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Online Marketplace Fiverr To Lay Off 30% of Workforce In AI Push

Slashdot.org - 10 hours 6 min ago
Fiverr is laying off 250 employees, or about 30% of its workforce, as it restructures to become an "AI-first" company. "We are launching a transformation for Fiverr, to turn Fiverr into an AI-first company that's leaner, faster, with a modern AI-focused tech infrastructure, a smaller team, each with substantially greater productivity, and far fewer management layers," CEO Micha Kaufman said. Reuters reports: While it isn't clear what kinds of jobs will be impacted, Fiverr operates a self-service digital marketplace where freelancers can connect with businesses or individuals requiring digital services like graphic design, editing or programming. Most processes on the platform take place with minimal employee intervention as ordering, delivery and payments are automated. The company's name comes from most gigs starting at $5 initially, but as the business grew, the firm has introduced subscription services and raised the bar for service prices. Fiverr said it does not expect the job cuts to materially impact business activities across the marketplace in the near term and plans to reinvest part of the savings in the business.

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Our new Waltham Cross data center is part of our two-year, £5 billion investment to help power the UK’s AI economy.Our new Waltham Cross data center is part of our two-year, £5 billion investment to help power the UK’s AI economy.

GoogleBlog - 13 hours 6 min ago
Google is deepening our roots in the UK with the opening of our new data centre in Waltham Cross, Hertfordshire.It’s part of a £5 billion investment including capital ex…
Categories: Technology

OpenAI's First Study On ChatGPT Usage

Slashdot.org - Mon, 09/15/2025 - 22:30
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Today, OpenAI's Economic Research Team went a long way toward answering that question, on a population level, releasing a first-of-its-kind National Bureau of Economic Research working paper (in association with Harvard economist David Denning) detailing how people end up using ChatGPT across time and tasks. While other research has sought to estimate this kind of usage data using self-reported surveys, this is the first such paper with direct access to OpenAI's internal user data. As such, it gives us an unprecedented direct window into reliable usage stats for what is still the most popular application of LLMs by far. After digging through the dense 65-page paper, here are seven of the most interesting and/or surprising things we discovered about how people are using OpenAI today. Here are the seven most interesting and surprising findings from the study: 1. ChatGPT is now used by "nearly 10% of the world's adult population," up from 100 million users in early 2024 to over 700 million users in 2025. Daily traffic is about one-fifth of Google's at 2.6 billion GPT messages per day. 2. Long-term users' daily activity has plateaued since June 2025. Almost all recent growth comes from new sign-ups experimenting with ChatGPT, not from established users increasing their usage. 3. 46% of users are aged 18-25, making ChatGPT especially popular among the youngest adult cohort. Factoring in under-18 users (not counted in the study), the majority of ChatGPT users likely weren't alive in the 20th century. 4. At launch in 2022, ChatGPT was 80% male-dominated. By late 2025, the balance has shifted: 52.4% of users are now female. 5. In 2024, work vs. personal use was close to even. By mid-2025, 72% of usage is non-work related -- people are using ChatGPT more for personal, creative, and casual needs than for productivity. 6. 28% of all conversations involve writing assistance (emails, edits, translations). For work-related queries, that jumps to 42% overall, and 52% among business/management jobs. Furthermore, the report found that editing and critiquing text is more common than generating text from scratch. 7. 14.9% of work-related usage is dealt with "making decisions and solving problems." This shows people don't just use ChatGPT to do tasks -- they use it as an advisor or co-pilot to help weigh options and guide choices.

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FTC Probes Whether Ticketmaster Does Enough To Stop Resale Bots

Slashdot.org - Mon, 09/15/2025 - 20:25
The FTC is investigating whether Ticketmaster is doing enough to prevent bots from illegally reselling tickets on its platform, with a decision on the matter coming within weeks, according to Bloomberg (paywalled). Reuters reports: The 2016 law prohibits the use of bots and other methods to bypass ticket purchase limits set by online sellers. As part of the probe, FTC investigators are assessing whether Ticketmaster has a financial incentive to allow resellers to circumvent its ticket limit rules, according to the report. A settlement is also possible, Bloomberg reported. If the FTC pursues a case and Live Nation loses, the company could face billions of dollars in penalties, as the law permits fines of up to $53,000 per violation.

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'Meta Ray-Ban Display' Glasses Design, HUD Clips Leak

Slashdot.org - Mon, 09/15/2025 - 19:45
A leaked Meta video revealed upcoming "Meta Ray-Ban Display" smart glasses with a monocular HUD and sEMG wristband control, set to debut at Connect 2025 for around $800. Despite past hesitation, it looks like EssilorLuxottica has agreed to co-brand after Meta invested $3.5 billion in the company, taking a 3% stake. UploadVR reports: Meta's HUD glasses with the sEMG wristband will in fact be Ray-Ban branded, a leaked video which also depicts the HUD and wristband in action reveals. A quickly removed unlisted video on Meta's YouTube channel showed what will soon be Meta and EssilorLuxottica's full lineup: - The regular Ray-Ban Meta glasses. - The recently-launched Oakley Meta HSTN glasses. - The rumored Oakley Meta Sphaera glasses, with eye protection and a centered camera. - The rumored monocular heads-up display (HUD) glasses controlled by Meta's long-in-development sEMG wristband, which are labeled as "Meta Ray-Ban" with the word "Display" underneath. The smart glasses are expected to be made official during the Meta Connect 2025 keynote at 5pm PT on Wednesday.

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Robinhood Plans To Launch a Startups Fund Open To All Retail Investors

Slashdot.org - Mon, 09/15/2025 - 19:02
Robinhood has filed with the SEC to launch "Robinhood Ventures Fund I," a publicly traded fund designed to give retail investors access to startup shares before IPOs. TechCrunch reports: While the current version of the application is public, Robinhood hasn't filled in the fine-print yet. This means we don't know how many shares it plans to sell, nor other details like the management fee it plans to charge. It's also unclear which startups it hopes this fund will eventually hold. The paperwork says it "expects" to invest in aerospace and defense, AI, fintech, robotics as well as software for consumers and enterprises. Robinhood's big pitch is that retail investors are being left out of the gains that are amassed by startup investors like VCs. That's true to an extent. "Accredited investors" -- or those with a net worth large enough to handle riskier investments -- already have a variety of ways of buying equity in startups, such as with venture firms like OurCrowd. Retail investors that are not rich enough to be accredited have more limited options. There are funds similar to what Robinhood has proposed, including Cathy Wood's ARK Venture Fund, a mutual fund which holds stakes in companies like Anthropic, Databricks, OpenAI, SpaceX, and others. [...] This new closed-end "Ventures Fund I" is a more classic, mutual fund-style, approach. As to when Robinhood's new fund will be available we don't know that either yet.

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Vibe Coding Has Turned Senior Devs Into 'AI Babysitters'

Slashdot.org - Mon, 09/15/2025 - 18:20
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Carla Rover once spent 30 minutes sobbing after having to restart a project she vibe coded. Rover has been in the industry for 15 years, mainly working as a web developer. She's now building a startup, alongside her son, that creates custom machine learning models for marketplaces. She called vibe coding a beautiful, endless cocktail napkin on which one can perpetually sketch ideas. But dealing with AI-generated code that one hopes to use in production can be "worse than babysitting," she said, as these AI models can mess up work in ways that are hard to predict. She had turned to AI coding in a need for speed with her startup, as is the promise of AI tools. "Because I needed to be quick and impressive, I took a shortcut and did not scan those files after the automated review," she said. "When I did do it manually, I found so much wrong. When I used a third-party tool, I found more. And I learned my lesson." She and her son wound up restarting their whole project -- hence the tears. "I handed it off like the copilot was an employee," she said. "It isn't." Rover is like many experienced programmers turning to AI for coding help. But such programmers are also finding themselves acting like AI babysitters -- rewriting and fact-checking the code the AI spits out. A recent report by content delivery platform company Fastly found that at least 95% of the nearly 800 developers it surveyed said they spend extra time fixing AI-generated code, with the load of such verification falling most heavily on the shoulders of senior developers. These experienced coders have discovered issues with AI-generated code ranging from hallucinating package names to deleting important information and security risks. Left unchecked, AI code can leave a product far more buggy than what humans would produce. Working with AI-generated code has become such a problem that it's given rise to a new corporate coding job known as "vibe code cleanup specialist." TechCrunch spoke to experienced coders about their time using AI-generated code about what they see as the future of vibe coding. Thoughts varied, but one thing remained certain: The technology still has a long way to go. "Using a coding co-pilot is kind of like giving a coffee pot to a smart six-year-old and saying, 'Please take this into the dining room and pour coffee for the family,'" Rover said. Can they do it? Possibly. Could they fail? Definitely. And most likely, if they do fail, they aren't going to tell you. "It doesn't make the kid less clever," she continued. "It just means you can't delegate [a task] like that completely." Further reading: The Software Engineers Paid To Fix Vibe Coded Messes

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Internet Archive Ends Legal Battle With Record Labels Over Historic Recordings

Slashdot.org - Mon, 09/15/2025 - 17:40
The Internet Archive has reached a confidential settlement with Universal Music Group and other major labels, "ending a closely watched copyright battle over the nonprofit's effort to digitize and stream historic recordings," reports the San Francisco Chronicle. From the report: The case (PDF), UMG Recordings, Inc. v. Internet Archive, targeted the Archive's Great 78 Project, an initiative to digitize more than 400,000 fragile shellac records from the early 20th century. The collection includes music by artists such as Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday, and has been made available online for free public access. Record labels including Universal, Sony Music Entertainment and Capitol Records had sought $621 million in damages, arguing the Archive's streaming of these recordings constituted copyright infringement. The Internet Archive, based in San Francisco's Richmond District, describes itself as a digital library dedicated to providing "universal access to all knowledge." Its director of library services, Chris Freeland, acknowledged the settlement in a brief statement. "The parties have reached a confidential resolution of all claims and will have no further public comment on this matter," he wrote.

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