“We’ve been building with AI since 2007,” its head of product, Tomer Cohen, said in an interview with TechCrunch this week.
Below is a run-down of some of the new features:Job searches and job applications: We’re getting a new way to search for jobs using conversational prompts.
You can be sure that LinkedIn is pushing its search algorithms to tap into the interest, but it’s also boosting its content with AI in another way.
The third big area LinkedIn is leaning heavily on AI is search.
Alongside all this, LinkedIn is expanding availability of Recruiter 2024, adding more tools for marketers, and introducing enhanced, premium company pages for small businesses.
It’s been 20 years since Shira Yevin, the lead singer of punk band Shiragirl drove a pink RV into the Vans Warped Tour grounds, the now-defunct punk rock festival notorious for being male-dominated.
After Shiragirl Stage, Yevin went on a “lifelong crusade for carving out a space for women in music and other male-dominated industries,” she told TechCrunch.
This began with the launch of Gritty in Pink in 2020, a Live Nation-backed platform designed to empower women in the music industry.
Like freelance platforms Fiverr and Upwork, users can publish listings to highlight their services on InPink’s marketplace and connect with major brands.
Yevin said InPink is already working with one sports client, Angel City Football Club (the LA-based women’s soccer league), to help them hire talent for pre-shows.
The CFPB is permanently banning BloomTech from consumer lending activities and its CEO, Austen Allred, from student lending for a period of ten years.
Allred founded BloomTech, which rebranded from the Lambda School in 2022 after cutting half its staff, in 2017.
(According to the CFPB, BloomTech originated “at least” 11,000 such loans.)
BloomTech didn’t market the loans as such, saying that they didn’t create debt and were “risk free,” and advertised a 71%-86% job placement rate.
And, unbeknownst to many students, BloomTech was selling a portion of its loans to investors while depriving recipients of rights they should’ve had under a federal protection known as the Holder Rule.
IBM has pledged to skill 2 million people in AI by 2030; Intel has said it’ll upskill over 30 million with AI in the same timeframe.
Yet it’s not clear how many AI roles will be available then.
According to a recent analysis by Lightcast, a labor market analytics firm, the demand for AI roles is decreasing, not increasing.
“Consortium members commit to developing worker pathways particularly in job sectors that will increasingly integrate artificial intelligence technology,” the spokesperson said.
Big Tech has big promises to keep, particularly where it concerns the future of work and the tech industry’s role in shaping it.
Turnitin laid off staff earlier this year, after CEO forecast AI would allow it to cut headcountPeople worry that advances in AI will lead to job losses, but rarely does a company’s CEO openly admit that AI will help to reduce their headcount.
TechCrunch learned that Turnitin laid off around 15 people earlier this year, as part of broader organizational changes.
Klarna recently announced that its AI Assistant can do the job of 700 workers, shocking the industry.
(Klarna later clarified that the customer service workers the AI was replacing were hired from outsourcing firms, not direct employees.)
Turnitin confirmed its layoffs in a statement to TechCrunch, but not the headcount:
Veho, a package delivery company, confirmed that it laid off 19% of its employee headcount, or about 65 jobs.
As first reported by The Information, these layoffs came after Veho grew revenue nearly 90% in 2023.
That was after announcing $125 million in Series A funding two months prior, the round that pushed Veho into unicorn territory.
At that time, Veho said it had 910 employees across corporate and warehouse teams and was looking to fill additional positions.
Veho remains optimistic, telling TechCrunch that its capital position “is very strong and we are building on our strong momentum and record peak season in 2023.”
Duolingo is the latest company to cite AI as a reason for job cuts.
The company confirmed it cut around 10% of its contractor workforce at the end of 2023, as it turns to AI models like OpenAI’s GPT-4 to streamline content production and translations.
“The reason [Duolingo] gave is that AI can come up with content and translations, alternative translations, and pretty much anything else translators did.
Duolingo also has its own proprietary AI model, “Birdbrain” that personalizes lesson content.
Understandably, both the contractors and Duolingo users were upset by the job cuts, as it adds to the ever-growing fear that AI will replace human workers.
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