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Hard Numbers: Not-so-Swift, Job cuts, Microsoft’s milestone, Meta goes to Indiana, Blocking bots

January 30, 2024
Scott Nover
Taylor Swift at a premiere of "Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour" in Los Angeles, California, in October 2023.

Taylor Swift at a premiere of "Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour" in Los Angeles, California, in October 2023.

REUTERS/Mario Anzuoni

45 million: AI-generated pornographic images of Taylor Swift circulated around social media sites last week, spurring Swift’s team to contemplate legal action. On X, formerly Twitter, one such post had 45 million views before it was finally removed for violating the site’s rules.

8,000: Tech companies are slashing jobs to invest in AI. The German software firm SAP announced it plans to cut or restructure 8,000 jobs — training some of the employees to work alongside AI.

3 trillion: SAP isn’t alone: Microsoft cut 1,900 jobs from its video game business just as AI has pushed its market capitalization past the $3 trillion mark. Yes, Microsoft, which has spent $13 billion investing in OpenAI in addition to its internal work on AI, is the most valuable company in the world.

800 million: Facebook parent company Meta announced it is building an $800 million data center in Jeffersonville, Indiana, to support its AI efforts. We detailed Meta’s controversial ambitions to build open-source AGI, or artificial general intelligence, in last week’s newsletter.

90: News companies are pushing back against AI companies training their models on their articles — at least not without proper payment. More than 90% of top news organizations, according to one estimate, have protections in place to stop data collection bots.

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