End for AI ethics department and NFTs on Facebook and Instagram

We hope you had a good day and now we want to give you some exciting information to take with you into the evening. t3n Daily is also available as a podcast and as a newsletter. Here are the topics of the day.

In the course of the announced wave of layoffs of 10,000 employees, Microsoft has now also laid off the ethics team of the AI ​​department. The specialists have so far been responsible for helping to implement the principles of the higher-level Office of Responsible AI and creating rules for previously unknown areas. The aim was to prevent previously unforeseeable damage that could be caused by artificial intelligence.

The dismissal of the ethics department comes as a surprise, as the expansion of AI products is currently one of the most pursued goals at Microsoft. Critics suspect that the decision was made in order to be able to keep up with the rapid developments on the market without being slowed down by moral issues.

As the tech group Meta has announced, all NFT functions will be discontinued on Facebook and Instagram in the future. This affects the “minting”, the sale and exchange of tokens on social platforms. Instead, they want to focus more on the monetization of reels by creators and the expansion of the Meta Pay payment system. The end of NFT trading on Meta’s platforms is most likely part of the efficiency measures CEO Zuckerberg announced for 2023.

Although NFT was planned as an integral part of the Metaverse, after a longer test phase on Facebook and Instagram, the decision was made against it. The in-house cryptocurrency and a wallet app have also fallen victim to the cuts.

Although it is not expected to be released until May, photos and technical details of the new Google Pixel 7a budget smartphone have already appeared on the Internet. A Vietnamese website was the first to publish the high-resolution images. It can be seen that the mid-range cell phone will be based on the 7 series visually, for example with the metal camera bar. However, the display will be slightly smaller at 6.1 inches. The fact that it delivers images with a resolution of twelve megapixels makes the 7a smartphone more similar to the Pixel 6a. In contrast to this previous model, it will be able to display a significantly higher frame rate of 90 Hertz instead of 60 Hertz, for example. The Google Pixel 7a is expected to cost around 450 euros.

It’s really a bit early for nostalgia, and probably most investors at Silicon Valley Bank are still digesting their shock at the bankruptcy. Nevertheless, former employees are already offering cups and baseball caps with the company logo of the crashed bank on Ebay. Interested parties are apparently already willing to pay 200 US dollars for it. Even items such as a postal box in the typical SVB look change hands for sums of this magnitude.

In fact, the former bank employees can really use the money, since saving their jobs is now out of the question. And it’s entirely possible that a limited souvenir of the spectacularly failed startup lender could increase in value in the future.

While regulators grapple with whether Microsoft’s takeover of games maker Activision-Blizzard would give the company a monopoly position in the market, competitor Sony warns against believing the competitor’s claims. When it took over the games company Bethesda, Microsoft promised not to make any anti-competitive decisions, only to then release titles like “Starfield” and “Elder Scrolls VI” exclusively for PC and its own Xbox console. Sony fears that after the Activision takeover, previous Playstation exclusive titles such as “Call of Duty” will only appear for Microsoft’s gaming platforms. The company itself denies that. But even with a contractual arrangement, according to Sony, Microsoft has “countless ways of circumventing it”.

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