The mood after the wave of layoffs is so bad

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.

The mood at Meta is as bad as ever! The reason: the wave of layoffs, in which more than 21,000 people are said to lose their jobs. Around 30 percent of the employees at Meta are affected. And that not only affects those who have to leave, but also those who are still with the company.

“A lot of the employees feel like they’re in limbo,” said Erin Sumner, a former Facebook employee who was fired in November. “They say it’s a cross between ‘Hunger Games’ and ‘Lord of the Flies,’ where everyone’s trying to prove their worth to management.”

At the same time, when evaluating chats, the workforce is frustrated by the lack of muesli in the office, kitchens that are not stocked and a poorer selection of cafeterias. And not only the mood in the company is bad: The share price has fallen by 43 percent since its high 19 months ago.

Competition for Idealo and Check24: Klarna now also offers price comparisons in online shopping. Because the Swedish payment provider wants to expand its app into a “One Stop Shop”, more and more additional functions are being added to the Klarna world. A price comparison tool has been available in Germany since the beginning of April and has also been in use in the USA, Great Britain, Sweden and Denmark since last year.

This allows users to compare the prices of retailers and find the cheapest offer. The tool is integrated via a panel in the browser of the Klarna app. You can filter by colour, size, features, customer ratings, availability in stores and shipping options. And the price development of the items is also displayed to the users. A pop-up also automatically indicates available discount coupons before payment. But what can Klarna do that other comparison portals cannot? Payment and price comparison are combined in one place.

That’s the downside of self-driving cars. Because most of them are not equipped for fog. A weather phenomenon known as “Karl,” which occurs frequently in San Francisco, has now disabled a number of Waymo cabs and caused traffic chaos. The fog that forms disturbs the sensors of the vehicles so much that they come to a standstill.

Because five of the cars could no longer continue in thick fog, they caused a traffic jam. They only started moving again when the fog cleared. Waymo has known about the fog problem for a long time. The company said it plans to update the software to improve the vehicles’ fog and parking performance.

Would you like breakfast in Manhattan? Or a cocktail in Shibuya? All of this could soon become reality thanks to the Swiss startup Destinus. The company is working on a hypersonic hydrogen jet that can take passengers from London to New York in 90 minutes. For a flight from Frankfurt to Sydney, the plane needs a little more than four hours, to Tokyo just three.

Destinus has already successfully completed initial tests with its hypersonic prototype “Eiger”. The jet is powered by liquid hydrogen and is even climate-neutral because it only emits heat and water vapor into the environment. The plane should also be easy to integrate into everyday life, “because it doesn’t cause any noise and can use conventional airports”. The first jet, which can carry 25 passengers up to 7,500 kilometers, should be ready by the end of this decade.

Bad news for human financial analysts: ChatGPT can predict stock prices. As Alejandro Lopez-Lira, professor at the University of Florida Financial Institute, found out, the AI ​​model did better than traditional stock market barometers.

As part of an experiment, ChatGPT was taught to analyze financial news headlines. The chatbot should recognize how these messages will affect the development of share prices. According to the researchers, the AI ​​was surprisingly often correct with its forecasts and was therefore even more accurate than random predictions.

That’s it for today’s t3n daily. You can find much more about all aspects of digital life, working life and the future around the clock at t3n.de.