🌍 Buy a chatbot

Plus: "Boeing's Bad Week": A drama in five acts.
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Illustration: Reuters (Dado Ruvic)
Good morning, Quartz readers!

OpenAI's GPT store is here. Its release got a little sidetracked (understandably), but three million customized chatbots are now available to paid users, with a revenue sharing program that will be ready to roll before April. (For more about GPTs, check out our recent Quartz Obsession podcast episode.)
Bitcoin got some much-needed validation in the US... The Securities and Exchange Commission approved exchange-traded funds that invest directly in the cryptocurrency.
…but in India, Binance and other crypto apps disappeared from Apple's app store. With nine apps affected, users have to wait and hope for their foreign apps to make a comeback.
Amazon Prime Video is laying off hundreds. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy may have said he was excited about Prime Video's potential in a November earnings call, but he must not have been excited enough.
Big Tech isn't the fairy godmother of employing industries anymore. Google and Microsoft have both fallen far on Glassdoor's list of the top 100 companies to work for, and for the second year in a row, Meta, Zillow, and Zoom didn't make the list at all.

Sometimes technology changes everything. Sometimes it makes our lives simpler. And sometimes innovations just make no sense (we're looking at you, Dyson Zone air purifying headphones).
Only time will tell where these five latest tech reveals at CES will land on that spectrum—though if car manuals do perish, what will we put in passenger seat glove boxes?
🚗 Amazon wants you to throw out your BMW's user manual in favor of AI
🖼️ Samsung would like it if your picture frames played music
🎧 Another screen for your screen-filled life? JBL says put it on an earbud case
🥽 Sony isn't just interested in fun when it comes to VR headsets (hint: it's about work)
⌨️ A customizable mechanical keyboard that's also really pretty? OK! Sure!

Want to get caught up on the Boeing drama without having to read a bunch of news? We can give it to you extremely quickly, or Laura Bratton can give it to you with just a little more detail.
Act I, The incident: Jan. 5, the night sky over Portland, Oregon — A panel rips off an airplane at low altitude. No one is seriously hurt, but everyone is extremely traumatized.
Act II, Aftershock: The following day, Washington, DC — The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) issues immediate inspections of 171 Boeing aircraft, Alaska Airlines cancels flights, and Boeing apologizes.
Act III, Piecing it together: Jan. 7, a backyard in Portland — A schoolteacher named Bob finds a piece of the plane. More flights are canceled.
Act IV, Money talks: Jan. 8, Wall Street — Boeing's stock drops 13%, and loose bolts are found on other 737 Max 9 planes.
Act V, Atonement: Jan. 9, the internet — Boeing CEO David Calhoun meets with employees and gets choked up referencing his own kids and grandkids.
It's likely this drama will go on for some time. A passenger's appearance on "Good Morning America" to talk about the flight yesterday was not good press for Boeing. Alaska Airlines is still canceling flights, and Boeing's stock is still down 8% from last week's close.

Apps that were launched last year with the word "chatbot" in their description—many, many more than the years before. Who misses the old Quartz chatbot? Drop us a line.
Graphic: (Quartz)

Canada will no longer have Kleenex. The genericized tissue maker is being wiped from shelves as profits dry up.
What's it like playing 580 rounds of golf in a year, each on a different course? Ask this guy—he spent 2023 doing just that.
Slack's new update looks like Tinder. Swipe left to mark a message as read, right to get back to a DM later, but probably don't date your coworkers.
Bottled water is full of plastic. There could be as many as 240,000 tiny fragments per one-liter (33-ounce) container, signaling that our reliance on single-use plastics could be hurting us more than we know.
Giganto, the world's largest primate, probably wasn't shooting for extinction when it picked a new diet. Twigs and bark just weren't as nutritious as harder-to-find fruits.

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Our best wishes for a productive day. Send any news, comments, time to play 580 rounds of golf, and fruit diets to talk@qz.com. Today's Daily Brief was brought to you by Morgan Haefner and Susan Howson.

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