Alex Heath

The VP running Google News, Shailesh Prakash, has resigned, according to The Wall Street Journal, which notes his exit “comes amid a continuing rift between Google and news outlets.”

As I reported last year, Prakash’s org was one of the first inside Google to get hit by rolling layoffs. He told employees at the time that there was a “reckoning” due to the company hiring too many senior workers during the pandemic.

During his interview with Joe Rogan yesterday, Musk confirmed that X’s business is still suffering from an advertiser boycott and that he thinks “there’s no way that a Kamala regime would allow X to exist.”

“I think, if Trump wins, we’ll see most of the boycott lift,” he said. “But if Kamala wins, we’ll see that boycott get stronger.”

Meta’s X.com competitor now has 275 million monthly users, up from 200 million in August, according to Mark Zuckerberg. On Meta’s Q3 earnings call just now, he says Threads is seeing more than one million sign-ups per day and is on track to becoming “our next major social app.”

The time people spend in Threads “also continues to grow,” and Meta is working to “make it easier to stay up to date on topics,” adds CFO Susan Li.

I reported last week that Google is aiming to release its next big Gemini AI model in December. On the company’s earnings call today, CEO Sundar Pichai confirmed that it’s coming:

We’ve had two generations of Gemini model. We are working on the third generation, which is progressing well.

Relatedly, The Information reported after my scoop that Google is working to bring agent-like behavior to the next Gemini. The idea is that the model can take over a computer screen in a way that would work similarly to what Anthropic recently released.