Google is laying off employees, Tesla is canning its Supercharger team, and UnitedHealthcare is revealing security vulnerabilities

Welcome to Week in Review (WiR), TechCrunch’s regular newsletter summarizing the week in technology. This release is a bit bittersweet for me – it would be my last (a minimum of for some time). I’ll soon be shifting my focus to a brand new AI newsletter that I’m very enthusiastic about. Stay tuned for further information!

Now, let’s get to the news: This week, Google laid off employees from its Flutter, Dart, and Python teams just weeks before its annual I/O developer conference. In total, 200 people from Google’s “core” teams were laid off, including people working on application platforms and other engineering roles.

Elsewhere, Tesla CEO Elon Musk has gutted the corporate’s team answerable for overseeing its supercharger station network in a brand new round of layoffs – despite recently bringing in major automakers like Ford and General Motors. The cuts are so complete that Musk suggested in an email that they might force Tesla to slow the rollout of its Supercharger network.

UnitedHealthcare CEO Andrew Witty told a House subcommittee that the ransomware gang that breached US health tech giant Change Healthcare – a subsidiary of UnitedHealthcare – used a set of stolen credentials to realize access to Change Healthcare systems that didn’t were protected by multi-factor authentication. Last week, UnitedHealthcare reported that hackers had stolen health data for “a significant portion of people in America.”

News

Hallucinations, hallucinations: OpenAI faces one other privacy grievance within the EU. This one – filed by a nonprofit privacy rights organization night on behalf of a person complainant – targets the shortcoming of the AI-powered ChatGPT chatbot to correct misinformation about individuals that it generates.

Just get out… of Sam’s Club: Sam’s Club customers who pay on the register or via the Scan & Go mobile app can now leave the shop without having to double-check their purchases. Technology, exposed at January’s Consumer Electronics Show, it has already been implemented in 20% of Sam’s Club locations.

TikTok bypasses Apple’s rules: TikTok provides some users with a link to a web site where they should purchase coins used to tip digital creators on the platform. Typically, these coins have to be purchased via an in-app purchase – which requires a 30% commission paid to Apple – suggesting that TikTok could also be attempting to bypass Apple’s App Store rules.

NIST’s GenAI Platform: The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), an agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce that develops and tests technologies for the U.S. government, businesses and most people, has launched NIST GenAI, a brand new program to judge generative artificial intelligence technologies, including text-based technologies and artificial image generating intelligence.

Getir draws out: Getir, the fast-trading giant, has withdrawn from the US, UK and Europe to deal with Turkey, its home country. The company – once valued at nearly $12 billion – said the move would impact hundreds of salaried and full-time employees.

Analysis

About Techstars’ Cold War: Dom’s stellar reporting pulls back the curtain on a 12 months of monetary losses and staff cuts at startup accelerator Techstars, whose CEO, Maëlle Gavet, has been a controversial force for change.

AI-based coding: Yours is really taking a look at Copilot Workspace, which is kind of an evolution of GitHub’s AI-powered coding assistant Copilot right into a more general tool — constructing on recently introduced features like Copilot Chat, which allows developers to ask questions on their code in natural language.