California’s labor regulator on Tuesday said it fined Amazon nearly $6 million for violating a state law aimed at curtailing the use of onerous warehouse productivity quotas.

The California Labor Commissioner’s Office said it investigated two Amazon facilities in Moreno Valley and Redlands, both located east of Los Angeles, and found 59,017 violations of the state’s Warehouse Quotas law, officials said. Productivity quotas have become a common source of consternation among Amazon workers.

The Warehouse Quotas law went into effect in 2022 and requires employers to disclose productivity quotas to employees and government agencies, as well as any discipline workers may face for not meeting them. The law also prohibits employers from requiring warehouse employees to meet unsafe quotas preventing them from taking state-mandated meal and rest breaks or using the bathroom.

Amazon “failed to provide written notice of quotas,” the Labor Commissioner’s office said Tuesday. The company argued it doesn’t need quotas because it uses a “peer-to-peer evaluation system,” officials said.

“The peer-to-peer system that Amazon was using in these two warehouses is exactly the kind of system that the Warehouse Quotas law was put in place to prevent,” Labor Commissioner Lilia Garcia-Brower said in a statement.

Amazon has in recent years faced scrutiny over how it treats its warehouse and delivery employees. Regulators and critics have specifically zeroed in on the pace of work, arguing that the speed requirements put workers at greater risk of injury.

Washington safety regulators in 2022 fined Amazon for “willfully” violating workplace safety laws by requiring employees to work at such a fast pace that it put them at higher risk of musculoskeletal disorders or problems such as sprains and strains often caused by repetitive tasks.

The Labor Department’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration has also cited Amazon numerous times for safety violations. Amazon has said it would appeal all the citations.

States including New York, Washington and Minnesota have passed similar regulations, and a federal bill was introduced last month by Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass.

Amazon, the second-largest private employer in the U.S., has previously said it doesn’t use fixed quotas. Rather, the company said, it relies on “performance expectations” that factor in multiple indicators, such as how certain teams at a site are performing. It’s also disputed allegations that employees don’t get enough breaks.

Amazon has also defended its safety record. The company said in March that its injury rates have improved, and it announced plans to invest more than $750 million in safety initiatives this year.

Maureen Lynch Vogel, an Amazon spokesperson, said the company disagrees with the allegations and has filed an appeal.

“The truth is, we don’t have fixed quotas,” she wrote in an email. “At Amazon, individual performance is evaluated over a long period of time, in relation to how the entire site’s team is performing. Employees can – and are encouraged to – review their performance whenever they wish. They can always talk to a manager if they’re having trouble finding the information.”

WATCH: Amazon’s worker safety hazards come under fire from regulators and the DOJ

Amazon on Thursday reported fourth-quarter results that sailed past analysts’ estimates, and gave strong guidance for the current quarter. The stock climbed more than 8% in extended trading.

Here are the results:

• Earnings per share: $1.00 vs. 80 cents expected by LSEG, formerly known as Refinitiv
• Revenue: $170 billion vs. $166.2 billion expected by LSEG

Wall Street is also watching several other numbers in the report:

• Amazon Web Services: $24.2 billion vs. $24.2 billion, according to StreetAccount
• Advertising: $14.7 billion vs. $14.2 billion, according to StreetAccount

Amazon said first-quarter sales will be between $138 billion and $143.5 billion, representing growth of 8% to 13%. Analysts were expecting revenue of $142.1 billion, according to Refinitiv.

Amazon easily topped Wall Street’s expectations for earnings, indicating that CEO Andy Jassy’s efforts to rein in costs are paying off. Net income surged to $10.6 billion, or $1.00 per share, compared to $278 million, or 3 cents per share, a year earlier.

The company laid off 27,000 employees between late 2022 and mid-2023, and ended some of its more unproven bets. It has continued to look for ways to trim expenses in other areas, such as its fulfillment business. In January, it announced cuts in Prime Video, MGM Studios and Twitch, among other units.

Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky told reporters on Thursday that the company will continue to take a careful approach on new investments, but that it doesn’t see 2024 “as a year of efficiency type thing.”

“We’re going to continue to invest in new things and new areas and things that are resonating with customers,” Olsavsky said. “Where we can find efficiencies and do more with less, we’re going to do that as well.”

Revenue jumped 14% to $170 billion in the fourth quarter. The period reflects results from the holiday shopping season and Amazon’s October Prime Day event, both of which the company said exceeded its expectations.

“This Q4 was a record-breaking Holiday shopping season and closed out a robust 2023 for Amazon,” Jassy said in a statement. “As we enter 2024, our teams are delivering at a rapid clip, and we have a lot in front of us to be excited about.”

Sales at Amazon Web Services climbed 13% in the fourth quarter to $24.2 billion, in line with Wall Street’s forecast. That marks a slight uptick from the previous quarter, when sales expanded 12%, but it’s a deceleration from the year-ago period, when sales grew 20%.

For the past year, growth in AWS has slowed, as businesses trimmed their cloud spend. But Olsavsky said the company is seeing those cost optimizations diminish, and new workloads are picking up. He said there has been “a lot of interest” in AWS’ generative artificial intelligence products, such as “Q,” an AI chatbot for businesses.

Jassy said on a conference call with analysts that generative AI services remain a “relatively small” business, but the company believes they could drive “tens of billions of dollars” in revenue within the next several years.

Ahead of its earnings release Thursday, Amazon announced a generative AI shopping assistant, dubbed Rufus, which it’s testing among a subset of users in the U.S.

Amazon’s profitable advertising unit saw sales grow 27% year over year to $14.7 billion. Last month, the company began showing ads on Prime Video content, in a move analysts project will generate substantial new revenue for the business. Olsavsky said the company has seen “a lot of enthusiasm” from advertisers, but that Amazon plans to keep ad loads low.

TikTok has cut about 60 jobs, CNBC confirmed, the latest tech company to downsize at the start of 2024.

A company spokesperson said all of those who were laid off “may apply to any open internal roles, of which there are over 120 similar roles posted currently.”

The job cuts were first reported on Monday evening by NPR. The ByteDance division characterized the layoffs to NPR as part of a routine reorganization that affected staff in sales and advertising who worked in the Los Angeles, New York, and Austin, Texas offices, as well as other global outposts.

Tech companies like Amazon, Alphabet, Unity, Discord and Trend Micro have all cut staff in January, continuing a trend from last year, when the industry slimmed down and slashed costs following an extended boom.

Earlier this week, Tencent’s Riot Games unit said it would cut 11% of its workforce, representing about 530 employees. In a letter to employees that was published as a blog post, Riot Games CEO Dylan Jadeja said the job cuts were necessary to “create focus and move us toward a more sustainable future.”

As of 2023, TikTok employed about 7,000 workers in the U.S. Meanwhile, ByteDance has a global workforce of over 150,000 employees.

In November, ByteDance slashed hundreds of jobs in the company’s gaming division, Nuverse. The layoffs indicated that ByteDance was scaling back its gaming efforts, an area where it’s been competing with Chinese rivals Tencent and NetEase.

“We regularly review our businesses and make adjustments to center on long-term strategic growth areas,” a spokesperson told CNBC at the time. “Following a recent review, we’ve made the difficult decision to restructure our gaming business.”

WATCH: The AI dark horse: Why Apple could win the next evolution of the AI arms race

Former Meta operating chief Sheryl Sandberg is leaving the company’s board of directors.

“With a heart filled with gratitude and a mind filled with memories, I let the Meta board know that I will not stand for reelection this May,” Sandberg wrote in a Facebook post on Wednesday.

Sandberg, 54, joined Facebook in 2008 as Mark Zuckerberg’s top deputy after spending about seven years at Google. In 2012, she became a board member at the company. During her tenure, Facebook rose from a highflying startup to become one of the most valuable companies in the world, topping a $1 trillion market cap at its peak in 2021.

Sandberg announced her departure from Meta in mid-2022, following multiple controversies that dogged the company and sullied its reputation among users, lawmakers and investors. Most notably, Facebook was central to the spread of disinformation ahead of the 2016 election and during the early days of the Covid pandemic in 2020. The company has also been in the subject of antitrust investigations and was scrutinized in Sandberg’s waning days for its insufficient efforts to combat hate on its platform.

When Sandberg stepped down as Meta COO in June 2022, she was replaced by Javier Olivan, who had been serving as Meta’s chief growth officer.

Since leaving Meta, Sandberg has dedicated much of her time on her LeanIn.org nonprofit, which focuses on empowering women tin the workplace, and related projects.

“I wanted my new chapter to be able to really make a difference,” Sandberg told CNBC Make It in August. “We’ve been in development on this since I was at Meta, but being able to have the time to put into [this launch] and to really be … a bigger part of this has meant a lot to me.”

Shortly after Sandberg’s post, Zuckerberg responded with a short reply.

“Thank you Sheryl for the extraordinary contributions you have made to our company and community over the years,” Zuckerberg wrote. “Your dedication and guidance have been instrumental in driving our success and I am grateful for your unwavering commitment to me and Meta over the years. I look forward to this next chapter together!”

Meta technology chief Adam Bosworth wrote, “Amazing run Sheryl, thank you so much for everything you did for all of us and also for me personally.”

Meta’s board consists of Zuckerberg, who serves as chairman, as well as former PayPal Executive Vice President Peggy Alford, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, Dropbox CEO Drew Houston, former McKinsey & Company senior partner Nancy Killefer, former U.S. deputy secretary of the treasury Robert M. Kimmitt, DoorDash CEO Tony Xu and Tracey T. Travis, a former CFO at Estée Lauder.

Here’s the full text of Sandberg’s post:

With a heart filled with gratitude and a mind filled with memories, I let the Meta board know that I will not stand for reelection this May. After I left my role as COO, I remained on the board to help ensure a successful transition. Under Mark’s leadership, Javi Olivan, Justin Osofsky, Nicola Mendelsohn, and their teams have proven beyond a doubt that the Meta business is strong and well-positioned for the future, so this feels like the right time to step away. Going forward, I will serve as an advisor to the company, and I will always be there to help the Meta teams.

Serving as Facebook’s – and then Meta’s – COO for 14 ½ years and a board member for 12 years has been the opportunity of a lifetime. I will always be grateful to Mark for believing in me and for his partnership and friendship; he is that truly once-in-a-generation visionary leader and he is equally amazing as a friend who stays by your side through the good times and the bad. I will always be grateful to my colleagues and teammates at Meta for all the years of working side by side and all they taught me. And I am particularly grateful to my fellow Meta board members for their lasting friendships, the guidance they provided me for so many years, and their stewardship of products that mean so much to people all over the world.

WATCH: Three buys and a bail

Amazon is rolling out an artificial intelligence tool that can answer shoppers’ questions about a product, a spokesperson confirmed, as the company continues to experiment with generative AI.

The new feature in Amazon’s mobile app prompts users to ask questions about a specific item. It then returns an answer within a few seconds, primarily by summarizing information collected from product reviews and the listing itself.

“We’re constantly inventing to help make customers’ lives better and easier, and are currently testing a new feature powered by generative AI to improve shopping on Amazon by helping customers get answers to commonly asked product questions,” Maria Boschetti, an Amazon spokesperson, said in an email.

The feature could keep shoppers from scrolling through pages of reviews or reading through a listing to find information about a product.

Unlike OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Amazon’s new feature isn’t equipped to carry out a conversation, but it can respond to creative prompts. On a listing for a women’s vest, it could write a haiku about the product. It was also able to describe the item in the style of Yoda from Star Wars. The tool is designed not to veer off subject, and will return an error message if it can’t answer questions such as, “Who is Jeff Bezos?”

The tool was first spotted by Marketplace Pulse, an e-commerce research firm.

Amazon has introduced several AI tools to its site in recent months. Last June, the company started testing AI-generated summaries of product reviews, and it has launched AI features for third-party sellers that help them write listings, as well as generate photos for ads. Elsewhere, it has rolled out “Q,” an AI chatbot for companies to assist with daily tasks, and Bedrock, a generative AI service for Amazon Web Services customers.

In Amazon’s latest earnings call, CEO Andy Jassy said the company is using generative AI to forecast inventory and to determine the best last-mile routes for drivers.

“Generative AI is going to change every customer experience, and it’s going to make it much more accessible for everyday developers, and even business users, to use,” Jassy told CNBC’s Jim Cramer last month. “So I think there’s going to be a lot of societal good.”

WATCH: Cramer interview with Andy Jassy

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A year ago, there was little holiday cheer at Affirm. The point-of-sale lender was confronting rising interest rates, recession fears and weakening consumer spending. Affirm shares ended 2022 down 90%, wiping out billions of dollars in market value.

Affirm investors are wrapping up 2023 in a much different mood.

The stock skyrocketed 430% in 2023, as of Wednesday’s close, outperforming all other U.S. tech companies valued at $5 billion or more. The next-best performer was Coinbase, which shot up 423% largely because of bitcoin’s rebound.

With the Federal Reserve setting the stage for interest rate cuts in the year ahead and more retailers signing onto Affirm’s buy now, pay later offerings, or BNPL, fear of a doomsday scenario for the company has faded. Shares of Affirm got a big boost in November after the company inked an expanded partnership with Amazon, and BNPL purchases hit an all-time high on Cyber Monday.

“The expectation was the consumer was going to be toast, unemployment was going to pick up and higher interest rates would destroy everything, and the exact opposite has happened on all fronts,” said Tom Hayes, chairman at Great Hill Capital, which doesn’t have a position in the stock. “So that’s why you have a scenario where Affirm can start to perform.”

Created in 2012 by PayPal co-founder Max Levchin, Affirm is competing with companies including Klarna, Block’s Afterpay and Zip in the burgeoning BNPL market. Shoppers who choose to pay with a BNPL service split their purchase into four or more installments typically over a period of three months to a year, without accruing compounding interest. The lenders make money from interest payments and by charging merchants fees to offer their lending services.

Retailers benefit by giving consumers another option for purchasing a skateboard, watch or a gift for a family member, and one that can come with less sticker shock, resulting in fewer abandoned carts.

Affirm made its public market debut on the Nasdaq in January 2021, as the Covid-19 pandemic was driving a surge in adoption of BNPL services. Shoppers flush with stimulus checks used the small loans when buying clothes, electronics and Peloton exercise bikes, which at one point accounted for 30% of Affirm’s revenue. Online storefronts rushed to add BNPL as an option at checkout.

But by early 2022, Affirm’s share price had fallen more than 60% from its 2021 peak. The rest of the year was just as gloomy as soaring interest rates made it more expensive for Affirm to borrow money to fund installment loans. In February 2023, Affirm cut 19% of its workforce, and executives said macro headwinds and “negative consumer sentiment” would likely persist for the remainder of the fiscal year.

As it turns out, they were overly bearish.

Affirm shares started climbing higher in August after the company’s fiscal fourth-quarter earnings report. The company picked up new merchant deals in sectors beyond retail, such as travel, wireless, ticketing and health care. The stock has more than doubled in the fourth quarter, boosted by an announcement last week that Affirm would offer BNPL loans at Walmart‘s self-checkout kiosks.

Even with their dramatic bounce back, Affirm shares are about 70% below their high in November 2021.

Heading into 2024, BNPL lenders face cooling inflation and an optimistic interest rate environment.

Dan Dolev, managing director at Mizuho Securities, said Affirm is in a strong position to retain users. He pointed to new merchant deals and the expanding market for BNPL offerings in physical stores. Affirm says 16.9 million people have used its services, and the company counts more than 266,000 merchant partners.

Affirm is eyeing international expansion and has launched a debit card that lets customers pay upfront or in installments. Affirm announced at its investor day last month that it plans to introduce a spending account tied to its debit card that will allow for ATM access and direct deposit capability.

“The next year or two years are going to be something very different,” said Dolev, who has a buy rating on Affirm shares. “Now they’ve got the brand, and what are they going to do with it? They’re going to turn it into a full-fledged financial services firm.”

Hayes sees more cause for skepticism. He said Affirm faces an “uphill battle” competing with entrenched operators such as PayPal and Block, as well as credit card companies such as American Express, Citi and Chase that have jumped into installment loans.

“It’s David against Goliath, and Goliath is going to win,” Hayes said.

Hayes said Affirm is going down a similar path to online lender SoFi, trying to “have a thousand different projects, and say we’re as big as JPMorgan, but at the end of the day, it’s just simply not going to work.”

BNPL lenders also face heightened risk of users failing to make payments on time. A March report by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau found BNPL users were on average more likely to have higher levels of credit card debt. BNPL borrowers also tend to have lower credit scores, the CFPB said, with an average score in the subprime range of 580 to 669.

An Affirm spokesperson didn’t provide a comment for this story but pointed to past comments from company executives.

“As our network grows, our moats get deeper,” Levchin said at the company’s investor forum in November. “We get more data. We underwrite more transactions. We meet more people.”

Affirm’s defaults remain low by industry standards. Average delinquency rates for peers, such as LendingClub, SoFi, Upstart and OneMain Financial, increased from 5.7% to 6.3% between January and November, while Affirm’s delinquency rate fell from 2.8% to 2.6%, Jefferies analysts wrote in a report last month.

Affirm says it bases loan decisions on a variety of data points in addition to a user’s credit score.

“Our process involves looking at credit report data, but could also involve some Affirm-specific stuff, like what we know about the merchant and the thing they are about to sell you,” Levchin said in a release last year.

As BNPL adoption grows, regulators are keeping a close eye on the space. Last week, three U.S. senators penned a letter to the CFPB urging the agency to monitor the uptick in BNPL usage during the holidays, saying it could leave consumers overextended. The CFPB announced in September 2022 that it would subject BNPL to greater oversight, in line with credit card companies.

Wells Fargo issued a report earlier this month that described BNPL loans as “phantom debt” that may be lulling “consumers into a false security in which many small payments add up to one big problem.” As it stands today, the industry is “not a major problem for consumer spending yet,” Wells Fargo economists Tim Quinlan and Shannon Seery Grein wrote.

Since BNPL loans are not currently reported to major credit reporting agencies, they wrote, there is “no way to know when this phantom debt could create substantial problems for the consumer and the broader economy.”

WATCH: Payments trends for 2024

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Shares of cloud monitoring software firm Datadog soared 28% on Tuesday, their best day ever, after the company reported stronger-than-expected third-quarter earnings and full-year guidance.

The company reported quarterly revenue of $547.5 million, up 25% year over year, topping estimates. That growth rate was consistent with results in the second quarter. Analysts surveyed by LSEG, formerly known as Refinitiv, had expected revenue of $524.1 million. Adjusted earnings per share came out to 45 cents, better than the 34 cents analysts expected.

Datadog also bumped up its revenue and profit view for the full year. The company now expects fourth-quarter revenue between $564 million and $568 million, alongside full-year revenue of around $2.1 billion. The figures exceeded consensus of $543.3 million and $2.06 billion, respectively, according to a survey of analysts by LSEG.

Co-founder and CEO Olivier Pomel told analysts on a conference call that “AI-native customers” contributed 2.5% of Datadog’s annualized revenue during the quarter. Pomel declined to confirm if his company was working with OpenAI, Anthropic or Cohere. All three sell access to large language models that can compose text based on a few words of human input.

Datadog’s surge buoyed other cloud-computing names, including MongoDB and Snowflake.

The latest guidance is the cheeriest Datadog has been all year. Its stock fell sharply in August after lowering guidance as companies reduced cloud spending.

Datadog builds cloud monitoring and security products that work with Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. The company was founded in 2010 and debuted on the Nasdaq in 2019.

The cloud infrastructure providers indicated in late October that some organizations’ cost-reduction efforts have begun to wane. Similar to many cloud names, Datadog was not immune to corporate belt-tightening. Pomel validated that observation, saying optimization activity among Datadog clients could be easing up. “Overall, we continue to see impact from optimization in our business, but we believe that the intensity and breadth of optimization we’ve experienced in recent quarters is moderating,” he said Tuesday.

The fourth quarter is off to a good start, although usage does tend to fall around the holidays, Pomel said.

“Into the print there was a lot of anxiety about whether Datadog would follow AWS to improving QoQ growth and stable YoY, or demonstrate a worried disconnect and continue to decelerate on a YoY basis,” Bernstein Research analysts led by Peter Weed wrote in a Tuesday note. “Datadog emphatically dispelled these worries.” The analysts have the equivalent of a buy rating on the stock.

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Coinbase is confident that a U.S. bitcoin exchange-traded fund will be approved by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the company’s chief legal officer, Paul Grewal, told CNBC.

“I’m quite hopeful that these [ETF] applications will be granted, if only because they should be granted under the law,” Grewal said in an interview with CNBC’s Arjun Kharpal.

The SEC was recently dealt a major court setback when a judge ruled that the regulator had no basis to deny crypto-focused asset manager Grayscale’s bid to turn its huge GBTC bitcoin fund into an ETF.

The SEC last week declined to appeal that ruling by a key deadline, likely paving the way for a bitcoin-related ETF to be approved in the coming months.

“I think that the firms that have stepped forward with robust proposals for these products and services are among some of the biggest blue chips in financial services,” Grewal added.

“So that, I think, suggests that we will see progress there in short order.”

He didn’t say when that’s likely to happen, and added the caveat that any decision would ultimately be up to the SEC.

But, Grewal said, it’s likely now that the SEC will approve a bitcoin ETF soon, highlighting the regulator’s failure in court to block Grayscale from converting its GBTC bitcoin fund into an ETF.

“I think that, after the U.S. Court of Appeals made clear that the SEC could not reject these applications on an arbitrary or capricious basis, we’re going to see the commission fulfill its responsibilities. I’m quite confident of that.”

The SEC declined to comment on Grewal’s comment when contacted by CNBC.

A bitcoin ETF would give investors a way to own bitcoin without having to make a direct purchase from an exchange.

That could be more appealing to retail investors looking to gain exposure to bitcoin without having to actually own the underlying asset.

Coinbase would likely benefit from any bitcoin ETF that is ultimately approved. The company, the largest crypto exchange in the United States, is a common stock held in portfolios designed to give investors exposure to crypto.

Not all is rosy in Grayscale’s bid to turn GBTC into an ETF, however.

The asset management firm’s parent company, Digital Currency Group, along with crypto exchange Gemini and DCG subsidiary Genesis, were accused in a lawsuit from New York’s attorney general of defrauding investors of more than $1 billion.

Still, Grewal sounded a positive note on the prospect of additional bitcoin ETFs being approved — sooner rather than later.

“We think that other ETFs are going to be coming online soon enough as the SEC follows the law and is required to apply the law in a neutral way to the applications that are pending,” he said.

Bitcoin has risen about 72% in the year to date, in a comeback by stealth for the world’s biggest digital currency after huge declines in 2022.

There’s been greater investor demand for the token in recent months, as the market reacts to prospect of the Federal Reserve ending its campaign of persistent interest rate rises, and as anticipation builds around the upcoming bitcoin “halving” event, which will see rewards to bitcoin miners reduced by half, thereby limiting the coin’s supply.

Still, trading volumes have declined, as retail investors have become uninterested in engaging in the market in light of a lack of volatility and in response to severe wounds suffered by once-large industry players like FTX, BlockFi and Three Arrows Capital.

FTX collapsed into bankruptcy last year after investors fled the platform en masse because of concerns over its liquidity. The company and its founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, are accused of defrauding investors in a multibillion-dollar scheme. Bankman-Fried is standing trial over these allegations and has pleaded not guilty.

Addressing the trial, Grewal said he was “quite encouraged and quite optimistic that a number of the bad actors in this space are being held to account through criminal trials and through aggressive regulatory actions.”

“We are quite excited that there are a number of developments we think that are just around the corner, or underway even as we speak, that will bring back investor and consumer interest in crypto,” Grewal added.