• Apple is looking to integrate AI in iPhones sold in China via local partnerships, Reuters reported.
• Regulatory barriers in China mean Apple is required to partner with domestic AI companies.
• Apple has faced increasing local competition in one of its key markets.

Apple is in early-stage talks with Tencent and ByteDance to integrate their AI models into iPhones sold in China, Reuters reported.

The move could be a way for Apple to introduce AI to mobile devices in China after the country blocked its rollout of Apple Intelligence.

The tech giant started releasing some Apple Intelligence features in the US in October. However, Apple must partner with domestic AI companies to deliver the new features in China while complying with local rules.

Apple has yet to roll out the full suite of Apple Intelligence features planned for its iPhones. So far, the company has introduced a limited number of functions, including a feature that uses OpenAI's ChatGPT for Apple's Siri voice assistant.

Apple CEO Tim Cook said in a recent earnings call that the company plans to roll out more AI features in April.

Representatives for Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider, made outside normal working hours.

Apple has also discussed partnering with Baidu to roll out AI features on iPhones in China, but technical disagreements reportedly stalled progress, The Information reported in early December.

It comes as Apple attempts to fight off increasing competition from local brands like Huawei and Xiaomi. The company has had a rough time in one of its key markets and missed its sales estimates in Greater China last quarter.

Apple hopes the AI features will encourage consumers to upgrade to new iPhones that support the technology. While some analysts have predicted that the iPhone 16 would drive a massive upgrade cycle, others have been enthusiastic about the idea.

• Deel CEO Alex Bouaziz told BI he considers product, people and tech when picking acquisition targets.
• On Thursday, Deel announced it acquired Assemble to boost its all-in-one HR platform capabilities.
• It's Deel's fifth acquisition in 2024 and 10th since its 2019 launch.

When Alex Bouaziz, the cofounder and CEO of Deel, lines up his next acquisition, he considers three core criteria: product, people, and tech.

Deel needs a clear M&A strategy. The global HR platform has now acquired 10 companies since its 2019 launch. And, on Thursday, it announced its fifth acquisition of the year — Assemble, a compensation management and analytics startup.

Completing acquisitions so frequently means Deel needs a large net to identify the right target.

"For every company we acquire, we speak to 1,000," Bouaziz told Business Insider. "So it's definitely a small ratio of acquisition to targets."

He added, "It's super important for our long-term strategy to pick the best companies in their space, bring them into our product suite, rebuild, and innovate together as a team with a lot more resources."

Deel plans to integrate Assemble's tech within its talent management HR, AI, and payroll tools for an all-in-one platform. The company says the acquisition will help it become a platform that offers payroll, compensation, performance, and other HR tools all in one place.

Acquisition spree

Earlier this year, Deel acquired Zavvy, a German-based people development platform; PaySpace, a payroll company; Hofy, a software firm; and Atlantic Money, a fintech.

Some of those deals have focused on increasing the time of getting a product to market, instead of building it in-house.

Bouaziz said other acquisitions aimed to bring specific talent and skills into Deel, a type of M&A known as aqui-hires. As the company scales rapidly, Bouaziz said it can often encounter a skills gap.

"The one thing that, as we build, we sometimes lack is true knowledge in all areas," he said. "Bringing their brains and their entrepreneurial spirits and bringing them next to us in terms of building innovation and making it better is something that is super positive for the company."

Deel also looks at company culture and integrating tech stacks when picking acquisition targets.

"Even if the product is amazing, even if they are the best of the best, if they don't align with our internal culture and how we see the world in terms of what we want to build for our customers, it's typically not going to work," Bouaziz said. "We would never do an acquisition where the founders and myself didn't see eye to eye in terms of culture."

Post-acquisition, Bouaziz said he typically has the founders of the acquired business report to him to help smooth the transition.

HR tech boom

Deel has grown significantly since it was founded more than five years ago by Bouaziz and Shuo Wang, who met while studying at MIT.

Bouaziz says the company now has over 35,000 customers and has been profitable for the last two years. Deel is valued at $12 billion and has raised $650 million since it was founded.

The company has also grown to over 4,000 employees worldwide in over 100 different countries. It operates as a remote-first company with a work-from-anywhere option.

"The world kind of went crazy with COVID, and I think a lot of people realized that there's enough talent everywhere, and we really wanted to build that infrastructure," said Bouaziz.

Its journey as one of the fastest-ever growing software companies hasn't always been smooth. In March 2023, Business Insider spoke with more than 30 current or former Deel workers about the HR company's rapid scaling, which some described as a grow-at-all-costs approach that required working long hours. Some employees said they were misclassified as independent contractors, which Deel disputed.

Deel reached $500 million in annual recurring revenue in March — and it sees even more scope for growth. Bouaziz says HR tech needs and international hiring have been on the rise for years, creating demand for services like Deel's.

"I think we're a good example of a company that's leading the way on how you get to bring the best people together in order to build the best product for your customers," Bouaziz said.

• Arm and Qualcomm are heading to trial this week in Delaware after two years of legal disputes.
• The legal battle over a licensing agreement puts Arm in conflict with one of its largest customers.
• The trial could have big implications for the entire chip industry, from M&A to IP.

A legal battle between two of the world's biggest chip companies, Arm and Qualcomm, is heading to trial this week — and its outcome could have wide-ranging consequences for the entire industry.

The jury trial in Delaware, starting Monday, is the result of a two-year fight between the two major chip companies. The dispute centers on a licensing arrangement connected to Qualcomm's $1.4 billion acquisition of chip startup Nuvia in 2021.

The fight has put Arm in conflict with one of its largest customers. Qualcomm pays Arm roughly $300 million a year in fees, Reuters reported, citing Stacy Rasgon, a senior analyst at Bernstein Research.

The trial is expected to last until Friday, with each side given 11 hours to present its case. It is set to include testimony from the CEO of Arm, Rene Haas, the chief executive of Qualcomm, Cristiano Amon, and the founder of Nuvia, Gerard Williams.

The legal battle

Arm first filed the lawsuit against Qualcomm in August 2022, alleging a breach of contract and trademark infringement.

The suit revolved around Qualcomm's 2021 acquisition of Nuvia, a chip design startup.

Nuvia had a license to use Arm's architecture to design server chips before Qualcomm acquired it. After the deal closed, Qualcomm reassigned Nuvia engineers to work on a laptop processor. Arm claims that Qualcomm failed to properly transfer the license after the acquisition.

Arm has argued Qualcomm should have renegotiated the licensing agreement because it had different financial terms with each company. Arm, which is majority-owned by SoftBank, has accused Qualcomm of continuing to use its intellectual property in products designed with Nuvia's technology despite not having the required licensing agreements.

In response, Qualcomm has said its existing license with Arm is sufficient and countersued the company, accusing Arm of overstepping its rights. Qualcomm has also said the lawsuit is harming its business and ability to innovate.

Haas addressed the case in a recent interview with The Verge's Alex Heath.

"I can appreciate — because we talk to investors and partners — that what they hate the most is uncertainty," the Arm CEO said. "But on the flip side, I would say the principles as to why we filed the claim are unchanged."

The company has previously said the lawsuit was a last-resort move to protect its intellectual property.

Arm is not seeking monetary damages from Qualcomm but is asking it to destroy any products built using Arm's IP without proper licensing.

Consequences for the chip industry

The trial could have ramifications for IP licensing agreements, mergers and acquisitions, and contract law in the tech industry, wrote Jim McGregor, a principal analyst and partner at TIRIAS Research, in an article for Forbes.

"In addition, it will have an impact on the entire electronics ecosystem, especially each party's supply chains and customer bases," he continued.

Arm and Qualcomm are longtime allies, and the trial is an unusual escalation for two companies so closely tied together.

"It's really not in either of their best interests to go nuclear," Rasgon told The Financial Times. "I think it would make sense to see a settlement — they need each other."

The case could also disrupt a wave of AI computers. Arm said in June that Qualcomm used designs based on Nuvia engineering to create new low-power AI PC chips, which launched earlier this year. Should Arm win the legal battle, it could halt shipments of laptops made by partners — including Microsoft — that contain disputed Qualcomm chips.

Representatives for Arm and Qualcomm did not immediately respond to a Business Insider request for comment.

• Microsoft's CEO has said OpenAI's two-year lead in the AI race gave it "escape velocity" to build out ChatGPT.
• Satya Nadella told a podcast this gave OpenAI "two years of runway" to work "pretty much uncontested."
• Microsoft stepped up investing in the startup after ChatGPT's launch in November 2022.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has said OpenAI has benefited from a two-year lead in the AI race to work "pretty much uncontested."

The startup, in which Microsoft has been investing since 2019, prompted an AI arms race when it released ChatGPT in November 2022, which Nadella said gave it an "escape velocity."

The launch left rival companies such as Google battling claims they had been caught off guard by the chatbot's launch.

"The advantage we have had, and OpenAI has had, which is we've had two years of runway — pretty much uncontested," Nadella said on an episode of the "BG2Pod with Brad Gerstner and Bill Gurley" released on Thursday.

"I don't think they'll be ever again, maybe, be a two-year lead like this," Nadella said. "I think it's unlikely that that type of lead could be established with some foundation model, but we have that advantage, that was the great advantage we've had with OpenAI."

After ChatGPT's launch, Microsoft capitalized on its 2019 investment to build a closer partnership with OpenAI and began incorporating the company's tech into its Office apps, the Bing search engine, and Edge — beating its biggest rivals to market.

In return, Microsoft has provided OpenAI with massive cloud-computing resources.

Microsoft was an early investor in OpenAI, investing $1 billion in 2019. The tech giant has invested a total of $13 billion in the company, according to its latest Securities and Exchange Commission filings.

In the same filing, Microsoft described its relationship with OpenAI as an equity investment rather than a partnership, as it had previously done.

In its July SEC filing, it listed OpenAI alongside Anthropic and Meta as "emerging competitors."

• Character.AI has been hit with a second lawsuit that alleges its chatbots harmed two young people.
• In one case, lawyers say a chatbot encouraged a minor to carry out violence against his parents.
• Google and its parent company, Alphabet, are also named as defendants in the suit.

The AI startup Character.AI is facing a second lawsuit, with the latest legal claim saying its chatbots "abused" two young people.

The suit, bought by two separate families in Texas, seeks damages from the startup and codefendant Google for what it calls the "serious, irreparable, and ongoing abuses" of an 11-year-old and 17-year-old.

Lawyers for the families say a chatbot on Character.AI's platform told one of the young people to engage in self-harm and encouraged him to carry out violence against his parents.

One teenager, identified as J.F. in the lawsuit, was told by a Character.AI chatbot that his parents imposing screen limits on him constituted serious child abuse, lawyers say. The bot then encouraged the teen to fight back and suggested that killing his parents could be a reasonable response, per the lawsuit.

The civil suit also says the young users were approached by characters that would "initiate forms of abusive, sexual encounters, including rough or non-consensual sex and incest" and, at the time, "made no distinction between minor or adult users."

The lawyers allege that "the app maker knowingly designed, operated, and marketed a dangerous and predatory product to children."

Camille Carlton, the policy director at the Center for Humane Technology, said in a statement that the case "demonstrates the risks to kids, families, and society as AI developers recklessly race to grow user bases and harvest data to improve their models."

"Character.AI pushed an addictive product onto the market with total disregard for user safety," she said.

A spokesperson for Character.AI told BI that it did not comment on pending litigation.

"Our goal is to provide a space that is both engaging and safe for our community. We are always working toward achieving that balance, as are many companies using AI across the industry," the spokesperson said.

"As part of this, we are creating a fundamentally different experience for teen users from what is available to adults. This includes a model specifically for teens that reduces the likelihood of encountering sensitive or suggestive content while preserving their ability to use the platform."

Legal trouble

The new case is the second lawsuit filed against Character.AI by lawyers affiliated with the Social Media Victims Law Center and the Tech Justice Law Project.

In October, Megan Garcia filed a lawsuit against Character.AI, Google, and Alphabet after her 14-year-old son, Sewell Setzer III, died by suicide moments after talking to one of the startup's chatbots. Garcia's suit accuses the companies of negligence, wrongful death, and deceptive trade practices.

Meetali Jain, the director of the Tech Justice Law Project and an attorney on both cases, told BI the new suit showed harms caused by Character.AI were "systemic in nature."

"In many respects, this new lawsuit is similar to the first one. Many of the claims are the same, really drawing from consumer protection and product liability legal frameworks to assert claims," she said.

The new lawsuit builds on the first by asking the court to shut down the platform until the issues can be resolved.

"The suite of product changes that Character.AI announced as a response to the previous lawsuit have, time and time again, been shown to be inadequate and inconsistently enforced. It's easy to jailbreak the changes that they supposedly have made," Jain said.

A headache for Google

Both suits named Google and its parent company, Alphabet, as defendants. Google did not respond to a request for comment from BI on the most recent case.

Character.AI's founders, Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, worked together at Google before leaving to launch the startup. In August, Google rehired them in a deal The Wall Street Journal later reported was worth $2.7 billion.

The money was used to buy shares from Character.AI's investors and employees, fund the startup's continued operations, and ultimately bring Shazeer and De Freitas back into the fold, the Journal reported.

"Google and Character AI are completely separate, unrelated companies and Google has never had a role in designing or managing their AI model or technologies, nor have we used them in our products," said José Castaneda, a Google spokesperson.

"User safety is a top concern for us, which is why we've taken a cautious and responsible approach to developing and rolling out our AI products, with rigorous testing and safety processes."

• Google has unveiled its new chip, Willow, which outperforms current computer benchmarks.
• Google says the chip solves a 30-year hurdle and advances quantum computing for commercial uses.
• Tech leaders, including Sam Altman and Elon Musk, have praised the development.

Google unveiled a new chip that it says reduces errors and vastly outperforms standard benchmarks in quantum computing.

The company said the new chip, called Willow, can perform a standard benchmark computation in under five minutes. The same task would take the current fastest supercomputers 10 septillion years, longer than the universe had existed.

In an X post on December 9, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said the chip cracked "a 30-year challenge in the field."

"We see Willow as an important step in our journey to build a useful quantum computer with practical applications in areas like drug discovery, fusion energy, battery design + more," he said in a follow-up post.

The new chip won praise from other leading tech figures, including Elon Musk and Sam Altman. Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, reposted the announcement congratulating the company on the development, while Musk replied to Pachai's post saying, "Wow."

Google's development represents a key milestone in the decadeslong race to build quantum computers that are accurate enough to have practical applications.

Quantum computers use quantum mechanics to solve problems faster than traditional computing. Qubits — the unit of information in quantum computing — are unpredictable and have high error margins.

In the past, the more qubits a chip has the more errors appear. This has been an outstanding challenge in the field since the 1990s.

To show progress, quantum computers must demonstrate they are "below threshold," which means they can drive errors down while scaling up the number of qubits.

Google published an experiment in the science journal Nature on Monday showing the new potential of the Willow chip. The study demonstrated that the more qubits are scaled up in the Willow chip, the lower the rate of error. Google also said errors in their new chip can be corrected as they occur.

The director of Google's Quantum AI lab, Michael Cuthbert, told the BBC that commercial applications for a quantum computing chip would still not be available before 2030, at the earliest.

Experts have praised the company's efforts as a major breakthrough in the field.

"This work shows a truly remarkable technological breakthrough," Chao-Yang Lu, a quantum physicist at the University of Science and Technology of China in Shanghai, told Nature.

Current quantum computers on the market are too small and make too many errors to be used for commercial gain. However, Google's recent development has demonstrated a significant reduction in the error rate can be achieved with increased scale.

In a blog post, Google also praised Willow's performance on the random circuit sampling benchmark, a method of testing the performance of quantum computers, as "astonishing."

"It performed a computation in under five minutes that would take one of today's fastest supercomputers 1025 or 10 septillion years. If you want to write it out, it's 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years. This mind-boggling number exceeds known timescales in physics and vastly exceeds the age of the universe," the company said in the post.

• Jack Ma, the cofounder of Alibaba Group, discussed AI's future in a rare public appearance.
• The speech marks his first public appearance since March 2023.
• Ma has largely disappeared from the public eye and has rarely been seen in the last four years.

Jack Ma, the cofounder of Alibaba Group, made a rare public appearance on Sunday to give a speech about how AI will bring changes over the next two decades that "go beyond everyone's imagination."

Speaking at an event to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Alibaba's fintech affiliate, Ant Group, Ma said that AI's success is tied to creating "truly valuable and unique things."

Multiple Chinese media outlets reported Ma's comments, and snippets of the transcribed speech were shared on Chinese social media.

"Twenty years ago, the internet had just begun, and my generation was fortunate to seize the opportunities offered by the internet," Ma said, per The South China Morning Post. "From today's perspective, the changes brought by artificial intelligence in the next 20 years will go beyond everyone's imagination, as AI will bring a greater era."

"AI will change everything, but it doesn't mean AI can dictate everything," he said. "While technology is important, the real truth to determine success or failure is whether we can create truly valuable and unique things in the coming era."

Ma also congratulated the company on its achievements, adding he had faith in the "next 20 years of Ant."

Representatives for Ant Group did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider, made outside normal working hours.

Ma's speech is his first public appearance that has been reported on since March 2023, when he resurfaced at a school in Hangzhou.

Ma, who largely vanished from the public eye four years ago, was one of the most high-profile Chinese billionaires to disappear amid a crackdown on tech entrepreneurs.

Due to his highly successful companies, Ma was one of the richest men in China. However, in 2020, he clashed with Chinese regulators, which then began to crackdown on his empire, including Alibaba and Ant Group.

It resulted in an antitrust investigation, a suspended IPO, and Ma losing $12 billion of his fortune in just a few months. Ma disappeared from public view in 2020 amid the investigation.

A report from the Financial Times in November 2022 said Ma had been living in Tokyo for six months. In January 2023, he was sighted in Thailand after being spotted at a restaurant in Bangkok.

• Elon Musk's xAI plans to make a tenfold increase to the number of GPUs at its Memphis supercomputer.
• The expansion aims to help the startup compete with OpenAI and Google in the AI race.
• Nvidia, Dell, and Supermicro Computer also plan to establish operations in Memphis.

Elon Musk's xAI is ramping up its Memphis supercomputer to house at least 1 million graphic processing units, the Greater Memphis Chamber said on Wednesday.

The supercomputer, called Colossus, is already considered the largest of its kind in the world. The expansion would increase the number of its GPUs tenfold.

The move is part of xAI's effort to ramp up AI development and outpace rivals like OpenAI and Google. The GPUs are used to train and run xAI's AI-powered chatbot Grok, the company's answer to products like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini.

"In Memphis, we're pioneering development in the heartland of America," Brent Mayo, an xAI engineer, said in a statement. "We're not just leading from the front; we're accelerating progress at an unprecedented pace while ensuring the stability of the grid utilizing megapack technology."

The Greater Memphis Chamber said Nvidia — the leader in the GPU market and a supplier to Colossus — along with Dell and Supermicro Computer, also plan to establish operations in Memphis.

A 'superhuman' task

xAI built its supercomputer, Colossus, at a rapid pace. The supporting facility and supercomputer were built by xAI and Nvidia in just 122 days, according to a press release from Nvidia.

In an interview with Jordan Peterson on X in June, Musk said it took 19 days to get Colossus from hardware installation to beginning training, adding it was "the fastest by far anyone's been able to do that."

The speed of xAI's expansion won praise from Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, who described the effort as a "superhuman" task and hailed Musk's understanding of engineering.

Huang said a project like Colossus would normally take "three years to plan" and another year to get it up and running.

Musk's AI startup has also been on a fundraising streak. The Wall Street Journal reported that xAI is valued at $50 billion, doubling its valuation since the spring.

Investors in xAI's latest funding round reportedly include Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz. Earlier this year, xAI raised a $6 billion Series B from A16z and Sequoia Capital at a $24 billion post-money valuation. The new round means the AI company has raised a total of $11 billion this year.

• Meta is seeking nuclear energy developers to power its AI and sustainability goals.
• The company said in a blog post it's targeting delivery of the project in the early 2030s.
• Meta is not alone in turning to nuclear power, with Microsoft and Google making investments.

Meta is looking for nuclear energy developers to power its AI ambitions.

On Tuesday, Meta said in a blog post that it's targeting 1 to 4 gigawatts of new nuclear generation capacity to be delivered starting in the early 2030s.

The move is the latest push from Big Tech to use nuclear power to meet the rapidly growing energy demands from the AI boom.

Meta said it's releasing a request for proposals to identify nuclear energy developers with skills in permitting and community engagement who could help the company meet its AI and sustainability objectives.

The company added that it was planning for its data center energy needs while "simultaneously contributing to a reliable grid and advancing our sustainability commitments."

"As new innovations bring impactful technological advancements across sectors and support economic growth, we believe that nuclear energy can help provide firm, baseload power to support the growth needs of the electric grids that power both our data centers," the company said in the blog post shared on its website.

Big Tech goes nuclear

Major tech companies, including Microsoft and Google, are investing in nuclear power to provide energy for AI data centers.

Nuclear energy provides clean, constant power to fuel data centers, the infrastructure that supports the training and running of AI models.

In September, energy supplier Constellation Energy struck a deal with Microsoft to provide the tech giant with nuclear power for the next two decades by resurrecting part of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania.

Google announced in Ocotber it was purchasing nuclear energy from Kairos Power, a California-based company developing small modular reactors.

Representatives for Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider, made outside normal working hours.

• Donald Trump has tapped Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to lead the Department of Government Efficiency.
• The advisory group is aimed at reducing federal spending and cutting waste.
• Several notable tech figures have already been linked to DOGE.

Donald Trump has picked Elon Musk and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy to lead the Department of Government Efficiency, also known as DOGE — and they appear to be tapping into their network of Silicon Valley contacts to make it happen.

The department is set to be an advisory group outside the Trump administration that will seek out ways to cut costs and curb federal spending.

Although Musk has said he wants to cut $2 trillion from the federal budget to make it more efficient, under current law, Congress must approve most budget changes, which limits DOGE's power.

Musk has already reportedly been consulting Silicon Valley leaders about the advisory group. These are the tech figures that have already been linked to DOGE.

Vivek Ramaswamy

Ramaswamy is set to spearhead the DOGE alongside Musk.

The biotech billionaire previously ran for president, launching his bid in February 2023. He later dropped out to support Trump and campaigned for the former president.

Ramaswamy has said DOGE will be "crowdsourcing examples of government waste, fraud, and abuse.

"Americans voted for drastic government reform & they deserve to be part of fixing it," he wrote in a post on X.

Marc Andreessen

The Washington Post reported that the Andreessen Horowitz cofounder has been involved in helping Musk plan the department. Andreessen also discussed Musk and DOGE on a recent episode of Joe Rogan's podcast.

On the podcast, he criticized the "raw administrative power" of independent federal agencies like the SEC, FTC, and CFPB, highlighting Musk's direct business approach as a model for government accountability.

Sriram Krishnan

Sriram Krishnan, a general partner at A16z, has had discussions with Elon Musk about joining DOGE, The Information reported.

Krishnan has a history with Musk, assisting him in the early stage of his Twitter takeover. He's also previously held roles within Big Tech companies, including Twitter, Snap, and Meta.

Krishnan confirmed in an X post on Wednesday that he will be leaving A16z at the end of the year.

"What's next? I'll have more on that in a bit but it's obvious we are living through a unique moment in history," Krishnan wrote. "I'm going to be jumping all into something I've wanted to spend my energy on. More on that in the coming months."

Antonio Gracias

Private equity executive Antonio Gracias has also been linked to the new advisory group.

The Washington Post reported that Gracias, alongside Boring Company President Steve Davis, was among Musk's business associates helping to plan the coming department.

Gracias also assisted Musk with his Twitter deal, helping him line up financing for the $44 billion deal. Gracias was also a director of Tesla from 2007 to 2021.

Travis Kalanick

Musk is also reportedly consulting Uber cofounder and former CEO Travis Kalanick about his plans for DOGE.

Kalanick is one of several tech titans being approached by Musk and Ramaswamy, according to a report from The Washington Post, which cited people familiar with the matter.

Kalanick was CEO of Uber from 2010 to 2017. He stepped down from the board in 2019.

• Sriram Krishnan, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, is leaving the firm at the end of the year.
• Krishnan has discussed joining Elon Musk at the Department of Government Efficiency, reports say.
• Krishnan has supported Musk in the past and worked at various Big Tech companies.

Sriram Krishnan, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, is leaving the firm and has had discussions with Elon Musk about joining the Department of Government Efficiency, reports say.

Krishnan joined Andreessen Horowitz, also known as A16z, in 2021 and has worked as a crypto investor at the firm. He's also previously held roles within Big Tech companies, including Twitter, Snap, and Meta.

Krishnan confirmed in an X post on Wednesday that he'd be leaving A16z at the end of the year.

"What's next? I'll have more on that in a bit but it's obvious we are living through a unique moment in history," Krishnan wrote. "I'm going to be jumping all into something I've wanted to spend my energy on. More on that in the coming months."

The Information, which first reported Krishnan's departure, said he'd had discussions with Musk about joining DOGE, President-elect Donald Trump's initiative to cut government waste.

Andreessen Horowitz didn't immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider made outside normal working hours.

Krishnan is the latest Silicon Valley leader to be linked with DOGE, which is set to be an advisory group outside the Trump administration and spearheaded by Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy.

Several notable tech figures — including the Palantir cofounder Joe Lonsdale, the A16z cofounder Marc Andreessen, the hedge-fund manager Bill Ackman, and former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick — are involved in planning the department, The Washington Post reported.

Musk loyalists, including Steve Davis, the president of The Boring Company, and Antonio Gracias, a private-equity executive, are also said to be involved in planning out DOGE's early stages.

Krishnan and Musk have a history. The investor temporarily helped Musk in the early days of his Twitter takeover. He's also publicly supported the billionaire in the past, calling him an "inspirational person and an iconic founder."

Cutting 'insanely dumb' government spending

Under current law, Congress must approve most budget changes, limiting DOGE's power.

Musk has said he wants to cut $2 trillion from the federal budget to make it more efficient. He's floated several plans to cut waste, including creating a leaderboard displaying the "most insanely dumb" examples of government spending in an attempt to promote "maximum transparency" and allow the public to share feedback.

The name DOGE is a nod to the Dogecoin cryptocurrency, which was based on a Shiba Inu dog meme.

Trump's administration has signaled that it plans to be particularly attentive to emerging technologies. Reports say the transition team is considering appointing a czar for crypto and AI.

• The rate of AI model improvement appears to be slowing, but some tech leaders say there is no wall.
• It's prompted a debate over how companies can overcome AI bottlenecks.
• Business Insider spoke to 12 people at the forefront of the AI boom to find out the path forward.

Silicon Valley leaders all-in on the artificial intelligence boom have a message for critics: their technology has not hit a wall.

A fierce debate over whether improvements in AI models have hit their limit has taken hold in recent weeks, forcing several CEOs to respond. OpenAI boss Sam Altman was among the first to speak out, posting on X this month that "there is no wall."

Dario Amodei, CEO of rival firm Anthropic, and Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, have also disputed reports that AI progress has slowed. Others, including Marc Andreessen, say AI models aren't getting noticeably better and are all converging to perform at roughly similar levels.

This is a trillion-dollar question for the tech industry. If tried-and-tested AI model training methods are providing diminishing returns, it could undermine the core reason for an unprecedented investment cycle that's funding new startups, products, and data centers — and even rekindling idled nuclear power plants.

Business Insider spoke to 12 people at the forefront of the AI industry, including startup founders, investors, and current and former insiders at Google DeepMind and OpenAI, about the challenges and opportunities ahead in the quest for superintelligent AI.

Together, they said that tapping into new types of data, building reasoning into systems, and creating smaller but more specialized models are some of the ways to keep the wheels of AI progress turning.

The pre-training dilemma

Researchers point to two key blocks that companies may encounter in an early phase of AI development, known as pre-training. The first is access to computing power. More specifically, this means getting hold of specialist chips called GPUs. It's a market dominated by Santa Clara-based chip giant Nvidia, which has battled with supply constraints in the face of nonstop demand.

"If you have $50 million to spend on GPUs but you're on the bottom of Nvidia's list — we don't have enough kimchi to throw at this, and it will take time," said Henri Tilloy, partner at French VC firm Singular.

There is another supply problem, too: training data. AI companies have run into limits on the quantity of public data they can secure to feed into their large language models, or LLMs, in pre-training.

This phase involves training an LLM on a vast corpus of data, typically scraped from the internet, and then processed by GPUs. That information is then broken down into "tokens," which form the fundamental units of data processed by a model.

While throwing more data and GPUs at a model has reliably produced smarter models year after year, companies have been exhausting the supply of publicly available data on the internet. Research firm Epoch AI predicts usable textual data could be squeezed dry by 2028.

"The internet is only so large," Matthew Zeiler, founder and CEO of Clarifai, told BI.

Multimodal and private data

Eric Landau, cofounder and CEO of data startup Encord, said that this is where other data sources will offer a path forward in the scramble to overcome the bottleneck in public data.

One example is multimodal data, which involves feeding AI systems visual and audio sources of information, such as photos or podcast recordings. "That's one part of the picture," Landau said. "Just adding more modalities of data." AI labs have already started using multimodal data as a tool, but Landau says it remains "very underutilized."

Sharon Zhou, cofounder and CEO of LLM platform Lamini, sees another vastly untapped area: private data. Companies have been securing licensing agreements with publishers to gain access to their vast troves of information. OpenAI, for instance, has struck partnerships with organizations such as Vox Media and Stack Overflow, a Q&A platform for developers, to bring copyrighted data into their models.

"We are not even close to using all of the private data in the world to supplement the data we need for pre-training," Zhou said. "From work with our enterprise and even startup customers, there's a lot more signal in that data that is very useful for these models to capture."

A data quality problem

A great deal of research effort is now focused on enhancing the quality of data that an LLM is trained on rather than just the quantity. Researchers could previously afford to be "pretty lazy about the data" in pre-training, Zhou said, by just chucking as much as possible at a model to see what stuck. "This isn't totally true anymore," she said.

One solution that companies are exploring is synthetic data, an artificial form of data generated by AI.

According to Daniele Panfilo, CEO of startup Aindo AI, synthetic data can be a "powerful tool to improve data quality," as it can "help researchers construct datasets that meet their exact information needs." This is particularly useful in a phase of AI development known as post-training, where techniques such as fine-tuning can be used to give a pre-trained model a smaller dataset that has been carefully crafted with specific domain expertise, such as law or medicine.

One former employee at Google DeepMind, the search giant's AI lab, told BI that "Gemini has shifted its strategy" from going bigger to more efficient. "I think they've realized that it is actually very expensive to serve such large models, and it is better to specialize them for various tasks through better post-training," the former employee said.

In theory, synthetic data offers a useful way to hone a model's knowledge and make it smaller and more efficient. In practice, there's no full consensus on how effective synthetic data can be in making models smarter.

"What we discovered this year with our synthetic data, called Cosmopedia, is that it can help for some things, but it's not the silver bullet that's going to solve our data problem," Thomas Wolf, cofounder and chief science officer at open-source platform Hugging Face, told BI.

Jonathan Frankle, the chief AI scientist at Databricks, said there's no "free lunch " when it comes to synthetic data and emphasized the need for human oversight. "If you don't have any human insight, and you don't have any process of filtering and choosing which synthetic data is most relevant, then all the model is doing is reproducing its own behavior because that's what the model is intended to do," he said.

Concerns around synthetic data came to a head after a paper published in July in the journal Nature said there was a risk of "model collapse" with "indiscriminate use" of synthetic data. The message was to tread carefully.

Building a reasoning machine

For some, simply focusing on the training portion won't cut it.

Former OpenAI chief scientist and Safe Superintelligence cofounder Ilya Sutskever told Reuters this month that results from scaling models in pre-training had plateaued and that "everyone is looking for the next thing."

That "next thing" looks to be reasoning. Industry attention has increasingly turned to an area of AI known as inference, which focuses on the ability of a trained model to respond to queries and information it might not have seen before with reasoning capabilities.

At Microsoft's Ignite event this month, the company's CEO Satya Nadella said that instead of seeing so-called AI scaling laws hit a wall, he was seeing the emergence of a new paradigm for "test-time compute," which is when a model has the ability to take longer to respond to more complex prompts from users. Nadella pointed to a new "think harder" feature for Copilot — Microsoft's AI agent — which boosts test time to "solve even harder problems."

Aymeric Zhuo, cofounder and CEO of AI startup Agemo, said that AI reasoning "has been an active area of research," particularly as "the industry faces a data wall." He told BI that improving reasoning requires increasing test-time or inference-time compute.

Typically, the longer a model takes to process a dataset, the more accurate the outcomes it generates. Right now, models are being queried in milliseconds. "It doesn't quite make sense," Sivesh Sukumar, an investor at investment firm Balderton, told BI. "If you think about how the human brain works, even the smartest people take time to come up with solutions to problems."

In September, OpenAI released a new model, o1, which tries to "think" about an issue before responding. One OpenAI employee, who asked not to be named, told BI that "reasoning from first principles" is not the forte of LLMs as they work based on "a statistical probability of which words come next," but if we "want them to think and solve novel problem areas, they have to reason."

Noam Brown, a researcher at OpenAI, thinks the impact of a model with greater reasoning capabilities can be extraordinary. "It turned out that having a bot think for just 20 seconds in a hand of poker got the same boosting performance as scaling up the model by 100,000x and training it for 100,000 times longer," he said during a talk at TED AI last month.

Google and OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

The AI boom meets its tipping point

These efforts give researchers reasons to remain hopeful, even if current signs point to a slower rate of performance leaps. As a separate former DeepMind employee who worked on Gemini told BI, people are constantly "trying to find all sorts of different kinds of improvements."

That said, the industry may need to adjust to a slower pace of improvement.

"I just think we went through this crazy period of the models getting better really fast, like, a year or two ago. It's never been like that before," the former DeepMind employee told BI. "I don't think the rate of improvement has been as fast this year, but I don't think that's like some slowdown."

Lamini's Zhou echoed this point. Scaling laws — an observation that AI models improve with size, more data, and greater computing power —work on a logarithmic scale rather than a linear one, she said. In other words, think of AI advances as a curve rather than a straight upward line on a graph. That makes development far more expensive "than we'd expect for the next substantive step in this technology," Zhou said.

She added: "That's why I think our expectations are just not going to be met at the timeline we want, but also why we'll be more surprised by capabilities when they do appear."

Companies will also need to consider how much more expensive it will be to create the next versions of their highly prized models. According to Anthropic's Amodei, a training run in the future could one day cost $100 billion. These costs include GPUs, energy needs, and data processing.

Whether investors and customers are willing to wait around longer for the superintelligence they've been promised remains to be seen. Issues with Microsoft's Copilot, for instance, are leading some customers to wonder if the much-hyped tool is worth the money.

For now, AI leaders maintain that there are plenty of levers to pull — from new data sources to a focus on inference — to ensure models continue improving. Investors and customers just might have to be prepared for them to come at a slower pace compared to the breakneck pace set by OpenAI when it launched ChatGPT two years ago.

Bigger problems lie ahead if they don't.

• Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are making plans for the Department of Government Efficiency.
• Several notable Silicon Valley figures are involved in the planning, The Washington Post reported.
• Musk has said he wants to cut $2 trillion from the federal budget to make it more efficient.

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are starting to shape the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, and they appear to be turning to Silicon Valley leaders for support.

Musk loyalists, including the president of The Boring Company, Steve Davis, and the private-equity executive Antonio Gracias, are involved in planning the department, The Washington Post reported. Both men also assisted Musk at various points during his takeover of Twitter, now X.

The report said notable Silicon Valley figures — including the Palantir cofounder Joe Lonsdale, the investor Marc Andreessen, the hedge-fund manager Bill Ackman, and former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick — were also involved in the department's early planning.

DOGE, a nod to the Dogecoin cryptocurrency, which was based on a Shiba Inu dog meme, is also looking to recruit people for the department.

A post on the department's newly created X account on Thursday said: "We don't need more part-time idea generators. We need super high-IQ small-government revolutionaries willing to work 80+ hours per week on unglamorous cost-cutting."

"If that's you, DM this account with your CV. Elon & Vivek will review the top 1% of applicants," it continued.

DOGE, headed by Musk and Ramaswamy, is set to be an advisory group outside the government. Under current law, Congress must approve most budget changes, limiting DOGE's power.

Musk has said he wants to cut $2 trillion from the federal budget to make it more efficient — but it's still unclear how he plans to achieve this. The billionaire has said he plans to create a leaderboard displaying the "most insanely dumb" examples of government spending in an attempt to promote "maximum transparency" and allow the public to share feedback.

Musk said all the activities of DOGE would be published online in the name of transparency.

Representatives for Musk didn't immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider made outside normal working hours.

• Last year's job cuts weren't the end of layoffs. Further reductions continue in 2024.
• Companies like Flagstar Bank, Meta, PwC, Tesla, Google, Microsoft, and Nike have all announced cuts.
• See the list of companies reducing their worker numbers in 2024.

After a brutal year of layoffs in 2023, companies this year have continued to cut jobs across tech, media, finance, manufacturing, and retail.

Tech titans like Meta, IBM, Google, and Microsoft; finance leaders like Goldman Sachs, Citi, and BlackRock; accounting firms like PwC; entertainment behemoths like Pixar and Paramount; and corporate giants like Tesla, Dow, and Nike have all announced layoffs.

A survey in late December said nearly 40% of business leaders had expected layoffs this year, ResumeBuilder said. ResumeBuilder talked to about 900 leaders at organizations with more than 10 employees.

One major factor survey respondents cited was artificial intelligence. Around four in 10 leaders said they would conduct layoffs as they replace workers with AI. Last year, Dropbox, Google, and IBM announced job cuts related to AI.

Here are the dozens of companies with job cuts planned or already underway in 2024.

The US' biggest privately-owned company, Cargill, is cutting thousands of jobs

Cargill, the largest privately owned company in the US, is slashing 5% of its workforce.

The company, which is the world's largest agricultural commodities trader, will lay off thousands of workers from its 164,000-strong workforce, Bloomberg reported on Monday, citing an internal memo it had seen.

"To strengthen Cargill's impact, we must realign our talent and resources to align with our strategy," a Cargill spokesperson told BI.

The cuts would impact workers across all professional levels from countries in Asia, Latin America, North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.

The layoffs will not touch its executive team but will impact its "next level senior leaders," Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter.

"The majority of these reductions will take place this year," Chief Executive Officer Brian Sikes said in the memo, seen by Bloomberg. "They'll focus on streamlining our organizational structure by removing layers, expanding the scope and responsibilities of our managers, and reducing duplication of work."

Microchip Tech is closing an Arizona factory

Microchip Technology, a chipmaker for a variety of consumer products, on Monday said it was closing a facility in Tempe, Arizona, as it deals with slower-than-anticipated orders.

The closure is expected to affect about 500 jobs from the company's total of 22,300, Microchip said. The closure will progress in stages and end in September 2025.

"While the company has taken steps to right size inventory and reduce expenses— including temporary pay reductions and company-wide and factory shutdowns—these measures have not been enough," a spokesperson for Microchip said in a statement on Tuesday.

Microchip also updated its revenue guidance for the quarter ending in December quarter to $1.025 billion, which is at the lower end of its earlier forecast.

The company's stock fell about 3% in after-hours trading and is down 22% year-to-date.

Publishing giant Hearst Magazines trims staff.

The owner of publications including Esquire and Cosmopolitan is conducting a round of layoffs, The Hollywood Reporter said in a November 21 report.

The exact number of positions impacted is not clear.

"After a thorough review of our business, we've decided to reallocate resources to better support our goals and continue our focus on digital innovation while strengthening our best in class print products," Hearst Magazines president Debi Chirichella told staff in a memo obtained by THR. "We will scale back in areas that do not support our core strategy and will eliminate certain positions as we reimagine our team structures to drive long-term growth."

Boeing starts issuing layoff notices to 400 workers amid plans for 10% global cut

In October, Boeing said that it would cut 10% of its 170,000-strong global workforce. The reduction plan will include 2,199 employees in Washington and another 50 in Oregon, according to the company's filings.

As part of the cuts, Boeing is laying off more than 400 workers who are part of its professional aerospace labor union. The Seattle Times reported that 438 members of the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace (SPEEA) received pink slips.

These included engineers, scientists, analysts, technicians, and other jobs, the outlet reported.

In a note to employees on October 11, CEO Kelly Ortberg said Boeing was in a "difficult position" and that "restoring our company requires tough decisions."

The layoffs come at a difficult time for Boeing. Its share price has fallen more than 40% since the start of the year as it grapples with the fallout from a seven-week strike and technical faults like a door plug coming off an Alaska Airlines 737 Max midflight in January.

Representatives of Boeing and the SPEEA didn't immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

Exxon is cutting nearly 400 jobs after Pioneer merger

ExxonMobil is cutting about 400 employees from Pioneer Natural Resources, the oil and gas company it acquired earlier this year.

The cuts will come in seven stages and will be completed in May 2026, Exxon said in a notice to the Texas Workforce Commission.

The cuts represent almost 20% of Pioneer's pre-merger workforce and will mostly affect employees in Pioneer's suburban Dallas offices, the notice said.

AMD is laying off roughly 4% of its workforce.

AMD confirmed it would be reducing its global staff, which numbered around 26,000 total employees as of December 2023.

″As a part of aligning our resources with our largest growth opportunities, we are taking a number of targeted steps that will unfortunately result in reducing our global workforce by approximately 4%," an AMD representative said in a statement to Business Insider. "We are committed to treating impacted employees with respect and helping them through this transition."

The cuts are reportedly targeting sales and marketing roles in areas like consumer PC and gaming PC, according to Bloomberg.

The computer chipmaker is focusing efforts on the artificial intelligence industry as it chases rival Nvidia in the GPU market. In October, AMD raised its 2024 GPU sales estimates from its initial $4.5 billion to over $5 billion.

Chegg is cutting 21% of its employees as AI search destroys its business

Online education site Chegg is laying off staff for the second time this year as generative AI platforms obliterate its business model.

Chegg said it is cutting 319 employees, or 21% of its staff, as it faces strong competition from platforms like ChatGPT. The company slashed global headcount by 23% in June.

"The speed and scale of Google's AIO rollout and student adoption of generative AI products have negatively impacted our industry and our business," Nathan Schultz, Chegg's CEO, said in an earnings release. The company reported a loss of $212.6 million for the third quarter.

Chegg's stock has fallen nearly 85% since the start of this year.

23andMe is cutting 40% of its staff

Genetic testing company 23andMe is cutting 200 employees, or 40% of its workforce, to reduce costs and refocus its business.

The Bay Area-based company is also discontinuing further development of all its therapeutics programs, it said in a mid-November statement.

Anne Wojcicki, 23andMe's CEO and cofounder, has been trying to take the struggling company private since April.

23andMe debuted on the stock market in 2021 but fallen from its peak valuation of $6 billion — its market cap is now north of $100 million. Financial and strategic missteps, as well as high-profile user data hacks, have dragged the company down.

Beyond Inc. plans to cut 20% of its workforce

The parent company of Bed Bath & Beyond, Overstock, Zulily, and other brands revealed its decision to slash a fifth of its staff in an October SEC filing.

The workplace reduction was taken to create a more "variable, leverageable cost structure" and to help align the company with its "asset-light business that supports an affinity and data monetization model with a strong technology focus," Beyond Inc. said in the filing.

The cuts are estimated to save roughly $20 million annually in fixed costs and are expected to be "substantially implemented" in the fourth quarter of 2024.

The news came shortly after Beyond Inc. and Kirkland announced a partnership that means physical Bed Bath & Beyond stores will return in smaller-format "neighborhood" locations.

Meta added to the 20,000+ people it's laid off since 2022

Meta is eliminating some roles on units including Instagram, WhatsApp, and its VR and AR division Reality Labs.

"A few teams at Meta are making changes to ensure resources are aligned with their long-term strategic goals and location strategy," a Meta spokesperson told BI on October 17. "This includes moving some teams to different locations, and moving some employees to different roles."

It's unclear how many roles will be affected, but Meta has trimmed its staff significantly in the year and a half, with more than 20,000 job cuts since 2022. CEO Mark Zuckerberg proclaimed 2023 a "year of efficiency" at the company, and continued cost-cutting measures this year as the tech giant gets flatter in structure.

TikTok is laying off employees as part of content moderation changes.

TikTok is cutting employees in various locations as part of changes to its content-moderation strategy.

A spokesperson for the China-owned company told Reuters in October that 80% of content that violates its policy is now removed through automated technology.

The company did not provide details on the exact number of positions that it eliminated but told Reuters the cuts would affect "several hundred" employees.

PwC is cutting 1,800 employees.

Big Four accounting firm PwC is cutting 1,800 workers, which is about 2.5% of its staff. The cuts will impact staffers ranging from associates to managing directors — half of them offshore. Those affected by the cuts will be informed in October.

In an emailed statement to Business Insider, Tim Grady, PwC's US chief operating officer, said, "To remain competitive and position our business for the future, we are continuing to transform
areas of our firm and are aligning our workforce to better support our strategy, including attracting and moving the right talent and skill sets to the areas where we need them most. Right now, we are focused on running our business well and adapting to meet the needs of our clients and the rapidly changing market."

Nike's up-to-$2 billion cost-cutting plan will involve severances

Nike announced its cost-cutting plans in a December 2023 earnings call, discussing a slow growth in sales. The call subsequently resulted in Nike's stock plunging.

"We are seeing indications of more cautious consumer behavior around the world," Nike Chief Financial Officer Matt Friend said in December.

Google laid off hundreds more workers in 2024

On January 10, Google laid off hundreds of workers in its central engineering division and members of its hardware teams — including those working on its voice-activated assistant.

In an email to some affected employees, the company encouraged them to consider applying for open positions at Google if they want to remain employed. April 9 was the last day for those unable to secure a new position, the email said.

The tech giant laid off thousands throughout 2023, beginning with a 6% reduction of its global workforce — about 12,000 people — last January.

Discord laid off 170 employees.

Discord employees learned about the layoffs in an all-hands meeting and a memo sent by CEO Jason Citron in early January.

"We grew quickly and expanded our workforce even faster, increasing by 5x since 2020," Citron said in the memo. "As a result, we took on more projects and became less efficient in how we operated."

In August 2023, Discord reduced its headcount by 4%. According to CNBC, the company was valued at $15 billion in 2021.

Citi will cut 20,000 from its staff as part of its corporate overhaul.

The layoffs announced in January are part of a larger Citigroup initiative to restructure the business and could leave the company with a remaining head count of 180,000 — excluding its Mexico operations.

In an earnings call that month, the bank said that layoffs could save the company up to $2.5 billion after it suffered a "very disappointing" final quarter last year.

Amazon-owned Twitch also announced job cuts.

Twitch announced on January 10 that it would cut 500 jobs, affecting over a third of the employees at the live-streaming company.

CEO Dan Clancy announced the layoffs in a memo, telling staff that while the company has tried to cut costs, the operation is "meaningfully" bigger than necessary.

"As you all know, we have worked hard over the last year to run our business as sustainably as possible," Clancy wrote. "Unfortunately, we still have work to do to rightsize our company and I regret having to share that we are taking the painful step to reduce our headcount by just over 500 people across Twitch."

BlackRock is planning to cut 3% of its staff.

Larry Fink, BlackRock's chief executive, and Rob Kapito, the firm's president, announced in January that the layoffs would affect around 600 people from its workforce of about 20,000.

However, the company has plans to expand in other areas to support growth in its overseas markets.

"As we prepare for 2024 and this very exciting but distinctly different landscape, businesses across the firm have developed plans to reallocate resources," the company leaders said in a memo.

Rent the Runway is slashing 10% of its corporate jobs as part of a restructuring.

In the fashion company's January announcement, COO and president Anushka Salinas said she will also be leaving the firm, Fast Company reported.

Unity Software is eliminating 25% of its workforce.

Around 1,800 jobs at the video game software company will be affected by the layoffs announced, Reuters reported in January.

eBay cut 1,000 jobs

In a January 23 memo, CEO Jamie Iannone told employees that the eBay layoffs will affect about 9% of the company's workforce.

Iannone told employees that layoffs were necessary as the company's "overall headcount and expenses have outpaced the growth of our business."

The company also plans to scale back on contractors.

Microsoft is reportedly cutting 650 more jobs from its Xbox division

Microsoft will be laying off hundreds of employees in its Xbox gaming division, Bloomberg first reported in September.

The job cuts will mainly affect workers in corporate and support functions, the outlet reported, citing a memo sent by Microsoft Gaming chief Phil Spencer.

However, he reportedly added that the company is not planning to close any studios or remove any games or devices.

This comes after the company also slashed 1,900 workers at Activision, Xbox, and ZeniMax in late January.

Nearly three months after Microsoft acquired video game firm Activision Blizzard, the company announced layoffs in its gaming divisions. The layoffs mostly affect employees at Activision Blizzard.

Xbox in May also reportedly offered some employees voluntary severance packages after shutting three units and absorbing a fourth earlier in the month.

Salesforce is cutting 700 employees across the company, The Wall Street Journal reported

Salesforce announced a round of layoffs that the company says will affect 1% of its global workforce, The Journal reported in late January.

The cuts followed a wave of cuts at the cloud giant last year. In 2023, Marc Benioff's company laid off about 10% of its total workforce — or roughly 7,000 jobs. The CEO said the company over-hired during the pandemic.

iRobot is laying off around 350 employees and founder Colin Angle will step down as chairman and CEO

The company behind the Roomba Vacuum announced layoffs in late January around the same time Amazon decided not to go through with its proposed acquisition of the company, the Associated Press reported.

UPS will cut 12,000 jobs in 2024.

The UPS layoffs will affect 14% of the company's 85,000 managers and could save the company $1 billion in 2024, UPS CEO Carol Tomé said during a January earnings call.

Paypal CEO Alex Chriss announced the company would lay off 9% of its workforce.

Announced in late January, this round of layoffs will affect about 2,500 employees at the payment processing company.

"We are doing this to right-size our business, allowing us to move with the speed needed to deliver for our customers and drive profitable growth," CEO Alex Chriss wrote in a January memo. "At the same time, we will continue to invest in areas of the business we believe will create and accelerate growth."

Okta is cutting roughly 7% of its workforce.

The digital-access-management company announced its plans for a "restructuring plan intended to improve operating efficiencies and strengthen the Company's commitment to profitable growth" in an SEC filing in February.

The cuts will impact roughly 400 employees.

Okta CEO Todd McKinnon told staff in a memo that "costs are still too high," CNBC reported.

Snap has announced more layoffs.

The company behind Snapchat announced in February that it's reducing its global workforce by 10%, according to an SEC filing.

Estée Lauder said it will eliminate up to 3,100 positions.

The cosmetics company announced in February that it would be cutting 3% to 5% of its roles as part of a restructuring plan.

Estee Lauder reportedly employed about 62,000 employees around the world as of June 30, 2023.

DocuSign is eliminating roughly 6% of its workforce as part of a restructuring plan.

The electronic signature company said in an SEC filing in February that most of the cuts will be in its sales and marketing divisions.

Zoom is slashing 150 jobs

Zoom announced 150 job losses in February, which amounted to about 2% of its workforce. It had announced it was laying off 1,300 people the previous February.

Paramount Global is laying off 800 employees days after record-breaking Super Bowl

In February, Paramount Global CEO Bob Bakish sent a memo to employees announcing that 800 jobs — about 3% of its workforce — were being cut.

Deadline obtained the memo less than a month after reporting plans for layoffs at Paramount. The announcement comes on the heels of Super Bowl LVIII reaching record-high viewership across CBS, Paramount+, and Nickelodeon, and Univision.

Morgan Stanley is trimming its wealth management division by hundreds of staffers

Morgan Stanley is laying off several hundred employees in its wealth-management division, the Wall Street Journal reported in February, representing roughly 1% of the team.

The wealth-management division has seen some slowdown at the start of 2024, with net new assets down by about 8% from a year ago. The layoffs mark the first major move by newly-installed CEO Ted Pick, who took the reins from James Gorman on January 1.

Expedia Group is cutting more than 8% of its workforce

An Expedia spokesperson told BI that it was implementing cutbacks, as part of an operational review, that were expected to impact 1,500 roles this year.

The company's product and technology division is set to be the worst hit, a report from GeekWire said, citing an internal memo CEO Peter Kern sent to employees in late February.

"While this review will result in the elimination of some roles, it also allows the company to invest in core strategic areas for growth," the spokesperson said.

"Consultation with local employee representatives, where applicable, will occur before making any final decisions," they added.

Sony is laying off 900 workers

The cuts at Sony Interactive Entertainment swept through its game-making teams at PlayStation Studios.

Insomniac Games, which developed the hit Spider-Man video game series, as well as Naughty Dog, the developers behind Sony's flagship 'The Last of Us' video games' were hit by the cuts, the company announced on February 27.

All of PlayStation's London studio will be shuttered, according to the proposal.

"Delivering and sustaining social, online experiences – allowing PlayStation gamers to explore our worlds in different ways – as well as launching games on additional devices such as PC and Mobile, requires a different approach and different resources," PlayStation Studios boss Hermen Hulst wrote.

Hulst added that some games in development will be shut down, though he didn't say which ones.

In early February, Sony said it missed its target for selling PlayStation 5 consoles. The earnings report sent shares tumbling and the company's stock lost about $10 billion in value.

Bumble slashed 30% of its workforce

On February 27, the dating app company announced that it would be reducing its staff due to "future strategic priorities" for its business, per a statement.

The cuts will impact about 30% of its about 1,200 person workforce or about 350 roles, a representative for Bumble told BI by email.

"We are taking significant and decisive actions that ensure our customers remain at the center of everything we do as we relaunch Bumble App, transform our organization and accelerate our product roadmap," Bumble Inc CEO Lidiane Jones said in a statement.

Electronic Arts reduced its workforce by 5%

Electronic Arts is laying off about 670 workers, equating to 5% of its workforce, Bloomberg reported in late February.

The gaming firm axed two mobile games earlier in February, which it described as a difficult decision in a statement issued to GamesIndustry.biz.

CEO Andrew Wilson reportedly told employees in a memo that it would be "moving away from development of future licensed IP that we do not believe will be successful in our changing industry."

Wilson also said in the memo that the cuts came as a result of shifting customer needs and a refocusing of the company, Bloomberg reported.

IBM cut staff in marketing and communications

IBM's chief communications officer Jonathan Adashek told employees on March 12 that it would be cutting staff, CNBC reported, citing a source familiar with the matter.

An IBM spokesperson told Business Insider in a statement that the cuts follow a broader workforce action the company announced during its earnings call in January.

"In 4Q earnings earlier this year, IBM disclosed a workforce rebalancing charge that would represent a very low single-digit percentage of IBM's global workforce, and we expect to exit 2024 at roughly the same level of employment as we entered with," they said.

IBM has also been clear about the impact of AI on its workforce. In May 2023, IBM's CEO Arvind Krishna said the company expected to pause hiring on roles that could be replaced by AI, especially in areas like human resources and other non-consumer-facing departments.

"I could easily see 30% of that getting replaced by AI and automation over a five-year period," Krishna told Bloomberg at the time.

Amazon is laying off hundreds in its cloud division in yet another round of cuts this year

Amazon is cutting hundreds of jobs from its cloud division known as Amazon Web Services, Bloomberg reported on April 3.

The reduction will impact employees on the sales and marketing team and those working on tech for its retail stores, Bloomberg reported.

"We've identified a few targeted areas of the organization we need to streamline in order to continue focusing our efforts on the key strategic areas that we believe will deliver maximum impact," an Amazon spokesperson told Bloomberg.

On March 26, Amazon announced another round of job cuts after the company said it was slashing 'several hundred' jobs at its Prime Video and MGM Studios divisions earlier this year to refocus on more profitable products.

"We've identified opportunities to reduce or discontinue investments in certain areas while increasing our investment and focus on content and product initiatives that deliver the most impact," Mike Hopkins, SVP of Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios, told employees in January.

This year's cuts follow the largest staff layoff in the company's history. In 2023, the tech giant laid off 18,000 workers.

Apple has cut over 700 employees across its self-driving car, displays, and services groups

Apple slashed its California workforce by more than 600 employees in April.

The cuts came after Apple decided to withdraw from its car and smartwatch display projects.

The tech giant filed a series of notices to comply with the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification program. One of the addresses was linked to a new display development office, while the others were for the company's EV effort, Bloomberg reported.

Apple officially shut down its decadelong EV project in February. At the time, Bloomberg reported that some employees would move to generative AI, but others would be laid off.

Bloomberg noted that the layoffs were likely an undercount of the full scope of staff cuts, as Apple had staff working on these projects in other locations.

In late August, Bloomberg reported that Apple was slashing 100 jobs in its services group, citing people familiar with the matter.

The layoffs mainly involved people working on the Apple Books app and the Apple Bookstore, Bloomberg reported. Cuts were also made to other service teams like Apple News, the outlet added.

Representatives for Apple did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider sent outside normal business hours.

Tesla laid off over 10% of its workforce

Tesla CEO Elon Musk sent a memo to employees on April 14, at nearly midnight in California, informing them of the company's plan to cut over 10% of its global workforce.

In his companywide memo, Musk cited "duplication of roles and job functions in certain areas" as the reason behind the reductions.

An email sent to terminated employees, obtained by BI, read: "Effective now, you will not need to perform any further work and therefore will no longer have access to Tesla systems and physical locations."

On April 29, Musk reportedly sent an email stating the need for more layoffs at Tesla. He also announced the departure of two executives and said that their reports would also be let go. Six known Tesla executives have left the company since layoffs began in April.

Grand Theft Auto 6 publisher Take-Two Interactive is reducing its workforce by 5%

Take-Two Interactive, the parent company of Rockstar Games, said on April 16 that it would be "eliminating several projects" and reducing its workforce by about 5%.

The move — a part of its larger "cost reduction program" — will cost the video game publisher up to $200 million. It's expected to be completed by December 31.

As of March 2023, the company said it employed approximately 11,580 full-time workers.

Peloton announced it was reducing its staff by 15% as the CEO stepped down

Peloton CEO Barry McCarthy is stepping down, the company announced May 2. Along with his departure, the fitness company is also laying off about 400 workers.

McCarthy is leaving his role just two years after replacing John Foley as CEO and president in 2022. Peloton said the changes are expected to reduce annual expenses by over $200 million by the end of fiscal 2025 as part of a larger restructuring plan.

Indeed is cutting 1,000 workers after laying off 2,200 in 2023

Careers site Indeed says it will lay off roughly 1,000 employees, or 8% of its workforce, as it looks to simplify its organization.

CEO Chris Hyams took responsibility for "how we got here" in a memo in May but said the company is not yet set up for growth after last year's global hiring slowdown caused multiple quarters of declining sales.

Hyams said the latest cuts will be more concentrated in the US and primarily affect R&D and Go-to-Market teams. It comes after last year's across-the-board reduction of 2,200 workers.

Walmart is axing hundreds of corporate jobs

Retail giant Walmart is cutting hundreds of corporate jobs and asking remote employees to come to work, The Wall Street Journal reported in May, citing people familiar with the matter.

Workers in smaller offices, such as those in Dallas, Atlanta, and Toronto, are also being asked to move to central locations like Walmart's corporate headquarters in Arkansas or those in New Jersey or California, the Journal reported.

Under Armour is slashing an unspecified number of jobs, incurring $22 million in severance costs

Under Armour confirmed it was conducting layoffs in its quarterly earnings report, which was released May 16.

The company said it will pay out employee severance and benefits expenses of roughly $15 million in cash-related and $7 million in non-cash charges this year related to a restructuring plan, with close to half of that occurring in the current fiscal quarter.

"This is not where I envisaged Under Armour playing at this point in our journey," CEO Kevin Plank told investors on the company's full-year earnings call. "That said, we'll use this turbulence to reconstitute our brand and business, giving athletes, retail customers and shareholders bigger and better reasons to care about and believe in Under Armour's potential."

Pixar cuts about 175 people in pivot back to feature films

Disney's Pixar Animation Studios is cutting 175 people, about 14% of its staff, Reuters reported.

The cuts started on May 21 as the studio returns to its focus on feature-length movies. Former Disney CEO Bob Chapek, who was axed in 2022, had increased staff across studios to create more content for the company's streaming service, Disney+.

Pixar cut 75 jobs last year, Reuters previously reported, part of a larger restructuring across Disney.

Lucid Motors is slashing around 400 jobs

In a regulatory filing, Lucid Motors said it would lay off about 400 employees as part of a restructuring plan that should be complete by the end of the third quarter.

"I'm confident Lucid will deliver the world's best SUV and dramatically expand our total addressable market, but we aren't generating revenue from the program yet," CEO Peter Rawlinson said in an email to employees obtained by TechCrunch.

The cuts come ahead of Lucid's launch of its first electric SUV later this year. It comes over a year after the California-based company laid off 1,300 employees, TechCrunch previously reported.

John Deere is laying off over 600 employees

John Deere, maker of the iconic green-and-yellow tractors, is laying off over 600 employees at factories in Illinois and Iowa, the AP reported July 1.

In May, John Deere said sales fell for the third consecutive quarter and projected that the declines would continue in the second half of its fiscal year.

Burberry is expected to cut 100s of jobs

London-based luxury retailer Burberry is expected to cut hundreds of jobs in the coming weeks, the Telegraph reported July 6.

Employees learned about the cuts in late June when they were told in a Zoom meeting that their roles could be eliminated or that they would need to apply for other jobs, according to the Telegraph.

Intuit announced cuts on July 10

Intuit announced on July 10 that it's cutting its workforce by 10%. The layoffs will affect 1,800 employees nationwide, but the company plans to hire 1,800 new employees in "key areas" like engineering, InvestorPlace reports.

The refocus on other areas is following a shift in focus on AI within the company, according to the outlet.

Intuit's stock dropped by 4.01% on July 10 after the company announced the layoffs.

Tinder parent Match group plans to cut 6% of jobs

Match Group, the parent company of Tinder and Hinge, said on July 30 that it would reduce its global workforce by about 6%, or about 156 employees because it is exiting the livestreaming business.

Match said it would remove the livestreaming service from its app Plenty of Fish and sunset the Hakuna app, which focuses on Korea and Japan.

The reduction in workforce is expected to save the company $13 million in annual costs.

Disney cuts 140 jobs across its TV division

Deadline and Bloomberg reported in July that Disney was making cuts across its TV division, to the tune of roughly 140 jobs — or 2% of the staff at Disney Entertainment Television (DET).

Layoffs will impact National Geographic, owned television stations, the marketing and publicity departments, and Freeform, per a source close to the matter, which notes no teams have been eliminated.

While Disney's cable TV business generates billions, it's on the decline, Bloomberg reports, and the company is seeking to cut costs.

Last year, Disney slashed 7,000 jobs across multiple rounds of layoffs as part of a strategy implemented by returning CEO Bob Iger.

Intel plans to eliminate thousands of jobs

Intel plans to cut thousands of jobs in response to a second-quarter earnings slump, Bloomberg reported earlier this week, citing unnamed people familiar with the move.

It was officially announced on August 1, as it posted Q2 earnings. The company intends to reduce its workforce by 15% by the end of 2024.

"Our Q2 financial performance was disappointing, even as we hit key product and process technology milestones," Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger said in a statement. "Second-half trends are more challenging than we previously expected, and we are leveraging our new operating model to take decisive actions that will improve operating and capital efficiencies while accelerating our IDM 2.0 transformation."

Intel's stock was down following the lackluster earnings.

The layoffs come after the chip maker laid off about 5% of its workforce last year, bringing its head count down to around 124,000, Bloomberg reported.

During the last round of layoffs, announced in October 2022, Intel faced a drop in demand for processors for personal computers and estimated the layoffs would save $10 billion in costs by 2025, per Bloomberg.

Intel did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

WW International is cutting jobs in corporate

Diet program creator WW International, formerly WeightWatchers, plans to lay off employees, it said in an earnings call on August 1.

The company did not specify the number of jobs it will cut. But the layoffs will largely focus on corporate positions, including a 40% cut in roles above and at the vice president level.

The cuts are expected to save the company $60 million, the company's chief financial officer said.

Dell is cutting sales jobs in new focus on AI products

Dell is cutting jobs on its sales team, Bloomberg reported. It wasn't immediately clear how many jobs Dell planned to eliminate.

In a memo announcing the cuts, company executives said that the choice was part of a restructuring to focus more on selling AI products and data center services, Bloomberg reported.

Dell did not immediately respond to a request for comment from BI, but a spokesman told Bloomberg: "Through a reorganization of our go-to-market teams and an ongoing series of actions, we are becoming a leaner company."

Paramount Global announced it plans to slash 15% of its US workforce

Paramount Global is planning to cut about 2,000 jobs ahead of its merger with Skydance Media, CNBC reported.

The company identified $500 million in cost savings as it prepared to join forces with Skydance, totalling about 15% of its US workforce, according to the outlet.

The cuts will begin in a few weeks and will mostly be finished by the end of 2024. Paramount employees in marketing and communications, finance, legal, technology, and other support functions have been targeted, the company said on an earnings call.

The cuts come about a month after Paramount agreed to merge with Skydance. Paramount shares jumped more than 5% after hours.

Stellantis is slashing white-collar and factory jobs

In August, the owner of Jeep and Dodge announced it is cutting 2,450 factory workers from its Warren Truck assembly plant outside Detroit.

The layoffs come because the company is ending production of the Ram 1500 Classic truck, Stellantis said. These factory cuts came after white-collar jobs were axed earlier this year.

On March 22, the company said it would lay off employees on its engineering, technology, and software teams in an effort to cut costs, CNBC reported.

Stellantis announced plans for another round of layoffs on July 30, according to Bloomberg. The company is offering voluntary buyouts to non-unionized US employees to "assist those interested in pursuing other career options or retirement," Stellantis said in a message seen by Bloomberg.

The job cuts, the total number of which remains unknown, come after a difficult first half of the year, with unit sales sinking by 16% in the US.

Sonos laid off about 6% of its workforce

The audio equipment company said it slashed roughly 100 jobs in August. The layoffs significantly targeted its marketing division, The Verge reported.

CEO Patrick Spence said in a statement to BI that the company is now focusing on departing employees and "ensuring they have the support they need."

"This action was a difficult, but necessary, measure to ensure continued, meaningful investment in Sonos' product roadmap while setting Sonos up for long term success," Spence said.

Sonos is also reducing some of its customer support offices and will close one in Amsterdam later this year, according to The Verge.

The company previously cut around 7% of its workforce in June 2023, a month after it announced a 24% revenue drop in the second quarter compared to the previous year.

Cisco announced two rounds of layoffs this year

In February, networking company Cisco announced it was slashing 5% of its workforce, upward of 4,000 jobs, Bloomberg reported.

The company said it was restructuring after an industry-wide pullback in corporate tech spending — which execs said they expect to continue through the first half of the year.

On August 14, in a filing, Cisco said it would further reduce its global workforce by 7% amid sales and revenue declines. Reuters reported earlier that the company was slashing around 4,000 jobs as it shifted attention to cybersecurity and artificial intelligence.

Per its latest annual filing, Cisco had about 85,000 employees as of July 2023.

GoPro is laying off nearly 140 employees

Long-troubled GoPro is laying off 15% of its 925 current employees, the company said in a filing.

The action sports camera maker reported a net loss of nearly $48 million in the quarter that ended in June, adding to a streak of consecutive losses.

The company laid off 4% of its staff in March.

Shell is reportedly planning for major cuts in its oil exploration division

Oil giant Shell will slash its workforce in oil and gas exploration and development by 20%, according to an August 29 report from Reuters. Company sources reportedly cited intentions to cut costs in the highly profitable segments due to "deep cuts in renewables and low-carbon businesses."

Exploration, wells development, and subsurface units will face hundreds of layoffs globally, with offices in Houston, The Hauge, and Britain expected to take the biggest hit, the sources told Reuters.

A Shell spokesperson would not comment directly on the layoffs but told Business Insider that, "Shell aims to create more value with less emissions by focusing on performance, discipline and simplification across the business."

"That includes delivering structural operating cost reductions of $2-3 billion by the end of 2025, as announced at our Capital Markets Day event in June 2023," the spokesperson added.

Goldman Sachs plans to lay off more than 1,300 workers, The Wall Street Journal reported

The global investment bank is set to cut hundreds of employees during annual reviews this year, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the situation.

Goldman Sachs is targeting low performers with the intention of laying off between 3% and 4% of its global workforce, equaling somewhere between 1,300 and 1,800 people, according to the outlet.

The cuts are already underway and will continue in the coming months, one person told the outlet. Goldman typically tries to cut anywhere from 2% to 7% of employees each year, per The Journal.

Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop is cutting 18% of staff

Goop is cutting 18% of its 216-person staff, citing a change to its organization, WWD wrote in September. It will now focus on beauty, fashion, and food — specifically its Goop Beauty and good.clean.goop beauty brands, G.Label clothing line, and Goop Kitchen restaurants.

That means it's moving away from wellness, home, travel, and sexual wellness, some of which are categories that once defined the brand.

Samsung plans to cut jobs globally this year, Reuters reported

Samsung is planning to cut jobs this year, a move that will impact workers in the US, Europe, Asia, and Africa, Reuters reported.

The electronic devices maker will cut up to 30% of staff in some divisions, the report says. It is unclear how many jobs will be impacted.

Samsung told Reuters in a statement that the workforce adjustments would not impact its production staff and that no specific targets for the cuts are in place.

Verizon is laying off 4,800 US employees

Verizon is letting go of 4,800 US-based management employees in a voluntary separation program.

The company said in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing that more than half of these employees would exit in September, while the rest will leave by the end of March 2025.

The telecommunications giant expects severance charges to cost as much as $1.9 billion before tax in the third quarter of this year.

General Motors is laying off about 1,700 employees in Kansas

General Motors is laying off 1,695 employees at its Fairfax plant in Kansas, the company said in a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification notice in mid-September.

The layoffs will begin in mid-November, and a second phase will continue in January, Reuters reported, citing a GM spokesperson. It is unclear which departments will be affected, but about 1,450 of these employees will be laid off temporarily, the spokesperson said.

In August, the carmaker laid off over 1,000 workers, or 1.3% of its workforce.

The August layoffs came primarily from GM's software and services business, which it had bulked up over the past few years. Last year, the company brought on two former Apple executives to run the unit.

Flexport conducts second round of layoffs in 2024

US logistics startup Flexport is laying off another 2% of its US staff this week as it aims to cut costs and reorganizes its retail delivery business.

The fulfillment center-focused cuts amount to about 40 people and were first reported by The Information, citing an internal memo.

In January, Flexport cut 15% of its staff, or around 400 people. Those cuts came after Flexport founder and CEO Ryan Petersen initiated a 20% reduction of its workforce of an estimated 2,600 employees in October 2023.

Flexport kicked off 2024 with the announcement that it raised $260 million from Shopify and made "massive progress toward returning Flexport to profitability."

NYCB's Flagstar Bank cuts 700 jobs

New York Community Bancorp's Flagstar Bank will cut 8% of its workforce, or 700 jobs, as it aims to revamp its business, the company's CEO, Joseph Otting, said in a statement on October 17.

An additional 1,200 employees will be laid off at the end of the quarter after the company sells its residential mortgage business.

NYCB is also changing its name to Flagstar Financial as part of the turnaround efforts after losses from its commercial real estate portfolio.

Chief, a networking group for female executives, made cuts across the company

Chief, which has positioned itself as the nation's largest network of senior executive women, confirmed to Business Insider on October 20 that it has shed roles.

The company told BI that the cuts, which had already been announced internally, mainly impacted "our technology and administrative functions."

"Like many companies, we are balancing growth and profitability," the spokesperson added.

In a June press release, the American company said 40% of its members were C-suite executives and that they represent more than 10,000 companies.

In April 2023, Chief cut 14% of its workforce in what the founders called a "challenging economic environment," TechCrunch reported at the time.

This January, the company said it would close its London offices — opened one year previously — to refocus on the American market.

Visa will reportedly lay off around 1,400 people

Visa plans to lay off around 1,400 workers this year, The Wall Street Journal reported on October 29.

In a statement provided to BI, a Visa spokesperson said the company expects to grow its workforce for the foreseeable future but that it is continuously evolving to serve clients, innovate, and grow, "which can lead to the elimination of some roles."

"When this happens, we are committed to supporting our employees," the spokesperson added.

Workers affected by layoffs included employees and contractors, with more than 1,000 in technology roles, the Journal reported, citing unnamed sources familiar with the situation. Visa has more than 30,000 employees.

Dropbox is slashing around 20% of its global workforce

The cloud storage company is laying off 528 employees, targeting "over-invested or underperforming" areas, CEO Drew Houston announced in an email sent to employees.

"As CEO, I take full responsibility for this decision and the circumstances that led to it, and I'm truly sorry to those impacted by this change," Houston wrote.

The Dropbox chief cited diminishing demand and macro headwinds in the company's core business, as well as excessive management levels, as contributing factors.

The layoffs come as the company is undergoing a "transitional period" with its growing File Sync and Share (FSS) business and greater efforts on products like Dash, Dropbox's AI-powered work assistant.

KPMG plans to cut nearly 4% of its US audit workforce.

Consulting giant KPMG informed about 330 people, or less than 4%, in its US audit workforce that they would be laid off within the next couple of weeks, a spokesperson told BI.

"The actions reflect our ongoing focus to align the size, shape and skills of our workforce to the market, while addressing continued low levels of attrition," the spokesperson said in a written statement.

This follows an earlier round of layoffs in March, as well as another one last summer, that also affected the company's audit unit, similarly due to low levels of voluntary exits, the spokesperson said.

Nissan said it will slash 9,000 jobs globally.

Japanese automobile giant Nissan said during its November earnings release that it would be cutting 9,000 jobs in an attempt to save money.

The car company reported lower revenue for the period, which it attributed to higher selling and production costs. Nissan said it brought in about 32 million yen, or $208 million, at the end of the first half of the fiscal year — a steep drop from the $1.4 billion it reported for the same time last year.

In addition to a 20% production capacity reduction, CEO Makoto Uchida will give up 50% of his compensation and other executives have taken voluntary pay cuts.

NASA JPL plans to cut about 5% of its workforce.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California is cutting its workforce for the second time this year.

In November, the agency announced it plans to lay off 325 employees, or about 5% of its workforce. The cuts follow a round of layoffs in February, where JPL cut 530 employees.

"Although we can never have perfect insight into the future, I sincerely believe that after this action we will be at a more stable workforce level moving forward," JPL Director Laurie Leshin wrote in a company-wide memo.

Leshin added that the reductions affect all areas of JPL including technical, project, business, and support areas. The layoffs are the result of "continued funding challenges" Leshin wrote.

JPL is responsible for some of NASA's most daring feats like landing the Curiosity rover on Mars and guiding Voyagers 1 and 2 into interstellar space.

Associated Press will lay off 8% of its global staff.

The Associated Press in November announced plans to reduce its staff by 8% through a combination of buyouts and layoffs.

"This is about ensuring AP's important role as the only truly independent news organization at scale during a period of transformation in the media industry," The Associated Press said in a statement about the cuts.

The union representing a portion of AP members indicated 121 of its guild members would be offered buyouts before layoffs began, per AP.

Less than half of the expected cuts will involve news employees, the outlet reported, and though the AP has bureaus around the world, a majority of the staff reduction will occur within the United States.

Sotheby's laid off 100 workers.

Sotheby's cut 100 employees from its New York offices on Tuesday, the company confirmed to multiple publications. The layoffs include back-office workers, junior staffers, and specialists, reports said.

The layoffs come as the auction market has experienced a recent slowdown in sales and earnings. The company also previously cut about 50 employees in its London location, Art News reported.

Sotheby's recently closed a deal in October for Abu Dhabi investment company ADQ to acquire a minority stake in the company. ADQ said in a press release about the deal that the $1 billion investment was meant to support Sotheby's domestic and international expansion plans.

Sotheby's did not immediately respond to a request for comment from BI.

Wells Fargo plans to cut over 700 workers in Oregon.

Wells Fargo filed two WARN notices on December 4 sharing plans to lay off over 700 workers in Oregon, including 500 people from its Hillsboro location and 221 employees from its Salem office. It also plans to shut down both offices.

The company said in its filing that it verbally notified employees of the changes on December 3, and plans to deliver formal notices for displacement in the fourth quarter of 2025. Wells Fargo said it will provide more details on impacted roles at a later time.

Those who don't get relocated into other roles within the business are eligible to receive severance based on years of service and their opportunity to use the company health plan at active rates, the filing said.

"We continue to bring the majority of our non-customer facing positions together in locations best suited for our customers and our company," a Wells Fargo spokesperson told BI. "This effort does not impact our commitment to serving customers and clients."

• Elon Musk's AI startup, xAI, has been valued at $50 billion, The Wall Street Journal reported.
• xAI's valuation has doubled since the spring, surpassing the $44 billion Musk paid for Twitter.
• Investors in xAI's new funding round reportedly include Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz.

Elon Musk's AI startup, xAI, has reportedly been valued at $50 billion — $6 billion more than what the billionaire paid to acquire Twitter, the social media platform now known as X.

The startup told investors it had raised $5 billion in a funding round that saw its valuation double from the spring, The Wall Street Journal reported.

The new valuation means xAI has surpassed the $44 billion Musk paid for Twitter back in October 2022. X was valued at $9.4 billion by Fidelity, one of its investors, in September. The firm, which invested $19.6 million in the social media platform, has written down the value of its investment by nearly 79% since 2022.

The Journal reported last month that xAI had previously been in talks to raise money at a valuation of $40 billion.

X has faced financial challenges since Musk took control of the company in 2022. The platform has seen a drop in advertising revenue after some major brands pulled their content from X, and the company has struggled to win back advertisers.

Representatives for xAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment, made outside normal working hours.

Valor Equity Partners, Sequoia Capital, and Andreessen Horowitz are expected to participate in xAI's fresh funding round, people familiar with the matter told The Journal. Qatar's sovereign wealth fund and Qatar Investment Authority are also expected to be involved, per the report.

xAI previously raised a $6 billion Series B from A16z and Sequoia Capital at a $24 billion post-money valuation. The new round means the AI company has raised a total of $11 billion this year.

Musk founded xAI in 2023, partly to serve as an alternative to OpenAI, which the billionaire cofounded in 2015 alongside current CEO Sam Altman. Musk parted ways with the company in 2019 and has been publicly critical of its shift away from its nonprofit origins.

He sued the company this year, accusing OpenAI and Microsoft of creating an artificial-intelligence monopoly and engaging in "intensified" anti-competitive practices, citing "lavish compensation" offers as one example.