According to a December survey of 9,338 software engineers performed on behalf of Motherboard by Blind, an online anonymous platform for verified employees. In the poll, nearly nine in 10 surveyed software engineers said it is more difficult to get a job now than it was before the pandemic, with 66 percent saying it was “much harder.”
https://www.vice.com/en/article/g5y37j/thousands-of-software-engineers-say-the-job-market-is-getting-much-worse
On Tuesday, Elon Musk’s X wrote about a grand vision for the company in 2024, which includes launching peer-to-peer payments and more AI-powered tools. Amid all this, the company silently removed a feature for paid subscribers. They’re no longer able to set an NFT as a profile picture.
https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/10/x-removes-support-for-nft-profile-pictures/
Much-hyped hardware startup Humane has announced that it’s laying off 10 employees — 4% of its workforce — before it has shipped a single one of its funky new ambient computing devices. The company’s chief technology officer (CTO) is also “transitioning” into an advisor role after five years at the company. “As we begin this new chapter of Humane, going from stealth to customer facing, we are making some changes to best prepare us for continued growth,” CEO and co-founder Bethany Bongiorno wrote in a LinkedIn post (as reported by The Verge).
https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/10/humane-layoffs-ai-pin-hardware/
Wizards of the Coast, the publishers of the popular games Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons and Dragons, admitted on Monday that it published a marketing image containing some AI generated content—after initially claiming that it didn’t. Wizards also said it was updating its policies to make it clear to the artists they work with that AI wasn’t to be used in the creation process. In December, Wizards officially announced a ban on the use of AI images in Magic: The Gathering cards.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/7kxq3x/magic-the-gathering-publisher-denies-then-admits-using-ai-art-in-promo-image
A video on TikTok has accused Wacom of using AI-generated images in their latest New Year’s advertisement. The images show different Chinese dragon-inspired illustrations. The quality of the images is, at best, a bit shonky. One of the dragons has a tail that doesn’t quite attach to its body. Another has some pretty bizarre-looking teeth. Or are they hair? I actually can’t tell, that’s how bad it is!
https://www.diyphotography.net/did-wacom-use-ai-generated-images-in-their-latest-ad/
In a blog announcing the change, Microsoft executive vice president Yusuf Mehdi said it was a "transformative" moment and compared it to the addition of the Windows key nearly 30 years ago. He added that it would "simplify" and "amplify" user experience.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-67881373
OpenAI plans to launch a store for GPTs, custom apps based on its text-generating AI models (e.g. GPT-4), sometime in the coming week. GPTs don’t require coding experience and can be as simple or complex as a developer wishes. For example, a GPT can be trained on a cookbook collection so that it can answer questions about ingredients for a specific recipe. Or a GPT could ingest a company’s proprietary codebases so that developers can check their style or generate code in line with best practices.
https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/04/openais-app-store-for-gpts-will-launch-next-week/