip K. Dick stories, the Ocean’s film series, and footage from Meta Connect. Poker etiquette pro tip? It’s gauche to get any Sweet Baby Ray’s on the cards.
Today’s tech news below. —Andrew Nusca
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Amazon will reportedly lay off 30,000 people
Two weeks ago it was looking like Amazon was planning a fresh wave of layoffs.
It’s now happening, according to a new Reuters report—to the tune of about 30,000 people, or 10% of its corporate staff.
Amazon has about 350,000 corporate employees and 1.55 million total employees, by far the largest of the Magnificent 7 tech companies.
Affected employees will be notified beginning today, according to the report.
Amazon’s last major cut came in late 2022, when it eliminated about 27,000 employees. It has since nipped and tucked in certain departments, e.g. podcasting.
This latest cut will reportedly affect many departments—among them HR, operations, devices, and even Amazon’s lucrative cloud computing unit, AWS.
CEO Andy Jassy said in June that he expected further cuts at the company thanks to AI-driven automation efforts and an allergy to middle management who seek to “put their fingerprint on everything.”
In truth, it’s just the latest cut in a broader Big Tech culling as leadership teams ride pressures to go big on AI and reduce their reliance on humans who don’t scale. —AN
Qualcomm stock jumps 15% as it enters the AI chip fray
Rack ‘em up.
Shares of Qualcomm soared on Monday—from $170 to more than $200, higher than they’ve been in more than a year—after the company took the wraps off two new AI chips.
The hardware represents the San Diego chipmaker’s entry into the data center market and places the company in direct competition with NorCal peers Nvidia and AMD.
Qualcomm calls the new chips AI200 and AI250, and they’re intended for generative AI inference in data centers.
As a reminder, AI inference involves running a trained model on new data to produce new conclusions. (To paraphrase an entirely different A.I., we’re talking about a game—not practice.)
As another reminder, data centers are precisely where the tech industry is seeing explosive growth. Predictions for the multibillion-dollar market’s compound annual growth rate range between 25% and 30%.
The AI200, which touts a high memory capacity and low total cost of ownership, is expected to arrive next year. The AI250, which promises “10x higher effective memory bandwidth and much lower power consumption,” is expected in 2027. —AN
The maker of Roombas is on death’s door
Pour one out for iRobot.
The company behind the iconic Roomba robotic vacuum has been watching its stock progressively slide since 2021 as its early success was overrun by stiff competition from Chinese rivals Anker, Ecovacs, and Roborock.
A maneuver to sell itself to Amazon seemed like the solution until antitrust concerns by European Union regulators spiked the deal in early 2024.
iRobot has been in financial free fall ever since, with revenue and headcount sliding and a $200 million Carlyle Group loan hanging over its head.
According to a new SEC filing, iRobot states that its last potential buyer has walked away.
“The last remaining counterparty to a potential sale transaction withdrew from the process following a lengthy period of exclusive negotiations,” the Oct. 22 filing reads, “and we currently are not in advanced negotiations with any alternative counterparties to a potential sale or strategic transaction.”
Shares of iRobot dropped 33%, to $3.69, on Monday. —AN
More tech
—SAP takes another run at BlackLine. Its previous bid of almost $4.5 billion for the accounting software company was rejected in June.
—Meta’s metaverse chief switches to AI. Vishal Shah will lead AI product management, per an internal memo.
—AMD and the U.S. gov’t partner to build two supercomputers, Lux and Discovery, for science.
—JPMorgan Chase to employees: Go on, use our home-grown AI to write performance reviews!
—Employees to accounting: No, we definitely didn’t use AI to create these expense receipts, Scout’s honor!
—Microsoft's next Xbox will reportedly run “full bore” Windows as its operating system.
—China's MiniMax releases M2, an open-source AI model optimized for agents and coding.