Morning Brew - ☕ Marissa Mayer spills the tea

The former Yahoo CEO wishes she had acquired Hulu, not Tumblr.
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May 05, 2023

Emerging Tech Brew

Secureframe

Welcome to the end of the working week. Tech Brew’s Patrick Kulp sat down with former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer to talk about her new startup, the AI search race, technology fears, and her biggest Yahoo regrets. It’s a compelling read to kick off your weekend.

In today’s edition:

Patrick Kulp, Jordan McDonald, Annie Saunders

Q&A

Marissa Mayer, on the record

Marissa Mayer, on the record Marissa Mayer

After a decades-long career at two of Silicon Valley’s biggest names, Marissa Mayer is setting her sights on a smaller problem: Your contacts list.

The former Yahoo CEO and early Google executive co-founded Sunshine, the maker of an app that uses AI to organize your network’s phone numbers and email addresses. The company next plans to tackle social groups and event scheduling with other products, including an upcoming app called Sunshine Circles.

And yes, she’s aware that these might not sound like the most exciting AI applications these days, but she thinks they can make a big difference.

“We mused about naming the company Mundane AI,” Mayer told Tech Brew. “How do you take cutting-edge AI and just apply it to everyday problems that we all have to deal with?”

Beyond how AI can clean up your phone, we spoke with Mayer—who holds two AI-focused degrees from Stanford—about the state of the search wars, her time at Yahoo, and where she stands on the fears around the technology’s future.

Keep reading here.—PK

     

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ELECTRIC VEHICLES

Bye-bye, Bolt

Bye-bye, Bolt Francis Scialabba

It’s time to say goodbye to the Chevy Bolt. GM CEO Mary Barra told investors on the company’s first-quarter earnings call in April that this year will mark the end of production for both the Bolt EV and Bolt EUV.

GM plans to manufacture 70,000 of the EVs in 2023 before sunsetting them at the end of the year. The Orion Township, Michigan, plant where the Bolt is assembled will be closed and renovated, with plans for the newly spruced-up plant to nearly triple the number of employees and aid in a company-wide goal of building 600,000 electric trucks annually when it reopens in 2024.

The axe is falling on the EV not because of poor sales or even a lingering distaste among consumers due to recalls related to the fire-prone batteries in earlier Bolt models—indeed, Bolt sales increased 50% in 2022. It’s something much simpler: The Bolt is out of date with modern EVs.

Keep reading here.—JM

     

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BITS AND BYTES

Stat: 30%. That’s the percentage of back-office roles at IBM that CEO Arvind Krishna told Bloomberg he “could easily see...getting replaced by AI and automation over a five-year period.”

Quote: “We don’t need another pinkie promise from a tech company that they’re going to safeguard our data. We need meaningful limitations on what data they can collect and use.”—Sara Geoghegan, a lawyer at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, to the Washington Post, regarding the terms patients must agree to before they can use Amazon Clinic

Read: Tesla’s magnet mystery shows Elon Musk is willing to compromise (Wired)

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COOL CONSUMER TECH

Jack Dorsey Joe Raedle/Getty Images

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

Bluesky from now on? Morning Brew broke down the buzz around Bluesky, “a social media app that’s gaining traction as an alternative to Twitter.” It’s currently invitation-only, but notable very online names including AOC, Dril, and Chrissy Teigen have signed up for Jack Dorsey’s new project.

I always feel like somebody’s watching me: Nonprofit newsroom The Markup recently introduced a tool it calls Blacklight, which lets web browser users (so that’s…you and me and everyone we know) see “the specific user-tracking technologies” being used by a particular site. If you plug a few of your favorite websites into Blacklight and are disturbed by the results, The Markup offers a guide for beefing up your browser’s privacy settings.

         

Written by Patrick Kulp, Jordan McDonald, and Annie Saunders

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