☕️ Meta plans to cut 20% of its workforce

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In today's Techpresso:

🪓 Meta plans to cut 20% of its workforce

🤖 Travis Kalanick launches new robotics startup

🔓 Meta removes end-to-end encryption from Instagram DMs

💰 Trump administration to receive $10 billion TikTok fee

🪦 Digg shuts down just two months after its comeback

Plus: 🎁 10 other news you might like, 🧰 5 tools, and 📚 3 papers.

🪓 Meta plans to cut 20% of its workforce LINK

Meta is considering cutting around 20% of its workforce, which would eliminate roughly 15,800 jobs from its nearly 79,000 employees, though no timeline or final number has been set.

The planned reductions come as Meta ramps up AI spending, with up to $600 billion earmarked for data center infrastructure by 2028 and large compensation packages to recruit top researchers.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg has pointed to AI-driven efficiency gains, saying projects that used to require big teams can now be done by a single person, echoing similar cuts across the tech industry.

🤖 Travis Kalanick launches new robotics startup LINK

Uber founder Travis Kalanick has launched a new robotics company called Atoms, which will operate in the food, mining, and transportation industries and absorbs his existing ghost kitchen company, CloudKitchens.

Kalanick said Atoms will build a "wheelbase for robots" focused on specialized machines rather than humanoids, and he is close to acquiring Pronto, an autonomous vehicle startup for industrial and mining sites.

The Information reported that Kalanick has "major backing" from Uber and has told people he wants to be more aggressive in rolling out self-driving technology than Waymo, though Atoms' website does not mention Uber.

🔓 Meta removes end-to-end encryption from Instagram DMs LINK

Meta is removing the option for end-to-end encryption in Instagram DMs, with the feature set to stop working after May 8, 2026, according to an update on its support page.

A Meta spokesperson said the company is retiring the feature because very few people were opting in, and pointed users toward WhatsApp for end-to-end encrypted messaging instead.

The decision comes as internal documents from a New Mexico child safety trial show Meta executives debating the trade-offs between privacy and safety related to encryption across its platforms.

💰 Trump administration to receive $10 billion TikTok fee LINK

The Trump administration is set to receive roughly $10 billion from investors in the recently completed deal to take control of TikTok's U.S. business, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Investors including Oracle, Silver Lake, and Abu Dhabi's MGX already paid about $2.5 billion to the Treasury Department at closing, with subsequent payments planned until the total reaches $10 billion.

Administration officials said the fee is justified, citing Trump's role in rescuing TikTok's U.S. operations and guiding negotiations with China while tackling lawmakers' national security concerns.

🪦 Digg shuts down just two months after its comeback LINK

Digg, the link-sharing site Kevin Rose relaunched earlier this year, is laying off a large portion of its staff just two months after its comeback, though the company says it is not closing down.

The startup said it was overwhelmed by sophisticated AI bots and automated accounts from its earliest days, which ruined the voting system it relied on to rank content and made results untrustworthy.

The Digg app has been pulled from the App Store, Rose will return to work on the project full-time, and a small team plans to rebuild the site as something "genuinely different."

Other news you might like

• The MacBook Neo is Apple's most repairable laptopLINK

• Prime Video's ad-free plan gets a price increase, and a new nameLINK

• Adobe to pay $75 million settlement for making it too hard to cancel subscriptionsLINK

• FBI Investigating After Malware Found Lurking in Steam PC GamesLINK

• BuzzFeed Nearing Bankruptcy After Disastrous Turn Toward AILINK

• Microsoft is working to eliminate PC gaming's "compiling shaders" wait timesLINK

• Musk says Tesla's mega AI chip fab project to launch in seven daysLINK

🧰 Trending tools

Agent 37: a managed container service offering 1 vCPU and 4GB RAM with terminal access and app integrations for $3.99/month instead of typical $20 hosting plans.LINK

Lemon: a voice-activated assistant that executes tasks across apps via fn+speak, handling emails, documents, and searches without tab-switching to maintain workflow focus.LINK

Struct: an AI agent that analyzes logs, metrics, traces, and code to automatically diagnose the root cause of engineering alerts and incidents.LINK

Socra: an AI learning platform that uses Socratic questioning to help you build structured knowledge through interactive dialogue and personalized feedback sessions.LINK

Campee: a lightweight, ad-free planning poker tool requiring no signup, letting agile teams start estimation sessions instantly without tracking or distractions.LINK

📚 Trending papers & reports

Terraforming Mars would require delivering 3.4 million tons of greenhouse gases annually for centuries, exceeding current global industrial capacity by orders of magnitude, making it practically infeasible with foreseeable technology.LINK

Hardware-aware graph preprocessing boosts graph neural network speed by up to 2.8x by reorganizing data to match how GPUs actually access memory, reducing wasted cycles.LINK

Language models for audio compression achieve 4.27 bits per sample on music files, outperforming FLAC by 15% while maintaining perfect quality through lossless encoding.LINK

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