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Here’s what you need to know
Cisco is cutting more than 4,000 jobs. It’s the latest tech company to issue layoffs this year as the industry carries on its cost-eliminating push. Meanwhile, Morgan Stanley is laying off several hundred workers in its wealth management division, per the Wall Street Journal.
SpaceX plans to take an unprecedented number of Starlink satellites out of orbit. Their removal — prompted by a defect — highlights the challenge of maintaining huge satellite constellations.
Alphabet-owned Waymo recalled software after two crashes into the same truck. The autonomous car industry’s ongoing issues with regulators just aren’t letting up.
Jeff Bezos sold another $2 billion in Amazon stock. Everything about his timing was great.
AI girlfriend chatbots aren’t keeping your secrets
“To be perfectly blunt, AI girlfriends are not your friends.”
That’s the truth bomb from Misha Rykov, a researcher at *Privacy Not Included, a consumer guide from Mozilla Foundation that looked into potential privacy concerns with AI-generated chatbots that double as romantic partners.
Some digits illuminate this quite well (and these aren’t even the scariest thing the researchers highlighted).
8: Girlfriend chatbots Quartz found on OpenAI just a day after its GPT store opened last month. We just tried to do another search and were overwhelmed by the volume of results.
73%: Bots *Privacy Not Included identified that don’t share how security issues are managed
64%: Bots that didn’t have “clear information about encryption”
<50%: Bots that allowed users the right to delete personal data
Mortgage rate surges don’t have to be so spooky
The average 30-year fixed mortgage rate in the U.S. rose to 7.13% yesterday after the government reported that inflation edged higher than the Fed and consumers hoped.
That spooked homebuyers. But should it? One analyst thinks the hoopla about recent rate increases is overblown, and typical: Financial markets often react suddenly to individual data points. What’s needed is a longer view. Read the full take here.
All the world’s Bitcoin is worth $1 trillion again
Bitcoin is on a roll. The cryptocurrency’s price is knocking on $52,000, the highest level since June 2021. That’s enough to send its market capitalization above $1 trillion. Here’s what’s driving the surge.
More from Quartz
🤖 An Ivy League school just announced its first AI degree
🧬 23andMe wants to double down on DNA data mining with its business in a tailspin
🏈 Dating a Kansas City Chief or San Francisco 49er is lucrative
🫰 OpenAI is set to hit $2 billion in revenue — and fast
💔 Uber and Lyft drivers are planning a Valentine’s Day strike
😡 Elon Musk bought Twitter because the account tracking his private jet annoyed him, book says
Surprising discoveries
Uber and Lyft are popping on pop stars. The ride-sharing companies name-dropped Taylor Swift and Beyoncé as giving them a boost in their latest earnings reports.
Speaking of that… a typo in Lyft’s earnings report sent its stock on a wild ride. It accidentally put an extra “0” where it wasn’t supposed to be, and investors were stoked.
Old airplanes are being repurposed into EV parts. A new startup out of Singapore is making one man’s cheap aluminum another one’s treasure.
Teenager great apes are annoying too. It’s not just a human thing.
The most money spent on a Grateful Dead t-shirt was close to $20,000. What makes the merch so coveted? We looked at the economic staying power of the band in this week’s Obsession. Sign up to get the email each week.
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