Happy Friday. On Wednesday, Twitter suffered an outage that temporarily prevented users from tweeting. It also introduced a huge change to the character limit for Twitter Blue subscribers: Those who pay for the subscription can now fire off up to 4,000-character-long missives, which is basically a novel compared to the standard 280-character limit.
So…is there any way to cause another outage, but only for those who try to send superlong tweets? No?
In today’s edition:
 Grammarly’s take on the boom in generative language models
 The auto industry wants to scoop up laid-off tech workers
—Hayden Field, Eoin Higgins, Dan McCarthy
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Francis Scialabba
Thanks to ChatGPT, text-focused AI is having a moment—but the Grammarly team has been tinkering with the tech since before it was cool.
Some context: In 2021, Grammarly was the 10th most valuable US startup, according to CB Insights data, after it raised $200 million in funding and boosted its valuation to $13 billion from $1 billion in 2019. Globally, Grammarly serves 30 million users every day, including 50,000 teams, according to the company.
- But the field has become crowded in recent years. One example: DeepL, a German AI startup best known for language translation and for its recent $1 billion valuation, recently released a tool called Write, which uses a neural network to correct grammatical errors and suggest alternate phrasing.
- And then there’s the recent generative AI boom, including text-based services like ChatGPT, which surpassed 1 million users in its first week.
But Grammarly executives believe the company is well-positioned, despite exploding interest in language-centric AI tools. Read the full story on Grammarly’s position here.—HF
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The search for a haircare solution that actually combats hair loss is o-v-e-r.
The beauty pros at Revela used AI to discover a magical molecule that targets the causes of hair loss directly. That molecule, ProCelinyl™, stimulates hair growth by reawakening dormant follicles.
This molecule saw a 97% success rate in clinical trials. And it works fast—according to board-certified dermatologist Dr. Daniel Sugai, Revela’s serum can yield results in just 6 weeks.
Revela’s so confident you’ll see results, they offer a money-back guarantee on all of their products.
Ready to experience quick + thick hair results? Get 15% off here.
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Sebastian Kahnert/picture alliance via Getty Images
Tech layoffs have dominated economic headlines as companies cut positions—but Silicon Valley’s loss is the auto industry’s gain. IT workers changing positions might find their next job in cars.
The automotive sector’s desire for IT workers is related to the narrow tech job market. Despite large firm layoffs, CompTIA VP of Industry research Seth Robinson told IT Brew that workers are finding positions in other sectors.
“The demand for technology workers is still outpacing the supply, even though more supply is being pumped into the system,” Robinson said. “Again, this is because the appetite for technology and the need for using technology as a competitive differentiator is only continuing to grow.”
Zoom out: Automotive hasn’t traditionally been a soft landing spot for IT workers—and it’s “still not leading the pack,” Robinson said.
Because of the unique challenges and specifications of developing and maintaining software and applications for 3,000-pound machines that travel at high speeds, there’s a need for IT workers joining the industry to have more knowledge of the context of the programming they will be doing. Read the full story from IT Brew here.—EH
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Francis Scialabba
Usually, we write about the business of tech. Here, we highlight the *tech* of tech.
Switcheroo: Nintendo held its first Nintendo Direct event for 2023, and leading the pack of Switch announcements was a trailer for the sequel to the latest, critically acclaimed installment in the Zelda franchise, Breath of the Wild. The much-anticipated follow-up will drop May 12 and cost $70—$10 more than similar Switch titles. Here’s a list of the other big announcements from the event.
Search wars 2.0: This week, we found out that tech giants are suckers for nostalgia just like the rest of us. Fueled by the meteoric rise of ChatGPT, Google and Microsoft ambled onto a classic battleground for internet companies, trading announcements about their search engines. Microsoft’s big idea is to bolster Bing with an OpenAI model that it claims is even more powerful than the one underpinning ChatGPT. Meanwhile, Google announced a handful of new AI features for both search and maps and said it’s rolling out an AI chatbot, Bard, to a handful of testers before unveiling it to the public in the coming weeks.
One more thing: Samsung’s new Galaxy S23 Ultra is apparently…really good at taking pictures of the moon.—DM
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Urupong/Getty Images
Stat: Social media users seem to mostly ignore platform prompts around sharing potentially false or misleading posts, per EU reports cited by Bloomberg. For example, EU TikTok users continued to share 71% of flagged posts, while FB users shared 75%.
Quote: “The vast majority of places I applied to were not the usual suspects in the tech industry…It seemed like companies who you wouldn’t think of as tech companies were hiring tech talent.”—Jeff Martin, a software engineer at Vistar Media, to the Wall Street Journal
Read: A look at Meta’s relatively cautious approach to chatbots, despite its AI leadership.
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Alibaba is throwing its hat into the language-model ring, announcing Wednesday that it’s working on a ChatGPT-esque tool as well.
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Arm is eyeing an IPO in 2023. Reminder: The chip design company was almost acquired by Nvidia last year, but the deal fell apart after mounting regulatory pushback.
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Meta is reportedly seeking to draw more teen users into Horizon Worlds, its VR app that has so far been slow to gain traction.
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Satya Nadella goes in-depth on Microsoft’s efforts to challenge Google search.
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GM and GlobalFoundries have signed a long-term deal to carve out “exclusive production capacity” at the chipmaker’s New York manufacturing facility.
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Three of the following news stories are true, and one...we made up. Can you spot the odd one out?
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Voice actors are reportedly facing increasing requests to sign contracts that would allow clients to use AI to replicate their voices.
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On Tuesday, Bing’s search market share surged to overtake Google for the first time ever thanks to its OpenAI integration.
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Zoom’s CEO said he would reduce his salary by 98% after announcing layoffs.
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An ad for Google’s new Bard AI featured the chatbot giving an incorrect answer to a question.
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Catch up on the top Tech Brew stories from the past few editions:
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There’s a lot of buzz around Bing at the moment, but it’d have a long way to go in order to overtake Google. In January, Google had ~93% of the global search-engine market, per StatCounter, while Bing was in second place with…3%.
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Written by
Hayden Field, Eoin Higgins, and Dan McCarthy
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