Technologies

Amazon’s Big Year of Thinking Small

Amazon built like our pandemic-fueled shopping spree would never end. Now it has, and the company’s shrinking.

We all came out of the last three years changed. Amazon is no different.

All that online shopping you did during the pandemic added to soaring demand, which combined with other economic forces to push prices higher. Costs got too high for the tech industry, too, driving companies to shrink their ambitions – even the gargantuan Amazon.

Amazon was already the Goliath of US e-commerce before the pandemic, representing more than 40% of the market, according to Statista. With the boom in online shopping, fueled first by lockdowns and then by stimulus cash, the company’s profits shot up for more than a year.

Then came the bust. Amazon’s growth stalled out in the middle of 2021, and it posted its first loss in seven years at the beginning of 2022. By November, Amazon was the first company in the world to lose $1 trillion dollars in value, Bloomberg reported.

The problem wasn’t just that we stopped shopping through our misery. Amazon, like a lot of tech companies, banked big time on our new buying behaviors. As we went back to brick-and-mortar stores and cut our spending this year, the company was left with an oversized workforce and a hulking logistics network it couldn’t support. This year, Amazon and its competitors scrapped large chunks of what they built during the pandemic.

For you, Amazon’s new frugality means its advancements on flashy new gadgets — or the inexpensive ones you use to set timers, create reminders and check the weather — may get less of the company’s devotion next year.

Amazon’s most visible sign of retreat was the planned layoffs, which the company has confirmed will happen without giving the number of employees it plans to cut. Estimates in new reports range from 10,000 to 20,000 people who will lose their Amazon jobs in the coming months, but that’s just the most recent glimpse of trouble. Amazon began telling investors in October 2021 that it had built up its warehousing and air freight capacity too much in response to early pandemic demand.

The middle of this year started to reveal casualties elsewhere in the company. Amazon shut down its physical bookstores and some Amazon Go convenience store locations. It jettisoned its Amazon Care health care service on doubts it would ever be profitable. And departments in charge of customer favorites like Alexa-powered devices took a disproportionate hit from the layoffs so far.

Amazon declined to provide a comment for this story but directed CNET to remarks Amazon CEO Andy Jassy made during the New York Times DealBook Conference. Jassy said then that Amazon wasn’t done making bets on businesses that could have long-term payoffs.

«What we’re trying to do is streamline our costs in a bunch of different areas, while at the same time making sure that we keep betting on the things that we believe long-term could change,» Jassy said.

Still, this year’s cuts at Amazon reflect a turn toward immediate profitability, said Neil Saunders, a retail analyst at GlobalData, noting that the company hasn’t found a way to profit from Alexa devices.

It’s a sign of an industry-wide reckoning with shoppers hitting the brakes on spending, Saunders said, adding, «A lot of companies behaved as if it was a permanent shift.»

Peaks and valleys

E-commerce hit startling heights in 2020. Shoppers dropped earnings and stimulus cash on home furnishings, gardening supplies and electronics, and growth of online shopping was remarkable. It shot up from a steady growth rate of around 16% at the end of 2019 to more than 44% in the summer months of 2020.

E-commerce is still growing today, but the frenzy is over.

But while spending was still at unprecedented levels, Amazon used the extra cash to feverishly build warehouses and air hubs. It doubled its ranks from just under 800,000 employees at the end of 2019 to more than 1.6 million by the end of 2021. And it wasn’t just Amazon. Shopify, the company behind many standalone online shops, also went on a hiring spree. Social media companies like Meta and Twitter benefited too, bringing in extra advertising revenue from merchants who aimed targeted ads at shoppers sitting at home.

Figures from the US Census Bureau show e-commerce spending is now where it would be if it had just kept growing at the same steady clip that it was before the pandemic. Even though the feverish buying started to cool last year, a few tech chiefs have said they thought the shift to online shopping was permanent. It wasn’t.

«Those chickens are coming home to roost,» Saunders said.

When Meta announced layoffs of 11,000 employees in November, CEO Mark Zuckerberg conceded it was a mistake to assume increased revenues would endure. Shopify cut 10% of its workforce in July, with CEO Tobi Lutke saying he was wrong to predict a permanent leap ahead of five to ten years in the growth rate of online shopping.

Amazon’s layoffs will also be significant. Proportionally, they’re on track to represent the company’s biggest workforce reduction since the 2001 dot-com bust, which hit 15% of its staff, according to the New York Times. Nonetheless, Jassy said Amazon made the right decision to scale up rapidly starting in 2020, adding that it was better to get too big than to stay too constrained to meet demand from shoppers and from sellers who use the company’s marketplace.

The slowdown shouldn’t have caught the heavyweights of e-commerce by surprise, said Andrew Lipsman, a retail analyst at Insider Intelligence. We were going to regain access to in-person stores at some point, and stimulus payments weren’t going to last forever. But even if cash-flush tech companies knew there would be an inevitable bust, they couldn’t let the opportunity to scale up and capture all our shopping dollars pass them by.

«They tend to think of it as an arms race,» Lipsman said. «When their major competitor is investing heavily, they don’t want to be the ones not doing it.»

Slowing innovation

That bitter downswing has forced Amazon to pull back on some of its flashy pet projects, like Alexa, where a large portion of the layoffs took place. While Alexa-powered devices like Echo smart speakers and displays dominate the smart home market, they’re priced to lose money. And even though Alexa made huge advances in voice recognition and AI-generated speech, the technology hasn’t succeeded in getting people to shop by voice, analysts say.

Amazon’s health care initiatives are also seeing cutbacks. The company said Amazon Care, a service that offered telehealth and in-home medical appointments, would close down at the end of 2022. (Amazon says it’s pushing forward with its purchase of One Medical, which offers primary care clinics and telehealth services).

Also on the chopping block were Amazon’s brick-and-mortar bookstores and its remaining «Four-star Stores,» which analysts say never found a purpose.

Amazon hasn’t killed the Alexa division or its health care efforts entirely, and Jassy has said the company is still betting on innovations like autonomous vehicles with its Zoox business. But the moves show Amazon is unwilling to sink quite as much money into services just for the sake of destabilizing or owning a market. That’s a contrast to its earliest approaches with selling books and music online, which Amazon pursued while taking a loss for seven years before finally turning a profit in 2001, said Sucharita Kodali, a retail analyst with Forrester.

«The DNA of Amazon was, ‘we’re going to lose money,'» Kodali said. Now the company must invest in things that’ll pay off sooner rather than later, she added.

And just like everything about Amazon, when the company cuts back, it does it in a big way.

Technologies

Astronomers Say There’s an Increased Possibility of Life on This Distant Planet

Using the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers are working to confirm potential evidence of life on a distant exoplanet dubbed K2-18b.

Astronomers are nearing a statistically significant finding that could confirm the potential signs of life detected on the distant exoplanet K2-18b are no accident.

The team of astronomers, led by the University of Cambridge, used data from the James Webb Space Telescope (which has only been in use since the end of 2021) to detect chemical traces of dimethyl sulfide (DMS) and/or dimethyl disulfide (DMDS), which they say can only be produced by life such as phytoplankton in the sea.

According to the university, «the results are the strongest evidence yet that life may exist on a planet outside our solar system.»

The findings were published this week in the Astrophysical Journal Letters and point to the possibility of an ocean on this planet’s surface, which scientists have been hoping to discover for years. In the abstract for the paper, the team says, «The possibility of hycean worlds, with planet-wide oceans and H2-rich atmospheres, significantly expands and accelerates the search for habitable environments elsewhere.»

Not everyone agrees, however, that what the team found proves there’s life on the exoplanet.

Science writer and OpenMind Magazine founder Corey S. Powell posted about the findings on Bluesky, writing, «The potential discovery of alien life is so enticing that it drags even reputable outlets into running naive or outright misleading stories.» He added, «Here we go again with planet K2-18b.Um….there’s strong evidence of non-biological sources of the molecule DMS.»

K2-18b is 124 light-years away and much larger than Earth (more than eight times our mass), but smaller than Neptune. The search for signs of even basic life on a planet like this increases the chances that there are more planets like Earth that may be inhabitable, with temperatures and atmospheres that could sustain human-like lifeforms. The team behind the paper hopes that more study with the James Webb Space Telescope will help confirm their initial findings.

More research to do on finding life on K2-18b

The exoplanet K2-18b is not the only place where scientists are exploring the possibility of life, and this research is still an early step in the process, said Christopher Glein, a geochemist, planetary researcher and lead scientist at San Antonio’s Southwest Research Institute. Excitement over the significance of the research, he said, should be tempered.

«We need to be careful here,» Glein said. «It appears that there is something in the data that can’t be explained, and DMS/DMDS can provide an explanation. But this detection is stretching the limits of JWST’s capabilities.»

Glein added, «Further work is needed to test whether these molecules are actually present. We also need complementary research assessing the abiotic background on K2-18b and similar planets. That is, the chemistry that can occur in the absence of life in this potentially exotic environment. We might be seeing evidence of some cool chemistry rather than life.»

The TRAPPIST-1 planets, he said, are being researched as potentially habitable, as is LHS 1140b, which he said «is another astrobiologically significant exoplanet, which might be a massive ocean world.»

As for K2-18b, Glein said many more tests need to be performed before there’s consensus on life existing on it.

«Finding evidence of life is like prosecuting a case in the courtroom,» Glein said. «Multiple independent lines of evidence are needed to convince the jury, in this case the worldwide scientific community.» He added, «If this finding holds up, then that’s Step 1.»

Technologies

The Future’s Here: Testing Out Gemini’s Live Camera Mode

Gemini Live’s new camera mode feels like the future when it works. I put it through a stress test with my offbeat collectibles.

«I just spotted your scissors on the table, right next to the green package of pistachios. Do you see them?»

Gemini Live’s chatty new camera feature was right. My scissors were exactly where it said they were, and all I did was pass my camera in front of them at some point during a 15-minute live session of me giving the AI chatbot a tour of my apartment. Google’s been rolling out the new camera mode to all Android phones using the Gemini app for free after a two-week exclusive to Pixel 9 (including the new Pixel 9A) and Galaxy S5 smartphones. So, what exactly is this camera mode and how does it work?

When you start a live session with Gemini, you now how have the option to enable a live camera view, where you can talk to the chatbot and ask it about anything the camera sees. Not only can it identify objects, but you can also ask questions about them — and it works pretty well for the most part. In addition, you can share your screen with Gemini so it can identify things you surface on your phone’s display.

When the new camera feature popped up on my phone, I didn’t hesitate to try it out. In one of my longer tests, I turned it on and started walking through my apartment, asking Gemini what it saw. It identified some fruit, ChapStick and a few other everyday items with no problem. I was wowed when it found my scissors.

That’s because I hadn’t mentioned the scissors at all. Gemini had silently identified them somewhere along the way and then recalled the location with precision. It felt so much like the future, I had to do further testing.

My experiment with Gemini Live’s camera feature was following the lead of the demo that Google did last summer when it first showed off these live video AI capabilities. Gemini reminded the person giving the demo where they’d left their glasses, and it seemed too good to be true. But as I discovered, it was very true indeed.

Gemini Live will recognize a whole lot more than household odds and ends. Google says it’ll help you navigate a crowded train station or figure out the filling of a pastry. It can give you deeper information about artwork, like where an object originated and whether it was a limited edition piece.

It’s more than just a souped-up Google Lens. You talk with it, and it talks to you. I didn’t need to speak to Gemini in any particular way — it was as casual as any conversation. Way better than talking with the old Google Assistant that the company is quickly phasing out.

Google also released a new YouTube video for the April 2025 Pixel Drop showcasing the feature, and there’s now a dedicated page on the Google Store for it.

To get started, you can go live with Gemini, enable the camera and start talking. That’s it.

Gemini Live follows on from Google’s Project Astra, first revealed last year as possibly the company’s biggest «we’re in the future» feature, an experimental next step for generative AI capabilities, beyond your simply typing or even speaking prompts into a chatbot like ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini. It comes as AI companies continue to dramatically increase the skills of AI tools, from video generation to raw processing power. Similar to Gemini Live, there’s Apple’s Visual Intelligence, which the iPhone maker released in a beta form late last year.

My big takeaway is that a feature like Gemini Live has the potential to change how we interact with the world around us, melding our digital and physical worlds together just by holding your camera in front of almost anything.

I put Gemini Live to a real test

The first time I tried it, Gemini was shockingly accurate when I placed a very specific gaming collectible of a stuffed rabbit in my camera’s view. The second time, I showed it to a friend in an art gallery. It identified the tortoise on a cross (don’t ask me) and immediately identified and translated the kanji right next to the tortoise, giving both of us chills and leaving us more than a little creeped out. In a good way, I think.

I got to thinking about how I could stress-test the feature. I tried to screen-record it in action, but it consistently fell apart at that task. And what if I went off the beaten path with it? I’m a huge fan of the horror genre — movies, TV shows, video games — and have countless collectibles, trinkets and what have you. How well would it do with more obscure stuff — like my horror-themed collectibles?

First, let me say that Gemini can be both absolutely incredible and ridiculously frustrating in the same round of questions. I had roughly 11 objects that I was asking Gemini to identify, and it would sometimes get worse the longer the live session ran, so I had to limit sessions to only one or two objects. My guess is that Gemini attempted to use contextual information from previously identified objects to guess new objects put in front of it, which sort of makes sense, but ultimately, neither I nor it benefited from this.

Sometimes, Gemini was just on point, easily landing the correct answers with no fuss or confusion, but this tended to happen with more recent or popular objects. For example, I was surprised when it immediately guessed one of my test objects was not only from Destiny 2, but was a limited edition from a seasonal event from last year.

At other times, Gemini would be way off the mark, and I would need to give it more hints to get into the ballpark of the right answer. And sometimes, it seemed as though Gemini was taking context from my previous live sessions to come up with answers, identifying multiple objects as coming from Silent Hill when they were not. I have a display case dedicated to the game series, so I could see why it would want to dip into that territory quickly.

Gemini can get full-on bugged out at times. On more than one occasion, Gemini misidentified one of the items as a made-up character from the unreleased Silent Hill: f game, clearly merging pieces of different titles into something that never was. The other consistent bug I experienced was when Gemini would produce an incorrect answer, and I would correct it and hint closer at the answer — or straight up give it the answer, only to have it repeat the incorrect answer as if it was a new guess. When that happened, I would close the session and start a new one, which wasn’t always helpful.

One trick I found was that some conversations did better than others. If I scrolled through my Gemini conversation list, tapped an old chat that had gotten a specific item correct, and then went live again from that chat, it would be able to identify the items without issue. While that’s not necessarily surprising, it was interesting to see that some conversations worked better than others, even if you used the same language.

Google didn’t respond to my requests for more information on how Gemini Live works.

I wanted Gemini to successfully answer my sometimes highly specific questions, so I provided plenty of hints to get there. The nudges were often helpful, but not always. Below are a series of objects I tried to get Gemini to identify and provide information about.

Technologies

Today’s Wordle Hints, Answer and Help for April 26, #1407

Here are hints and the answer for today’s Wordle No. 1,407 for April 26. Hint: Fans of a certain musical group will rock out with this puzzle.

Looking for the most recent Wordle answer? Click here for today’s Wordle hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Connections, Connections: Sports Edition and Strands puzzles.

Today’s Wordle puzzle isn’t too tough. The letters are fairly common, and fans of a certain rock band might get a kick out of the answer. If you need a new starter word, check out our list of which letters show up the most in English words. If you need hints and the answer, read on.

Today’s Wordle hints

Before we show you today’s Wordle answer, we’ll give you some hints. If you don’t want a spoiler, look away now.

Wordle hint No. 1: Repeats

Today’s Wordle answer has no repeated letters.

Wordle hint No. 2: Vowels

There is one vowel in today’s Wordle answer.

Wordle hint No. 3: Start letter

Today’s Wordle answer begins with the letter C.

Wordle hint No. 4: Rock out

Today’s Wordle answer is the name of a legendary English rock band.

Wordle hint No. 5: Meaning

Today’s Wordle answer can refer to a violent confrontation.

TODAY’S WORDLE ANSWER

Today’s Wordle answer is CLASH.

Yesterday’s Wordle answer

Yesterday’s Wordle answer, April 25, No. 1406 was KNOWN.

Recent Wordle answers

April 21, No. 1402: SPATE

April 22, No. 1403: ARTSY

April 23, No. 1404: OZONE.

April 24, No. 1405: GENIE

What’s the best Wordle starting word?

Don’t be afraid to use our tip sheet ranking all the letters in the alphabet by frequency of uses. In short, you want starter words that lean heavy on E, A and R, and don’t contain Z, J and Q.

Some solid starter words to try:

ADIEU

TRAIN

STARE

NOISE