Rivian reportedly plans to lay off around five percent of its workforce

Electric truck maker Rivian is reportedly planning to lay off hundreds of workers. While the company hasn’t made a firm decision on mass job cuts, according to Bloomberg, it may shed around five percent of the workforce. With a headcount of more than 14,000, that equates to around 700 employees. Layoffs may be announced in the coming weeks, the report suggests. Rivian declined to comment to Engadget.

The job cuts would primarily be for non-manufacturing positions in areas where Rivian has expanded too quickly. Teams with duplicate functions are said to be among those the company has targeted. The total number of employees at Rivian has more or less doubled over the last year as the automaker increased production.

The automotive industry has been hit hard by supply chain issues and the economic climate, and it seems Rivian is no exception. The company still expects to build 25,000 EVs this year despite production difficulties. Rivian eventually aims to manufacture 600,000 vehicles per year between its existing plant in Normal, Illinois and a second planned factory in Georgia that’s expected to open in 2024.

The company has a backlog of tens of thousands of EV orders. It will have to juggle those with the 100,000 delivery vehicles it will build for Amazon by the end of the decade. As such, bolstering production while streamlining operations elsewhere seems a logical move.

The news follows a recent report noting that Rivian hired dozens of former Tesla employees in recent months, according to LinkedIn data. It was reported in late June that Tesla cut around 200 people from its Autopilot team after CEO Elon Musk announced plans to reduce the company’s salaried workforce by 10 percent. Musk told employees earlier that month he had a “super bad feeling” about the state of the economy and for them to expect layoffs.

Meta made a fact-checking AI to help verify Wikipedia citations

In 2020, the Wikipedia community was engulfed in scandal when it came out that a US teen had written 27,000 entries in a language they didn’t speak. The episode was a reminder that the online encyclopedia is not a perfect source of information. Sometimes people will attempt to edit Wikipedia entries out of malice, but frequently factual errors come from some well-intentioned individual making a mistake.

That’s a problem the Wikimedia Foundation recently partnered with Facebook parent company Meta to address. The two set their sights on citations. The problem with Wikipedia footnotes is that there are almost too many for the platform’s volunteer editors to verify. With the website growing by more than 17,000 articles every month, countless citations are incomplete, missing or just plain inaccurate.

Meta developed an AI model that can automatically scan citations at scale to verify their accuracy. It can also suggest alternative citations when it finds a poorly sourced passage. When Wikipedia’s human editors evaluate citations, they rely on common sense and experience. When an AI does the same work, it uses a Natural Language Understanding (NLU) transformation model that attempts to understand the various relationships of words and phrases within a sentence. Meta’s Sphere database, consisting of more than 134 million web pages, acts as the system’s knowledge index. As it goes about its job of checking the citations in an article, the model is designed to find a single source to verify every claim.

To illustrate the capabilities of the AI, Meta shared an example of an incomplete citation the model found on the Wikipedia page for the Blackfoot Confederacy. Under the Notable Blackfoot people section, the article mentions Joe Hipp, the first Native American to compete for the WBA World Heavyweight title. The linked website doesn’t mention Hipp or boxing. Searching the Sphere database, the model found a more suitable citation in a 2015 article from the Great Falls Tribune. Here’s the passage the model flagged:

In 1989 at the twilight of his career, [Marvin] Camel fought Joe Hipp of the Blackfeet Nation. Hipp, who became the first Native American to challenge for the world heavyweight championship, said the fight was one of the weirdest of his career.

What’s notable about the above passage is that it doesn’t explicitly mention boxing. Meta’s model found a suitable reference thanks to its natural language capabilities. The tool could one day help with Facebook’s misinformation problems. “More generally, we hope that our work can be used to assist fact-checking efforts and increase the general trustworthiness of information online,“ the model’s creators said. In the meantime, Meta hopes to build a platform Wikipedia editors can use to verify and correct footnotes systematically.

macOS Ventura preview: Stage Manager is the star of the show

It’s rare for Apple to reshape the way people work on Macs, but that’s precisely what the company is trying to do with Stage Manager in macOS Ventura. At first glance, it’s just a quick visual way to swap between your recently used applications. But af…

Apple’s iOS 16, macOS Ventura and watchOS 9 public betas are ready to download

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Sony’s new portable speakers are waterproof and better with calls

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WhatsApp now lets you use any emoji as a reaction

WhatsApp launched emoji reactions with six options just a few months ago, but it just boosted that number to the entire emoji lexicon. “We’re rolling out the ability to use any emoji as a reaction on WhatsApp,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote, while declaring the 🏄‍♂️, 🍟, 👊 and 💯 as some of this favorites. 

Emoji reactions are a nice way to keep communications succinct or quickly indicate to a message sender that you found their joke funny (or not), for example. To use any emoji as a reaction, long press on a message and tap the + button to the right to get a full list. Then, select the one you want and it should appear in the usual way under a message. 

The update puts WhatsApp on par with Messenger in terms of emoji reactions, and works exactly the same way on mobile. Telegram recently unveiled expanded emoji and animated reactions as well, but you have to subscribe to its new $5/month premium service. The new WhatsApp feature is now live, but it may take a few days to arrive to your region. 

The best dorm room essentials for college students

College will be back in session soon enough, which also means a new batch of freshmen will start living the dorm life. If that applies to you, we think it’s a good idea to stock up on a few essentials for your new tiny abode before you get there, espec…

Sony’s LinkBuds S are cheaper than ever ahead of Prime Day

Sony released its LinkBuds S less than two months ago, but you can already pick up the true wireless earbuds for a solid discount on Amazon. Just ahead of Prime Day, they’re down to $157. That’s a drop of 22 percent from the regular price of $200. It’s the lowest price we’ve seen to date for LinkBuds S and the discount applies to both the white and black variants.

Buy Sony LinkBuds S at Amazon – $157

The LinkBuds S have a more regular closed design rather than the open wear format of the standard LinkBuds that Sony unleashed earlier this year. The company claims the more recent model is smaller and lighter than other earbuds that have active noise cancellation (though it admits the ANC isn’t as sturdy as on its WF-1000XM4 model).

The earbuds have a passthrough/transparency mode too, so you can hear “natural” ambient sound. With the Adaptive Sound Control feature, Sony says the LinkBuds S can learn your preferences over time and automatically tweak the sound settings based on your location or activity.

They have 5mm drivers that provide what Sony claims are “powerful bass and stunningly clear vocals.” With the Integrated Processor V1, which is also found on Sony’s WH-1000XM5 headphones, the company aims to bolster sound quality, mitigate distortion and boost ANC. There’s support for high-resolution audio as well, powered by Sony’s LDAC codec and DSEE Extreme upscaling.

In addition, LinkBuds S have Sony’s Speak-to-Chat feature. The idea is that the earbuds will be able to automatically detect your voice. They will pause the audio and switch on the passthrough mode when you start talking. There’s a feature called Auto Play as well. This allows LinkBuds S to play or resume audio based on your activity when you put them in or end a call. However, the functionality is somewhat limited for now — it currently works with Spotify and Endel.

Elsewhere, the earbuds have an IPX4 water resistance rating, so they should be able to withstand bad weather and workouts. There’s built-in Alexa functionality too.

Sony says LinkBuds S have a battery life of six hours if ANC is switched on. You’ll get another 14 hours of ANC listening time thanks to the charging case. Through a quick-charge function, you’ll get up to an hour of extra use after five minutes of charging time.

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