Coders were hit hardest among Microsoft’s 2,000-person layoff in its home state of Washington, Bloomberg reports.

Over 40% of the people laid off were in software engineering, making it by far the largest category, Bloomberg found based on state filings. Relatively few sales or marketing positions were affected, Bloomberg added. 

To be fair, coders are a big chunk of Microsoft’s workforce, although it doesn’t disclose the exact proportion. The cuts are part of recent layoffs at Microsoft affecting about 6,000 people.

Still, these cuts come after CEO Satya Nadella said last month that up to 30% of the company’s code was now written by AI. 

TechCrunch asked Microsoft if the layoffs were motivated by the rise of AI-assisted coding. The tech giant declined to comment. Microsoft has said the layoffs are aimed at reducing management layers. 

Imagine you’re watching a highly anticipated video from your favorite YouTube creator — perhaps the moment a famous couple finally gets engaged — when an ad pops up immediately after the clip. This is part of YouTube’s new ad format called “Peak Points.”

The company revealed the new ad format during its Upfront presentation on Wednesday in New York.

Peak Points leverages Google’s Gemini AI to analyze YouTube videos and identify moments it believes have the highest viewer engagement or are most emotionally impactful, and then suggests placing the ad right after it.

Point Peaks aims to benefit advertisers by using a tactic that aims to grab users’ attention right when they’re most invested in the content. This approach appears to be similar to a strategy called emotion-based targeting, where advertisers place ads that align with the emotions evoked by the video. It’s believed that when viewers experience heightened emotional states, it leads to better recall of the ads. 

However, viewers may find these interruptions frustrating, especially when they’re deeply engaged in the emotional arc of a video and want the ad to be over quickly to resume watching. 

In related news, YouTube announced another ad format that may be more appealing to users. The platform debuted a shoppable product feed where users can browse and purchase items during an ad.

AI startup Stability AI has released Stable Audio Open Small, a “stereo” audio-generating AI model that the company claims is the fastest on the market — and efficient enough to run on smartphones.

Stable Audio Open Small is the fruit of a collaboration between Stability AI and Arm, the chipmaker that produces many of the processors inside tablets, phones, and other mobile devices. While a number of AI-powered apps can generate audio, like Suno and Udio, most rely on cloud processing, meaning that they can’t be used offline.

Stability also claims that Stable Audio Open Small’s training set is made up entirely of songs from the royalty-free audio libraries Free Music Archive and Freesound. That’s as opposed to the training sets of the aforementioned Suno and Udio, which reportedly contain copyrighted content, posing an IP risk.

Stable Audio Open Small is 341 million parameters in size and optimized to run on Arm CPUs. (Parameters, sometimes referred to as weights, are the internal components of a model that guide its behavior.) Designed for quickly generating short audio samples and sound effects (e.g., drum and instrument riffs), Stable Audio Open Small can produce up to 11 seconds of audio on a smartphone in less than 8 seconds, claims Stability AI.

Here’s a sample generated by Stable Audio Open Small:

And here’s another one:

The model isn’t without its limitations. Stable Audio Open Small only supports prompts written in English, and Stability notes in its documentation that the model can’t generate realistic vocals or high-quality songs. The model also doesn’t perform equally well across musical styles, Stability warns — a consequence of its Western-biased training data.

In another potential wrinkle for devs, Stable Audio Open Small has somewhat restrictive usage terms. It’s free to use for researchers, hobbyists, and businesses with less than $1 million in annual revenue, but developers and organizations making over $1 million in revenue have to pay for Stability’s enterprise license.

Stability, the beleaguered firm behind the popular image generation model Stable Diffusion, raised new cash last year as investors, including Eric Schmidt and Napster founder Sean Parker, sought to turn the business around. Emad Mostaque, Stability’s co-founder and ex-CEO, reportedly mismanaged Stability into financial ruin, leading staff to resign, a partnership with Canva to fall through, and investors to grow concerned about the company’s prospects.

In the last few months, Stability has hired a new CEO, appointed Titanic director James Cameron to its board of directors, and released several new image generation models.