Today’s top business headlines: Uber’s profitable, Snap is struggling, and Disney is getting deeper into gaming

Snap stock plummets: Will Snap shares continue to fall today, after dropping as low as $11.08 on Wednesday? The 34% plunge in stock price comes after the company reported disappointing Q4 results, including slower ad revenue growth—at a time when rivals Meta and Google increased ad revenue by 25% and 11%, respectively. The Snapchat parent also announced it would cut 10% of its workforce on Monday. Full story.

Uber earnings release: Uber reported $1.89 billion in profits for 2

Google is beginning to flex its Gemini muscle

Google said Thursday it’s bringing its new Gemini language models to the public in some new ways, including via a new web portal, a renewed chatbot, and some mobile apps

The company’s Bard chatbot, which was once powered by the LaMDA model, is now powered by Gemini. Google has changed the name of Bard to “Gemini” in honor of the upgrade.

The largest and most performant of Google’s family of large language models is called Ultra. The LLM,

Tech layoffs update this week: DocuSign, Grammarly, Amazon, Snap, Meetup cut jobs

Layoffs continue to mount in the tech sector as the first week of February comes to a close. As of yesterday, some well-known companies are among those to announce significant job cuts. Those layoffs have now accounted for 33,874 job losses in the industry since the start of the new year, according to tech layoffs tracker Layoffs.fyi. Here are the latest big-name tech companies to announce cuts.

Grammarly

On Wednesday, the popular spell- and grammar-checking tools compan

Will Trump be on the ballots? Everything to know about the Supreme Court’s landmark election case

The Supreme Court on Thursday will hear former President Donald Trump’s appeal to remain on the 2024 ballot, the justices’ most consequential election case since Bush v. Gore in 2000.

The court will be weighing arguments over whether Trump is disqualified from reclaiming the White House because of his efforts to undo his loss in the 2020 election, ending with the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

The case marks th

DOJ funding pipeline subsidizes questionable big data surveillance technologies

Predictive policing has been shown to be an ineffective and biased policing tool. Yet, the Department of Justice has been funding the crime surveillance and analysis technology for years—and continues to do so despite criticism from researchers, privacy advocates, and members of Congress.

Senator Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, and U.S. Rep. Yvette Clarke, D-New York, joined by five Democratic senators, called on Attorney General Merrick Garland to halt funding for predic

Disney invests $1.5 billion in ‘Fortnite’ creator Epic Games, its ‘biggest foray into the games space ever’

The Walt Disney Co. has announced plans to make a $1.5 billion equity investment into Epic Games, which will give the entertainment giant an equity stake in the creator of the Fortnite video game.

Disney CEO Bob Iger, appearing on CNBC Wednesday afternoon, called the initiative Disney’s “biggest foray into the games space ever.” The plan is to create a new “games and entertainment universe” that will live alongside (and be interoperable) with Fortn

Apple has the most to gain from smartphone-sized AI

Welcome to AI Decoded, Fast Company’s weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI. You can sign up to receive this newsletter every week here.

On-device AI is Apple’s game to lose

Tim Cook strongly hinted to analysts during an earnings call last week that his company will be building new AI features into its various operating systems later this year. Apple already uses some machine learning i

Uber just posted its first annual profit as a public company

Uber reported its first full year of profit as a public company on Wednesday, marking the end of a time of heavy venture capital subsidies and growth-at-all-costs mantra.

“2023 was an inflection point for Uber, proving that we can continue to generate strong, profitable growth at scale,” CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said in the company’s fourth-quarter earnings release. The rideshare and food delivery giant expects continued growth in the first quarter of 2024.

The Biden administration names a director of the new AI Safety Institute

The Biden administration on Wednesday named a top White House aide as the director of the newly established safety institute for artificial intelligence.

Elizabeth Kelly will lead the AI Safety Institute at the National Institute for Standards and Technology, which is part of the Commerce Department. Currently an economic policy adviser for President Joe Biden, Kelly played an integral role in drafting the executive order signed at the end of October that establi

Is Snapchat in trouble? Snap stock price plummets after disappointing earnings and layoffs

Snap investors are in a world of hurt this morning after a few whirlwind days that saw the company lay off 10% of its workforce and report worse-than-expected Q4 financial results. As of the time of this writing, shares in Snapchat’s parent company are down over 32% to $11.74 in premarket trading. Just yesterday, SNAP stock was trading at $17.45 per share.

The catalyst for Snap’s massive stock pummeling was the company’s disappointing Q4 results, which were repo


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