Startups spanning various sectors have also joined the trend, announcing employee layoffs in the first half of the year. Despite a brief slowdown in technology layoffs over the summer and fall, recent developments suggest that layoffs are on the rise again.

Here are the companies that laid off a large percentage of their employees this month:

Convoy
Is halting operations due to a “massive freight recession,” CEO Dan Lewis announced in a memo October 19, a week after laying off 20% of its workforce.

LegalZoom
Plans to lay off more than 100 workers in its sales division, the company disclosed in a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act letter.

Plume
Laid off more than two dozen workers, TechCrunch learned October 18, about a year after the trans healthcare startup raised a $24 million Series B.

Google
Eliminated at least 40 roles in its news division, Google confirmed October 18.

Expedia Group
Cut around 100 jobs, Skift reports, in its second round of layoffs in recent months. The cuts reportedly impacted employees across data and AI.

Stack Overflow
Laid off 28% of its staff, more than likely impacting 100 people, the Prosus-owned company announced October 16.

Bandcamp
Eliminated 50% of its staff on October 16 after ownership changed from video game company Epic to music licensing platform Songtradr.

LinkedIn
Confirmed October 16 that it will cut 668 more jobs, bringing the total to nearly 1,400 this year, with the bulk of the most recent cuts impacting those with R&D roles.

Flexport
On October 13 began laying off 20% of its workers, about 600 people, as it prepares for restructuring, and continues a cost-cutting campaign that began with rescinding offers and working to lease office space.

Qualcomm
Is cutting 1,258 jobs in two of its California offices. According to a filing with the California Employment Development Department, the semiconductor company plans to make the reductions in December.

Blue Origin
Laid off 40 people October 10, including software engineers and program managers, according to The Information.

Stitch Fix
Will lay off 558 employees after the personal styling subscription service closes a distribution center in Dallas.

Synapse
Confirmed October 6 that it had laid off 86 people, about 40% of the a16z-backed fintech company. Earlier in the year, Synapse laid off 18% of its employees after its growth slowed.

Bird
Issued a new round of layoffs after acquiring Spin, according to an email interim CEO Michael Washinushi sent to the company. The layoffs came one week after the company was delisted from the New York Stock Exchange, and the exact number remains unknown.

Qualtrics
Announced on October 4 that 780 roles are being eliminated and that “several hundred” roles are changing or moving locations in 2024.

Hopper
Is reducing its full-time staff by 30%, amounting to 250 job cuts, the company announced October 3.

Chainalysis
Announced October 2 that it is laying off around 15% of its workforce, affecting approximately 150 employees.

Although some economists are advising against succumbing to recession fears, there is cautious optimism. The technology sector’s road to recovery is characterised by slow progress. As a consequence, technology companies continue to downsize their workforces and shift from a growth-oriented approach to an efficiency-oriented approach, adapting to the constant challenges in the market. And the layoff trend will continue.

What does it mean? In fact, all these improvements enable running the Stable Diffusion text-to-image model on Apple Silicon-powered devices with the latest iOS or macOS versions – iOS 16.2 and macOS 13.1.

Stable Diffusion has been very well received by the community of artists, developers and hobbyists since its debut in 2022. The reason why is the ability to create unprecedented visual content with just a text prompt. In recognition, the community has in a matter of weeks built an extensive ecosystem of extensions and tools around this core technology. There are already methods that personalize Stable Diffusion, extend it to languages other than English, and more, thanks to open-source projects like Hugging Face diffusers.

Developers are discovering many more creative uses of Stable Diffusion such as image editing, in-picture painting, out-of-picture painting, super resolution, style transfer, and even color palette generation. With the growing number of applications, it is important to ensure that developers can use this technology effectively to create applications that creatives everywhere will be able to use.

There are a lot of reasons why on-device deployment of Stable Diffusion in an app is preferable to a server-based approach. The privacy of the end user is protected because any data the user provided as input to the model stays on the user’s device. After initial download, users don’t require an internet connection to use the model. And locally deploying this model enables developers to reduce or eliminate their server-related costs.

Getting to a compelling result with Stable Diffusion can require a lot of time and iteration, so a core challenge with on-device deployment of the model is making sure it can generate results fast enough on device. This requires executing a complex pipeline comprising 4 different neural networks totaling approximately 1.275 billion parameters.

Optimizing Core ML for Stable Diffusion and simplifying model conversion makes it easier for developers to incorporate this technology in their apps in a privacy-preserving and economically feasible way, while getting the best performance on Apple Silicon.

This release comprises a Python package for converting Stable Diffusion models from PyTorch to Core ML using diffusers and coremltools, as well as a Swift package to deploy the models. To get started, visit the Core ML Stable Diffusion code repository for detailed instructions on benchmarking and deployment.

Application providers will be expected to carry out a security assessment before trying to roll out new things such as applications, features, or technologies if some of these are capable of influencing the public.

The CAC did not point out any specific applications.

All the rules which have been proposed will be applied to “text, picture, voice, video, and other information production”. The regulator said also that the rules will be implemented in functions such as instant messaging, livestreaming, forum communities, etc.

Mobile app providers are not allowed to conduct activities that put the national security in danger. News applications must take licenses which give them allowance to publish news.

The rules will take effect in February-March.

When you receive a message from someone, a notification with a profile picture of the user who texted you will pop up on your screen.

If you have already installed the beta version but you didn’t get the feature, don’t worry. Wabetainfo reveals that it may take a time for the update to be launched on more accounts.

How to reply with a reel? The first step, needed to try out the new feature, is to post a reel on your Instagram account. If someone replies with a reel, you can send a reply by making another reel. A pop-up will ask you how you would like to reply, when you click on the ‘Reply on a comment’ button. Then users can tap on the blue reels button in order to create a video reply. On the other hand, the video reply will be pinned to the comment just like any other reply and it will be seen by other users. While introducing its new feature, Instagram said:

“We love the communities that creators have built on Instagram. That’s why we’re excited to launch reels visual replies,”

Recently, Indian users were provided with one more feature which allows them to add music on their feed, except on their stories or reels. If they want to add music to their posts, they can click on the Add Music option which will be visible to them while posting the picture. They can search for specific songs, as well as, choose its length of time.