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AI, MasterCard, and failed rabbits
All the news, industry moves, and IT-person attitude you can handle
Guess who’s back. Back again. ByteSize is back. Tell a friend. We’re here with Issue #2 of your inbox’s favorite combination of letters and punctuation, assembled together here to make sense to humanoids. In this edition:
🛩 Industry Moves - Intel possibly being acquired by Qualcomm, more OpenAI employees are leaving, and credit card companies are making waves.
👨💻 Job Opportunities - Looking for work? We’ve got you.
📰 News Roundup - WP Engine faces ban, OpenAI goes for-profit, and Starlink goes parabolic.
That’s it! Thanks for the great response to last week’s newsletter, we hope you enjoy this week’s edition. - The Experts Exchange Team
🛩 Industry Moves
Mastercard buys Recorded Future
Credit-card mainstays Mastercard have bought threat-intelligence specialist Recorded Future from Insight Partners for $2.65 billion, more than tripling the investment made by Insight five years ago. Recorded Future uses AI to analyze data and provide threat assessments for cyberattacks, serving clients like Disney, Microsoft, and government agencies worldwide.
UK looks the other way with Amazon and Anthropic AI
Can you still remain an independent company and get billions from other, bigger companies? Hmm. The UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has decided not to investigate Amazon's $4 billion investment in AI startup Anthropic, stating the partnership doesn't fall under its jurisdiction.
Visa makes a Feature… space!
Visa has agreed to acquire AI-driven payments protection firm Featurespace, who specialize in financial crime and fraud detection capabilities, for £700 million ($935.06 million). The deal comes as Visa faces a recent U.S. Department of Justice lawsuit alleging antitrust violations and ongoing allegations of a duopoly with Mastercard.
OpenAI is seeing a lot of open bye-byes
The hottest company in tech can’t seem to hang on to people. Departing CTO Mira Murati is taking two others with her, according to ChatGPT CEO and Supercuts frequenter Sam Altman. The other two departees are Bob McGrew, the company's chief research officer, and Barret Zoph, the vice president of research.
Election has big tech at crossroads
Cue up the Bone Thugz-n-Harmony, because CNBC is reporting that the future of tech M&A is at a crossroads (crossroads, crossroads, c’moooon, yeah). According to them, the future is uncertain, with both major political parties potentially maintaining a strict regulatory environment, leaving companies to navigate a complex landscape of antitrust concerns and shareholder expectations.
Qualcomm possibly, sort of, maybe, might buy Intel, kind of
Mobile chipmaker Qualcomm is itching to buy Intel, around the same time that global money-managing business Apollo has offered Intel “an equity stake,” according to Bloomberg. Are the two things related? Riddle me that, Batman. This is coming off the back of a big, bad year for Intel who recently let go of 15% of their staff and have paused paying dividends.
Have a career move to share? Let us know!
👨💻 Job Opportunities
📰 News Roundup
OpenAI to become for-profit company because money
ChatGPT maker OpenAI—you may have heard of them—will restructure its core business to become a for-profit business, and it will no longer be governed by a non-profit board. The company has also structured itself to give CEO Sam Altman equity, which is all happening just before the company could be worth $150 billion. Good timing! It’s not reported how much equity Altman—39 years old, already a billionaire according to Forbes, and absolutely 100% a “before” picture to Tony Robins’ “after”—stands to earn. The company was started as a non-profit in 2015 and gained a for-profit win in 2019, and released the now-ubiquitous and totally thought-through ChatGPT in the Fall of 2022. Two years on, you can use this revolutionary new technology to write some pretty neat email replies and cheat your way through a book report. This corporate shake-up all happens just as several C-level executives including Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati depart the company.
Starlink hits 4 million subscribers
It’s a bird! It’s a plane! No, it’s probably a satellite from Elon Musk’s satellite internet network, which just hit 4 million subscribers worldwide. It’s a pretty interesting milestone, as it means they gained a million new subscribers since May of this year and are set to make $6.6b in revenue in 2024. There’s over 6,000 satellites—none of which are cluttering up the atmosphere and certainly won’t be raining down in 40 years!—and subscribers in 100 countries.
WP Engine faces ban from
Wordpress.org In a blog post (naturally), the OG blogging platform Wordpress accuses WP Engine of trying to run a shadow entity through their sites. “WP Engine wants to control your WordPress experience … Their servers can no longer access our servers for free … WP Engine is free to offer their hacked up, bastardized simulacra of WordPress’s GPL code to their customers.” It’s worth reading in full if you appreciate The Real Housepersons of HTML drama.
Mad Money for Manchester’s ‘Sister’
Manchester—England’s answer to the question “What if Boston, but with an even more unintelligible regional accent?”— is set to invest 1.7 billion pounds ($2.3 billion) into a hub for science and technology companies. It’s called… drum roll please… the “Sister” innovation district. Right. OK. Well. Bravo to the copywriter at the creative agency who circled that on the whiteboard and called it a day. Sorry. What we meant to say is that they are repositioning a whole district in Manchester to attract more tech companies.
Harness definitely won’t replace engineers!
Sharpen those pitchforks, hoist up your cargo shorts, and raise your fists to the heavens, because Harness, a DevOps company, has introduced new services including AI Assistants for DevOps, coding and QA. Harness aims to deliver “AI-driven agents suggest and automation of DevOps tasks in response to plain English commands.” Which is… cool? Sure? Do we have to?
Wrong, Rabbit, wrong
Here’s a story: R1 made an AI (yep) device called the Rabbit. It sold 100,000 devices. Not too bad. But only 5,000 (just 5% of the total) have any sort of daily use, according to a new profile from Fast Company. A total of 16 software updates have attempted to patch the myriad of bugs that the device has, though the company promises a more reliable and successful product down the line.
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And that’s all the news we could fit into the internet tubes. Got news to share or topics you'd like us to cover? Send ‘em our way. We can’t wait to hear from you. Really.