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Hello again! Greg<\/a> here again with Week in Review<\/a>. WiR is the newsletter where we take the most read TechCrunch stories from the last seven days and wrap them up in as few words as possible \u2014 no fluff, no nonsense,* just a quick blast of everything you probably want to know about in tech this week.<\/p>\n *Maybe a little bit of nonsense.<\/em><\/p>\n Want it in your inbox every Saturday morning? Sign up here<\/a>.<\/p>\n Tip your Amazon driver (on Amazon\u2019s dime)<\/strong><\/a>: If you\u2019ve got an Alexa device at home, Amazon will pay your delivery driver an extra $5 if you say, \u201cAlexa, thank my driver\u201d after a delivery. Amazon could, of course, just pay drivers more to begin with\u2026but that, depressingly, probably wouldn\u2019t be a move that would get Amazon one of the most read headlines of the week.<\/p>\n Slack\u2019s CEO to depart<\/a><\/strong>: Last week Salesforce CEO Bret Taylor<\/a> stepped down; this week, Stewart Butterfield, CEO of (Salesforce-owned) Slack, announced he\u2019ll also step down come January. Ron Miller shares his insights on inbound Slack CEO Lidiane Jones and her decades of product experience<\/a>.<\/p>\n The \u201cTwitter Files\u201d<\/a><\/strong>: \u201cElon Musk reminded his followers on Friday that owning Twitter now means he controls every aspect of the company \u2014 including what its employees said behind closed doors before he took over,\u201d writes Taylor as an array of once-private internal Twitter communications is made public.<\/p>\n Lensa AI goes viral<\/strong><\/a>: Do all of your social media friends suddenly have avatars that make them look like sci-fi gods and action heroes? It\u2019s probably because of Lensa AI, a photo editing app that went viral this week after adding support for Stable Diffusion\u2019s AI-generated art tools. Popularity didn\u2019t come without controversy, though \u2014 many continue to debate the ethics of selling something generated by an AI trained on the works of real people; meanwhile, others noted that the AI could be \u201ctricked\u201d<\/a> into generating otherwise disallowed NSFW imagery.<\/p>\n More tech layoffs<\/strong><\/a>: This week Airtable laid off<\/a> about 20% of its staff \u2014 over 250 people. Plaid also laid off 20%<\/a>, which for them works out to 260 people. African fintech unicorn Chipper Cash let go of 50 people<\/a>, and the U.K. drag-and-drop e-commerce platform Primer let go of 85<\/a> (about one-third of the company).<\/p>\n Google combines Maps\/Waze teams<\/a><\/strong>: When Google bought the navigation app Waze for over $1 billion back in 2013, Google said they\u2019d keep the Waze and Google Maps teams separate \u201cfor now.\u201d Turns out \u201cfor now\u201d meant about 9.5 years, but Google confirmed this week that the two teams will be merged. Google says it expects Waze to remain a stand-alone service.<\/p>\n Twitter Blue might cost more on iOS<\/a><\/strong>: Twitter\u2019s $8 \u201cBlue\u201d subscription plan (which comes with a blue \u201cverified\u201d checkmark) is still on pause for now after a few false starts<\/a>, but when it returns, it\u2019ll reportedly cost a few bucks more if you subscribe through the iOS app in order to offset Apple\u2019s cut.<\/p>\n Found<\/a> \u2014 our podcast about founders and the companies they build \u2014 has a new co-host! Becca Szkutak stepped into the role this week, joining Darrell Etherington in a chat with Daye CEO Valentina Milanova. Meanwhile, the Equity crew tried to make sense of 2022 in a year-end look back<\/a>, and Taylor Hatmaker hopped on The TechCrunch Podcast<\/a> to explore what the sudden explosion of AI-generated art means for actual human artists.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s what subscribers were reading most on TechCrunch+:<\/p>\nmost read<\/h2>\n
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