Following many months of controversy surrounding the thus far rather secretive Elon Musk venture, Neuralink, the company has run a 9-minute live broadcast on X with the first patient who received one of its implants — and the reveal was more than promising.

https://t.co/OMIeGGjYtG

— Neuralink (@neuralink) March 20, 2024

29-year-old Noland Arbaugh suffered a broken spine in a diving accident eight years ago, leaving him quadriplegic: completely paralysed from the neck down. The consequences and resultant dependence on others for just about everything need not be explained here, of course, so every invention that permits the patient to communicate with a machine is a life-changer.

Neuralink’s stated goal is “creating a general-purpose, high-bandwidth interface to the brain”, which would allow all humans to communicate with computers directly via thoughts rather than typing or talking.

That said, the obvious candidates for early testing are those most in need of such a technology to return to doing most basic things in life.

In the long run, it may even be possible to use this innovation to fully restore motor function in paralysed patients one day, as per Elon Musk’s comment under the video:

Long-term, it is possible to shunt the signals from the brain motor cortex past the damaged part of the spine to enable people to walk again and use their arms normally

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 21, 2024

As of now, however, even doing as little as being able to control a laptop is an enormous improvement in the quality of everyday life.

Using the Force

So, how does it work? What does it feel like? Noland explained that it’s like using the Force in Star Wars movies — you just command the cursor to move where you want it to wirelessly, with nothing else but your thoughts (and no cables sticking out of your head, like in the past).

The process is a bit more complex, of course, and initially involves visualising movement and imagining what you would do to make the cursor move to the place you want, while the implant learns to translate your intent into motion on the screen.

But once it’s been dialled in, it becomes intuitive. So intuitive, in fact, that once he got his implant under control, he stayed up for 8 hours straight playing Civilisation VI while lying in his bed.

He’s also playing online chess with other players on the internet and is learning Japanese and French.

Long sessions at the computer were previously difficult, since lack of motion for many hours causes pressure sores and requires assistance from family to move his body around even in the wheelchair.

Right now, however, he can stay comfortably in bed, relying on himself to control the computer with nothing but his thoughts. The only limitation is the implant’s battery, which needs to be recharged periodically.

He admits that not everything was smooth sailing and it’s still a work in progress, but the impact it has had on his life is profound:

“I would say that we have run into some issues. I don’t want people to think that it is the end of the journey, there’s still a lot of work to be done, but it has already changed my life.”

Noland Arbaugh

Even the initial surgery, while invasive, went well and Noland was out of hospital after just one day.

The same cannot, probably, be said of the monkeys Neuralink is using to develop another implant: one whose aim is restoring sight.

Monkeys see again?

Following the broadcast Elon went on to introduce another product, called Blindsight, dedicated to patients who had either lost their sight or were born blind.

I should mention that the Blindsight implant is already working in monkeys.

Resolution will be low at first, like early Nintendo graphics, but ultimately may exceed normal human vision.

(Also, no monkey has died or been seriously injured by a Neuralink device!)

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 21, 2024

As he explained in a short video clip attached to the post, “the visual part of the cortex is still there”, so that even in extreme cases of blindness at birth, sight may eventually be restored.

The implant is currently being tested in monkeys and, per Musk, “is already working”. The billionaire took the opportunity to jab back at his critics, after allegations of animal abuse and numerous deaths of test subjects (monkeys) cast shadow on Neuralink’s practices.

That said, if the early results are anything to go by, then even if that happens occasionally, it is perhaps a small price to pay for the life-changing effects the company’s technology may have on humans.

Featured Image Credit: Neuralink

Disclaimer: Opinions expressed below belong solely to the author.

On November 30, 2022, the day OpenAI released ChatGPT to the public, we were thrust into a completely new reality — though not an unfamiliar one, given how many sci-fi novels and movies predicted that one day we would be conversing with intelligent machines.

Launched around the same time, diffusion models showed us that computers can learn to generate imagery at will, followed by increasingly more sophisticated video footage, as recently exhibited by OpenAI’s Sora.

Quite overnight, computers have been granted powers to do things that thus far only humans could do — create, speak, design, draw, and write.

Since then, the AI craze has taken over the world. We’re discussing how and when robots will take our jobs, making millions of people redundant, before conquering the planet and threatening our very existence.

On their way to total dominance they appear to have already conquered the world of business. A seemingly endless stream of billions of dollars is being poured globally into companies building competing AI models and the hardware necessary to run them.

And everybody wants to get a piece of the pie.

Not only are we now getting laptops or smartphones with AI features, but also AI vacuum cleaners and lawnmowers. Millions of inanimate, electronic devices seem to be acquiring reasoning skills which are expected to turn our world upside down within a few short years.

Some experts in the field make bold predictions that Artificial General Intelligence — machines with reasoning capacity equal to human beings — could arrive in as little as three to eight years.

Even Nvidia’s CEO, Jensen Huang, predicted that AI would be able to pass all human tests within five years.

However, if history teaches us anything, we might be in for a much lengthier wait.

Law of diminishing returns

With the dawn of AI-enabled washing machines and refrigerators, I think it’s worth to pause and think if we’re not getting ahead of ourselves.

The nature of technological development is that it typically starts with a breakthrough before gradually tapering off as evolution and refinement of the new invention inevitably take more and more time. There is no reason why AI should be different.

Think of it this way — the first slice of pizza usually provides the most satisfaction. You get quite a lot of it with your second or third slices as well. But at some point in satisfying your hunger each bite you take will provide less and less gratification — less “marginal return” or “marginal utility”.

Remember how 5G was promoted as the next big thing in technology? But how many of us have really noticed any difference? 4G was good enough for the vast majority of everyday uses. 3G was a huge leap in performance over 2G, which in turn provided the largest marginal leap by making the web reasonably accessible on mobile devices for the first time.

Life-changing technological developments have always needed enormous effort, even if the path was clear to engineers and investors.

They also require a lot of time.

It had taken 25 years for general-purpose computers to leave military compounds and universities, making their debut in people’s homes in the early 1970s, and another 40 years before reaching global saturation.

These days, they are overtaken by personal, mobile devices such as smartphones, which can perform many of the same functions.

On the topic of mobile phones, the world’s first launched in 1983, but it had taken another 20 years for it to become an ubiquitous device even in the developed world.

Today, most humans have a smartphone in their pockets, a technological “revolution” which has, however, needed four decades to fully unfold.

Or let’s take a more recent example: Tesla.

The trailblazing EV company launched the Autopilot driver-assistance system for its cars in 2013, and ever since then, we’ve been promised that self-driving vehicles were just around the corner.

In fact, Elon Musk has made so many failed predictions on the topic, that it has a dedicated Wikipedia page.

Many, perhaps even most, people bought into these visions because the original Autopilot was already very good. If we can teach the car to drive itself in most situations, how difficult can it be to improve it so that it can drive us reliably all the time?

The answer is: very.

In fact, the parallel between self-driving and AI is particularly relevant, since both technologies aim to teach machines to behave and think like a human being.

And it’s why AI is likely to struggle going forward just as self-driving technologies have.

It’s easy to teach a car to reliably change lanes, adjust speed or avoid obstacles in most conditions — but it’s very difficult to make it adapt to those which are less predictable and flexibly judge the changing situation on the road.

In the same way, it’s far easier to make a machine learn to mimic human speech and writing in most situations, giving it an impression of intelligence. However, it is far more difficult to actually make it think.

If you don’t trust me on this you don’t have to look far for confirmation of the slowdown in AI development — just look at the progress of the past 15 months.

How big was the leap between ChatGPT 3.5 and 4?

How many new, important features have been added in the past year? We’re 15 months into the AI revolution and yet nearly all that the “intelligent” chatbots do is the same as on day 1: summarise documents, provide simple suggestions, write or rewrite documents, answer questions, write simple code.

It’s the same among image generators, so universally vilified by artists and designers.

After initial improvements that made images they produce more usable and with the recent addition of better handling of text, their outputs haven’t exactly improved by leaps and bounds.

Most are still limited to a quite paltry resolution of 1 megapixel (1024x1024px) and have problems with accuracy or consistency.

Making that first impression of doing something out of nothing was far easier — and far more noteworthy — than spending months grinding just to make sure AI-generated humans have five fingers in each hand.

Former US president, Donald Trump, experienced it first “hand” two months ago when he posted an AI generated picture of himself praying with… six fingers on his hands.

Even after well over a year since the launch of AI image generators to the public, they are still struggling with things that are obvious and very basic to humans. Fixing them keeps consuming significant effort — quite unexpectedly, considering how we are being told that AI is about to outsmart us.

This is where AI revolution is currently at: its “grind phase”, where thousands of engineers around the world are working very hard refining things that should be fairly easy if the technology was really advanced.

Making sure the “intelligent” models don’t hallucinate, that they provide accurate outputs at all times, that they don’t mislead or insult their users. A million details that still require human sweat to get right.

Growing inputs produce increasingly smaller incremental outputs.

Yann LeCun, Meta’s lead AI researcher, highlighted the problem with the current approach upon OpenAI’s reveal of Sora, its text-to-video generating tool: it can’t really think or perceive objects, scenes, people, animals it creates.

Let me clear a *huge* misunderstanding here.
The generation of mostly realistic-looking videos from prompts *does not* indicate that a system understands the physical world.
Generation is very different from causal prediction from a world model.
The space of plausible videos is… https://t.co/gBCdTOnDbp

— Yann LeCun (@ylecun) February 17, 2024

It merely tries to accurately predict what the next pixels in the sequence should be, without understanding what it actually depicts (even if it’s remarkably convincing at it).

It’s a really compelling approximation rather than an intelligent creation — and still only a prototype that isn’t expected to launch anytime soon.

Slow is good

We’re at a point where producing smaller and smaller improvements is going to require increasingly larger investments. Such is the reality of progress in every domain of life, though (think of how much more difficult it is to set a new World Record in 100m sprint today than it was 50 years ago).

We may already be past the “wow!” moment that the launch of ChatGPT was. Every new AI service or product is likely to be less impressive, though still important and, ultimately, transformative to our lives (just like all technology before it).

The inevitable slowdown isn’t a bad sign. Quite the contrary, it’s how it has always been. The first iPhone was a bigger breakthrough than iPhone 15 but you wouldn’t trade the new one for the old one, would you?

Since we’re still in AI’s early days, we may occasionally see quite large leaps of progress, especially as the technology enters new fields.

But we also have to accept that even people who are driving the revolution say that it will require trillions of dollars and years of investments, making it one of the most expensive global endeavours ever undertaken by man.

So, we should neither be deluded by very human-like conversations with AI bots into thinking that smart androids are just around the corner, nor by the doom-and-gloom predictions of the naysayers, who claim that humanity is about to end.

We’re likely at least decades away from creating a truly thinking machine — but it’s unlikely to be the Terminator.

Featured Image: Nvidia

Singapore’s Temasek Holdings is in talks to invest in OpenAI, the Microsoft-backed artificial intelligence (AI) company behind ChatGPT.

Citing two people familiar with the matter, the Financial Times reported on Tuesday (March 5) that senior executives at Temasek have met OpenAI CEO Sam Altman several times over recent months.

The state-owned investment company had initially been interested in investing into Altman’s VC fund Hydrazine Capital, however, more recent talks had included the AI company. The report adds that the talks were preliminary but continuing, with no agreement on the size of any investment.

OpenAI did not immediately respond to Vulcan Post’s requests for comment, while Temasek declined to comment on the report.

The negotiations with Temasek is the first since reports surfaced last month that Altman was seeking to raise about US$5 trillion to US$7 trillion to launch a semiconductor business and reduce OpenAI’s reliance on AI chips made by Nvidia.

“Building massive-scale ai infrastructure, and a resilient supply chain, is crucial to economic competitiveness,” Altman posted on X last month. Despite having its revenue surpass US$2 billion on an annualised basis in December, the company still remains loss-making because of the vast costs of building and running its models.

we believe the world needs more ai infrastructure–fab capacity, energy, datacenters, etc–than people are currently planning to build.

building massive-scale ai infrastructure, and a resilient supply chain, is crucial to economic competitiveness.

openai will try to help!

— Sam Altman (@sama) February 7, 2024

Altman has also discussed fundraising with deep-pocketed investors in the Middle East and Asia, including Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed al-Nahyan, one of Abu Dhabi’s wealthiest and most influential figures, and SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son.

Currently, OpenAI is backed by US$13 billion from Microsoft, its biggest investor, as well as several venture capital groups, including Thrive Capital, Sequoia Capital, Tiger Global Management and Andreessen Horowitz.

In recent months, OpenAI completed a deal allowing employees to sell stakes in the company. The tender offer gave OpenAI a valuation of US$86 billion (or roughly three times what it was worth last April), making it one of the most valuable startups in the world.

Singapore’s AI investment

With a portfolio valued at US$284 billion, AI is currently a key focus for Temasek’s investments, according to the fund’s management.

Its existing investments in the space include UK-based legal technology company Robin AI, South Korean fabless AI chip start-up Rebellions and Silicon Valley-based generative AI chip designer d-Matrix.

Following the AI boom in recent years, AI startups have seen a notable increase in funding, including in Singapore. Across the city-state, the sector witnessed a substantial infusion of funds in 2023, amounting to US$481.21 million across 24 deals.

To advance Singapore’s AI ecosystem further, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong and Jacqueline Poh, the managing director of the Singapore Economic Development Board (EDB), reportedly met NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang earlier in December to discuss potential “large investments” in AI here.

Singapore has always embraced innovation and its unwavering commitment to technological advancement has solidified its position as a global business and innovation hub, but the journey hasn’t always been smooth-sailing.

During the previous crypto bull run, Singaporean investment firms, including GIC and Temasek, invested in various crypto firms, some of which backfired. With their shift in focus, it is yet to be seen if the current AI boom is merely just a passing trend.

Featured Image Credit: Munshi Ahmed via Bloomberg

Disclaimer: Any opinions expressed below belong solely to the author. No information published below should be treated as financial advice.

Despite growing competition in the e-commerce segment, Sea Ltd. has managed to achieve its first profitable year since going public in 2017. A fairly modest US$162 million in net income last year compared favourably against the loss of US$1.7 billion in 2022.

The stock market reacted positively, jumping as much as 11 per cent during yesterday’s session, before closing the day at 5.6 per cent, as some investors cashed their gains out.

This bump has pushed the year-to-date rally for Sea Ltd. stock beyond 40 per cent over just 2 months, reflecting a return of optimism about its future.

Shopee fends off competitors

Interestingly, the positive result was achieved despite a reversal of cost-cutting policy, which saw sales & marketing expenses plummet in late 2022.

In the 4th quarter of 2023 the company spent more than twice on promotional activities than it did the year before, approaching US$1 billion, driven mainly by the response to competition from Chinese companies like Temu.

This has helped to boost quarterly orders by 46 per cent and the Gross Merchandise Value by over US$5 billion compared to the Q4 of 2022.

Thanks to strong quarterly performance Shopee managed avoid statistical stagnation for the entire 2023, as without the additional 800 million orders in Q4 it would have struggled to show annual growth.

This is likely to become a recurring theme for Sea for the foreseeable future, as it tries to balance the need to spend enough to drive purchases and staying profitable in a time of restricted access to cheap capital.

In this context, perhaps the best news to come out of the company is that it has managed to grow its cash reserves by another US$1.6 billion this year, showing that liquidity should not be a problem (although it still can’t spend nearly as much as it did before the onset of global inflation in 2022).

Garena shrinks in half…

All of the above is particularly good news given that Sea’s cash cow, the digital entertainment arm Garena, has suffered a slump in the post-pandemic world, where people are no longer stuck at home playing video games.

Revenue in the segment fell by over 46 per cent, from US$948 million to just US$510 million for the last quarter, and by 44 per cent, from US$3.87 to just US$2.1 billion for the entire year.

All of these figures are below 50 per cent of what the company pulled in from gaming in 2021, when annual revenue topped US$4.3 billion, at the height of COVID-19 lockdowns.

…but SeaMoney fills the gap

Sea Ltd. is in a constant state of flux between its three constituent businesses. When one struggles others pick up.

It all started with gaming, which evolved into e-commerce — that now provides the bulk of the revenue and is likely seen by investors as the most valuable part — and digital finance, growing at a decent pace, having provided US$1.8 billion in revenue, an increase of 44 per cent over 2022.

This means that even as the composition of Sea’s revenue flows changes, the total figure keeps climbing.

In 2022 Garena brought in three times as much money as SeaMoney did, but a mere year later they were almost neck and neck.

If the trend continues (as it might given the stagnation in mobile gaming) the business that Sea was founded on may be the smallest of all by the end of 2024.

Nevertheless, Sea is seen mainly as an ecommerce company and the fortunes of Shopee are likely to dictate how it fares in the next few years, before digital banking can establish itself as a potent money maker. By then, digital entertainment might become a side note in its books.

PropertyGuru Group will lay off 79 of its staff, or about 5 per cent of the company’s total workforce, and close down unprofitable units part of a strategic review, The Edge reported.

In an open letter to employees today (February 27), the company’s CEO and Managing Director, Hari Krishnan, said that the decision was made after “careful and objective identification of the roles for PropertyGuru’s next phase of growth”.

Roles within customer support will be redesigned across marketing, product and enterprise sales to serve customers “holistically and with enhanced value”.

Affected staff will be given severance pay of one month for each year of service capped at 12 months or country statutory severance pay, whichever was higher.

The company will also give a goodwill payment of one-month base salary and eligible 2023 annual performance bonus for affected non-sales staff, or sales commission for February and March for affected sales staff. 

Additionally, PropertyGuru will extend company medical insurance, or a lump sum payment in lieu, and access to its employee assistance programme for three more months from the last date of employment. Affected staff will also be able to access an outplacement service for three months and keep their work laptops.

In order to “future-proof” the business, Krishnan adds that the company will be making “structural organisational changes”, including the closure of two of the company’s nine branches in Vietnam related to the company’s Marketplace business, which are operationally non-scalable and unprofitable.

The company will also consolidate technology delivery to “drive economies of scale” and to streamline its regional technology resources to improve collaboration.

Volatile market conditions and changing customer needs require us to adapt our strategy so that we can continue to grow sustainably. It’s essential that we periodically reassess our progress and take proactive steps to future-proof our business.

– Hari Krishnan, PropertyGuru Group’s CEO and Managing Director, on the layoffs

Featured Image Credit: PropertyGuru

Disclaimer: Unless otherwise stated any opinions expressed below belong solely to the author.

Nvidia, the long-time graphics card company turned AI giant, joined the US$1 trillion valuation club last year and is now just US$50 million shy of US$2 trillion, following the surge in demand for its accelerator cards that large language models like ChatGPT are trained on.

Its multibillionaire founder and CEO, Jensen Huang, is now one of the richest people in the world, with a net worth of close to US$70 billion, and one that is most sought after to speak about the future that his company is helping to build.

He was one of the headline guests at the World Government Summit in Dubai, which concluded a few days ago. At the event, he spoke at length about the future of the world in this new AI reality, including the impact it’s going to have on our careers going forward.

According to Jensen, the mantra of learning to code or teaching your kids how to program or even pursue a career in computer science, which was so dominant over the past 10 to 15 years, has now been thrown out of the window.

You’re already a programmer

Perhaps a bit paradoxically, the recent achievements of the IT industry are leading it to automate itself first, thereby reducing the need for tech experts and the number of tech jobs in the long run.

Here’s what Nvidia’s CEO had to say about it:

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has a unique take on what kids should study in school.

While computer science and programming were once the must-have skills, Huang believes that the focus should shift to specific domain knowledge such as biology, chemistry, or finance. pic.twitter.com/ImsKiVvcXK

— Mohit Chaprana (MCR) ?? (@ammohitchaprana) February 22, 2024

Over the course of the last 10 years, 15 years, almost everybody who sits on a stage like this would tell you that it is vital that your children learn computer science. [That] everybody should learn how to program. And in fact, it’s almost exactly the opposite.

It is our job to create computing technology such that nobody has to program and that the programming language is human. Everybody in the world is now a programmer.

This is the miracle of artificial intelligence.

Jensen Huang, Nvidia founder & CEO

Specialise

The future of human work is in specific domain expertise – branches of science, manufacturing, farming, construction, education, engineering and so on.

Understanding the challenges and then using autonomously intelligent technology to help us provide solutions, without us needing to spend months or years developing necessary software by hand.

For most of us it is irrelevant how a particular solution is provided. We’ve learned, or were advised to learn, how to code, because that was the only way humans could interact with computers.

If you wanted a machine to do something, you had to know how to speak to it in its highly technical programming language (or, more typically, a few of them at least).

But the rapid rise of AI is promising to make these skills obsolete for most people other than those designing and maintaining the systems the rest of us will depend on.

It’s already been proven possible, with early experiments indicating that a job that would typically be performed by a team of people over several weeks could be done by AI in just minutes.

We’re not there yet, of course, but we’re on a rapid trajectory that could derail your tech career plans within just a few years.

It makes far more sense to specialise in a particular industry or profession to understand its problems or possible avenues of future improvement so that you know what to ask AI for.

Because, while artificial intelligence can come up with any number of ideas, it can’t really know much about the reality of your work, beyond the information you provide it with. This is why your expertise in the matter is so important so that you can ask the right questions and it can provide you with the best possible answers.

Pick your street

I have to say that the blanket advice of “learning to code” has always felt wrong to me. This is because we all have a very limited amount of time, and if we spend it on one thing, we automatically can’t invest it in something else.

And, realistically, how many of us can be great at programming? (even if we ignore the sheer diversity of what it can actually mean)

Like with human languages, to be good at using any computer language you have to practice it and consistently upgrade your skills with time.

Superficially, “learning to code” can give you some basic understanding of how making computers do things works, but little beyond that unless you are constantly exposed to it. And even within the domain of programming, there are endless possibilities and specialities that you can pursue.

So, “programming” as such is an extremely broad term that is really empty on its own. Programming what? How? Why? For whom? At what scale?

Kids should, perhaps, be taught the fundamentals of computer science, much like they’re taught teaching human biology, even though most of us will never be doctors or scientists. A basic understanding of how computers power the AI-enabled future work is certainly valuable.

But only those who see themselves working as computer engineers should pursue specific skills, with the rest of us being directed towards whatever we’re passionate about and/or predisposed to, as that increases our chances of being really good at it.

So, don’t learn to code — learn to be great at something useful, whatever it may be. AI will always be there to help you out.

Disclaimer: Opinions expressed below belong solely to the author.

Mark Zuckerberg is clearly upset that Apple can get away with selling a $3500 headset that people around the world are fawning over (even if recognising that not everything about it is perfect), while he’s struggling to make money with his $500 Quest 3, as Reality Labs — Meta’s VR/AR business — is bleeding tens of billions of dollars each year.

Why would anybody buy Apple Vision Pro?

So, as he’s settling into his role of Steve Ballmer of our time, he recorded a short video, claiming that Meta’s Quest 3 is not only a better value than Apple’s Vision Pro but a better product overall, full stop.

In short, according to Mark, you can do a lot more with Meta Quest 3 (play games, watch videos, work etc.); it is also lighter and more comfortable, and the only thing that Apple is delivering for $3000 more is higher resolution.

In other words — why would anybody buy Apple Vision Pro over Quest 3?

Well, before we get to that, let’s see what Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer said about the iPhone when it was announced in 2007:

“500 dollars? Fully subsidized? With a plan? I said that is the most expensive phone in the world. And it doesn’t appeal to business customers because it doesn’t have a keyboard. Which makes it not a very good email machine. […] Right now, we’re selling millions and millions and millions of phones a year.  Apple is selling zero phones a year. In six months, they’ll have the most expensive phone by far ever in the marketplace…”

Steve Ballmer, January 2007

When was the last time you saw a Windows Phone?

They went extinct within a decade of Ballmer’s boastful Apple-bashing, along with the behemoths of Nokia and Blackberry, once ruling the mobile phone market.

The expensive toy without a keyboard, that so many people saw the iPhone as, is today making the most money, even if it doesn’t sell in quantities as large as Android phones do.

Apple is responsible for little over 20 per cent of all shipments but they generate 50 per cent of the global smartphone revenue and a whopping 82 per cent of all profits from the business.

This is what Apple is aiming for with Vision Pro.

Jack of all trades, master of none

Like an oldschool nerd that he is, this is what Zuckerberg is building at Meta — an all-round device that you can use for nearly everything but one that does not stand out in any particular way.

His vision appears to be that one day the Quest devices will be able to do anything you want, that you will never take them off and live in the metaverse — a term that, notably, nobody is using anymore, after it has become public mockery before it ever took off.

Now, this idea may not be all that different from Apple’s ultimate goal, in some distant time in the future.

Perhaps, indeed, one day we’re going to be putting on a set of digital goggles to do anything: gaming, working, watching movies and so on.

What is different, however, is the approach.

Instead of trying to cram in as much as possible into a single product, Apple is focusing on making at least one thing about it really great today. And with this first generation it’s the image quality of its displays, that currently nobody in the IT mainstream can really match.

Unlike Zuckerberg, who tried to convince us that we’re going to live in virtual worlds, meeting with cartoonish avatars of our buddies, Apple recognises — in a spirit true to Steve Jobs — that technology should blend in with what we already do and how we live our lives.

In other words, while Meta started with Virtual Reality (VR), Apple is starting with Augmented Reality (AR). How Zuckerberg doesn’t see this fundamental difference is both perplexing and comical.

For that reason, these devices shouldn’t even be compared. Meta has sold millions of cheap headsets of several generations, mostly for people looking for relatively affordable entertainment in VR.

Apple is selling Vision Pro to those who want to add high-end technology replacements of many of their existing devices, making for a much more minimalist lifestyle that is so fashionable these days.

Just look at the example below:

With AVP you no longer need a 70 inch TV or a massive desktop screen to do meaningful work on. You can just carry your Macbook around and expand both your work space as well as create a virtual media centre for when you watch movies, on demand.

You can append your spaces, walls and furniture with app windows wherever they might be useful, to provide reminders, serve as timers, guide you through cooking, fixing things in the house and so on.

And with high-quality passthrough video, you don’t even need to take the device off as you walk around — and don’t feel like you’re stuck in a blurry 720p render of the world around, like you may using Quest.

Yes, you can do more things with Meta’s device but none of them is really outstanding.

It’s good for gaming, good for entertainment, decent for work — but it’s not great at any of them. This is why people will not pay more than $500 for it, because it’s still just a middle-of-the-road compromise in a plastic case, that most customers will use for fairly brief gaming sessions, little else.

Apple, on the other hand, stated the function of the device clearly: spatial computing.

Adding a new dimension to the technology in your life, projected to your eyes through a single high-quality device.

They don’t overpromise on functions — they merely promise that whatever you do on AVP will blend in with surrounding reality as seamlessly as it is currently possible. That’s it.

All-you-can-eat buffet meets fine dining

And there is place for both. This is another judgement error Zuckerberg is making, probably because he’s so frustrated with the attention Apple is getting despite only entering the new market.

Meta offers a little bit of everything for everybody but Apple, in its trademark way, has created another product that is a status symbol, like the iPhone.

Just like you visit a food court to fill yourself for a few bucks but splurge on a nice restaurant for events that really matter, you don’t buy the Quest because you want the Quest but because you want to use VR. But you buy Vision Pro because you want the Vision Pro.

And while that may appear to be rather vain of us, it’s really good for business.

For that reason Apple isn’t really in competition with Meta, even though Zuck’s ego appears to be bruised. I have no doubt that Quest is going to vastly outsell Vision Pro just like Android phones keep outselling the iPhone.

But it is also clear that Apple is going to make far more money from a considerably smaller customer group, while Meta’s Reality Labs are going to be stuck seeking profitability.

The most mediocre billionaire

Mark Zuckerberg is currently the 4th richest person on the planet, with a net worth of over $166 billion and yet, among fellow Silicon Valley technologists he’s somewhat an aberration.

Despite his enormous success, you’ll struggle to find greatness in anything he does. Most other big names — Musk, Bezos, Gates, Page, Brin, Jobs — have produced multiple ground-breaking products and services, setting new standards for years.

The only thing that Zuck has ever invented was the Facebook timeline, which became the default UI in the social media age, introduced in a time when Myspace required you to visit individual pages of your friends manually.

But ever since it launched 20 years ago, Zuckerberg has only been a follower, typically late to every new trend and regularly failing at innovation.

He built his business empire through acquisitions of companies that successfully did something he struggled with — like Instagram or Whatsapp — often neglecting them somewhat down the road, opening opportunities for other competitors (like TikTok today).

I’m sure most readers will agree with me in observing that there’s nothing “great” about Facebook, which is still plagued by bugs, oppressive moderation policies and endless spam and phishing attempts, that the company appears to do nothing about.

Instagram, similarly, feels stuck in time. It’s 2024 and the web version is barely usable, while nobody at Meta thought to come up with a solution for posting links on the platform, currently still served by clunky 3rd party link-in-bio services.

His venture into VR — and its results — were no different.

Facebook acquired Oculus for $2 billion 10 years ago and this is how the flirt with Virtual Reality started, costing tens of billions more in subsequent years with little to show for the money spent.

The metaverse, that we were supposed to transfer our lives to, is all but dead, despite Mark making a big bet and even renaming the company for it.

Oculus devices are very good for what they offer but they too fall short of greatness, which explains Zuckerberg’s conniption upon seeing Vision Pro threatening to take the customers with the deepest pockets away from him.

But that also makes him a hypocrite, since he tried to approach them with his own upmarket Oculus Pro, launched in late 2022 for not an insignificant amount of $1500.

The device was widely panned in reviews, failed to gain any traction and was effectively discontinued in mid-2023.

That’s why seeing him now touting Oculus 3 as great value vs. Vision Pro is rather amusing considering how badly his attempts at making a premium product bombed just months ago.

He spent a ton of money making a good average product, which by his own murky descriptions has no single clear use case that is well-communicated to buyers. Is there any wonder why it keeps making catastrophic losses?

His problem is lack of commitment to detail, both in conceptual phase and in execution. Everything he does seems like it emerged from a cloud of chaotic ideas, which explains why he can’t grasp the very basic differences between Meta’s headsets and the latest Apple device, leading his entire VR business astray.

Fortunately, other units make enough money to make up for the shortfall, elevating Meta’s stock to new heights recently, which is why it’s unlikely that shareholders will start calling for his head anytime soon.

But it’s equally unlikely that anything that Reality Labs produce will hold its own vs. ruthlessly organised machinery at Apple — one of few companies Zuckerberg can’t even hope to acquire.

Disclaimer: Opinions expressed below belong solely to the author.

Not a day has passed since the beginning of 2024 without news of another major tech company planning to cut hundreds or thousands of jobs.

According to the layoff tracking website Layoffs.FYI over 24,000 roles went on the chopping block already, and this figure keeps growing almost every hour.

This adds to a whopping 262,595 jobs slashed in 2023 and 164,969 in 2022, bringing the global total to over 450,000 people across the past two years.

Bait and switch

“The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic.” is a quote widely misattributed to Soviet dictator, Joseph Stalin, though it is surely something he would agree with.

It seems that it could be paraphrased in reference to the ongoing tech job wipeout as well. One person losing a job is sad, but thousands appear to be just statistics.

At the end of the day, this is how we’re all treated, even by companies which, not so long ago, attracted millions with promises of great career prospects, relaxed working conditions, generous benefits, great food and office facilities including game rooms, gyms, kindergartens and bean bags.

Nearly half a million of them, however, have now had to experience a rude awakening.

Big Tech is, fundamentally, about numbers. And it turns out that people are just another spreadsheet entry, not flesh and bone.

All these stories about creating a new, 21st-century workplace reality, where employees would be well taken care of by their employers, enjoying time at work instead of being condemned to a depressing cubicle of the past, are turning out to have been bait.

Now it’s time for the switch.

Not only are jobs being cut, but those who are lucky enough to keep them see their perks disappear as well. Last year Google and Meta, famous for their swanky offices with robust facilities, announced the end of free snacks, laundry services, company lunches and even laptops.

“Picture catered meals, unlimited holidays, complementary gym memberships, and so on. These companies were pulling out all the stops to attract top-notch talent. In-office yoga classes and massages during lunch breaks, now who could resist that?”

Kelly Indah, a software developer, security analyst, and the editor-in-chief at technology website Increditools, for Cybernews, November 15, 2023.

Many of them are now going away, showing that years of talk about modern company culture were just HR fluff meant to attract and retain talent, before companies realised there wasn’t enough to do with it.

Company culture is dead

Up until 2022, tech businesses spent inordinate amounts of money hiring people they didn’t really need, only to keep them from being snapped up by the competition.

“They were just kind of, like, hoarding us like Pokémon cards,” a former Meta worker hired in April 2022 says in a recent TikTok video about her experience at the company.

With low interest rates, cash was cheap, and the belief had long been that there’s always a “next big thing” around the corner, so it was only prudent to employ as many talented individuals as you could and figure out what to do with them later.

Never before has the term “Human Resources” been used more literally, as millions employed in tech are clearly treated as little more than a “resource” that you obtain, manage and cut when no longer needed.

Perhaps we should all have sensed that it wasn’t going to last forever, but years of propaganda worked wonders. Everybody dreamt of landing a job at one of the Silicon Valley giants (or many of the ambitious, well-funded startups) and those who succeeded inspired envy.

Which is why hearing Google’s accountants talk about how cutting free snacks is somehow going to help the company focus on AI has replaced it with nausea.

The company pulling over $60 billion in net income per year suddenly can’t afford health bars and smoothies for its workers? Really?

Are the savings going to be worth the hit to the morale and the inevitable demise of the company culture, as all employees realise that nothing they enjoy has ever been a given? We’re about to learn that in the coming years.

Why so ruthless?

Because you’re just a number. The moment a decision is made to cut you, you’re no longer an asset but a security threat.

This is why layoff announcements are typically abrupt and unexpected. They leave people in shock, locked out of their company accounts overnight, and pending a call or message from the HR department. They can’t possibly trust you any longer, lest you decide to take your frustration out on the company and do some damage.

It is when most people learn that all corporations are really the same and that Silicon Valley hasn’t really changed much to change the workplace standards.

When push comes to shove you’re given a box and an escort out of the building, never to return.

But since it’s about numbers, then you should know your worth and act accordingly. The ongoing waves of layoffs mark the end of the dream career in tech for all but the most important engineers.

Don’t plan on staying long in any one place. Keep looking for better options, and make sure you get the most out of the business before it thinks it’s gotten the most out of you.

This game can be played in both directions, and if IT companies no longer offer their loyalty to you, then there’s no reason to offer yours to them.

Their myopia is going to come back to haunt them very soon.

Just when the worst seemed to be over, the doom and gloom from the past two years followed us into 2024, with companies such as Google and Amazon laying off hundreds of employees.

In the tech industry itself, over 10,000 employees have been retrenched from 63 companies this year, excluding FMCG giants like Unilever. Here is a comprehensive list of the significant layoffs reverberating through Singapore’s workforce this year.

1. Lazada

At the start of the year, Lazada axed at least 100 of its staff in Singapore across various departments, including its logistics team. Some departments even had a majority of their headcount retrenched, with one having its manpower reduced from 20 to 30 people to four or five remaining employees.

An undisclosed number of employees have also been retrenched from its regional offices in countries including Malaysia, Indonesia and Vietnam. According to sources close to the matter, the e-commerce giant is expected to let go up to 30 per cent of its total headcount of 8,000 to 10,000 staff.

This round of layoffs came unexpectedly for those who have been retrenched, with some citing the company’s lack of transparency causing large amounts of anxiety and uncertainty among current employees. 

Following reports of the layoff, the National Trades Union Congress (NTUC) in Singapore issued a statement expressing “deep disappointment” about Lazada’s retrenchment exercise, which was carried out without prior consultation with the Food, Drinks and Allied Workers Union (FDAWU) despite the fact that the Singapore-headquartered firm is unionised under FDAWU.

The FDAWU is currently negotiating with Lazada for better benefits for its laid-off employees, who were told that they would only receive two weeks’ salary for every year of service. The retrenched staff are also bound by a 12-month non-compete clause covering an extensive list of tech, retail and logistics companies, including Grab, TikTok and Amazon.

2. Google and YouTube

On January 11, Google eliminated over 1,000 of its staff in its Voice Assistant units, hardware teams responsible for Pixel, Nest and Fitbit, advertising sales team, as well as its augmented reality team. The company also confirmed that Fitbit co-founders James Park and Eric Friedman were leaving the organisation.

A week after the news broke, Google reportedly cut another 100 jobs from its video platform, YouTube. Following the. announcements of the layoffs, the tech giant’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, told his employees to expect more job cuts this year in an internal memo seen by The Verge on January 17.

According to Pichai, the latest round of layoffs focused on “removing layers to simplify execution and drive velocity in some areas.” The company is looking towards “responsibly investing in its biggest priorities and the significant opportunities ahead. “

However, the CEO adds that these role eliminations will not be at the scale of its previous layoffs, where Google eliminated over 12,000 roles, or about 6 per cent of its workforce, at the beginning of 2023, including 190 employees from the Singapore office.

It’s unclear how many staff from its Singapore office were affected by the recent round of layoffs; however, the National Trades Union Congress (NTUC) has contacted Google to offer aid to the affected employees, including placement and networking support.

3. Amazon and Twitch

American tech giant Amazon announced on January 10 that it would be laying off several hundred employees across its streaming and studio operations. 

According to an email sent by Mike Hopkins, the Senior Vice President at Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios, the layoffs come as the e-commerce giant looks to “increase investment and focus on content and product initiatives that deliver the most impact” for the business’s long-term success. 

As part of its strategy, Prime Video is also revamping its content strategy in Southeast Asia from a model based on original productions to one focused on licensing.

In an internal note seen by Variety, the company will reportedly decrease its investments in the region, and move towards to a leaner local operating model to support Southeast Asian territories. As a result of these changes, the e-commerce giant has eliminated “some roles” within its Singapore-based Southeast Asian team.

Amazon’s announcement of the layoffs came the same day as the live-streaming platform and the subsidiary of the e-commerce giant, Twitch, disclosed that it would lay off about 35 per cent of its workforce, or about 500 employees, across various locations, including Singapore.

Twitch, acquired by Amazon in 2014 for nearly US$1 billion, has failed to turn profitable since then and will shutter its South Korea operations in February due to high operating costs and network fees.

Twitch previously laid off more than 400 employees in March 2023, just after its longtime CEO Emmett Shear departed the company after 16 years. Meanwhile, Amazon laid off more than 27,000 employees in 2023, including its Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios employees. 

4. Riot Games

Tencent Holdings’ Riot Games announced on January 22 that it would be laying off 530 employees, or about 11 per cent of its staff globally, with its teams outside of core development seeing the largest impact. 

In a blog post that included a letter to employees from CEO Dylan Jadeja, the League of Legends producer acknowledged that it “had made a number of big bets across the company” since 2019, causing its costs to “grow to the point where they are unsustainable”. 

Over the last several years, the company has brought in new talent, expanded its global footprint, and changed its operating model to match its ambitions, which ultimately more than doubled its headcount.

Riot Games’ office in Singapore doubles down as its Asia-Pacific Headquarters, and is one of its largest offices in the world, employing over 180 staff. It is unclear how many Singapore employees have been affected by the layoff.

Tencent Holdings first bought a majority stake in Riot Games in February 2011, and fully acquired the video games firm by purchasing the remaining equity in 2015.

5. Unilever

On January 18, Campaign revealed that Unilever would carry out a slew of layoffs and role reorganisations across its teams in Singapore. The FMCG giant first announced the layoffs to affected staff in December 2023 to allow provide them with “adequate notice and transparency”.

The retrenchment and restructuring exercises will be “wide-reaching”, with the marketing teams in its personal care brands, including Dove, Lux and Lifeboy, seeing the largest impact.

According to Unilever, it will relocate some of its personal care roles which are currently based in Singapore to its lead markets in Asia. Several roles will remain in Singapore, however, some roles will no longer be required. The company declined to disclose the number of impacted staff.

In October 2023, the new CEO of Unilever, Hein Schumacher, who was appointed back in June, laid out a new strategy to streamline its operations and achieve higher growth as the company had underperformed in recent years.

Following the announcement, Unilever revealed in November that it would retrench 169 employees at its New York warehouses, effective April 2024, as part of the company’s restructuring in its beauty and personal care product manufacturing.

Prior to the recent slew of layoffs, the FMCG giant cut about 1,500 management jobs globally in 2022 as it looked to boost its growth after a failed acquisition attempt. Unilever’s rejected proposal to acquire consumer healthcare business GSK for US$67 billion was widely criticised by investors as being a costly and risky distraction from dealing with pressing challenges to the business, such as inflation in emerging markets and weakness in healthy foods.

Featured Image Credit: Getty/ Twitch/ Office Snapshots

Google is now in the midst of another round of piecemeal layoffs, as they will lay off 100 employees under its video platform YouTube after axing more than 1,000 jobs in the past week.

Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, has also told employees to expect more job cuts this year, The Straits Times quoted from a prior news report by The Verge on Jan 17 earlier today (Jan 18), citing an internal memo.

“These role eliminations are not at the scale of last year’s reductions and will not touch every team,” Mr Pichai informed all employees in the memo, referring to Google cutting 12,000 jobs at the beginning of 2023, including 190 employees from the Singapore office.

Pichai added that the layoffs were focused on removing layers to simplify execution and drive velocity in some areas, according to the report. This hints that more jobs will be axed this year as companies aim to automate their work processes by adopting Artificial Intelligence (AI) software to lighten workloads.

According to an e-mail reviewed by The New York Times, the tech giant on Jan 17 notified workers from YouTube’s operations and creator management team members of their retrenchment. It was also reported that YouTube employed 7,173 people as of Tuesday (Jan 16), according to a person with knowledge of the total.

“We’ve made the decision to eliminate some roles and say goodbye to some of our teammates,” YouTube’s chief business officer, Ms Mary Ellen Coe, wrote in a note to employees. “Anyone in the Americas” and the Asia-Pacific region “who is or may be impacted will be notified by the end of the day today”, the note said.

Tough fight with TikTok and inflation leading to slow growth

The layoffs primarily affect groups of employees who support YouTube’s millions of content creators, two people with knowledge of the cuts said.

YouTube has struggled to recover from an advertising slowdown in the past year and has contended with strong competition from TikTok, the short-video service popular with younger users.

YouTube generates a portion of its income through advertisements featured before and during videos. However, the platform experienced a disruption in its consistent growth starting in late 2022 due to an advertising slowdown triggered by escalating inflation and interest rates, leading advertisers to cut down on their budgets. YouTube saw a decline in revenue over multiple quarters, with the downward trend halting in June. Presently, ad sales have not yet surpassed their previous rate of growth.

The platform has since shifted its focus towards increasing subscriptions for YouTube TV, its cable programming alternative. This service now includes the National Football League’s Sunday Ticket, providing weekly access to various games. Additionally, YouTube has reported having over 80 million subscribers for its music streaming and ad-free video streaming services.

More tech companies are conducting layoffs

As part of its efforts to cut costs and trim bureaucracy, the company has eliminated over 1,000 jobs from its core engineering division, its voice-operated product, Google Assistant. They have also conducted layoffs in their hardware division, where approximately 100 jobs were cut from the following brands: Pixel, Nest and Fitbit.

Google was one of many to conduct layoffs this year. Alibaba-owned Lazada recently received immense flak for their sudden layoffs just after the New Year celebrations, where 100 employees were retrenched from Singapore. Amazon, another e-commerce giant, was also reported to have axed 35 per cent of employees from their streaming platform Twitch, comprising 500 employees across various locations, including Singapore. 

Currently, YouTube employees who were laid off have 60 days to find new roles within the company before their dismissals officially take effect. According to a news article by The Business Times, the National Trades Union Congress (NTUC) has also contacted Google to offer aid to employees affected in Singapore.

Featured Image Credit: EdgeProp