by tyler | May 7, 2024 | Tech
Jumia’s revenue and gross merchandise volume showed growth despite a decrease in quarterly active customers, according to its Q1 2024 report. Revenue increased by 19% year-over-year (57% in constant currency) to $48.9 million, while GMV surged by 5% year-over-year (39% in constant currency) to $181 million.
The quarterly active customers of the African e-tailer, on the other hand, declined by almost 5% from 2 million to 1.9 million due to cost-cutting measures such as reduced customer incentives and free shipping expenditures. However, this exercise led to a stickier and higher-quality customer base with increased repurchase rates. The average order value rose by 3% compared to Q1 2023, reaching $39.6 million. Interestingly, despite the decline in customer base, Jumia’s quarterly orders saw a 1.9% increase to 4.6 million. Jumia attributes this growth to continued improvements in its supply and product assortment.
“This quarter is special because we finally turned back to growth on GMV and orders. For a year and a half, very few people outside believed that we would be able to get Jumia to grow again with that level of cuts on marketing, staff, and everything. But it turns out we can with lower marketing and logistics costs and G&A,” CEO Francis Dufay said on a call with TechCrunch. “I mean, there are much fewer people at Jumia today who operate the business. We’ve lost about 40% of the workforce since late 2022. And still, we’re still growing. So that’s a very important achievement, and we believe we still have a lot of market potential to capture in our markets.”
Jumia reduces losses by over 90% in Q4 amid focus on restoring order and GMV growth
The e-commerce company says its revenue increase was because of sales of larger ticket items, such as electronics and home and living items, alongside higher commissions and corporate sales. Similarly, GMV growth reflects efforts to enhance its product assortment, more efficient marketing spending, and reductions in customer incentives, with marketing expenses dropping 30% from Q1 2023.
In addition, this disciplined expense management and further streamlining of its logistics network reduced Jumia’s quarterly cash burn to $19.1 million from $22.0 million in Q1 2023. Consequently, its operating loss and adjusted EBITDA loss for the quarter dropped 71% year-over-year and 83% year-over-year to $8 million and $4 million respectively, showing a continuous effort from the company to significantly reduce costs and improve its gross margins until it reaches profitability.
A big driver in Jumia’s quest to reach profitability continues to be JumiaPay (the ratio of JumiaPay orders on physical goods went up from 20% to 32.5% in Q1 2024). The continued rollout of JumiaPay on delivery in Nigeria and Kenya to increase cashless orders positions JumiaPay as a stronger enabler of its overall e-commerce platform; JumiaPay saw its transactions reach 2 million, an increase of 52% year-over-year while recording a 10% year-over-year growth in total processing volume (TPV) at $45.4 million in Q1 2024.
Jumia, whose share price has increased 26% to $6.90 since its earnings call, reported that its liquidity position in Q1 2024 totaled $101.5 million, with $28.6 million in cash and cash equivalents and $72.8 million in term deposits and other financial assets. The company emphasized that 79% of its liquidity was denominated in USD, providing protection against fluctuations in local currency valuations (it incurred a $5.9 million cash loss due to currency translation related to devaluations in Egypt and Nigeria, two of its largest markets, during the quarter).
by tyler | May 7, 2024 | Tech
On Tuesday, U.S. and U.K. authorities revealed that the mastermind behind LockBit, one of the most prolific and damaging ransomware groups in history, is a 31-year-old Russian named Dmitry Yuryevich Khoroshev , aka “LockbitSupp.”
As it’s customary in these types of announcements, law enforcement published pictures of Khoroshev, as well as details of his group’s operation. The U.S. Department of Justice charged Khoroshev with several computer crimes, fraud, and extortion. And in the process, the feds also revealed some details about LockBit’s past operations.
Earlier this year, authorities seized LockBit’s infrastructure and the gang’s banks of data, revealing key details of how LockBit worked .
Today, we have more details of what the feds called “a massive criminal organization that has, at times, ranked as the most prolific and destructive ransomware group in the world.”
Here’s what we’ve learned from the Khoroshev indictment .
LockBit’s leader was publicly known by the not-very-imaginative nickname LockBitSupp. But Khoroshev also had another online identity: putinkrab. The indictment doesn’t include any information about the online handle, though it appears to reference Russian President Vladimir Putin. On the internet, however, several profiles using the same moniker on Flickr , YouTube , and Reddit , though it’s unclear if these accounts were run by Khoroshev.
In the world of Russian cybercrime, according to experts, there’s a sacred, unwritten rule: hack anyone outside of Russia, and the local authorities will leave you alone. Surprisingly, according to the feds, Khoroshev and his co-conspirators “also deployed LockBit against multiple Russian victims.”
It remains to be seen if this means Russian authorities will go after Khoroshev, but at least now they know who he is.
A leader of what was once the world’s most harmful cyber crime group has been unmasked and sanctioned by the UK, US and Australia, following an NCA-led international disruption campaign. #Cronos @FBI @Europol
Full story ➡️ https://t.co/ECxlgOTH5E pic.twitter.com/iYz4w2jheK
— National Crime Agency (NCA) (@NCA_UK) May 7, 2024
Ransomware operations like LockBit are known as ransomware-as-a-service. That means there are developers who create the software and the infrastructure, like Khoroshev, and then there are affiliates who operate and deploy the software, infecting victims, and extorting ransoms. Affiliates paid Khoroshev around 20% of their proceedings, the feds claimed.
According to the indictment, this business model allowed Khoroshev to “closely” monitor his affiliates, including having access to victim negotiations and sometimes participating in them. Khoroshev even “demanded identification documents from his affiliate Coconspirators, which he also maintained on his infrastructure.” That’s probably how law enforcement was able to identify some of Lockbit’s affiliates.
Khoroshev also developed a tool called “StealBit” that complemented the main ransomware. This tool allowed affiliates to store data stolen from victims on Khoroshev’s servers, and sometimes publish it on LockBit’s official dark web leak site.
LockBit launched in 2020, and since then its affiliates have successfully extorted at least approximately $500 million from around 2,500 victims, which included “major multinational corporations to small businesses and individuals, and they included hospitals, schools, nonprofit organizations, critical infrastructure facilities, and government and law-enforcement agencies.”
Apart from the ransom payments, LockBit “caused damage around the world totaling billions in U.S. dollars,” because the gang disrupted victims’ operations and forced many to pay incident response and recovery services, the feds claimed.
Probably the most shocking of the latest revelations: In February, after the coalition of global law enforcement agencies took down LockBit’s website and infrastructure, Khoroshev “communicated with law enforcement and offered his services in exchange for information regarding the identity of his [ransomware-as-a-service] competitors.”
According to the indictment, Khoroshev asked law enforcement to “[g]ive me the names of my enemies.”
US, UK police identify and charge Russian leader of LockBit ransomware gang
by tyler | May 7, 2024 | Tech
Oyo, the Indian budget-hotel chain startup, is negotiating with investors to raise a new round of funding that could cut the Indian firm’s valuation to $3 billion or lower, three sources familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.
The startup is engaging with investors, including Malaysia’s sovereign wealth fund Khazanah, for the new funding, the sources said, requesting anonymity as the matter is private. The new funding round is likely to see some secondary transactions as well that will value the startup at as low as $2.5 billion, the sources added.
The proposed terms, if they materialize, would represent a steep drop from the peak valuation of $10 billion at which Oyo raised a funding round in 2019. A valuation of $3 billion or less would also be lower than the amount of capital Oyo has raised against equity and in debt over the years.
The deliberations for the new funding are ongoing, and its terms may still change, or a round may not materialize, the sources cautioned.
The cut in valuation is hardly a surprise. SoftBank, which owns more than 40% of Oyo, internally cut the valuation of the Indian startup to $2.7 billion in 2022. Oyo said at the time that there was “no rational basis” for the markdown of its valuation.
Oyo – which counts SoftBank, Airbnb, Peak XV Partners, and Lightspeed Venture Partners among its backers – disputed the “rumors,” asserting there wasn’t any “concrete transaction.” Khazanah didn’t respond to a request for comment. The terms about the proposed valuation haven’t been previously reported.
“We deny any rumors, including that of the valuation in the article. Oyo continues to focus on better performance and higher earnings and engages with esteemed investors time to time when approached, but there is no concrete transaction, let alone a valuation discussion at this stage,” a company spokesperson said.
The deliberations for the new funding follow Oyo withdrawing its draft red herring prospectus for an initial public offering for the second time, a source said. The Indian startup originally filed the paperwork to go public in 2021, seeking to raise about $1.2 billion at a valuation of $12 billion at the time.
India’s market regulator, SEBI, has not approved the startup’s application for an IPO.
According to local media, Oyo’s founder and chief executive, Ritesh Agarwal, told employees that the company expects revenue for the fiscal year ending March to be more than $682 million .
by tyler | May 7, 2024 | Tech
The tech layoff wave is still going strong in 2024. Following significant workforce reductions in 2022 and 2023 , this year has already seen 60,000 job cuts across 254 companies, according to independent layoffs tracker Layoffs.fyi . Companies like Tesla , Amazon , Google , TikTok , Snap and Microsoft have conducted sizable layoffs in the first months of 2024. Smaller-sized startups have also seen a fair amount of cuts, and in some cases, have shut down operations altogether .
By tracking these layoffs, we’re able to understand the impact on innovation across companies large and small. We’re also able to see the potential impact of businesses embracing AI and automation for jobs that had previously been considered safe. It also serves as a reminder of the human impact of layoffs and what could be at stake in regards to increased innovation.
Below you’ll find a comprehensive list of all the known layoffs in tech that have occurred in 2024, to be updated regularly. If you have a tip on a layoff, contact us here . If you prefer to remain anonymous, you can contact us here .
Laid off roughly 170 workers , impacting a third of its total headcount, in an effort to cut back on annual operating costs.
Closed Arkane Austin, Tango Gameworks, and more game studios as part of cuts at Bethesda . It’s currently unclear how many employees will be impacted.
Is eliminating 230 employees, about 49% of its workforce, in a cost cutting measure laid out in documents filed with the U.S. SEC .
Is slashing its workforce by 20% . The cuts will affect around 140 employees, and the company is also cutting ties with “the majority” of its contract workers.
Has laid off about 3% of its workforce , impacting 116 people, the company confirmed to TechCrunch in a statement. The cuts come over a year after the company eliminated about 4% of its headcount .
Is laying off 15% of its workforce , affecting about 400 people, as part of a cost-cutting effort. The company’s CEO Barry McCarthy is also stepping down.
Has gutted its charging team in a new round of layoffs , CEO Elon Musk announced in an overnight email to executives.
Has laid off staff across key teams like Flutter, Dart and Python . It is currently unclear how many employees were let go.
Is laying off more employees to “preserve cash,” according to an internal email viewed by TechCrunch . The number of cuts is currently unknown.
Is shutting down operations in the U.S., the U.K. and Europe, impacting at least 6,000 jobs across the closing markets .
Is cutting about 180 jobs in a profitability push and has let go its chief executive Hemant Bakshi, a source familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.
The space and defense startup laid off nearly 30 people, accounting for about 25% of its workforce, due to “duplication of roles and functions across the company,” TechCrunch exclusively reported.
Is expected to cut employees in its Austin office for the second time this year.
Plans to eliminate 740 employees at its Oregon headquarters this summer, according to a WARN Act notice.
Is eliminating 10% of its workforce following the exit of former CEO Emad Mostaque.
Is laying off workers as part of continued cost cutting measures . The number of employees affected was at the time unknown.
Is reducing its total workforce by 1% . It’s the second round of layoffs for the EV maker this year.
Is laying off 5% of its workforce , affecting around 579 employees. The GTA 6 publisher also announced the elimination of “several projects” in development.
Is eliminating about 20% of its 59 employees in a restructuring effort.
Is cutting “more than 10%” of its global workforce , per an internal email sent by CEO Elon Musk. That could impact more than 14,000 workers worldwide, as Tesla prepares itself “for our next phase of growth” amid a challenging EV market.
Is reducing its global workforce by nearly 4%, impacting up to 140 employees .
Is laying off 250 employees based in Ireland as it restructures its Training and Quality team.
Cut approximately 10% of its workforce, TechCrunch exclusively learned , as the company prepares for an IPO and aims to reach profitability.
Has laid off 382 employees, amounting to 32% of its total workforce, TechCrunch exclusively learned . The background-screening platform was last valued at $5 billion in April of 2022.
Reportedly laid off a sizable part of its staff in a restructuring effort. The number of employees impacted is currently unknown, but sources told Inc42 that it could be “in the range of 70-100” workers.
Is laying off 614 employees in California after abandoning its electric car project , according to a WARN notice .
Has laid off a “small number” of employees as part of a company-wide focus on commercialization efforts.
Shut down operations. The company, which was backed by OpenAI, employed about 100 people .
Is shutting down Yummly , the recipe and cooking app it acquired in 2017.
Will cut hundreds of jobs across Sales, Marketing, Global Services and its Physical Stores Technology team.
Is laying off about 500 employees , accounting for 3% of its total workforce, as part of a restructuring effort.
Has laid off 20% of its staff after acquiring point-of-sale platform Cuboh. The company previously laid off 100 people in 2022.
Is restructuring its testing department, which is largely made up of contractors. A Nintendo spokesperson told Kotaku the changes will end some assignments but will lead to the creation of new full-time positions.
Cut its global workforce by about 6,000 jobs , according to a 10-K SEC filing . The filing reveals the company cut 13,000 jobs in the last year .
Has made cuts to its staff, the company confirmed to TechCrunch . A report in Fintech Business Weekly estimates that 17 people, or about 15% of the company, were impacted.
Is cutting 195 roles in an effort to become more sustainable, CEO Henry Chan wrote in a blog post . The layoffs impact nearly a quarter of its staff.
Reportedly eliminated 20% of its total workforce in its second restructuring effort in the past year.
Conducted another round of layoffs impacting 20 employees, CEO Ham Serunjogi announced in a blog post .
Has reportedly cut 16% of its staff in a strategic move to support its Textio Lift product.
Is reportedly laying off around 25% of its workforce . According to Axios, the cuts affect roughly 80 people.
Is shutting down after failing to secure new funding, TechCrunch has learned . The remote driving startup, which had cut staff last year, employed a little more than 100 people.
Is reportedly slashing its marketing and communications staff. The company previously announced a strategy to replace upwards of 8,000 jobs with AI.
Cut just under 40% of its staff, equating to dozens of employees, the company confirmed to TechCrunch .
Laid off around 15 people earlier this year , following comments from CEO Chris Caren that the company would be able to reduce 20% of its headcount thanks to AI.
Laid off 13% of its staff based in its New York office as the web3 fantasy sports platform focuses on its Paris headquarters, a source familiar with the matter told TechCrunch .
Is eliminating roughly 7% of its workforce as part of organizational restructuring. The fintech unicorn last conducted layoffs in August 2022.
Is cutting about 13% of its workforce , affecting 40 employees. It’s the second round of layoffs for the battery startup in recent months.
Is shutting down, resulting in a “permanent mass layoff” impacting around 150 employees.
Plans to lay off 15% of its workforce and says it likely does not have enough cash on hand to survive the next 12 months.
Cut 5% of its workforce , impacting 670 employees, as it moves away from the “development of future licensed IP.”
Is letting go of about 350 employees, accounting for 30% of its workforce.
Is likely cutting hundreds of employees who worked on the company’s autonomous electric car project now that the effort has stopped, TechCrunch has learned.
Is laying off 900 employees from its PlayStation unit, affecting 8% of the division’s workforce. Insomniac Games, Naughty Dog, Guerrilla and Firesprite studios will also be impacted .
Will reportedly cut 1,500 roles in 2024 , primarily in its Product & Technology division, accounting for more than 8% of the company’s workforce.
Eliminated roughly 60 employees , or 17% of its workforce. It’s the financial startup’s third major layoff round in the past 12 months.
Is laying off 10% of its salaried workforce in a bid to cut costs in an increasingly tough market for EVs.
Will lay off 13% of its workforce as it works to “build a financially sustainable business,” CEO Phil Graves told TechCrunch exclusively .
Announced it will eliminate 5% of its employees, impacting more than 4,000 people .
Will lay off about 550 workers in a move designed to promote “operating expense efficiency.”
Announced in an SEC filing that it will lay off roughly 250 employees as part of a restructuring effort.
Is scaling back its investment in a number of products, TechCrunch has learned, resulting in layoffs that will affect roughly 60 employees .
Is laying off 230 employees worldwide as part of the company’s efforts to advance its focus on “the AI-enabled workplace of the future.”
Is cutting 30% of its North American workforce as part of a restructuring.
Is reportedly cutting jobs in its healthcare businesses One Medical and Amazon Pharmacy. The number of impacted roles is currently unknown.
Announced plans to eliminate 6% of its workforce , largely impacting the company’s sales and marketing divisions.
Announced plans to cut 10% of its workforce , impacting roughly 500-plus employees, in an effort to “reduce hierarchy.”
Has laid off 60 employees , or about 19% of its staff, CEO Marc Boiron announced in a blog post .
Is laying off approximately 400 employees . The layoffs come almost exactly a year to the day after Okta announced plans to cut about 300 employees.
Will lay off 95 workers in New York City, according to a filing with the New York Department of Labor.
Is laying off about 6% of its global workforce , or 280 employees, the company confirmed to TechCrunch.
Conducted another round of layoffs earlier this month, amounting to roughly 15% of its workforce, a source familiar with the situation told TechCrunch.
Is reportedly laying off around 1,000 people in the Cash App, foundational and Square arms of Block.
Has reportedly begun company-wide layoffs . While it is unclear how many people will be affected, one source told TechCrunch it was expected to be in the “thousands.”
Has laid off 20% of its staff of about 1,000 people, TechCrunch exclusively learned. The cuts to the software startup come despite record growth in the solar industry last year.
Is laying off 350 people , or one-third of its headcount, after Amazon’s bid to acquire the Roomba-maker shuttered. Longtime CEO Colin Angle has also stepped down.
Is reportedly laying off 700 workers , or around 1% of its staff. This comes after the company had a significant reduction of 10% of its workforce in 2023.
Is reportedly planning to cut around 20% of its staff in the next few weeks. The company announced similar cuts in October, when founder Ryan Petersen returned as CEO and slashed its workforce by 20%.
Is laying off 1,900 employees across its gaming divisions following its acquisition of Activision Blizzard. Blizzard president Mike Ybarra announced he will also be stepping down.
Is cutting about 400 jobs , 7% of its workforce, as the food delivery startup seeks to bring further improvements to its finances ahead of a planned IPO later this year.
Laid off dozens of workers , according to sources familiar with the decision. The autonomous vehicle technology company has since confirmed that about 3% of its workforce has been laid off.
Will lay off 9% of the company’s workforce , affecting about 1,000 full-time employees. In a blog post , the company also plans to cut contract roles in the coming months.
Announced it intends to offer voluntary buyouts or job changes to 8,000 employees amid restructuring.
Laid off 20% of its staff , affecting 282 workers. In a blog post , Co-CEO Pedro Franceschi said that the company is prioritizing “long-term thinking and ownership over short-term gains in our comp structure.”
Eliminated around 60 jobs across the U.S. in Los Angeles, New York, and Austin in addition to layoffs in international markets. The affected roles, according to NPR’s initial reporting, are largely in sales and advertising.
Is cutting 90% of its employees as it shuts down its online used car marketplace and shifts resources into two business units: one focused on auto financing and the other on AI-powered analytics.
Is laying off 11% of its workforce , affecting about 530 employees, as the company focuses on “fewer, high-impact projects.” The League of Legends maker is also sunsetting its five-year-old publishing group , Riot Forge.
Is eliminating 13% of its global workforce , affecting 1,650 employees, in a restructuring effort aimed at cutting layers of management.
Will eliminate 100 employees , a spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch, as part of a restructuring effort in its creator management and operations teams.
Is laying off “hundreds” of employees in its advertising sales team, according to a leaked memo. The cuts come a week after the company did sweeping layoffs across its hardware teams. And more layoffs will come throughout the year, as CEO Sundar Pichai told the company in a memo obtained by the Verge .
Reportedly laid off a “sizable” number of employees January 12. The game developer studio was acquired by Borderlands maker Gearbox in 2022.
Is going to lay off employees in 2024, TechCrunch exclusively learned , with the total impacted employees potentially reaching as high as 20% of the animation studio’s 1,300 person workforce. The cutbacks come as Disney looks to reduce the studio’s output as it struggles to achieve profitability in streaming.
Is laying off 5% of its workforce , citing an “increasingly challenging landscape,” according to a leaked memo obtained by Business Insider.
Is laying off 17% of its staff , impacting 170 people. In an internal memo obtained by the Verge , Discord CEO Jason Citron blamed the cuts on the company growing too quickly.
Laid off hundreds of employees across its Google Assistant division and the team that manages Pixel, Nest and Fitbit hardware. The company confirmed to TechCrunch that Fitbit co-founders James Park and Eric Friedman are also exiting.
Is laying off “several hundreds” of employees at Prime Video and MGM Studios, according to a memo obtained by TechCrunch. The cuts come days after the 500 layoffs at Amazon’s Twitch .
Is reportedly laying off 500 employees , 35% of its current staff, amid a continued struggle to achieve profitability in the face of rising costs and community backlash. The pending layoffs come after hundreds more employees were laid off in 2023.
Confirmed to TechCunch that layoffs, conducted in December, had impacted 14 employees, accounting for 60% to 70% of the company, according to multiple sources.
Confirmed it cut 10% of its contractor workforce at the end of 2023 as it turns to AI to streamline content production and translations previously handled by humans.
Will cut about 10% of corporate roles as it goes through a restructuring plan following Anushka Salinas’ planned resignation as operating chief and president at the end of January.
Is reducing its workforce by about 25% , or 1,800 people. The video game engine maker went through three rounds of layoffs in 2023.
Laid off two-thirds of its employees as the German startup, which built collaborative presentation software, looks to pursue a “completely different path.” CEO and co-founder Christian Reber also stepped down.
The AI and biomedical startup reportedly cut 17% of its workforce January 8, citing “shifts in the economic environment,” in a LinkedIn post announcing the layoffs.
Eliminated 38% of its staff January 8 as the online retail logistics company follows up after conducting layoffs in September 2023.
Announced January 8 it is laying off 28% of its staff , or 154 workers, as the small modular nuclear reactor company shifts its focus to “key strategic areas.”
Is reportedly laying off 15% of its workforce focused on computer vision for retailers.
Is shutting down at the end of 2024 after a 12 year run. The design collaboration startup was once valued at nearly $2B.
Is laying off nearly 20% of its workforce as it tries to maintain its battle with Nielsen over media measurement. CEO Ross McCray stepped down from the company.
Is laying off roughly 15% of its staff , totaling 60 employees. The Israel-based unicorn reportedly plans to move some impacted employees into other positions at the company.
Laid off its entire 200-person workforce January 2 after attempts to raise more capital failed, TechCrunch exclusively learned . The mass layoff comes just seven months after the startup acquired rival Zencity .
by tyler | May 7, 2024 | Tech
Amazon is launching a new tool, Bedrock Studio , designed to let organizations experiment with generative AI models, collaborate on those models, and ultimately build generative AI-powered apps.
Available in public preview starting today, the web-based Bedrock Studio — a part of Bedrock, Amazon’s generative AI tooling and hosting platform — provides what Amazon describes in a blog post as a “rapid prototyping environment” for generative AI.
Bedrock Studio guides developers through the steps to evaluate, analyze, fine-tune and share generative AI models from Anthropic, Cohere, Mistral, Meta and other Bedrock partners, as well as test different model settings and guardrails and integrate outside data sources and APIs. Bedrock Studio also offers tools to support collaboration with team members to create and refine generative AI apps, including single sign-on credentials for enterprises using them.
Image Credits: Amazon
Image Credits: Amazon
Bedrock Studio automatically deploys the relevant Amazon Web Services (AWS) resources as developers request them, Amazon says, and — in the interest of security — apps and data never leave the signed-in AWS account.
“When you create applications in Amazon Bedrock Studio, the corresponding managed resources such as knowledge bases, agents and [more] are automatically deployed in your AWS account,” Amazon principal developer advocate Antje Barth explains in the blog post. “You can use the Amazon Bedrock API to access those resources in downstream applications.”
Less an attempt to reinvent the wheel than streamline existing products and services, Bedrock Studio appears to be a stringing-together of AWS tools that have been around for some time, topped with a sprinkle of corporate governance and compliance capabilities. One imagines it’s all in service of Amazon’s bid to make Bedrock the go-to platform for generative AI app development.
It’s a steep road ahead for Bedrock, which is up against generative AI development platforms from Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and others. But Amazon telegraphed in a recent earnings report that Bedrock — along with AWS’ other generative AI-related services — are holding their own, with AWS’ generative AI businesses hitting a combined “multi-billion dollar run rate,” according to Amazon CEO Andy Jassy.
by tyler | May 7, 2024 | Tech
Robert Kahn has been a consistent presence on the Internet since its creation — obviously, since he was its co-creator. But like many tech pioneers his resumé is longer than that and in fact his work prefigured such ostensibly modern ideas as AI agents and blockchain. TechCrunch chatted with Kahn about how, really, nothing has changed since the ’70s.
The interview was conducted on the occasion of Kahn (who goes by Bob in conversation) being awarded the IEEE Medal of Honor this week — you can watch the ceremony and speeches here .
Sound familiar? Last year the IEEE gave that that Vint Cerf , Kahn’s partner in creating the protocols underpinning the internet and web. They’ve taken different paths but share a tempered optimism about the world of technology, and a sense that everything old is new again.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
A lot of some of the problems, technical and otherwise, that we’re facing now in computing and the internet, they’re problems that we’ve seen and maybe even solved before. I’m curious whether you find anything particularly familiar about the challenges that we’re facing today.
Kahn : Well, I don’t think anything really surprises me. I mean, I was concerned right from the get-go that the internet had the potential to be misused. But in the early days it was a very willing set of collaborators from the research community who all principally knew each other, or at least knew of each other. And so there wasn’t much that went wrong. If you have only 100 people that don’t know each other, maybe that’s workable, but if you’ve got a billion people, you know, you get a little bit of everything in society.
[CERN leadership] actually approached me with the possibility of setting up a consortium, which they later set up at MIT… and I had too many questions, most probably off-putting, like what about misinformation or disinformation? How are you going to control what goes on this? I thought there were approaches; in fact, we were working on some. And so, in some ways, I’m not terribly surprised — I am disappointed that approaches that could have made a difference were not adopted.
I was reading about your “knowbots” — this is a very similar thing to an AI agent, that is empowered to go and interact in a less structured way than an API call or a simple crawl.
The whole idea was launched in the form of a mobile program [i.e. the program is mobile, not for mobiles]; we called them know bots, which was short for knowledge robots. You told it what you wanted to do and launched it — you know, make airplane reservations, check your email, look at the news, let you know about things that might affect you, just freed you up; it would be doing your bidding on the internet.
We essentially made it available at the time, it couldn’t have been more unfortunate, just about when the very first cybersecurity threat was occurring: the Morris worm, back in the late 80s. It was done by accident by some guy, but you know, people looked and said, Hey, when you’re gonna have these bad things happen, we don’t want other people’s programs showing up on our machines. As a formality, we just kind of put it on the back burner.
But out of that came something that was I think, very useful. We called it the digital object architecture. You probably follow some of the work on cryptocurrency. Well, cryptocurrency is like taking $1 Bill and getting rid of the paper, right, then being able to work with the value of money on the net. The digital object architecture was like taking the mobile programs and getting rid of the mobility. The same information is there, except you get to it in different ways.
Robert Kahn accepting the IEEE Medal of Honor.
Robert Kahn accepting the IEEE Medal of Honor.
It’s interesting that you bring up the the digital object architecture and crypto in the same sort of sentence. We have the DOI system, I see it primarily in scientific literature, of course, it’s tremendously useful there. But as a general system, I saw a lot of similarities with the idea of the cryptographically signed ledgers and sort of canonical locations for digital objects.
You know, it’s a shame that people think that these digital objects have to be only be copyrighted material. I wrote a paper called representing values in digital objects… I think we called them digital entities, just for technical reasons. I believe it was the first paper that actually talked about the equivalent of cryptocurrency.
But we’ve been talking about linking blocks for the last… going back to the space age, when you wanted to communicate with the distant parts of the out of space, you didn’t want to have to come back and wait for minutes or hours through transmission delays back to Earth to get something corrected. You want to have blocks that are in transit linked together. So you know, when the next block that might arrive the millisecond later, you can figure out what went wrong with the block before it was released. And that’s what blockchains are about.
In the digital object architecture, we’re talking about digital objects being able to communicate with other digital objects. That’s not people sitting at keyboards. You know, you can send a digital object or mobile program into a machine and ask it to interact with another digital object that may be representative of a book, to get inside that book, do work, and interact with that system. Or you know, like an airplane — people think airplanes need to interact with other airplanes for the purposes of collision avoidance and the like, and cars need to talk to cars because they don’t want to bang into each other. But what if cars need to talk with airplanes? Since these objects can be anything you can represent in digital form, you’ve potentially got everything interacting with everything. That’s a different notion of the internet than, you know, a high-speed telecommunications circuit.
Vint Cerf on the ‘exhilarating mix’ of thrill and hazard at the frontiers of tech
Right, it’s about whether objects need to talk with objects, and enabling that as a protocol, whether it’s an airplane in a car. In the so called Internet of Things you have a connected doorbell, connected oven, a connected fridge, but they’re all connected via private APIs to private servers. It’s not about a protocol, it’s just about having a really bad software service living inside your fridge.
I really believe that most of the entities that would have had a natural interest in the internet had hopes that their own approach would be the thing that took over [rather than TCP/IP]. Whether it was Bell Systems or IBM or Xerox, Hewlett Packard, everybody had their own approach. But what happened was they kind of bottomed out. You had to be able to show interoperability; you couldn’t go in and ask for everybody to get rid of all their old stuff and take your stuff. So they couldn’t pick one company’s approach — so they were sort of stuck with the stuff we did at DARPA. That’s an interesting story in its own right, but I don’t think you should write about that (laughs).
If every house you walked into had a different power plug, you have a major problem. But the real issue is you can’t see it until you implement it.
I don’t think you can rely on government to take the lead. I don’t think he can rely on industry to take the lead. Because you might have 5 or 10 different industries that are all competing with each other. They can’t agree on whether there should be a standard until they’ve exhausted all other options. And who’s going to take the lead? It needs to be rethought at the national level. And I think the universities have a role to play here. But they may not necessarily know it yet.
We’re seeing a big reinvestment in the US chip industry. I know that you were closely involved in the late ’70s, early ’80s, with some of the nuts and bolts, and working with people who helped define computing architecture of the period, which has informed, of course, future architectures. I’m curious what you think about the evolution of the hardware industry.
I think the big problem right now, which the the administration has clearly noted, is we don’t have we haven’t maintained a leadership role in manufacturing of semiconductors here. It’s come from Taiwan, South Korea, China. We’re trying to fix that, and I applaud that. But the bigger issue is probably going to be personnel. Who’s going to man those sites? I mean, you build manufacturing capability, but do you need to import the people from Korea and Taiwan? OK, let’s teach it in schools… who knows enough to teach it in schools, are you going to import people to teach in the schools? Workforce development is going to be big part of the problem. But I think we were there before, we can get there again.
