Today’s Samsung Unpacked Highlights; Google Lays off Hundreds in Ad Division Switching to AI Powered Sales; Uber Shutters Booze Delivery Service Drizly; Semiconductor Revenue Declined in 2023

Samsung showed off the new Galaxy S24 phones at their latest Unpacked event today. The S24 Ultra has a titanium body like the iPhone 15, and more notably, a flat screen…after years of the curved OLED panels we’ve seen on the Samsung phones. Arstechnica.com reports that the new Ultra has 42% slimmer bezels and that the front hole punch cam cutout is 11% smaller than on the S23 Ultra. The bottom still houses an S-Pen for handwriting and drawing. The Ultra got a $100 price bump, so will set you back $1300…a hundred more than the iPhone 15 Pro Max, and $300 more than the Pixel 8 Pro. As we previously reported, Samsung will match Google with  “seven years of security updates and seven generations of OS upgrades.” Samsung spent a lot of time talking about the generative AI in the phone, which it calls ‘Galaxy AI.’ The keyboard’s “Chat Assist” will let you enter text, then change the tone to something like “professional” or “fun” before sending it. The notes app can reformat your typed notes. The phone app can live-translate your speech into another language and vice versa. Samsung’s updated voice recorder app will now transcribe multiple speakers and AI-generate a summary of the recording. “Browsing Assist” in Samsung’s browser will summarize websites. “Generative edit” in the photo editor will create missing background chunks when you cut and paste an object or reframe a photo. Preorders start now, with the phones in stores on January 31st.

Google has apparently laid off ‘hundreds of employees’ from its ad sales team. Remaining employees won’t be picking up the slack, either…the work is to be handled by AI. Arstechnica.com reports that most of the layoffs are in the ‘Large Customer Sales’ team. Some employees have been reassigned as opposed to laid off. Part of what an AI system will be doing is helping people navigate the large selection of ad products; another system can just make ad assets like images and text on its own based on a budget and goals given by the ad purchaser. Google used to have humans do sales guidance for its products, create art assets, and decide on text and layouts, but now AI can do it a thousand times a second. A few years ago, Google tried programmatic buying of radio time that was unsold by stations. That experiment was closed down after a while, as it proved to be not quite ready for prime time. Time will tell how the AI does…for clients that know exactly what they want, it may actually be fine…for those who are less sophisticated at ad buying…maybe not.

Back in 2021, Uber bought Drizly for $1.1 billion, thinking that adding it to their food delivery service might be a plus. The food delivery biz kept losses manageable for Uber during the pandemic. Engadget.com notes that Uber’s SVP of delivery said that they were shutting down the US based alcohol delivery service to focus on its ‘core Uber Eats strategy.’  Uber integrated Drizly’s offerings into its Eats app, but the alcohol delivery service maintained a separate application of its own. In a statement, Uber said customers can get almost anything from food to groceries to alcohol, all on a single app. So the shutdown of Drizly doesn’t mean Uber will no longer deliver alcohol…your booze delivery is safe.

Gartner has crunched the numbers, and worldwide semiconductor sales revenue dropped 11% in 2023. The revenue total was $533 billion. Gartner notes that the semiconductor industry tends to be cyclical, but said “while the cyclicality in the semiconductor industry was present again in 2023, the market suffered a difficult year with memory revenue recording one of its worst declines in history.” Intel did reclaim the #1 spot from Samsung after two years. Nvidia grew revenue 56.4% and made it into the top 5 for the first time ever. 

I’m Clark Reid and you’re ‘Technified’ for now.