With the announcement of good earnings…with third quarter earnings up 19% and net income year over year up 35%, Meta also has announced some big increases in usage of its AI and of Threads. Engadget.com reports that Threads is now up to “almost 275 million” monthly users, according to CEO Mark Zuckerberg. “It’s been growing more than a million sign ups per day,” Zuckerberg said, adding that “engagement is growing too.” Meta AI has now passed the 500 million user mark, and Zuck says they are on track to become the most-used generative AI assistant in the world. Meta AI has only been out about a year, too. 

There is always major resistance when Microsoft finally gets serious about dropping support for an operating system in order to get users to move on to the latest one Redmond offers. According to engadget.com, Windows 10 will see support end on October 14, 2025. Now, Microsoft has thrown laggards a lifeline with an Extended Security Updates program for regular users. If you are one of those, you will be able to buy a one year extension for $30. ESU programs have been in place for a long time for commercial users, but this one is for personal users. Commercial users can buy up to 3 years of ESU support, which takes them to 2028…BUT the commercial licenses double in price every year until 2028. Defender Antivirus will get updates for Windows 10 until at least October 2028. Kicking or screaming or not, Microsoft is going to drag all Windows 10 users to Windows 11. 

In his robotaxi presentation, Elon Musk claimed that Tesla would be launching a robotaxi ride-hailing service in California next year. Now, Zoox co-founder and CTO Jesse Levinson has opined that Tesla won’t be launching anywhere next year. TechCrunch.com says Levinson was quoted as commenting that the “fundamental issue is they don’t have technology that works,” Levinson said Wednesday at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024.” His remarks came at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 yesterday. Levinson went on to say he was differentiating between a driver assistance system that drives most of the time, but requires human intervention “versus a system that’s so reliable and robust that you don’t need a person in it.” He continued, “Our perspective is you really do need significantly more hardware than Tesla is putting in their vehicles to build a robotaxi that is not just as safe, but as especially safer than a human,” he said. Levinson said he believes that Tesla full self driving is “about 100 times less safe than a human if you look at all the metrics that are publicly available.”

In a statement saying it had over invested and underperformed, Dropbox has chopped 20% of their global staff. Arstechnica.com reports that CEO Drew Houston wrote that Dropbox’s core file sync and sharing “business has matured, and we’ve been working to build our next phase of growth with products like Dash,” an “AI-powered universal search” product targeted to business customers. The company’s “current structure and investment levels” are “no longer sustainable.” With several cloud services offering easier large file sharing, it shouldn’t be a big surprise. Box had things to itself for a while, but competition makes for real challenges. 

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