X CEO Linda Yaccarino called a report from a watchdog group that led to a large-scale advertiser pullout “misleading and manipulated” in a note she sent to X employees on Sunday night.

“While some advertisers may have temporarily paused investments because of a misleading article, the data will tell the real story,” Yaccarino wrote in the note, which was first published by The Hollywood Reporter, and which Engadget has seen a copy of. “Because for all of us who work at X, we’ve been extremely clear about our efforts to combat antisemitism and discrimination, as there’s no place for it anywhere in the world.” Yaccarino’s note was titled “Our Work is Meaningful”.

She also framed the situation as a free speech issue, writing that “no critic will ever deter us from our mission to protect free speech.” In doing so, she aligned herself with X owner Elon Musk’s repeated claims that free speech on the platform is paramount. Musk has repeatedly dismissed concerns of hate speech increasing on X ever since he bought the service last year.

Major advertisers including IBM, Apple, Disney, Lionsgate, Warner Brothers Discovery, Paramount Global, and NBCUniversal, whose advertising division Yaccarino previously headed, pulled their ads from X last week after a report from watchdog group Media Matters for America found that ads from some of these brands ran next to pro-Nazi content on the website. The move also came days after Musk publicly endorsed an antisemitic conspiracy theory as a response to a far-right X user. Musk’s comment drew widespread criticism, including a statement from the White House, which called his post an “abhorrent promotion of Antisemitic and racist hate” that “runs against our core values as Americans.”

On Friday, Musk said that the company would file “a thermonuclear lawsuit against Media Matters and ALL those who colluded in this fraudulent attack on our company” when court opens on Monday. As of Monday afternoon, there was no sign of a lawsuit.

Yaccarino was already under pressure to resign as X CEO from advertisers who are questioning her decision to risk her reputation to protect Musk, Forbes reported. In a post on X on Monday morning, Yaccarino doubled down on her criticism of Media Matters. “When you’re this consequential, there will be detractors and fabricated distractions, but we’re unwavering in our mission,” she wrote. “Thank you for standing with us!”

An X spokesperson sent a link to Yaccarino’s X post in response to Engadget’s request for comment.

A remastered version of The Last Of Us Part 2 is coming to the PlayStation 5 in January, according to a leaked trailer from Sony. The new version of the hit post apocalyptic zombie adventure will be available on the platform on January 19, 2024, and will feature improved loading times, 4K graphics in the console's Fidelity mode and full integration with the PS5’s new DualSense wireless controller. Insider Gaming and multiple leakers on X first wrote about the remastered version.

In addition to quality of life improvements, the game will also include a brand new “Roguelike Survival Mode," which will allow players to “choose [their] path through a series of randomized encounters” and play as unlockable characters never before seen in the franchise. The remastered version will also include early versions of three new levels that weren't present in the original game, as well as commentary from developers.

This isn't the first time that a Last of Us trailer has leaked straight from Sony before an official announcement. The same thing happened last year with the remake of The Last of Us Part I.

Amazon is sacking employees in its Alexa division even as it prepares to upgrade Alexa to be as smart as modern AI-powered chatbots like ChatGPT. The move will impact several hundred employees in the US, Canada, and India, according to an internal email sent on Friday.

“As we continue to invent, we’re shifting some of our efforts to better align with our business priorities, and what we know matters most to customers — which includes maximizing our resources and efforts focused on generative AI,” wrote Daniel Bausch, Amazon’s vice president of Alexa and Fire TV in the email, first obtained by GeekWire. “These shifts are leading us to discontinue some initiatives, which is resulting in several hundred roles being eliminated.”

An Amazon spokesperson confirmed to Engadget that the company was, indeed, laying off “several hundred” people in the division and said that Amazon was trying to find roles for those impacted wherever possible. “While this was a hard decision to make, we remain very optimistic about the future of Alexa,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “As we move forward, Alexa remains an incredibly important part of our business, and we will continue to invest and innovate to deliver on our vision.” The spokesperson did not say which initiatives were being discontinued.

Amazon released Alexa in 2014. But nearly ten years later, most people don’t use the digital assistant for anything beyond playing music, asking for the weather, or setting timers. OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which was powered by generative AI, was widely perceived to be smarter than Alexa and Siri, which sometimes struggle with basic requests. A few months ago, OpenAI added voice capabilities to ChatGPT, letting people have conversations with it in natural language.

In September, Amazon announced that it would upgrade Alexa with capabilities that would bring it closer in line with ChatGPT. Alexa will soon be powered by a large language model, the same foundational technology that is the basis of modern chatbots like ChatGPT. “Our latest model has been specifically optimized for voice,” David Limp, Amazon’s SVP of Devices & Services, told the audience at the company’s event that month, “and the things we know our customers love — like having access to real-time information, efficiently controlling their smart home, and getting the most out of their home entertainment.” Earlier this year, Limp announced he would leave Amazon after more than 13 years later this year and is now the CEO of Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origin.

The new upgrades to Alexa will mean that you won’t have to say “Alexa” each time you want something done. You’ll also be able to give complex requests, like asking the assistant to prepare the house for bedtime every weeknight at 9 PM, dim the lights, lock the doors, and set the temperature all at one go. Alexa will also be able to hold longer conversations and maintain the context of the discussion.

Amazon has so far laid off more than 27,000 employees across the company after it began mass-scale cutbacks a year ago for the first time in its history. Last week, the company cut 180 jobs from its gaming division, including the entire staff of Crown, a company-backed Twitch channel. Earlier this month, Amazon also laid off an unspecified number of employees in its music streaming unit and has previously cut more than 100 employees from its gaming divisions.

Next year, Amazon will let you add a whole ass car to your shopping cart. The company announced today that it will launch vehicle sales in the US next year. The first cars available to purchase will be from Hyundai, as part of an Amazon partnership with the company, but more brands will presumably be added.

Buying a car on Amazon doesn’t seem to be super different from buying pretty much anything else on the website. According to an Amazon blog post, you’ll be able to search for vehicles in your area based on model, trim, color, and features. Once you’ve selected a car, you can choose to pick it up or have it delivered to a local dealership, and then check out using the same standard payment or financing options you normally use on the site. Do Prime members get free shipping? I sure hope so.

Hyundai is also building in Alexa into its cars starting in 2025 as part of its partnership with Amazon. This will let you ask Alexa to not only do the usual Alexa things like playing music and setting timers, but also ask for directions, traffic updates and weather reports, and control the car’s media player and navigation system.

A set of features rolling out to Google Photos today will make it much easier to declutter your photo library, the company announced in a blog post. Google Photos will now automatically identify similar photos that you took in rapid succession – helpful for those times when you clicked 50 shots of that gorgeous sunset to get the one perfect frame you will never look at again – and group them in a single “stack” to clean up your library.

The service will select a top pick that best represents the moment, but you can manually choose an image you want too. If you prefer to have multiple sunsets littering your library, you can turn off stacking.

Google

Photos will also automatically organize your pictures, separating IDs, receipts, and tickets into different albums, a feature that seems like it should have been there ages ago given how good Google Photos is at recognizing what’s in your images. You can also add an event to your calendar directly from a screenshot or a photo of a ticket, which seems really useful.

Unsurprisingly, Google says that all these features are powered by AI, something that the company has lately been cramming into all its products in general. Google Photos, however, has always been powered by AI. For years, the service sucked up all your photos and stored them in exchange for training its machine learning algorithms on them to be able to recognize their contents. That’s why you can search Google Photos for pictures of dogs or the beach, for instance, so easily (Google stopped providing free storage for Photos a couple of years ago).

Earlier this year, Google added another AI-powered feature to Photos that creates personalized scrapbook montages. Google’s algorithms sort your photos into relevant categories and create titles that you can modify if you want. Google also lets people use AI to easily make edits, such as removing unwanted people or objects from photos.

Tesla apparently won’t sue Cybertruck buyers for reselling the vehicle within the first year of buying it. Its newly-updated purchase agreement, which had included the controversial clause as of last week, has now been removed, according to Electrek, which first spotted the change.

The previous version of the agreement stated that Tesla “may seek injunctive relief to prevent the transfer of title of the Vehicle” if buyers breach its resale provision, or it may “demand liquidated damages from you in the amount of $50,000 or the value received as consideration for the sale or transfer,

whichever is greater.” Buyers who tried to flip their Cybertrucks could also be banned from buying Tesla vehicles in the future, the previous agreement said. It was also unclear how long Tesla would enforce this clause.

Electrek noted that clauses like these have been used by other car companies like Ferrari, Ford, and Porsche before to prevent resellers from scalping rare or expensive cars. But the Cybertruck, whose first deliveries are due around the end of this month, is supposed to be a mass-produced vehicle, with Tesla claiming to be able to build around 125,000 of them each year. The company has delayed the Cybertruck numerous times and won’t start full-fledged production until 2024.

Google pays Apple 36 percent of all ad revenue it generates whenever someone does a Google search using Apple’s Safari browser. The number, which was supposed to remain confidential, was revealed by Kevin Murphy, an economics professor at the University of Chicago during his testimony on behalf of Alphabet at the company’s ongoing Justice Department trial in Washington on Monday, Bloomberg reported.

The number shed more light on the relationship between two of the world’s largest tech companies, which has come under antitrust scrutiny in the last few years. The DOJ has accused Google of using its vast resources to maintain market dominance by paying companies like Apple, whose iPhone, iPad, and Mac devices have billions of users collectively, to be the default search engine on Safari. In 2021, Google reportedly paid Apple “around $18 billion” to be the default search engine on Safari, a New York Times report revealed.

Last week, Google and Apple had raised objections making details of their arrangement public, Bloomberg noted. Google said that making more details public "would unreasonably undermine Google's competitive standing in relation to both competitors and other counterparties" in a court filing. 

It’s not clear how much ad revenue Google generates from Safari, but it’s safe to assume that 36 percent of that number would likely be tens of billions of dollars. In 2022, Google’s total revenue was $279.8 billion, and a majority of it came from advertising.

Google and Apple did not respond to Engadget’s request for comment.

Apple will pay $25 million in backpay and civil penalties to settle allegations that it favored visa holders and discriminated against US citizens and permanent residents during its hiring process, the Department of Justice said in a statement on Thursday. This is the largest amount that the DOJ has collected under the anti-discrimination provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act.

At the heart of the issue is a federal program administered by the Department of Labor and the Department of Homeland Security called the Permanent Labor Certification Program (PERM). PERM allows US employers to file for foreign workers on visas to become permanent US residents. As part of the PERM process, employers are required to prominently advertise open positions so that anyone can apply to them regardless of citizenship status.

The DOJ said that Apple violated these rules by not advertising PERM positions on their recruiting website, and also made it harder for people to apply by requiring mailed-in paper applications, something that it did not do for regular, non-PERM positions. As a result, a DOJ investigation found that Apple received few or no applications for these positions from US citizens or permanent residents who do not require work visas.

As part of the settlement, Apple will pay $6.75 million in civil penalties and set up a $18.25 million fund to pay back eligible discrimination victims, the DOJ's statement said. 

Apple disagreed with the DOJ’s characterization. “Apple proudly employs more than 90,000 people in the United States and continues to invest nationwide, creating millions of jobs,” a company spokesperson told CNBC. “When we realized we had unintentionally not been following the DOJ standard, we agreed to a settlement addressing their concerns. We have implemented a robust remediation plan to comply with the requirements of various government agencies as we continue to hire American workers and grow in the US”

The Ai Pin from Humane, a much-hyped startup founded by former Apple employees, will cost $699. That’a according to The Verge, which obtained documents about the device ahead of its official launch on November 9.

In addition, the Pin will reportedly have a monthly $24 subscription fee for access to T-Mobile’s cellular network and large language models from OpenAI and Microsoft to power its smarts.

The Ai Pin is a device that’s about the size of a large business card that clips on to your clothing magnetically and acts as a personalized assistant controlled via voice and touch. Notably, it doesn’t have a screen. Instead, it projects a barebones user interface onto the palm of your hand.

We expect to have more details about the Pin and confirmation of The Verge’s leak tomorrow once the device is officially released.

Cruise, General Motors’ driverless car subsidiary, will soon lay off employees. According to Forbes, the company’s CEO Kyle Vogt told staff of the decision in an all-hands meeting earlier this week. Cruise hasn’t yet decided who or how many people will lose their jobs, Vogt said, but promised to provide more details in the next three weeks. The company will also conduct internal “listening sessions”, and explore building websites detailing collisions Cruise cars are involved in, Forbes said.

The news comes on the heels of multiple crises facing the company since October after a Cruise robotaxi dragged a San Francisco pedestrian thrown into its path more than 20 feet before braking to a halt. That incident caused California’s DMV to revoke Cruise’s operating permit in the state. In a statement, the DMV said that Cruise’s vehicles “are not safe for the public’s operation”, and said that Cruise had “misrepresented” information relating to the safety of its autonomous vehicles.

Weeks after the incident, Cruise, which operated in San Francisco, Austin, Houston, Dallas, Miami, and Phoenix, fully paused its driverless operations. This week, General Motors recalled Cruise’s entire fleet of 950 robotaxis.

Other reports, based on Cruise's internal safety documents, showed that the car’s algorithms had trouble identifying children, something that Cruise employees knew about.

On Wednesday, Cruise published a blog post responding to the recent events. The company said that it was looking to hire a Chief Safety Officer who would report directly to Vogt. Cruise will also hire a third-party law firm to review its response to the October incident. The firm, Quinn Emmanuel, is known for its work for Tesla and Elon Musk, CNBC noted.