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☆ Amazon to shut down Halo division, lays off some staff
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-26 | by ( ) www.reuters.com time to read: +1 min

April 26 (Reuters) - Amazon.com Inc (AMZN.O) said on Wednesday it was shutting down its Halo division that sells health and sleep trackers as the technology giant kicks off wider company layoffs. The company said it will stop supporting Halo services from July 31, and will fully refund Halo devices purchases made in the preceding 12 months. The company had introduced the original Halo band in 2020, which came as a fitness tracker along with a subscription to certain health monitoring and analysis services from Amazon. It later released a new version called Halo View and Halo Rise, a contact-less sleep tracker and smart alarm clock. Heads of Amazon Web Services and the People Experience and Technology team emailed affected staff about the cuts, the company said.

☆ Here’s our April rapid-fire update on the stocks in Cramer’s Charitable Trust
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-26 | by ( Kevin Stankiewicz | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +10 min

When AMD reports earnings next week, we'll be looking for signs that its integration of Xilinx has proven a success. Amazon (AMZN): Investors will be looking closely at profit margins and the growth rate at cloud unit Amazon Web Services when the company reports earnings after the closing bell Thursday. After a disappointing fourth-quarter print, we're hoping to see evidence that CEO Jim Farley has righted the ship. (See here for a full list of the stocks in Jim Cramer's Charitable Trust.) Jim waits 45 minutes after sending a trade alert before buying or selling a stock in his charitable trust's portfolio.

Amazon Web Services CEO Adam Selipsky and human resources head Beth Galetti sent notes to staffers informing them of the job cuts. I wanted to let you know that conversations with impacted AWS employees started today, with notification messages sent to all impacted employees in the U.S., Canada, and Costa Rica. In other regions, we are following local processes, which may include time for consultation with employee representative bodies and possibly result in longer timelines to communicate with impacted employees. To those to whom we are saying goodbye today, thank you for everything you have done for this business and our customers. In other regions, we are following local processes, which may include time for consultation with employee representative bodies and possibly result in longer timelines to communicate with impacted employees.

☆ Google's cloud business turns profitable for the first time on record
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-25 | by ( Jordan Novet | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +2 min

Alphabet said Tuesday that Google's cloud business is profitable for the first time in the three years it's been reporting operating metrics for the division. The cloud business includes the Google Cloud Platform, which rents out cloud infrastructure and services that companies can use to build and run their own applications, as well as Google Workspace productivity software subscriptions. Amazon Web Services, the leader in cloud infrastructure, popularized the market in the mid-2000s and has been profitable every quarter since 2014. Alphabet started disclosing cloud revenue in 2020, and the following year began providing information on the scale of its operating losses. Last week Alphabet restated operating income for cloud and its other segments, resulting in lower cloud losses in 2021 and 2022.

☆ Amazon's rush to bring employees back to office stirs anxiety over badge tracking, relocation, and impact on performance reviews
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-25 | by ( Eugene Kim | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +9 min

this person asked in the Slack channel called "remote-advocacy," according to a screenshot seen by Insider. Change in remote statusSome Amazon employees hired during the pandemic said they were promised permanent remote work, through what they saw as a "handshake agreement." One employee shared their vice president's email in the Slack channel, saying this manager was willing to be more flexible. People walk into the lobby of Amazon offices in New York. Over 30,000 Amazon employees joined an internal Slack channel shortly after the RTO announcement and signed a petition to demand a reversal of the mandate.

☆ 2023 layoff tracker: The latest on which companies have announced job cuts
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-25 | by ( Jennifer Korn | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +20 min

New York CNN —BuzzFeed, Lyft, Whole Foods and Deloitte all recently announced layoffs affecting thousands of US workers. With 11,000 job cuts announced in November and the 10,000 announced in March, Meta’s headcount will fall to around 66,000 — a total reduction of about 25%. The company announced in January that it was eliminating some 18,000 positions as part of a major cost-cutting bid at the e-commerce giant. IndeedJob listing website Indeed.com announced cuts of approximately 2,200 employees, representing almost 15% of its total workforce, the company said in March. The cuts come after the company announced several rounds of job cuts throughout the pandemic due to falling demand, followed by rapid hiring last year.

☆ Earnings playbook: Your guide to a busy week of earnings, featuring Meta and Amazon
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-24 | by ( Fred Imbert | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +13 min

What history shows: GM has reported a better-than-expected bottom line in 29 of the last 30 quarters, per FactSet. McDonald's is set to report earnings in the premarket, with management slated to hold a call at 8:30 a.m. What history shows: History shows Google's parent company beats earnings expectations 68% of the time, with the stock averaging a gain of 1.6% on earnings day, per Bespoke. Meta Platforms is set to report earnings after market close, followed by a conference call at 5 p.m. What history shows: Bespoke data shows Intel beats earnings expectations 77% of the time.

April 21 (Reuters) - Amazon's stock rallied to its highest in more than two months on Friday after a research firm predicted the online heavyweight's retail business in North America is set to beat Wall Street's estimates. Data compiled by YipitData suggests Amazon's March-quarter North American net sales will beat analysts' expectations, and that April sales are also trending ahead of Wall Street's consensus for the second quarter, the research firm told Reuters in an email. North American net sales account for more than half of Amazon's overall revenues, with international and Amazon Web Services, or AWS, making up the rest. With Amazon set to report its first-quarter results on Thursday next week, analysts on average see the company's North American net sales climbing 8.5% year over year to $75.2 billion, according to Refinitiv data. He maintained Amazon's stock as "our Best Idea".

☆ Companies Turn to AI to Avoid ‘Cloud Sprawl’
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-20 | by ( Angus Loten | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

One advantage of third-party cloud systems, such as Amazon.com Inc.’s Amazon Web Services, is that they enable companies to quickly scale up or down computing power as needed. Photo: pau barrena/Agence France-Presse/Getty ImagesCompanies are turning to artificial intelligence to root out savings in runaway cloud-computing bills, tapping software designed to pinpoint overlapping cloud applications, excess data storage and other inefficiencies across information-technology systems, corporate technology chiefs and industry analysts say. The efforts come as cloud-based tools take over an ever-wider range of operations. That, and the murky economic outlook, is prompting many chief information officers and other enterprise technology leaders to take a closer look at cloud costs—even as they increase overall spending.

☆ ChatGPT could cost over $700,000 per day to operate. Microsoft is reportedly trying to make it cheaper.
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-20 | by ( Aaron Mok | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +4 min

ChatGPT could cost OpenAI up to $700,000 a day to run due to "expensive servers," an analyst told The Information. Microsoft is secretly building an AI chip to reduce the cost, per The Information. "Most of this cost is based around the expensive servers they require," Patel told the tech publication. Microsoft is reportedly working on a secret chipIn an effort to reduce the cost of running generative AI models, Microsoft is developing an AI chip it calls Athena, The Information first reported. Nearly four years later, more than 300 Microsoft employees are now reportedly working on the chip, according to the report.

☆ Artificial intelligence will make Big Tech even bigger. Something needs to be done about the power imbalance, researchers warn
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-20 | by ( Diamond Naga Siu | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +5 min

She asked if the company was selling unregistered securities (which is typically illegal, by the way — here's what it means). Big Tech + AI = even bigger tech. So Big Tech companies are best-positioned to gain even more power as artificial intelligence technology — like ChatGPT — gets further developed. Something needs to be done about this power imbalance, researchers warn. My teammate Emilia David breaks down the AI power imbalance and highlights some proposed solutions in her latest story.

☆ Developer tool startups in Y Combinator's latest class are grabbing the attention of investors like Elad Gil and Google's Gradient Ventures. Here are 4 that have already landed funding.
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-20 | by ( Stephanie Palazzolo | Madeline Renbarger | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +4 min

Developer tool startups that were part of Y Combinator's latest class are drawing strong interest from several high-profile venture capitalists. Sequoia partner Lauren Reeder personally participated in the code review startup's recent funding round, according to a Sequoia spokesperson. That fundraising was at a $30 million post-money valuation, one person familiar with the deal said. Developer tool startups accounted for 26% of the companies in YC's winter 2023 batch, up from 16% of the summer 2022 class, according to the accelerator's startup directory. Have a tip on a startup funding round?

☆ Meta and Disney begin cutting jobs. Here's a rundown of all Club names planning major layoffs
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-20 | by ( Paulina Likos | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +10 min

The list includes Meta Platforms (META) and Walt Disney (DIS). META YTD mountain Meta's stock performance year to date. The March layoff plan was in addition to the 11,000 job cuts disclosed in November. As part of this effort, Disney announced in February it was planning roughly 7,000 total job cuts in a series of three rounds. Amazon (AMZN) CEO Andy Jassy announced 18,000 job cuts in early January impacting retail and recruiting operations .

☆ Balyasny built these 4 cloud-based tools that are critical in the $19.5 billion hedge fund's push into new trading strategies
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-19 | by ( Bianca Chan | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +2 min

Balyasny Asset Management is a multi-strategy hedge fund that has used the cloud since 2017. The firm's chief information officer and chief data officer detail 4 tools it built on the cloud. Balyasny Asset Management is deploying an arsenal of secret weapons that the $19.5 billion hedge fund has been building on the public cloud. The firm's data, applications, and investment teams all operate on cloud-based technologies, added Grimaldi, who is a former managing director at both JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs. In turn, the firm's tech and data teams have doubled in size since 2021 to more than 450 people.

☆ The rise of AI will only make Big Tech more powerful, NYU researchers warn
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-19 | by ( Emilia David | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +5 min

That gives Big Tech companies an advantage. Last week, AI Now released a report detailing Big Tech's impact on AI development — finding that AI development has been "foundationally reliant" on resources controlled by Big Tech, including data and computing power. AI Now said Big Tech has also been positioned as a crucial part of the US-China race, giving them geopolitical importance. The report said much of the narrative around AI development has been shaped by Big Tech, from the idea that AI needs unrestricted innovation for social good to connecting AI development to societal progress. Myers West said better enforcement of antitrust laws and connecting competition with the concept of privacy could limit just how big Big Tech can get.

☆ How Larry Page's flying-car company of the future turned into a stunning failure
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-18 | by ( Diamond Naga Siu | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +5 min

Although I'm currently pretty homesick and jet lagged, I'm blessed with "the life-changing magic of working from home." One worker told my colleague Rebecca Knight how remote work transformed her life and how returning to the office has killed company morale. The stunning failure of Google founder Larry Page's flying-car company. In April 2022, company morale plummeted when it axed one of its most promising projects, those former insiders say. The company put together a thorough document to help managers navigate pay-related conversations with employees, and Insider got a look.

Amazon on Tuesday began laying off some employees in its advertising as part of CEO Andy Jassy's effort to rein in costs, the company confirmed. Jassy last month announced Amazon would lay off 9,000 employees, on top of the 18,000 cuts already announced last November and in January. In March, Jassy said the latest round would affect employees in Amazon's advertising, cloud computing, Twitch livestreaming and human resources divisions. Importantly, I want to acknowledge and thank our impacted colleagues for the work they have done on behalf of Amazon Ads customers. PaulWATCH: Watch CNBC's full interview with Amazon CEO Andy Jassy on message to investors, new AI tools and stock price

☆ Amazon services AWS and Alexa back up after brief outage
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-16 | by ( ) www.reuters.com time to read: +1 min

April 16 (Reuters) - Amazon.com Inc (AMZN.O) said its cloud computing division Amazon Web Services (AWS) and its voice assistant service Alexa were back online after a brief outage on Sunday. Alexa was down for thousands of users in the United States, according to Downdetector, while hundreds of users reported issues with accessing AWS. Users also reported issues accessing Amazon's mobile app. Alexa is now operating normally, an Amazon spokesperson told Reuters in an email. AWS on its website said services have recovered from an issue in which AWS users were unable to complete the account signup process and were receiving error messages regarding their billing console.

☆ Amazon's AWS says it is investigating issues with signup
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-16 | by ( ) www.reuters.com time to read: +1 min

April 16 (Reuters) - Amazon.com's (AMZN.O) cloud service division Amazon Web Services (AWS) said on Sunday it was investigating an issue where users attempting to access AWS signup were receiving error messages. Hundreds of users reported issues with accessing Amazon Web Services on Sunday, according to outage-tracking website Downdetector.com. Amazon's voice assistant Alexa was also down for thousands of users in the United States, according to Downdetector.com. More than 15,000 users reported issues with Alexa at the peak of disruption, Downdetector data showed. Users also reported issues accessing Amazon's mobile app.

☆ Amazon Warns of Weaker Cloud Sales as Businesses Cut Spending
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-14 | by ( Angus Loten | Isabelle Bousquette | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

‘While these short-term headwinds soften our growth rate, we like a lot of the fundamentals that we’re seeing in AWS,’ Amazon CEO Andy Jassy says. Amazon .com Inc. is facing “short-term headwinds” in its cloud-computing business, Amazon Web Services, as companies continue to look for ways to cut costs, Chief Executive Andy Jassy said in an investor letter Thursday. “One of the many advantages of AWS and cloud computing is that when your business grows, you can seamlessly scale up,” Mr. Jassy said. “Conversely, if your business contracts, you can choose to give us back that capacity and cease paying for it.”

☆ Piper Sandler calls generative A.I. the next $100 billion tech revolution, names stocks to play it
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-14 | by ( Samantha Subin | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +4 min

"We see Generative AI as the next major revolution in technology that could have far reaching implications across both consumer and enterprise sectors," wrote analyst Brent Bracelin in a Friday note to clients, calling generative AI the "next $100B+ technology revolution." Amazon Web Services is also launching Bedrock , a generative AI service that's geared toward developers. Given this setup for the industry, Piper Sandler named some of its top picks to play the growing field. Microsoft seemed to win the first marketing battle, but Piper Sandler sees Alphabet as well-positioned for AI given its yearslong use of AI and machine learning in its search products. Despite the run up in shares, Piper Sandler expects nearly 7% downside for the stock from Thursday's close.

☆ Amazon cranks up AI competition against Microsoft, Google with new cloud tools
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-13 | by ( Stephen Nellis | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +2 min

Amazon Web Services (AWS), the world's biggest cloud computing provider, on Thursday jumped into that race with a suite of its own proprietary AI technologies, but it is taking a different approach. ChatGPT creator OpenAI, for example, offers a similar service, letting customers fine-tune the models behind ChatGPT to create a custom chatbot. The Bedrock service lets AWS customers test-drive those technologies without having to deal with the underlying data center servers that power them. "It's unneeded complexity from the perspective of the user," Vasi Philomin, vice president of generative AI at AWS, told Reuters. Those underlying servers will use a mix of Amazon's own custom AI chips as well as chips from Nvidia Corp (NVDA.O), the biggest supplier of chips for AI work but whose chips have been in tight supply this year.

☆ Having one of these in-demand tech skills can help boost your pay by nearly $40,000—here's how
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-13 | by ( Morgan Smith | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +1 min

The only thing standing between you and a pay bump of almost $40,000 could be a certificate in machine learning. U.S. workers with advanced tech skills earn about 49% more than workers who don't use tech skills in their jobs, according to newly released research from Gallup and Amazon Web Services (AWS), which surveyed more than 3,000 U.S. workers and 1,170 U.S. employers in August 2022. As the development and adoption of new technologies continue at a breakneck pace, the need for digitally savvy workers is "greater than ever," the report notes. Those who consider digital upskilling stand to reap major benefits from this trend: At least four in 10 U.S. workers say learning new digital skills helped them boost their pay (43%), work more efficiently (42%), or get promoted (40%). Here are the 10 tech skills employers say are "extremely likely" to become stand parts of doing business — and the most in-demand skills they are hiring for — according to AWS and Gallup:

☆ Amazon announces 'Bedrock,' its ChatGPT and DALL-E rival
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-13 | by ( Aaron Mok | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

Amazon announced on Thursday its generative AI toolkit called "Bedrock," a ChatGPT and DALL-E rival. Amazon Web Services customers can use Bedrock to build chatbots, generate text, and create images. AmazonThe announcement comes after Amazon CEO Andy Jassy wrote in his annual shareholder letter that his company is betting big on generative AI. As generative AI tools have become more widely available to the public, people have flocked to tools like ChatGPT to start their own businesses. Amazon is the latest big tech giant to release generative AI tools along companies like Microsoft and Google, which launched their own versions of AI chatbots earlier this year.

☆ Amazon jumps into the generative A.I. race with new cloud service and its own large language models
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-13 | by ( Jordan Novet | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +4 min

Through its Bedrock generative AI service, Amazon Web Services will offer access to its own first-party language models called Titan, as well as language models from startups AI21 and Google-backed Anthropic, and a model for turning text into images from startup Stability AI. Generally speaking, large language models are AI programs trained with extensive amounts of data that can compose human-like text in response to prompts that people type in. Amazon is "really concerned about" accuracy and ensuring its Titan models produce high-quality responses, Bratin Saha, an AWS vice president, told CNBC in an interview. Clients will be able to customize Titan models with their own data. He said Amazon wants to ensure Bedrock will be easy to use and cost-effective, thanks to the use of custom AI processors.

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