Mark Zuckerberg Acquiesces to Donald Trump

US President Donald Trump has signed a legal settlement that will see Meta pay out roughly $25 million. 

Trump had sued the social media giant and their chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, in 2021 over the suspension of his accounts after the January 06 Capitol riots that year. In July 2024, Meta lifted the final restrictions on Trump's Facebook and Instagram accounts in the lead up to US presidential elections. 

The settlement was first reported by the Wall Street Journal.

Separately on Wednesday, Meta defended their $65 billion investment in AI which Zuckerberg had announced on January 24, after tech stocks were rocked in the wake of Chinese AI app DeepSeek's sudden rise. 

He told investors there was a lot to learn from DeepSeek, but it was too soon to have "a really strong opinion" about what the app means for the future of AI. 

"If anything, I think the recent news has only strengthened our conviction that this is right thing for us to be focused on", he added.

Many US tech stocks sank this week after DeepSeek surged in popularity, though Meta bucked this trend. The stock was up in after hours trading after they posted better than expected financial results on Wednesday itself. 

Meta, parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, took a different tack from many US companies by releasing an open source AI model called "Llama 3.1 405B", an advanced LLM for synthetic data generation, distillation, and inference for chatbots, coding, and domain-specific tasks. 

Zuckerberg said he thought that approach was important to keeping the US at the cutting edge, as countries around the world compete to become the key players in the still-emerging industry. 

"There's going to be an open source standard globally and I think for our own national advantage it's important that it's an American standard", he declared. "We take that seriously. We want to build the AI system that people around the world are using".

Methinks, it is China that'll be setting the global standard. In AI and everything else. Americans should get used to it! 😁😁😁

On January 18, I received my new 14ʺ Lenovo ThinkPad T14 Gen 5 laptop. 

I'm really pleased to be able to finally replace my Dell Inspiron 16 laptop – its construction quality is appalling, the plastics is fragile and the hinges are notorious for breaking quickly. I saw on Reddit that this is pretty common among Dell laptops. 

I don't recommend Dell at all, period!

TikTok Get Blamed for Guzzling Energy in Norway

TikTok are being blamed for being an energy-guzzler! 

 

At Raufoss (about 120 kilometers north of Oslo in Norway), a weapons firm co-owned by the Norwegian government and a Finnish state-controlled defence company, said they can’t meet the surging demand for artillery shells because a TikTok data center there is using up the electricity! 

 

Elvia, the local energy company, confirmed that the electricity network has no spare capacity after promising it to the data center as they allocate it on a first come, first served basis. 

 

Experts say fights over which companies and which type of industry get priority access to electricity grids are likely to increase across Europe. Data centres have flourished in the Nordic countries because of once-plentiful and cheap electricity, as well as a colder climate that keeps cooling costs down. 

 

“We are concerned because we see our future growth is challenged by the storage of cat videos", Morten Brandtzæg, the CEO of Nammo AS, said in an interview with the Financial Times. (I guess he doesn't like cats!)

 

Brandtzæg said that the demand for artillery rounds was 15 times higher than normal – a trend driven by the war in Ukraine, which has featured heavy artillery use. Ukraine, for instance, would like to increase its daily usage of rounds from 6,000 to 65,000, he explained. 

 

It isn’t known if Nammo shells are being used in Ukraine – their customer base, as described in a 2021 annual report, is overwhelmingly EU and NATO states, which have been making huge donations to Ukraine since Russia launched its Special Military Operation. 

 

TikTok and other tech giants have faced criticism for their energy use. Back in July, a report from the FT found that the electricity usage of large companies – including Microsoft, Oracle, LG, Huawei, Amazon, and Dell – was making it harder to build more homes in London, UK. Due to the electricity grid running out of capacity, the report stated that the capital could face a ban on new housing projects until 2035. 

 

An earlier report from 2019 by EirGrid, Ireland's electrical grid operator, found similar conclusions for Ireland, which is a popular base for global companies' European data centers. It found that data centers can often require the "same amount of energy as a large town", and could account for "29% of electricity demand in Ireland by 2028".

More Tech Companies Slash Jobs

Dell Technologies Inc are slashing about 6,650 jobs, or 5% of their global workforce, as they struggle with a slump in the personal computer market and brace for a potential recession. 

 

The move on Monday aligns Dell with a raft of US companies, tech and non-tech that have laid off thousands this year to ride out a demand downturn wrought by high inflation and rising interest rates. 

 

Dell had already rolled out cost-cutting moves such as a hiring pause and limits on travel as they dealt with a post-pandemic collapse in PC sales, which account more than half of their revenue. 

 

However, those moves are "no longer enough", co-Chief Operating Officer Jeff Clarke wrote in a memo to employees. 

 

“What we know is market conditions continue to erode with an uncertain future", Clarke added. 

 

Dell are expecting to book costs related to the layoffs in their fiscal fourth quarter, which ends in January. 

 

Rival HP Inc have also said they will cut up to 6,000 jobs. The market for PCs and tablets is set for another year of decline in 2023 with a fall of 2.6%, according to research firm IDC, after rapid growth during the pandemic on the back of remote working. 

 

Already on January 25, IBM Corp announced 3,900 layoffs as part of some asset divestments and missed their annual cash target, dampening cheer around beating revenue expectations in the fourth quarter. 

 

The layoffs – related to the spinoff of their Kyndryl business and a part of AI unit Watson Health – will cause a $300 million charge in the January-March period, IBM said. 

 

Meanwhile, Yahoo Inc. are planning to reduce headcount at their Yahoo for Business ad tech unit by almost 50% by the end of 2023, or more than 20% of the workforce at Yahoo. 

 

According to Chief Executive Officer Jim Lanzone on Thursday, they are “very profitable”, adding that the job cuts were due more to the division’s restructuring than troubles in the ad market. “We would’ve made these changes even at the peak of the market”, he maintained. 

 

Yahoo are “still hiring aggressively”, Lanzone added, and employees who lose their jobs will be considered for other roles at the company. 

 

However you may want to spin it, the fact of the matter is that tech companies are slashing jobs!