Happy Monday! It's the year of efficiency at big tech - Meta laid off 4,000 folks last week, and Google's CEO Sundar Pichai has hinted at a second round of layoffs in the next few months. Somehow the memo may didn't extend to the top echelons, as Sundar banked a cool $225 million last year. Gotta love that efficiency 💵 💵 💵

🌶 Highlight of the day 🌶

Bard shipped a range of software development features. The AI tool can generate its own code, and can also help with debugging and explaining general code snippets as well as code within GitHub repos. Given the right prompts, Bard can apparently also debug code that it wrote itself, as well as write functions for Google Sheets 🧑‍🎤

These features span 20+ languages including Python, C++, Javascript and more. Given just last week Google employees described Bard as a useless pathological liar, the big question is how accurately Bard can actually perform these functions. Nonetheless, the race is on 🏃‍♀️

 ♨️ Hot off the press launches

Big tech

• Amazon ships a major dataset for training "pick and place" robots 

• Apple is working on its own mental health journaling app for iOS

• Twitter backtracks and removes all 'government funded' news labels 

• YouTube TV tests major picture quality improvements 

• Google Fi rebrands and expands support for smartwatch connectivity

General and early-stage

• Stack Overflow to start charging AI companies for training data 

• Shop With AI launches a personal AI stylist 

• Strava ships a Spotify integration to access songs within Strava 

• Bluesky launches its Twitter competitor on Android

• Imgur bans explicit content from its platform 

🔍 Other good finds

• Clear ROI. The ultimate guide to product-led sales

• No 1. More people watch Netflix than Disney+, Hulu, and HBO combined

• Linguistics. Spotify's DJ voice actor, on what it's like to become an AI

🧈 Twitter nugget

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- Amol