3 From Techquity
Welcome to Techquity Takes! Here are three technology stories that caught our eye last week.
After 20-Month Battle, Microsoft Finally Completes Activision Acquisition
In a bid to shore up Microsoft’s position in online games, the company fought regulators for months to gain the right to buy gaming giant Activision. With the green light finally glowing, Redmond wins its prize.
Techquity Take: M&A in any regulated area is going to be increasingly challenging as government anti-trust and anti-competition activity is not only on the rise but spreading into areas normally not scrutinized as strongly (like online games). For Microsoft, this is further acknowledgment, as well, that it needs more purchases in one of the fastest-growing areas of online activity and revenue growth - the game space.
StackOverflow Lays 28% of Workforce, Bowing to AI Pressure
The most popular coding QA site has faced declining traffic ever since GitHub Copilot launched over a year ago. Worse, the number of answers posted by site users has also dropped by over 10%. In the age of AI, will coding assistants replace community-driven QA sites?
Techquity Take: This might be the first major media casualty of the new age of Generative AI. OpenAI and others actually trained their foundational models on the StackOverflow corpus (without explicit permission). StackOverflow later blocked them and is now selling access to its data, but it may be too late. Over the long run, however, there is a real risk that AI will destroy a valuable community repository of shared knowledge.
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Sweetgreen’s is All-In on Robot Salad Makers
An eye-opening article about how the salad chain Sweetgreen’s is ramping up robots to do much of the work making salads. The first system went live in May and can cut in half the time it takes to make a bowl of salad.? Humans put on the finishing touches. This is just the latest robot sighting in the restaurant biz. Persistently high labor costs (and labor shortages) have made it harder for restaurants to stay open, let alone remain profitable and grow. Robotics has also gotten steadily better. The robots are mostly working alongside humans.
Techquity Take: Increasingly, we will see jobs broken down into “jobs to be done,” with pieces hived off for automation. There are no signs of the labor shortage abating, and robot makers have gotten smarter about identifying specific tasks — peeling avocados, making french fries, or assembling bowls of salad or burrito bowls — which are easier to perfect and operate than all-in-one kitchen robots. Robots are likely coming to a fast food joint near you soon, too.
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