Ilya Sutskever has announced on X, formerly known as Twitter, that he's leaving OpenAI almost a decade after he co-founded the company. He's confident that OpenAI "will build [artificial general intelligence] that is both safe and beneficial" under the leadership of CEO Sam Altman, President Greg Brockman and CTO Mira Murati, he continued. In his own post about Sutskever's departure, Altman called him "one of the greatest minds of our generation" and credited him for his work with the company. Jakub Pachocki, OpenAI's previous Director of Research who headed the development of GPT-4 and OpenAI Five, has taken Sutskever's role as Chief Scientist. 

While Sutskever and Altman praised each other in their farewell messages, the two were embroiled in the company's biggest scandal last year. In November, OpenAI's board of directors suddenly fired Altman and company President Greg Brockman. "[T]he board no longer has confidence in [Altman's] ability to continue leading OpenAI," the ChatGPT-maker announced back then. Sutskever, who was a board member, was involved in their dismissal and was the one who asked both Altman and Brockman to separate meetings where they were informed that they were being fired. According to reports that came out at the time, Altman and Sutskever had been butting heads when it came to how quickly OpenAI was developing and commercializing its generative AI technology. 

Both Altman and Brockman were reinstated just five days after they were fired, and the original board was disbanded and replaced with a new one. Shortly before that happened, Sutskever posted on X that he "deeply regre[tted his] participation in the board's actions" and that he will do everything he can "to reunite the company." He then stepped down from his role as a board member, and while he remained Chief Scientist, The New York Times says he never really returned to work. 

Sutskever shared that he's moving on to a new project that's "very personally meaningful" to him, though he has yet to share details about it. As for OpenAI, it recently unveiled GPT-4o, which it claims can recognize emotion and can process and generate output in text, audio and images.

Sony Interactive Entertainment (SEI) has announced a new leadership structure that puts two people in charge of different parts of its business. Hideaki Nishino, who is currently serving as the SVP for the Platform Experience Group, will become the CEO of SIE's Platform Business Group starting on June 1. On the same day, Hermen Hulst will take on the role of CEO for SIE's Studio Business Group after serving as SVP and Head of PlayStation Studios. 

The two executives are stepping into their roles after Jim Ryan decided to leave his seat as SEI's CEO in March. When he announced his departure, he said he was finding it "increasingly difficult" to juggle his home life in the UK and his job that's located in the US. Ryan helped establish the company's presence in Europe and oversaw the launch of the PlayStation 5 in the midst of the pandemic. Both Nishino and Hulst will report to interim CEO Hiroki Totoki, who will take a step back and continue his role as Chairman of SIE as as well as President, COO and CFO of Sony Group Corporation. 

Nishino currently leads the team that develops all the experiences and tech for PlayStation services and products. He'll continue being responsible for those, but he will also oversee the company's work with third-party publishers and developers. Nishino will be in charge of SIE's commercial operations, including sales and marketing for all PlayStation hardware, services and peripherals, as well. Meanwhile, Hulst has been heading efforts for content development across PlayStation consoles and PCs. He's also in charge of the development of video game adaptations for movies and TV, such as The Last of Us. In the future, he will be "responsible for the development, publishing, and business operations of SIE's first-party content."

In a couple of months, you'll be able to get Microsoft's mobile games from its own store. Xbox President Sarah Bond has revealed at the Bloomberg Technology Summit that the company is launching a web-based store where you can download its mobile games and get add-ons or in-app purchases at a discount. Bond said the company has decided to launch a browser-based store instead of an app to make it "accessible across all devices, all countries, no matter what" so that you don't get "locked to a single ecosystem."

Microsoft will only host its own games to start with, which means it will feature a lot of titles from Activision Blizzard. If you'll recall, it snapped up the gaming developer and publisher in a $70 billion deal that closed last year. You'll most likely find Candy Crush Saga, which has apparently generated $20 billion in revenue since it launched in 2012, and Call of Duty's mobile games in the first batch of titles available for download. Bond said that Minecraft may also be one of the first games you can get. 

An Xbox spokesperson told Bloomberg that this is "just the first step in [the company's] journey to building a trusted app store with its roots in gaming." Microsoft plans to open the app store to third-party publishers in the future, though it didn't share a timeline for that goal. 

The company first announced its intention to launch a gaming store for Android and iOS devices last year shortly before rules under the EU's Digital Markets Act became applicable. To comply with DMA rules, Apple and Google have to allow third-party app stores to be accessible on their platforms and to offer alternative billing systems for purchases. They're also compelled to allow app sideloading, which will be a massive change for Apple, a company known for its "walled garden" approach to business. 

Operators of third-party app stores will get to avoid some of the fees Google and Apple charge, but they'd still have to pay the companies for bypassing their mobile platforms' official stores. Both tech giants have already outlined how they're changing things up to comply with the DMA regulations. The companies' rivals found the changes they're making insufficient, however, prompting the European Commission to start investigating their compliance plans. 

Your cable streaming bill may be getting more expensive once again. Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) is reportedly planning another price increase for Max. Bloomberg didn't reveal how much WBD is expected to jack up the subscription by. The cheapest ad-free plan is currently $16 per month after a $1 increase in early 2023. WBD is said to be aiming for $1 billion in earnings from Max and Discovery+ next year.

We could find out about any Max price increase as soon as Thursday. That's when WBD will report its earnings for the first three months of the year.

The price increase may be on the way as part of WBD's seemingly never-ending cost-cutting drive. As part of that, more layoffs may be in the pipeline. Over the last year, the company has fired more than 2,000 people and eliminated their positions.

Very soon after WBD formed in 2022 following a merger between WarnerMedia and Discovery, CEO David Zazlav went into extreme costcutting mode as the company was saddled with over $50 billion in debt. The company quickly axed the just-launched CNN+, laid off staff, canceled projects, moved shows and movies from Max to ad-supported streaming services and shelved completed or nearly finished movies in favor of tax breaks.

Zazlav has reduced WBD's debt load by around $10 billion so far, according to Bloomberg. However, his decisions have infuriated creatives and many fans, such as those who are clamoring for the company to release the highly regarded live-action Looney Tunes film Coyote vs. Acme instead of canning it for a tax rebate.

Coincidentally, Variety on Wednesday published a list of media and tech CEOs' pay packages for 2023. Zazlav's compensation is said to have shot up by 26.5 percent to $49.7 million. That's around 290 times what the median WBD employee makes.

FTX has filed a plan with a bankruptcy court to pay back creditors who held cryptocurrency at the embattled exchange. The vast majority of customers are set to get their money back with interest, though they (and the debtors) missed out on major gains in the crypto market since FTX’s dramatic collapse in November 2022 — the price of Bitcoin has more than tripled since then.

FTX aims to fully pay back non-governmental creditors based on the value of their claims as determined by the bankruptcy court. That means 98 percent of creditors (those who have up to $50,000 in claims) will get 118 percent of the amount of their allowed claims. Other creditors will get their money back, plus what FTX describes as billions of dollars in compensation “for the time value of their investments.”

Government creditors are in line for payouts with a nine percent interest rate. The Internal Revenue Service and Department of Justice are among the stakeholders with which FTX has agreed settlements.

The company suggests that, if its plan of reorganization is rubber stamped, it would be able to resolve disputes with private and government stakeholders “without costly and protracted litigation.” All told, FTX says that it will be able to distribute between $14.5 billion and $16.3 billion in cash.

But, you may be wondering, where exactly is all this money coming from? After all, when FTX filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection 17 months ago, it held just 0.1 percent of the Bitcoin and 1.2 percent of the Ethereum that its customers thought it had.

FTX said it was able to monetize “an extraordinarily diverse collection of assets, most of which were proprietary investments held by the Alamedaor FTX Ventures businesses, or litigation claims.” As TechCrunch reports, the assets that FTX CEO John J. Ray III and his team tracked down included around $8 billion in real estate, political donations and venture capital investments.

The company filed the updated plan of reorganization just a few weeks after co-founder and former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried (aka SBF) was sentenced to 25 years in prison. He was found guilty in November of charges including wire fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering.

The pandemic sucked. Four years ago we were all stuck at home, and would continue being stuck at home for months on end. With all of us trapped in our houses, some products experienced a serious COVID-19 bump. Grocery delivery services absolutely blew up, as did Zoom and the perfectly-timed Animal Crossing: New Horizons.

The same goes for Peloton and its line of exercise equipment. People were buying bikes and treadmills in droves, ballooning the company’s market cap from $6 billion to $50 billion. However, what goes up must come down, and Peloton’s market cap shrank to $10 billion by 2022 and now it rests at around $1 billion. The company’s pandemic-era success story has officially ended, and now it's focused on cutting costs. So that means layoffs. Peloton is laying off 15 percent of its workforce, according to TechCrunch, which amounts to 400 people.

Aside from those massive cuts, the company is continuing to shut down brick-and-mortar showrooms. Barry McCarthy, the CEO, president and board director, is also stepping down after two years in the job. He was previously CFO at both Spotify and Netflix. Peloton says it's currently in the process of finding a successor, with current chairperson, Karen Boone, and director, Chris Bruzzo, to serve as interim CEOs.

However, it is expanding international reach, announcing a more “targeted and efficient” marketing strategy overseas. Peloton hopes all of these steps combined will reduce annual expenses by $200 million by the end of its fiscal year 2025.

All of this comes after the company reported some really bad Q3 2024 revenue and loss numbers, with a 21 percent decline in paid subscriptions compared to 2023. Unfortunately, Q2 wasn’t much better. Not that the stock market really means anything, just look at Tesla or that bizarre Trump stock, but Peloton’s shares have gone from $156 in 2021 to, uh, less than $3 today.

These aren’t just “people going outside again” numbers, as the company has experienced its share of controversies that have nothing to do with the pandemic. The Tread+ treadmill was recalled after being linked to 90 injuries and the death of a child. Peloton also recalled over 2 million bikes over a safety issue. It's been a bad few years. 

All of this doesn’t mean that Peloton can’t turn things around, as it's a fairly iconic brand in the space. It sure has some work to do, however, to reverse this decline.

The Financial Times has become the latest news organization to strike a deal with OpenAI. In a joint announcement on Monday, the Financial Times and OpenAI said that maker of ChatGPT will use the Financial Times’ journalism to train its AI models and collaborate on developing new AI products and features for the publication’s readers. ChatGPT will also attribute and and link back to the Financial Times when it includes information from the publication in its responses

“It is right, of course, that AI platforms pay publishers for the use of their material,” said Financial Times CEO John Ridding in a statement and added that the Times is “committed to human journalism.” Neither company disclosed the financial terms of the agreement. Earlier this year, The Information reported that OpenAI offers publishers between $1 million and $5 million a year to license their content to train its AI models.

Generative AI is only as good as the training data used to train the models that power it. So far, AI companies have scraped everything they can from the public internet often without the consent of creators, and are constantly on the hunt for new data sources to keep the outputs generated by these models current. Training AI models on news is one way to achieve that, but some publishers are wary of giving up their content to AI companies for free. The New York Times and the BBC, for instance, have OpenAI from scraping their websites.

As a result, OpenAI has been striking financial deals with leading publishers to keep its models trained. Last year, the company partnered with German publisher Axel Springer to train its models on new from Politico and Business Insider in the US and Bild and Die Welt in Germany. The company also has deals with the Associated Press, France’s Le Monde, and Spain’s Prisa Media.

Subscribing to the Financial Times costs at least $39 a month for. But, as some pointed out, its partnership with OpenAI effectively means a dismantling of its own paywall for general readers through generative AI.

Getir is hightailing it out of everywhere but Turkey. On Monday, the “instant delivery” startup said it would exit the US, UK, Germany and the Netherlands to serve its Turkish home market exclusively. TechCrunch notes the closures are likely to wipe out 6,000 jobs at the company.

Getir's business model, distinct from traditional shopping services like Instacart (which has problems of its own), involves establishing micro-fulfillment centers in urban areas that carry groceries and household essentials. This often lets them fulfill orders within minutes — hence the “instant delivery” moniker. Once valued at $12 billion, the startup experienced a surge in growth during the pandemic as investors bet on COVID-era consumer shopping habits enduring after lockdowns. So much for that.

“This decision will allow Getir to focus its financial resources on Turkey,” the company told TechCrunch in a statement. The startup said the markets it’s exiting made up about seven percent of its revenues.

Even as it slashes jobs and hits the undo button on its global expansion, Getir has secured funding to focus on Turkey. Mubadala (Abu Dhabi’s state-owned investment firm) and G Squared are reportedly among those financing the Turkish-only pivot.

Getir says its US subsidiary, FreshDirect, which it bought late last year, will continue to operate. But the company suggested to Reuters it was open to offers for its existing assets in the markets it’s leaving.

The startup was founded in 2015 and exploded in popularity in Turkey. From 2017 to 2023, it raised over $2.3 billion from investors as it sought global corporate conquest, scooping up smaller competitors along the way. TechCrunch says that, in early 2023, Getir had 32,000 employees.

Netflix will stop disclosing the number of people who signed up for its service, as well as the revenue it generates from each subscriber from next year, the company announced on Thursday. It will focus, instead, on highlighting revenue growth and the amount of time spent on its platform.

“In our early days, when we had little revenue or profit, membership growth was a strong indicator of our future potential,” the company said in a letter to shareholders. “But now we’re generating very substantial profit and free cash flow.”

Netflix revealed that the service added 9.33 million subscribers over the last few months, bringing the total number of paying households worldwide to nearly 270 million. Despite its decision to stop reporting user numbers each quarter, Netflix said that the company will “announce major subscriber milestones as we cross them,” which means we’ll probably hear about it when it crosses 300 million.

Netflix estimates that more than half a billion people around the world watch TV shows and movies through its service, an audience it is now figuring out how to squeeze even more money out of through new pricing tiers, a crackdown on password-sharing, and showing ads. Over the last few years, it has also steadily added games like the Grand Theft Auto trilogy, Hades, Dead Cells, Braid, and more, to its catalog.

Subscriber metrics are an important signal to Wall Street because they show how quickly a company is growing. But Netflix’s move to stop reporting these is something that we’ve seen from other companies before. In February, Meta announced that it would no longer break out the number of daily and monthly Facebook users each quarter but only reveal how many people collectively used Facebook, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram. In 2018, Apple, too, stopped reporting the number of iPhones, iPads, and Macs it sold each quarter, choosing to focus, instead, on how much money it made in each category.

TSMC is the world’s biggest chipmaker and its products are found in everything from phones to game consoles and computers. But devices using TSMC chips could become more expensive if manufacturers opt to buy ones that the company makes outside of its home base of Taiwan.

“If a customer requests to be in a certain geographical area, the customer needs to share the incremental cost,” TSMC CEO CC Wei said on an earnings call. “In today’s fragmented globalization environment, cost will be higher for everyone, including TSMC, our customers and our competitors.”

Talks with customers over price increases have already started. As the Financial Times points out, it’s more expensive for TSMC to manufacture chips outside of Taiwan (where over 90 percent of the planet’s most advanced semiconductors are made). But the company will be passing on those costs amid a push by companies and governments to increase chip supply outside of Taiwan, over which China is attempting to control.

TSMC has plants in Japan and is building several in Arizona, the first of which started operating this month and is expected to go into full production this year. It’s also constructing a plant in Germany.

In addition, the US government last week agreed to provide the company with $6.6 billion in funding under the CHIPS Act, which seeks to bolster semiconductor manufacturing in the country. In return, TSMC pledged to up its US investment by $25 billion to $65 billion. Aligned with that, the company announced plans to build a third US plant by the end of the decade and to start making more advanced 2nm chips by 2028.

Meanwhile, TSMC expects its manufacturing costs to increase in Taiwan. That’s because power prices there are soaring. An earthquake earlier this month is also expected to have a negative effect on the company’s profitability, as is its struggle to make the manufacturing of its most advanced 3nm chips more efficient.

Apple, NVIDIA, AMD and Qualcomm are among TSMC’s more notable customers. So if they end up buying chips from the company’s US, Japan or Germany fabs, their manufacturing costs could go up. Take a wild guess who’d end up having to eat the cost of those increased expenses so device makers can maintain their profit margins.