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OpenAI is expanding to Japan, with the opening of a new Tokyo office and plans for a GPT-4 model optimized specifically for the Japanese language.
Japan is the current G7 chair and President of the G7’s Hiroshima AI Process, an initiative to promote AI safety, including stronger AI governance.
EnterprisingAs president of OpenAI Japan, Nagasaki will be tasked with building a local team on the ground to double down on OpenAI’s business in the country.
OpenAI says ChatGPT is also being used by local governments to “improve the efficiency of public services in Japan.”ChatGPT has long been conversant in multiple languages, including Japanese.
For now, OpenAI is giving early access to the GPT-4 custom model to some local businesses, with access gradually opened up via the OpenAI API “in the coming months.”
Working from home isn’t going away, even if some CEOs wish it would Most workers crave flexibility and work-life balanceWhen I started working from home in the late 1980s as a freelance technical writer, I was clearly an outlier.
Today, 14% of U.S. workers work at home full time (including me), and that number is expected to increase to 20% by next year, according to data published by USA Today.
Wayfair, the Boston-based online furniture company, concentrated on remote workers over in-office folks in a layoff earlier this year, according to a WSJ report.
Meanwhile Michael Bloomberg suggested remote workers weren’t actually working, but playing golf (which honestly sounds like projecting to me).
That’s a lot of executive energy being directed against working from home and toward working in the office.
As Microsoft unbundles Teams, it might not have the impact on Slack you thinkOne of the primary reasons that Slack joined forces with Salesforce in 2021 in a $28 billion deal was to give the communications company the clout to compete with Microsoft.
For years, company co-founder Stewart Butterfield railed against Microsoft bundling Teams with Office 365, calling it anticompetitive and saying at one point that Microsoft was “unhealthily obsessed with killing Slack.”The company went so far as to file a complaint against Microsoft with the European Union in 2020.
This morning, Microsoft announced it was finally unbundling Teams from Office 365 in the future, although current customers could continue to use the bundled license.
The market has matured to the point that many larger firms have made their choice, and since swapping out solutions isn’t a trivial matter, unbundling Teams is unlikely to have an appreciable impact on market share.
What’s more, rather than aiding Slack, he sees this as helping Microsoft to get Teams into more accounts where companies weren’t buying Office 365 licenses.
Microsoft will introduce a new version of Microsoft 365 and Office 365 subscription service that excludes Teams, unbundling a suite following scrutiny from the European Union regulator and complaints from rival Slack.
The move follows Microsoft agreeing to sell Office 365 suite sans Microsoft Teams offering in the EU and Switzerland last year.
The company introduced Teams as a complimentary offering to the Office 365 suite in 2017.
Microsoft has enjoyed an unfair advantage by coupling the two offerings, many businesses have argued.
In a statement to Reuters, Microsoft said the unbundling “also addresses feedback from the European Commission by providing multinational companies more flexibility when they want to standardize their purchasing across geographies.”Reuters reported that Microsoft will introduce the new Office 365 lineups on Monday.
NFT fantasy sports startup Sorare lays off 13% of staff, as web3 gaming continues to sputter Sorare is not completely shuttering its New York office but is shifting more employees to ParisWeb3-enabled fantasy sports platform Sorare laid off 22 employees based in its New York office in February.
The company will backfill most of these laid-off roles in Paris, according to Julia, with plans to hire more than 20 roles in the next six months.
Sorare is not shutting down its New York office.
Sorare saw $200 million in user transaction volume in 2023, a source familiar with the situation said.
Web3 gaming startup Mythical Games raised nearly $300 million in venture money before holding three rounds of layoffs.
Disney-owned animation studio Pixar is poised to undergo layoffs this year, TechCrunch has learned and the company confirmed.
The studio stressed the layoffs are not imminent, but will take place later this year as Pixar focuses on making less content.
According to insiders, the Pixar layoffs include headcount that was hired for Disney+ — hires Disney pushed on Pixar to produce for its streaming division, which hasn’t yet turned a profit.
In Q4, Disney+ added 7 million new subscribers, bringing its total to 150.2 million, including Hotstar, beating analysts’ expectations of 148.15 million subscribers.
A Disney subsidiary, Pixar is best known for films like “Finding Nemo,” “Monsters, Inc.” “WALL-E,” the “Toy Story” franchise, and others.
The FTG+ is taking steps to ensure its position as the leading authority on technology regulation. This includes establishing an office to help it keep up with the rapidly changing…
