The Information — AI
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The Information — AI news-outlet 3mo ago
Google Employee Charged For Alleged Polymarket Bets
Federal prosecutors charged a Google employee with using confidential information to win $1.2 million betting on Polymarket, according to a Federal Court complaint unsealed on Wednesday. Michele Spagnuolo, a staff software engineer at Google, allegedly placed bets on the…
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Snowflake Shares Jump 35% as AI Product Adoption Grows
Shares of Snowflake rose more than 30% late Wednesday after the database provider surpassed its earlier forecast for product revenue—its most closely watched sales metric—by around $125 million for the first quarter ending April 30. The company raised its full-year product…
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Snowflake Inks $6 Billion Deal with AWS Tied to Graviton Chips
Database firm Snowflake said it has committed to spending $6 billion on Amazon Web Services over the next few years, including using Amazon’s Graviton chips and AI infrastructure. Graviton is a CPU, a chip designed for general computing. CPUs are becoming increasingly important…
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Salesforce Stock Dips as Software Firm Lowers Cash Flow Forecast
Salesforce on Wednesday lowered its projection for cash flow growth in its 2027 fiscal year, which ends January next year. The stock fell 3% in after-hours trading following Salesforce’s quarterly earnings results for the April quarter. The software firm said operating cash flow…
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Crypto-Friendly United Texas Bank Switches Regulator to OCC
United Texas Bank, a crypto-friendly bank, said it successfully switched its regulator through a charter conversion, despite being under a consent order. The move will help it grow its business serving digital asset firms and foreign banks. The Dallas-based bank, which has about…
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Coding Startup Cognition Raises $1 Billion at a $26 Billion Valuation
Coding startup Cognition has raised more than $1 billion in a funding round that valued the company at $26 billion including the investment, the company said in a blog post. That’s nearly double its valuation from its last fundraise, which valued the three-year-old company at…
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OpenAI Foundation to Spend $250 Million on AI Economic Impact
OpenAI’s foundation will grant $250 million in funding to promote research into the impact of artificial intelligence on the economy and jobs, the company said in a blog post on Wednesday. The company’s charitable arm was separated from OpenAI’s for-profit business last fall as…
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Amazon Launches Service to Put AI Shopping Assistants on Other Retailers’ Sites
Amazon is marketing a new service to let other retailers take advantage of its AI shopping assistant technology. For the past two years, Amazon has offered an AI shopping chatbot on its main retail site, which was originally called Rufus, but earlier this month was rebranded to…
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Pre-IPO Betting Boom Hits Prediction Markets
Most everyday investors can’t buy shares of hot private companies like SpaceX and OpenAI before they go public. With potential mega-IPOs looming this year, prediction markets like Polymarket and Kalshi are turning that hype into tradable bets. Users are flocking to yes-or-no…
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The Hot New Way to Communicate with AI? Whispering
If you wander into the Manhattan office of AI startup Basis on a workday, you’ll see most of its 100 or so staffers whispering quietly into gooseneck microphones at their desks. They aren’t taking phone calls or talking with other humans at all. They’re speaking softly to their…
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Polymarket Wants Traders to ID Themselves as It Faces Sanctions, Legal Risks
In Russia, making bets on Polymarket isn’t permitted by the popular online prediction market’s rules. But that hasn’t stopped Ruslan Kashaev, a software developer who lives in the small Russian city of Ufa, a 15-hour drive from Moscow, from turning the site into a lucrative…
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Kuaishou’s Kling AI Video Unit Reaches $500 Million in Annualized Revenue
Chinese social media giant Kuaishou Technology said on Wednesday that its Kling AI video business reached an annualized revenue of about $500 million in March. Kling, which develops and sells AI video generation models, generated more than 650 million yuan ($96 million) in…
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ByteDance Mulls $70 Billion Capex This Year as AI Costs Grow
ByteDance is considering more than doubling its capital expenditures this year to as much as $70 billion, as the Chinese tech giant ramps up its investment in data centers and other AI infrastructure, Bloomberg reported. ByteDance’s capex plans reflect the surging costs of…
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Qualcomm Strikes AI Chip Deal With ByteDance
Qualcomm has reached a deal with ByteDance to supply chips for AI data centers to the Chinese tech giant, Bloomberg reported. The deal comes as Qualcomm, one of the world’s largest suppliers of smartphone processors, is trying to increase its presence in chips for AI computing.…
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Micron Passes $1 Trillion as AI Memory Demand Sends Shares Soaring
Micron Technology crossed $1 trillion in market value for the first time Tuesday, as shares climbed 19% on rising demand for memory chips used in AI systems. It was Micron’s largest single-day gain since 2011. The rally came after UBS sharply raised its price target for Micron…
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Inference Provider Baseten in Talks to Double Valuation to $11 Billion
Baseten, a startup that rents out Nvidia AI servers to application developers and helps them customize models, has recently been in talks with investors to raise $1 billion at an $11 billion valuation including the money, The Information reported Tuesday. That would more than…
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Anthropic Is Likely Generating at Least 35% More Revenue Than OpenAI
On New Year’s Day, OpenAI leaders would have been happy to hear that the company’s monthly revenue would rise more than 50% over the first five months of 2026, roughly in line with the projections it previously shared with investors. But they’re not likely to feel that way now:…
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Boom Times for Inference Providers?
Less than a year ago, our reporters kept hearing doubts about a group of startups called inference providers. Companies like Fireworks, Baseten and Together AI, which rent out Nvidia servers to app developers and help them customize open-source models, had grown quickly but…
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AI Inference Provider Baseten in Talks to Raise $1 Billion at $11 Billion Valuation
AI startup Baseten has recently been in talks with investors to raise $1 billion at an $11 billion valuation including the money, according to a person with knowledge of the fundraise. That would more than double the company’s $5 billion valuation from its last round, which was…
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ServiceNow CMO to Join OpenAI
ServiceNow Chief Marketing Officer Colin Fleming said Tuesday that he is leaving the IT services software giant for OpenAI, where he will assume the role of CMO for its business segment. The executive worked for ServiceNow for two years and was previously a marketing executive…
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Dropbox CEO to Step Down After 20 Year Stint
Dropbox founder and CEO Drew Houston said Tuesday that he plans to step down as CEO, ending one of the longest running tenures at the helm of a tech company. Houston said Ashraf Alkarmi would become co-CEO with him during a transition period, after which Houston would become…
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Uber COO Says AI Lacks ROI
Many corporate leaders say they’re getting value from AI as their spending on it skyrockets, but hype is outpacing reality in plenty of cases. On a podcast over the weekend, for instance, Uber Chief Operating Officer Andrew Macdonald said the ride-hailing company isn’t seeing a…
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Ondo Finance Founder Nathan Allman, 32, Dies Unexpectedly
Nathan Allman, 32, the founder and CEO of Ondo Finance, the biggest tokenized stock provider, has died unexpectedly, the company said. “It is with profound sadness that we announce the unexpected passing of Nathan Allman, Ondo’s founder,” the company said on X late Monday,…
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SpaceX’s Starlink Coming to Half of American Airlines Main Fleet
American Airlines plans to start adding SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet service to around half of its main aircraft fleet beginning early next year, the airline said on Tuesday. The deal will offer in-flight wifi on approximately 500 narrowbody Airbus planes, but does not…
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OpenAI’s PR Challenge
The battle between OpenAI , Anthropic and Google spans revenue, models, server access and research talent. But as OpenAI and Anthropic barrel toward initial public offerings, public perception is also an important factor in the race as political backlash to the industry grows.…
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OpenAI Targets Smaller Advertisers With New ChatGPT Ads
When OpenAI first launched ChatGPT ads earlier this year, it lined up well-known brands with big advertising budgets, like Adobe, Ford and Target. Now it’s expanding its advertising business with offerings that cater more to marketers at far smaller companies, putting it…
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Pope Leo, Anthropic Co-Founder Warn of AI Power Concentration, Labor Displacement
Catholic Pope Leo XIV on Monday weighed in on hot-button AI policy debates, publishing a treatise describing the church’s concerns about AI development and its current and potential societal harms. His post, Magnifica Humanitas (“Magnificent Humanity”) , which runs more than…
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Salesforce and Snowflake Earnings to Focus Attention on AI’s Software Impact
As we return from the long weekend, we’re preparing for a resumption this week of one of tech’s big debates: whether AI is killing enterprise software. Salesforce, Snowflake and Asana are each reporting earnings for the first fiscal quarter in the next few days, providing us…
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Twilio’s AI Boost Is a Double-Edged Sword
Twilio stock is on a run so incredible you’d think it was immune to the “SaaS apocalypse” plaguing enterprise software stocks. But investors are missing the bigger picture. The company, which sells software tools to help firms communicate with their customers via text messaging,…
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Huawei Moves to Narrow Chip Gap With TSMC Despite U.S. Sanctions
Huawei Technologies said on Monday that it is using a new principle for semiconductor development to narrow its gap with the world’s leading chipmakers, despite U.S. export controls that have restricted China’s access to the most advanced equipment. He Tingbo, a Huawei board…
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As SpaceX and OpenAI Prepare for Public Debuts, What Recent IPO History Signals
Smart-ring maker Oura and crypto company Blockchain.com said last week they had filed paperwork to go public, adding to a growing number of companies, including OpenAI, that are making moves to list in the wake of SpaceX’s upcoming mega initial public offering. If recent history…
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White House, Anthropic Near Deal For Spy Agencies to Use AI
The White House is nearing a deal with Anthropic that allows the National Security Agency and other U.S. spy agencies to use the company’s advanced AI models for classified work, according to the New York Times. The deal talks come despite the Defense Department designating the…
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A Complicated Comeback for Stanford’s Ex-President
Welcome, Weekenders! In this newsletter: • The Big Read: The tech elite’s go-to real estate broker ? The mayor’s brother • Crypto: Inside crypto’s Washington command center • Lists: 20 great books for summer 2026 • Plus, Recommendations—our weekly pop culture picks: “ John…
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Inside Crypto’s Washington Command Center—and Blitz for Legitimacy
The most important real-world address in all of crypto may very well be 1155 F Street in Washington. The location is a 12-story, glass-paneled office tower that has quickly become the industry’s command center in its bid for securing greater sway in the nation’s capital. Nearly…
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20 Great Books for Summer 2026
It may feel like AI has seeped deep into our lives, but compared to the world within “Certainty,” a new dystopian novel by best-selling author John Twelve Hawks, we’re practically in the Flintstones era. In Twelve Hawks’ realm, self-driving tractor-trailers dominate the…
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SpaceX Completes First Starship Test of 2026
SpaceX held the first launch of the new version of its Starship spacecraft on Friday, successfully sending the craft from its Starbase Texas headquarters to space, where it deployed 22 test satellites. While the launch had some hitches, including an engine failure and an…
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Congress Launches Insider Trading Probe Into Kalshi, Polymarket
The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform opened an investigation into insider trading on Polymarket and Kalshi, warning that lawmakers may take action against the prediction markets. James Comer, the Republican chair of the committee, said the “growing pattern of…
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The Tech Elite’s Go-To Real Estate Broker? The Mayor’s Brother
Even measured against the frenetic heart rate of San Francisco’s real estate market, Alexander Lurie moves at a rapid pace. On a recent Tuesday, Lurie, 41, who’s become a go-to broker for anyone with newfound AI riches, drove around Pacific Heights in a blur while touring a…
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Microsoft Consumer CMO to Depart Next Year
Microsoft consumer chief marketing officer Yusuf Mehdi will leave the company next year, he announced late Thursday. Mehdi is a 34-year veteran of Microsoft but since 2023 he has overseen marketing for Microsoft’s consumer-focused products including its Surface devices and the…
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How to Create Presentation Outlines in Seconds with Google Gemini
When business leaders are preparing for an important presentation, their teams sometimes need to shut down their other work for days or even weeks to clear time for the prep work: multiple meetings to bat around ideas, long email threads to pin down the overarching narrative,…
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Microsoft Opens a New Front in the Fight Over Data for AI Agents
Microsoft has opened a new front in the AI data wars, blocking partners from connecting their data management tools to a popular product as it tries to defend its business software strength in the era of AI agents. The friction centers on Power BI, a Microsoft product nearly all…
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Meta Launches New App ‘Forum’
Meta Platforms has quietly launched a new app called Forum, part of a new push by the Facebook owner to launch a lot of new apps. The app lets users select topics they’re interested in and customize their feed by choosing which topics they want to see more or less of, according…
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Chinese EV Battery Giant CATL Plans to Invest in DeepSeek
Chinese battery giant Contemporary Amperex Technology, better known as CATL, is planning to invest in Chinese AI developer DeepSeek’s fundraising, according to two people with direct knowledge of the matter. CATL’s planned investment comes as it is aggressively stepping up its…
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Oura Confidentially Files for IPO
Oura Health, which makes rings that track users’ health data, filed its initial public offering paperwork Thursday with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the company said. Oura has not yet determined the number of shares it’ll offer, nor the proposed offering’s price…
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A Trio of Trillion Dollar IPOs
On Wednesday, right before SpaceX dropped its long-awaited S-1, the company led by Musk adversary Sam Altman had some IPO news of its own: OpenAI was planning to file its IPO prospectus within weeks. The news not only took some of the spotlight away from SpaceX’s upcoming public…
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Why SpaceX is Worth $700 Billion, Not $1.75 Trillion
If SpaceX pulls off what is widely described in the news media as the “largest IPO in history” next month, it will be a testament to Elon Musk’s skills as a salesman. The company’s newly public IPO prospectus makes it plain that SpaceX is largely a telecom firm with a rocket…
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SpaceX Delays Key Starship Test After Pre-Launch Problems
SpaceX postponed its closely watched first Starship test launch of 2026 after encountering last-minute problems on the launch pad Thursday evening. In a post on X , CEO Elon Musk said the “hydraulic pin holding the tower arm in place did not retract” and said SpaceX would launch…
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Workday Stock Jumps 10% After Company Reveals AI Agent Gains
Workday shares climbed more than 10% in after-hours trading on Thursday after the HR application maker said the number of customers using its AI agents in the three months ended April 30 roughly doubled from the previous quarter to more than 4,000. Gerrit Kazmaier, the company’s…
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Exclusive: OpenAI’s Altman Talks to Staff About IPO Timing
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman suggested Wednesday that even if the company makes a filing for a public offering, it may hold off on the actual listing. In a company-wide meeting, he noted that filing for an initial public offering was different than being ready to go public and said the…
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Blockchain.com Files Confidentially to Go Public
Blockchain.com said it has filed confidential paperwork with the Securities and Exchange Commission for an initial public offering. Founded in 2011 and headquartered in London, Blockchain.com serves as a crypto brokerage, meaning it executes trades for customers by using crypto…
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