LONDON: Meta Platforms Inc. on Wednesday carried out another round of job cuts, this time hitting engineers and adjacent tech teams, as Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg further moved to streamline the business in a bid to make 2023 a “year of efficiency.”
Meta in March became the first Big Tech company to announce a second round of mass layoffs, which it said would take place in three main batches over several months and impact 10,000 employees.
Wednesday’s cuts, though expected, prompted expressions of frustration from Meta employees. Layoffs were the subject of the most popular questions posted on an internal company forum on Wednesday ahead of an upcoming employee town hall.
“You’ve shattered the morale and confidence in leadership of many high performers who work with intensity. Why should we stay at Meta?” read one question seen by Reuters.
The question references comments Zuckerberg made last year urging employees to work with more “intensity” to meet the Facebook and Instagram parent company’s business challenges.
The company declined a Reuters request for comment.
Meta’s first round of layoffs in the fall hit more than 11,000 employees, or 13 percent of its workforce at the time, and preceded other major tech companies shedding thousands of employees after a pandemic-led boom in digital advertising and cloud computing.
With the restructuring, Meta is also shelving lower-priority projects and “flattening” layers of middle management.
Investors have rewarded the company for downsizing.
Meta shares have surged about 80 percent this year, outperforming the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite’s 16 percent rise in the period.
The company, which will announce its first-quarter results on April 26, is expected to benefit from a modest pickup in the digital advertising market and regulatory pressure on chief rival TikTok.
Meta lays off tech teams, battering employee morale
https://arab.news/jfzk2
Meta lays off tech teams, battering employee morale
- Employees expressed frustration, low confidence after latest round of layoffs
- Investors rewarded Meta's decision to downsize the company, shares surged 80%
Google launches AI music model in English, Arabic
- Lyria 3 lets users generate 30-second audio tracks via Gemini
DUBAI: Google has launched Lyria 3, a generative AI music model currently in final testing, that can be used via the Gemini website and app to create customized audio tracks.
Users can provide text prompts such as “an upbeat, modern Arabic fusion track for Ramadan” or “a massive, anthemic rock song with an emotive male singer.”
They can add images to their prompts and ask the model to generate a track that reflects the ideas within the pictures. They can also add lyrics or ask the model to generate them.
Lyria 3 then produces a 30-second track along with cover art generated by Google’s artificial intelligence image generator and editor, Nano Banana.
Google said the aim was not to create a musical masterpiece or for copying existing artists but to let users express themselves in unique ways. However, if a prompt specifies a particular artist, the model can draw inspiration their style while still creating an original track.
Lyria was launched in 2023 and is the company’s most advanced music generation model. SynthID, Google’s tool to watermark and identify AI-generated content, is embedded in all tracks it creates.
Users can also upload a file to check whether it was generated using Google AI. Gemini will examine it for SynthID and provide a response based on its analysis.
Lyria 3 is available in Arabic, English, Spanish, French, Hindi, Japanese, Korean and Portuguese, with more languages expected in the future. It will be available on the mobile app in the coming days.
