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Is this a bad time to be in tech? If you ask employees at Google, I am sure the answer to that question will be a hard YES. After laying off over 12,000 workers last year, Google is laying off an additional 1000.

Employee layoffs are common during an economic recession or when the company is not profitable. But Google is not strapped for cash. The company is said to have made more than $20 billion in profits in Q4.

So why the layoffs, and where is all the money going to? One word - Artificial Intelligence.

Like most other tech companies, Google is investing heavily in AI, and their investment seems to be paying off, at least for the company. In a not-so-subtle way, Google’s senior vice president revealed that “AI will do less important” jobs.

AI development is progressing rapidly. This means more and more “restructuring” (layoffs) is to be expected and according to INC, employees at Google are worried.

Here is the big question, is anybody safe? One Redditor said the only way to win is to job-hop. But there’s another way out and that’s starting a side hustle today.

A few months ago, AI-generated videos were easy to spot. Some details would appear blurry or poorly represented. But as more and more generative AI companies pop up, we’ve seen a lot of competition in the sector.

However, one company has always led the pack and that company is OpenAI. They kickstarted the AI race with the launch of ChatGpt and now, they have launched another AI called SORA.

AI-generated video comparison;

chatgptricks

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What is SORA?

This is a generative AI capable of creating videos from text prompts or still images. Videos generated with SORA are realistic and imaginative and are already going viral on social media.

Here are a few clips of videos generated with SORA.

According to OpenAI, SORA is capable of generating complex scenes with multiple characters, specific motions, and accurate details of the subject and background.

The company also said that SORA understands how objects in the video exist in the physical world. And its deep understanding of natural language helps it accurately interpret prompts.

But it’s not perfect yet. OpenAI has announced that SORA is still being evaluated for risk and harm. And it is available to visual artists, designers, and filmmakers whose feedback will help fine-tune the AI.

Reddit, a very popular online forum recently entered into a deal worth about $60 million per year. According to inside sources, the deal will give an unnamed AI company access to user-generated content on Reddit for use in training its AI model.

Like most high-value deals of this nature, the users did not give their consent, and neither do they stand to benefit in any way. Although the deal would not be possible without them.

And Redditors are not happy about this. Some of them have stormed the platform to air their grievances and sabotage the deal by providing inaccurate information or deleting their past messages. Others just made a joke of it all.

Here are snippets of some hilarious comments left by Redditors

On a more serious note, would this deal be good for Reddit in the long run? The company already stepped on many toes when it killed third-party apps. This new deal may be one too many and could force Redditors to start looking for other alternatives to Reddit.

That is if they are not doing so already.