Like rockets, not every aerospace company reaches the stars.

Virgin Orbit, founded by billionaire Richard Branson, has been struggling to take off in recent months. Its SPAC deal in 2021 raised far less than it expected, and its LauncherOne rocket failed to reach orbit in its first UK-based flight in January of this year.

• Those less-than-stellar results were followed by a mass furlough, then extensive layoffs, with Virgin Orbit announcing it would let go of about 85% of its workforce in an effort to cut costs.
• This week, it announced that it had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, sending its share price down to $0.15.

Sky is the limit: Claude Rousseau, research director at Northern Sky Research, told Tech Brew that Virgin Orbit’s failure “leaves room for other well-funded launchers to pick up the pieces, because there’s one less competitor out there, or at least a competitor that’s not as active as the others.”

Rousseau emphasized that making a splash in the rocket launch industry is difficult, and it could be a while before small rocket launches reach a cadence similar to larger companies like SpaceX.

“There are things that will be less tangible to evaluate because this is a new and emerging market. Hopefully, we’ll take stock of this to start thinking more iterms of ‘Where’s the business case here? How do we close that business case?” Rousseau said. “How do we ensure that the investment we make becomes, at one point, a revenue generator?’”—JM

Stanford’s annual AI Index aims to pin down a complex subject—the current status of the machine learning industry—and this year, researchers spent 385 pages painting that picture, from economic impact to policy and governance.

We combed through the report to highlight top business takeaways. Here’s our look at 2022’s report. Now let’s dive into 2023.

AI advancement goes corporate: Industry has taken the reins from academia when it comes to AI development. In 2022, just three significant machine learning models were developed in the world of academia, compared to 32 industry-produced models, researchers wrote.

• More context: The amount of money and energy needed to build and train large-scale AI models seems to be ever-increasing, and—for better or worse—large companies typically have more resources to meet those requirements. For instance, Google’s PaLM model cost $8 million to train, and OpenAI’s GPT-3 training phase emitted 502 metric tons of carbon, according to the report.

In-demand AI skills: Although many companies have frozen or paused hiring for tech roles amid the industry’s rising layoffs, AI hiring is on an upward trend. Many industrial sectors have displayed increased demand for machine learning-related roles, with related job postings rising from an average of 1.7% in 2021 to 1.9% last year.

• More context: “One area where [tech companies] plan to do a lot of hiring, still, is when it comes to AI and machine learning,” Julia Pollak, chief economist at ZipRecruiter, told Tech Brew in January.

Stagnated investment: VC funding for AI has decreased year over year for the first time in a decade, with a decline in both the number of “AI-related funding events” and “newly funded AI companies,” according to the report.

• More context: The slowdown in private AI investment was apparent even in August, as Tech Brew wrote, when AI funding was already falling faster than the market. It’s important to note that this decline comes after a decade of heightened investment: “In 2022 the amount of private investment in AI was 18 times greater than it was in 2013,” researchers wrote.—HF

Usually, we write about the business of tech. Here, we highlight the *tech* of tech.

And I would charge 500 miles: Automaker Ram unveiled its new electric pickup, the 1500 REV, at the New York Auto Show this week. The pickup, which is expected to go on sale late next year, features not only a 350-mile range option, but also a second, longer-range option that aims to reach 500 miles, leaving much of its competition in the dust.

Outline it again, Sam: Meta showed off its Segment Anything Model (SAM), which it claims has the ability to isolate and distinguish between individual objects within images or videos. The company said it could aid with things like “augmented reality applications, image editing, and aiding scientific study.”

Stat: More than 75 million packages have been delivered to US doorsteps by Amazon’s electric vans since the fleet launched in summer 2022.

Quote: “AI can help deal with some very difficult challenges like disease and climate change, but we also have to address the potential risks to our society, to our economy, to our national security.”—President Biden on the potential dangers of AI during a meeting of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology

Read: The Verge’s look at the aftereffects and nausea caused by VR headset usage.

Bye-bye, bugs: Don’t waste your engineering team’s time with troubleshooting and squashing bugs. QA Wolf gets you to 80% automated end-to-end test coverage in 4 months, getting your developers and QA back to what they do best. Book a demo.

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Three of the following news stories are true, and one...we made up. Can you spot the odd one out?

• Google contractors acknowledged that they “don’t have enough time to verify correct answers from the company’s AI chatbot and end up guessing.”
• Best Buy is now selling boxes that enable consumers to send in their unwanted electronics for recycling.
• Samsung announced a fully voiced AI assistant that is being developed exclusively for its line of smart appliances.
• An Australian mayor is threatening to file a defamation lawsuit against OpenAI over ChatGPT content that falsely alleges he was found guilty in a bribery scandal.

Catch up on the top Tech Brew stories from the past few editions:

• What businesses can learn from this year’s Stanford AI Index
• Vetting startups in ag tech? Here’s how Astanor Ventures does it.
• Microsoft plants seeds in the agriculture industry