Music streamer Tidal will have its second major layoff in a year, and it may be even smaller than the previous one, reports Fortune. Jack Dorsey, CEO of Block (Tidal’s parent company since 2021), announced that the organization will return to a start-up-style structure with fewer employees. “So we’re going to be separating from many people on our team,” Dorsey told employees in a note.
Block also owns Cash App, After Pay and BitKee, among others. “We will be moving forward with engineering and design and completely eliminating product management and product marketing functions,” Dorsey said in a note to Tidal employees.
“We are reducing the size of our design team and the foundational roles that support Tidal, and we will consider reducing engineering in the next few weeks as we have more clarity on leadership moving forward.” Tidal previously laid off about 40 people across multiple departments in December 2023.
Dorsey did not announce the exact number of employees being laid off, but company sources estimate it could be as many as 100 people — one-quarter of the company’s staff.
“We’ve made some internal changes to our Tidal team to focus on serving artists in the most meaningful way possible,” a Tidal spokesperson said in a statement. “This included eliminating some roles in our business and design teams. We’re going to be smaller, focus on fewer things, and move forward with a relentless approach to product development.” Tidal notably removed its free tier for users in March.
The rise of the AI NPC has felt like a threat for years, as if developers couldn’t wait to abandon human writers and offload NPC conversations to generative AI models.
At CES 2025, NVIDIA made it abundantly clear that the technology is all too close. PUBG developer Krafton, for example, plans to use NVIDIA’s ACE (Avatar Cloud Engine) to power AI companions that will assist and joke around with you during matches. Krafton isn’t just stopping there – it’s also using ACE in its life simulation title InZOI to make characters smarter and generate objects.
While the use of generative AI in games seems almost inevitable, as the medium has always toyed with new ways to make enemies and NPCs smarter and more realistic, watching multiple NVIDIA ACE demos back to back really floored me.
It wasn’t just slightly smarter enemy AI – ACE can create entire conversations out of thin air, simulate voices and try to give NPCs a sense of personality. It’s also doing this locally on your PC, powered by NVIDIA’s RTX GPUs. But while this all might sound great on paper, I hated nearly every second of watching the AI NPCs in action.