 |
|
|
|||||
Bluesky CEO Jay Graber took a clear swipe at Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg when she took the stage at the South by Southwest (SXSW) conference in Austin this week wearing a shirt that copied an infamous one he’d worn last year at a Meta product reveal event. Graber’s shirt read Mundus sine Caesaribus, or “A world without Caesars” in Latin. It was the same design as Zuckerberg’s shirt from last year that read, Aut Zuck aut nihil, which is a play on the phrase, Aut Caesar aut nihil: Either Caesar or nothing. Graber’s not-so-subtle message seemed to be that decentralized platforms, like the one she’s building with Bluesky, prioritize users over the platform’s bottom-line interests. “If a billionaire came in and bought Bluesky or took it over or, if I decided tomorrow to change things in a way that people really didnt like, then they could fork off and go on to another application,” Graber said while onstage. “Theres already applications in the network that give you another way to view the network or you could build a new one as well. And so that openness guarantees that theres always the ability to move to a new alternative.” Seeking freedom from billionaire control Bluesky, which is built on the open-source AT Protocol, really took off after the November presidential election, when X owner Elon Musk gained a large stake in President Trump’s campaign and subsequent administration. Users like the fact that Bluesky’s open social media ecosystem ultimately means that no one person controls it. So far, it’s amassed more than 33 million total users. To be sure, it’s still a long way from reaching the user numbers that Zuckerberg’s Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp enjoy. Meta said in its full-year 2024 earnings report that it has 3.35 billion daily active users across its whole family of apps. Still, Graber is optimistic in Bluesky’s model. “We want to give people real choicenot just a new platform, but a new paradigm,” she said.
Category:
E-Commerce
Southwest Airlines’ signature tagline Bags Fly Free seems to be a thing of the past. Since its inception nearly 60 years ago, the airline has offered customers two complimentary checked bags as part of its pitch to distinguish it from competitors. But by this summer, it seems, Southwest will have to replace its oft-repeated slogan with a new one: bags fly for an added fee. Thats because any customers who are not members of Southwests frequent fliers programs or traveling in an upgraded seat will have to pay for their checked bags, starting with flights booked after May 28, according to a company press release. The airline did not provide specific rates for the new fees. Southwest also announced that flight credits will now expire after one year, walking back a policy put in place during the pandemic that allowed customers to keep their credits indefinitely. So far, the reaction to the new bag fees has been overwhelmingly negative. But, when observed alongside all of the other changes that Southwest has made to its programming over the past several months, its not exactly surprising. As of last month, shares of Southwest’s stock (NYSE: LUV) were down nearly 50% compared to five years ago. In an effort to appease its investors, Southwest has been on a mission to aggressively cut costs and implement a slew of added fees. Those cost-saving policy changes appear to jettison all of the elements that once made Southwest’s brand identity distinct. Turbulence for Southwest’s leadership From its inception in 1966, Southwest has cultivated a reputation as a quirky, lower-cost carrier with unique perks and an equitable approach to seating that endeared it to a base of loyal fans. However, those perks have been first on the companys chopping block as its reduced costs and implemented more Spirit-esque fees to drive sales. Over the past several months, Southwest has been rolling out an overhaul intended to catch up with competitors like Delta and United by reviving its shrinking profits and the downward trajectory of its stock. The breakneck pace of this overhaul has been egged on by hedge fund Elliott Investment Management, which owns a $1.9 billion minority stake in the company and has frequently publicly criticized Southwest for not adapting to the times and cutting costs. Southwest kicked off 2024 by debuting an interior cabin redesign, which is set hit runways this year. While the company argued that the revamped look was made with comfort in mind, customers pointed out that the seating looked like a major downgrademainly because, based on renderings provided by the company, the seats looked almost comically thin and rigid. TikTok users dubbed them lawn chairs and Ozempic seats. But, as it turns out, the lackluster seating was only a harbinger of the airlines larger plans to come. A once-quirky airline joins a sea of corporate sameness Southwest has spent the last few months nixing its most distinctive offerings. In September, the company announced that it would slash its open seating policy, one of its characteristic brand traits, which allowed every Southwest passenger to choose their own seat when boarding. At the same time, the company revealed that it would swap a third of its seats for more premium chairs, which come with more legroom, faster Wi-Fi, and larger overhead binsfor an added cost, of course. This new seating policy on its own was enough to cause Fast Company to ask whether Southwest was losing its Southwest-ness by sacrificing its unfussy reputation for greater profits. Even during the September investor call announcing the end of open seating, though, Southwest executives argued that ending the signature Bags Fly Free plan would be a destructive step too far, adding that they estimated charging bag fees would bring in about $1.5 billion per year but cost another $1.8 billion in lost business. The program was so central to Southwests identity that the company trademarked the Bags Fly Free slogan and has a whole backlog of ads, going back decades, that center on the promise (see this spot from 2009 and this one from 2023.) Now, Southwest is scrapping the last vestige of its recognizable brand identity by backtracking on free bags. The backlash from fans has been swift. On X, one recent tweet with 4,000 likes and counting reads, If Southwest Airlines had assembled a focus group and asked them what’s the stupidest thing that we could do to ruin our company, this is what they would have come up with. Another tweet with 11,000 likes adds, Is Southwest aware that now people are no longer incentivized to fly with them?? Popular opinion may have turned against the airline, but the market seems to approve. As of this writing, Southwest stock is up around 9%. The market also responded positively last month when the airline announced that it planned to lay off 15% of its corporate workforce in another cost-cutting measure. As Southwest continues to whittle away the perks it once touted, its become just another set of wings in an industr full of likeminded competitors.
Category:
E-Commerce
More than three million developers are using OpenAIs APIs as shorthand code to infuse apps and websites with an engine of advanced AI. And today, the companys most popular API, called Chat Completions, is getting a significant sequel called Responses. Eight months in development, it will vastly expand upon and simplify the experience of plugging into OpenAI. For developers, Responses will mean using less code to stack more complex questions to the AI. A hundred lines of code will turn into just three, as the company is courting a wider set of developers who don’t consider themselves LLM experts. For consumers, it will mean youll soon be interacting with AI thats faster, more fluid in using forms of media other than text, and more capable of taking more steps on your behalf. Completions were very much designed in a world where you could only put text into it, and you could only get text out of it. But now we have models that can do work across multiple mediums. We can put images in, we can get audio out of the model, and [users] can speak to the model in real time and have it speak to you back, says Steve Coffey, an engineer at OpenAI. [Completions] is just like the wrong tool for the job…so Responses was designed from the ground up. What is OpenAIs new Responses API update? APIs are basically the software gateways to use features from a service or platform inside your own. And to OpenAI, its APIs are as carefully designed as any producteven if we dont tend to consider APIs as designed objects. The iPhone has APIs for apps using its camera and accelerometers, for instance, while Stripes APIs make it possible for websites and apps to take paymentsand in each case, the ease of integrating these APIs has been vital to courting developers and growing a business. OpenAI created the modern API for AI in 2020 (and Chat Completions in 2023) so developers could plug into its AI platform. Its competitors have since copied OpenAIs approach to be something of an informal standard across the industry. Thousands of apps, ranging from Perplexity (an AI search engine) to Harvey (an AI for lawyers), currently integrate OpenAI APIs. Today, OpenAI offers a few different APIs, including one that generates images for Dall-E and another that exclusively works to summarize or write text from scratch. For this release, OpenAI is focusing on Responses, the evolution of its Chat Completion APIthe companys popular way that app developers can plug into the core conversational technology behind ChatGPT. The way the Chat Completions was designed, developers could only send one query in text at a time, and get a single answer in text back. Practically speaking, that meant complicated questions could take several steps, and each individual new question took time, introducing more latency. Now, a developer plugs strings of code into the Responses API, crossed with natural language queries that developers can use that are more or less the way you or I would talk to ChatGPT. (A long user manual helps developers understand what they can and cant do.) OpenAI’s API will offer multi turn conversations that understand context and conversational floweven when you mix in multimedia like images and, soon to arrive, voice/sound. Responses can also juggle several processes at once, because with a single line of code, you can connect Tools hosted by OpenAI into this process. These tools will include a web search (so OpenAIs responses can be grounded in more real time data), a code interpreter to write and test code, and a file search to analyze and summarize files. The new API will also let developers connect to OperatorOpenAIs agentic tool that can analyze screens and actually take actions on the users behalfand comes with a new kit of software that helps developers juggle multiple AI agents at the same time. As the company explains, building APIs requires forecasting years ahead at the functions developers may want, and if you squint, its not hard to deconstruct OpenAIs own thesis on the future lurking in the feature set. The API has vastly expanded upon whats possible to do when you plug into OpenAI as a developerembracing fuzzy inputs of multimedia, integrating information so responses are current, and perhaps most notable of all, acting on behalf of the user to save them time and effort. I’m very excited for this year because of the agentic behavior that our models will unlock the model is taking multiple steps on its own volition and giving you an answer, says Atty Eleti, an engineer at OpenAI. On the far end, [it makes way for] AI engineers, AI designers, AI auditors, AI accountants. Little junior interns that you can instruct and operate and ask them to go up and do these things. And I think we’re on the cusp of that becoming a very tangible reality. Still, these long-term possibilities are grounded in immediate efficiencies. The API updates mean that a simple question, whats the weather in San Francisco, goes from taking a hundred lines of code to just three. Adding all of the aforementioned tools requires just one line of code. This means that coding AI apps should be faster for developers. And because many queries hit OpenAI’s servers all at once, responses should come faster for end users. [Image: OpenAI] The challenge of bringing developers along Like any tool, APIs have to be designed for ease of use. They are not ust about coding capabilities, the OpenAI team argues, but about designing clarity and possibility. The education ladder of an API is something that has to be very consciously designed, because our target audience is not people who know how AI works or how LLMs work, says Eleti. And so we introduce them to AI in a sort of a ladder way, where you do a bit of work and you get some reward out of it. You do a bit more work, you understand some more concepts, and then over time, you can graduate to the more complex functionality. OpenAI gives this instructive feedback to developers through their own mistakes. Whenever it generates errors, OpenAI tries to explain what went wrong in plain language, so the developer can actually understand how to improve their technique. The OpenAI team believes that such feedback, coupled with autocomplete coding tools, should make Responses easy for developers to learn. I think that really good APIs sort of allow you to start off with the gas pedal in the steering wheel and graduate slowly to the airplane cockpit by exposing more and more functionality in the form of knobs, in the form of like settings and these other things that are hidden from you first, but exposed over time, says Coffey. The tricky part of updating an API, however, is not just making it self-explanatory. The API also needs to be backwards compatible because software thats already been built to connect to OpenAI cant suddenly go dark after an update. So Responses is backwards compatible with software built upon Chat Completions. Furthermore, the Completions API itself will continue working as it always has. OpenAI will continue to support it into the future, offering updates that put Completions as close to feature parity with Responses as it can. (But to use those nifty tools, youll need to graduate to Responses.) Over time, the OpenAI API team bets that most of its developers will land on Responses, given the extra capabilities and that it will be price-equivalent to run. Assuming that OpenAI has bet on the right future, AI software is about to become faster, more capable, and more proactive than anything weve seen to date.
Category:
E-Commerce
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||