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Former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki Dies at 56 of Lung Cancer

YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki attends a conference at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, in Cannes, France, June 19, 2018. (Reuters)
YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki attends a conference at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, in Cannes, France, June 19, 2018. (Reuters)
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Former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki Dies at 56 of Lung Cancer

YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki attends a conference at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, in Cannes, France, June 19, 2018. (Reuters)
YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki attends a conference at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, in Cannes, France, June 19, 2018. (Reuters)

YouTube's former chief executive and long-time Google executive Susan Wojcicki died on Saturday at the age of 56 after a two-year battle with lung cancer.

"It is with profound sadness that I share the news of Susan Wojcicki passing. My beloved wife of 26 years and mother to our five children left us today after 2 years of living with non-small cell lung cancer," Dennis Troper, Wojcicki's husband, said in a Facebook post.

"Over the last two years, even as she dealt with great personal difficulties, Susan devoted herself to making the world better through her philanthropy, including supporting research for the disease that ultimately took her life," Google Chief Executive Sundar Pichai said in a blog post.

One of the most prominent women in tech, Wojcicki joined Google in 1999 to become one of the first few employees of the web search leader, years before it acquired YouTube.

Google bought YouTube in 2006 for $1.65 billion.

Before becoming CEO of YouTube in 2014, Wojcicki was senior vice president for ad products at Google.

After nine years at the helm, Wojcicki stepped down from her role at YouTube in 2023 to focus on "family, health, and personal projects". She was replaced by her deputy, Neal Mohan, a senior advertising and product executive who joined Google in 2008. Wojcicki at that time planned to take on an advisory role at Alphabet, Google's parent company.

"Twenty-five years ago, I made the decision to join a couple of Stanford graduate students who were building a new search engine. Their names were Larry and Sergey .... It would be one of the best decisions of my life," Wojcicki wrote in a blog post on the day she left YouTube, referring to Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

"Today we at YouTube lost a teammate, mentor, and friend, Susan Wojcicki," Mohan said in a post on X.

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Technology

Meta Reportedly Delays Release of Phoenix Mixed-reality Glasses to 2027

FILE PHOTO: The logo of Meta is seen at Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris, France, June 11, 2025. REUTERS/Gonzalo Fuentes/File Photo
FILE PHOTO: The logo of Meta is seen at Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris, France, June 11, 2025. REUTERS/Gonzalo Fuentes/File Photo
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Meta Reportedly Delays Release of Phoenix Mixed-reality Glasses to 2027

FILE PHOTO: The logo of Meta is seen at Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris, France, June 11, 2025. REUTERS/Gonzalo Fuentes/File Photo
FILE PHOTO: The logo of Meta is seen at Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris, France, June 11, 2025. REUTERS/Gonzalo Fuentes/File Photo

Meta is delaying the release of its Phoenix mixed-reality glasses until 2027, aiming to get the details right, Business Insider reported on Friday, citing an internal memo.

The delay from an initially planned release in the second half of 2026 is because the company wants a fully polished device, the report said.

Meta did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment on the report.

Meta executives Gabriel Aul and Ryan Cairns said moving the release date back is "going to give us a lot more breathing room to get the details right," the report added.

The goggles, previously code-named Puffin, weigh around 100 grams (3.5 ounces) and have lower-resolution displays and weaker computing performance than high-end headsets like Apple’s Vision Pro, the Information reported in July.

Mixed reality merges augmented and virtual reality and allows real-world and digital objects to interact.

Meta is expected to make budget cuts of up to 30% for its metaverse initiative, Bloomberg News reported on Thursday.

The metaverse group sits within Reality Labs, which produces the company's Quest mixed-reality headsets, smart glasses made with EssilorLuxottica's Ray-Ban and upcoming augmented-reality glasses.

Technology

Apple, Google Send New Round of Cyber Threat Notifications to Users Around World

The Apple logo is seen in this illustration taken September 24, 2025. (Reuters)
The Apple logo is seen in this illustration taken September 24, 2025. (Reuters)
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Apple, Google Send New Round of Cyber Threat Notifications to Users Around World

The Apple logo is seen in this illustration taken September 24, 2025. (Reuters)
The Apple logo is seen in this illustration taken September 24, 2025. (Reuters)

Apple and Google have sent a new round of cyber threat notifications to users around the world, the companies said this week, announcing their latest effort to insulate customers against surveillance threats.

Apple and the Alphabet-owned Google are two of several tech companies that regularly issue warnings to users when they determine they may have been targeted by state-backed hackers.

Apple said the warnings were issued on Dec. 2 but gave few further details about the alleged hacking activity and did not address questions about the number of users targeted or say who was thought to be conducting the surveillance.

Apple said that "to date we have notified users in over 150 countries in total."

Apple's statement follows Google's Dec. 3 announcement that it was warning all known users targeted using Intellexa spyware, which it said spanned "several hundred accounts across various countries, including Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Angola, Egypt, Uzbekistan, Saudi Arabia, and Tajikistan."

Google said in its announcement that Intellexa, a cyber intelligence company that is sanctioned by the US government, was "evading restrictions and thriving."

Executives tied to Intellexa did not immediately return messages.

Previous waves of warnings have triggered headlines and prompted investigations by government bodies, including the European Union, whose senior officials have previously been targeted using spyware.

Threat notifications impose costs on cyber spies by alerting victims, said John Scott-Railton, a researcher with the Canadian digital watchdog group Citizen Lab.

He said they were "also often the first step in a string of investigations and discoveries that can lead to real accountability around spyware abuses."

Technology

AI Bubble to Be Short-lived, Rebound Stronger, NTT DATA Chief Says

FILE PHOTO: Figurines with computers and smartphones are seen in front of the words "Artificial Intelligence AI" in this illustration taken, February 19, 2024. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo
FILE PHOTO: Figurines with computers and smartphones are seen in front of the words "Artificial Intelligence AI" in this illustration taken, February 19, 2024. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo
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AI Bubble to Be Short-lived, Rebound Stronger, NTT DATA Chief Says

FILE PHOTO: Figurines with computers and smartphones are seen in front of the words "Artificial Intelligence AI" in this illustration taken, February 19, 2024. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo
FILE PHOTO: Figurines with computers and smartphones are seen in front of the words "Artificial Intelligence AI" in this illustration taken, February 19, 2024. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo

A potential artificial intelligence bubble will deflate faster than past tech cycles but give way to an even stronger rebound as corporate adoption catches up with infrastructure spending, the head of Japanese IT company NTT DATA Inc. said.

Despite worries around supply chains, the direction of travel is clear, CEO Abhijit Dubey said in an interview with the Reuters Global Markets Forum.

"There is absolutely no doubt that in the medium- to long-term, AI is a massive secular trend," he said.

"Over the next 12 months, I think we're going to have a bit of a normalization ... It'll be a short-lived bubble, and (AI) will come out of it stronger."

With demand for compute still running ahead of supply, "supply chains are almost spoken for" over the next two to three years, he said. Pricing power is already tilting toward chipmakers and hyperscalers, mirroring their stretched valuations in public markets, he added.

AI has triggered the biggest technological shake-up since the advent of the internet, fueling trillions of dollars of investment and eye-watering equity gains. But it has caused shortages of memory chips, drawn regulatory scrutiny, and created growing unease over the future of work.

Dubey, who is also the firm's chief AI officer, said his company has begun rethinking recruitment strategies as AI reshapes labor markets.

"There will clearly be an impact ... Over a five- to 25-year horizon, there will likely be dislocation," he said. However, he added that NTT DATA continues to hire across locations.

Speakers at the Reuters NEXT conference in New York discussed how AI may upend work and job growth.

AI startup Writer Inc.'s CEO May Habib said customers are focused on slowing headcount growth.

"You close a customer, you get on the phone with the CEO to kick off the project, and it's like, 'Great, how soon can I whack 30% of my team?'," she said.

Still, a PwC survey of the global workforce released in November suggests the reality of generative AI usage has yet to match boardroom expectations.

Daily use of GenAI remains "significantly lower" than widely touted by executives, PwC said, even as workers with AI skills commanded an average wage premium of 56% — more than double last year's figure.

PwC also flagged a widening skills gap, with about half of non-managers reporting access to training resources, compared with roughly three-quarters of senior executives.