AOL lays off 200 U.S staffers, more overseas

By Geoff Duncan Updated March 10, 2011

Image used with permission by copyright holder

Struggling online portal AOL says it is laying off some 200 U.S. staffers from its technology and content departments in a move to eliminate redundancy in the wake of AOL’s $315 million acquisition of The Huffington Post. Layoffs have been widely expected to follow on the heels of the acquisition as AOL integrates The Huffington Post organization into its content development teams and installs Ariana Huffington as the editor in chief of all AOL content offerings.

The layoffs will also impact some 700 AOL positions in India that mainly provide backend support to AOL’s U.S. operations; however, an AOL spokesperson has indicated to the Associated Press that a few hundred of those positions are actually being shifted to other companies that will begin handling AOL’s support operations.

AOL’s acquisition of The Huffington Post closed on Monday. AOL immediately announced six new additions to its reporting staff, including three established journalists from the New York Daily News, the New York Times, and Yahoo. AOL CEO Tim Armstrong characterized the new hires as “only the beginning.”

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Geoff Duncan writes, programs, edits, plays music, and delights in making software misbehave. He's probably the only member…

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Best Buy deals: Save on laptops, TVs, appliances, and more

best buy shuts down insignia line smart home products store 2 768x768

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Best Buy TV deals

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The Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3 on a white background.

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a strawberry

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What is Project Strawberry?
Project Strawberry is OpenAI's latest (and potentially greatest) large language model, one that is expected to broadly surpass the capabilities of current state-of-the-art systems with its "human-like reasoning skills" when it is released. It might power the next generation of GPTs.
What can Strawberry do?
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The Reuters report also notes that Strawberry's architecture is similar to the Self-Taught Reasoner (STaR) technique. Developed at Stanford in 2022, STaR enables a model to generate training data on which to fine-tune itself, becoming more capable over time.
Why is it called that?
We don't know the exact reason for the name "Strawberry," as that's not something OpenAI has publicly disclosed. It's a code name chosen for internal reference and to maintain secrecy during development.