New York City reportedly has more Airbnb listings than rentable apartments

New York City may have more Airbnb listings than apartments for rent despite a 2016 law banning short-term rentals, Curbed has reported. April apartment rental inventory in Manhattan, Brooklyn and northwest Queens numbered 7,699 units, according to the Douglas Elliman report. That compares to somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 entire-apartment or entire-home Airbnb rental listings across all of NYC, as calculated by AirDNA and Inside Airbnb.

New York City has effectively prohibited short-term rentals (less than 30 days) in multi-unit buildings without the owner present since 2011, and made it illegal to even advertise such listings in 2016. If Airbnb renters are following the law, that means the listings are only active for short periods during the year.

Many could also be Brownstone “garden apartments” separated from but still a part of the main dwelling, which can be rented year-round by apartment owners. “A decade ago [those] may have gone to long-term tenants,” Curbed noted. The lack of that inventory on the long-term rental market is particularly noticeable now with rentals so tight and prices averaging $3,925 per month in Manhattan.

Other factors may have contributed to the NYC housing shortage, though, Airbnb said. “Over the past two years, our entire space listing supply citywide has decreased, and it now represents a fraction of a percent of the city’s rental units — and all while rent prices have trended upward and city-issued permits for new-unit development remain down by a double-digit percentage,” a spokesperson told Curbed in an email. In addition, some Airbnb listings may only be available for several weeks out of the year.

Airbnb is widely used by tourists and travelers, but hotels see them as unlicensed competition and city councils and housing advocates say that they take thousands of rentals off the market and distort market prices. The problem is particularly acute in cities with tight housing markets like New York and San Francisco, the latter of which also issued laws limiting rentals.

The extent to which Airbnb has contributed to a NYC housing shortage is debatable. However, the optics of having more Airbnb listings than rentable apartments isn’t great in a brutal rental market. “Bidding wars accounted for one in five new lease signings,” Elliman wrote. “Greater affordability is not right around the corner. More and more people are hunkering down.”

Apple’s former machine learning director reportedly joins Google’s DeepMind team

An Apple executive who oversaw Apple’s machine learning and artificial intelligence efforts has left the company in recent weeks, citing its stringent return-to-office policy, according to Bloomberg. Ian Goodfellow is now reportedly joining Google’s DeepMind team as an individual contributor, a few years after he left the tech giant for Apple. Based on his LinkedIn profile, Goodfellow worked in different capacities for Google since 2013, including as a research scientist and as a software engineering intern. 

Bloomberg says the former Apple exec referenced the policy in a note about his departure addressed to staff members. In April, Apple announced that it was going to start implementing its return-to-office policy on May 23rd and will be requiring employees to work in its offices at least three times a week. 

The New York Times has just reported, though, that the company has softened its stance on remote work and will now launch a pilot that will see some employees come in to office only twice a week. Google has also started implementing a “hybrid work” plan that requires employees to physically work in its offices some days of the week, but Goodfellow may have taken a role that allows him more freedom.

Goodfellow supervised the engineers working on autonomous technology at Apple and developed a system that gave Google Maps the ability to automatically transcribe addresses from Street View car photos. However, he’s probably mostly known for inventing generative adversarial networks or GANs, which can be used to create deepfakes. 

福特的 Argo AI 自駕車部門開始在奧斯汀及邁阿密進行試營運

福特旗下的自駕車部門 Argo AI 剛達成了一個重要的里程碑 —— 自週二起，該公司開始在美國德州的奧斯汀市及佛州的邁阿密市，開始進行自駕車的無人駕駛營運試驗。試驗初期將暫時不會搭載付費乘客，但可以在駕駛座空置的情況下，載送公司員工。…

Grubhub’s free lunch offer in NYC crashed its website and app

Grubhub’s offer of free lunch to anyone in the New York City metro area today led to sheer chaos. Many were unable to access the promotional deal — which was scheduled to run from 11 am to 2 pm ET this afternoon — when both the website and app started to crash, according to tweets from many frustrated users. A large number of restaurants were overwhelmed with orders from hungry customers, prompting them to pause taking on new orders or “close” for the day. Although Grubhub’s “free lunch” promo was actually just a deep discount (the offer was good for $15, and customers were responsible for additional taxes, tip and delivery fee), turns out few people will turn down the offer of a cheap meal, especially in one of the world’s most expensive cities. While access to the website and app was eventually restored, a number of customers still complained about delayed or canceled orders.

At its peak, Grubhub said its platform was receiving 6,000 orders per minute. “The initial demand temporarily overwhelmed our app, causing some diners to experience an error message when they used their promo code. However, this was quickly rectified, and along with our restaurant and driver partners, we were able to successfully fulfill more than 400,000 lunch orders connected to the promotion,” a spokesperson for Grubhub told Engadget. 

But workers and restaurant owners faced worse problems than merely going hungry on their lunch breaks. Buzzfeedspoke to several Grubhub delivery people and restaurant owners and workers, all who recounted a harrowing, stressful day filled with non-stop orders. Many workers and restaurants told various outlets that they weren’t informed about the promo in advance.

“We really got slammed by it today,” Ching, a worker from Greenberg’s Bagels told Buzzfeed. “It was just non-stop all day.”

Grubhub denied claims that it didn’t inform restaurants of the promo beforehand. “Grubhub isn’t just a delivery logistics app, we are a marketplace for restaurants. And as we do with any promotions, we notify our entire restaurant network in advance via multiple points of communication,” a Grubhub spokesperson told Engadget in a statement. 

Despite the advance warning, it’s clear many restaurants were unprepared for the barrage of orders and the extra strain on staff and food supply that such an offer incurred.