Fox Settles with Dominion; Top Ad Execs Abandon Meta

by Hannah Dillon on 19th Apr 2023 in News

In today's ExchangeWire news digest: Fox settles with Dominion to avoid a defamation lawsuit; Meta higher-ups leave the company in the midst of redundancies and cost-cutting measures; and Microsoft is reportedly developing its own chips for use on AI models.

Fox settles defamation case with Dominion

Fox Corp and Fox News have avoided a high-profile defamation case with voting machine firm Dominion. The media conglomerate agreed to pay a USD$787.5m (£633m) settlement after it was accused of airing allegations that Dominion’s voting software had switched votes for Donald Trump to Joe Biden during the 2020 presidential election.

Top Meta execs depart during the "year of efficiency"

Several of Meta’s top executives have departed the company amid a fresh wave of job cuts. Around 21,000 employees at the Facebook-parent are expected to be impacted by redundancies and cost-cutting measures under Mark Zuckerberg’s “year of efficiency”. Higher ups including VP of global channels Patrick Harris and VP of global business marketing Michelle Klein, however, have chosen to abandon ship.

Microsoft developing in-house chips

Microsoft is reportedly developing in-house AI chips to replace those manufactured by Nvidia. Believed to have been in development since 2019, the "Athena" chips would be used to train large language models such as GPT-4. According to The Information, some Microsoft and OpenAI employees are already testing the chips’ efficacy on existing AI systems.