Netflix has released at least one movie a week for the past two years – I challenge you to name them all! – but for 2023, the company is changing course. According to Bloomberg, the streaming giant is restructuring its movie division and releasing fewer movies overall. Despite the vast number of titles previously released by Netflix, only a few have won acclaim, achieved significant streaming hours, or had the cultural impact that some of the biggest blockbusters have achieved. (According to the company’s Top 10 Most Watched Movies of 2021 and 2022 page, they include Red notice, do not look up and Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery.)
Netflix has ramped up film development after studios began building their own streaming services instead of licensing their films to the company. This restructuring will combine the team working on small projects with budgets of $30 million or less, and the unit that produces medium-budget films that cost $30 million to $80 million. There’s also a big-budget branch of the film development department – presumably involved in the aforementioned hits. There is no word yet on whether the restructuring will affect this part of the business.
– Matt Smith
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Testing the limits of today’s leading AI chatbots.
Engadget
The race to generate AI is on, and the current leaders seem to be Google’s Bard and Microsoft’s Bing AI, which is powered by ChatGPT. But what are the limits of the questions it can answer? We asked Google’s Bard chatbots a series of questions to see which one is better at providing facts, replacing us at work, or engaging in existential debates. We also looked at their speed, transparency and the likelihood of them breaking if we start pushing its buttons. And don’t worry, Bing AI got the same treatment.
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Through technical questions.
Apple won an appeal against an investigation launched by the UK’s antitrust watchdog last fall. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) launched a full investigation into Apple and Google in November. At the time, the regulator said many UK businesses felt constrained by the “grip” the two tech giants had on mobile browsing. The study also sought to determine whether Apple is restricting the cloud gaming market through its App Store policies. The company said the CMA should have launched the study at the same time it first published its Mobile Ecosystems report in June last year. The Competition Appeal Tribunal (CAT), the court that oversees CMA cases, agreed with Apple, saying the regulator gave notice of its investigation too late.
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In addition, Tesla was ordered to rehire a worker it illegally fired.
Elon Musk violated US labor laws in 2018 when he tweeted that Tesla factory workers would give up stock options if they chose to unionize, according to a federal appeals court. In May 2018, a Twitter user asked Musk about his union stance. “There is nothing stopping the Tesla team at our car plant from voting for a union. They could do it if they wanted to,” he tweeted back. “But why pay union dues and give up stock options for nothing? Our safety record is 2x better than when the plant was UAW and everyone now gets health care.” Tesla claims the tweet was Musk’s way of pointing out that workers at other automakers don’t get stock options. The court ordered Musk to delete the tweet. As of this writing, the tweet is still out there.
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