The Information — AI
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The Information — AI news-outlet 3mo ago
AI Customers Negotiate a SaaS Escape Hatch
Businesses used to feel locked in to their enterprise software providers, but some now say they can cut and run if they need to. Companies such as insurer National Life Group, for instance, have negotiated “opt out” provisions that let them exit their software contracts or…
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OpenAI Generated Nearly $6 Billion in Revenue in First Quarter, Boosted by Codex
OpenAI generated about $5.7 billion in revenue in the first quarter, nearly $1 billion more than archrival Anthropic generated in the same period, according to two people with knowledge of the financials. OpenAI’s coding agent Codex, along with growth from selling to businesses…
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Exclusive: a16z Partner Returns to Full-Time Investing After Illness
Peter Levine, an Andreessen Horowitz general partner who stepped back from his role as an active investor six years ago after receiving treatment for a rare form of cancer, has made a full recovery and is returning to full-time work, according to a spokesperson for the venture…
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White House Delays AI Executive Order Event
A long anticipated executive order on AI and cybersecurity from President Donald Trump will take a bit longer. The White House has postponed a Thursday afternoon ceremony to sign the order, which is expected to establish a voluntary framework for AI companies to submit future…
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Cursor Sees Opening as GitHub Flounders
Microsoft's GitHub unit has been on the defensive lately. Amid a series of outages and other snags, Jay Parikh , who oversees the software-project management platform, recently warned deputies that coding tools from Cursor and Anthropic could eventually make GitHub obsolete, my…
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Anthropic Is in Talks to Use Microsoft’s AI Chips
Anthropic is in talks to rent servers powered by Microsoft-designed AI server chips as it seeks more computing power to meet rising demand for its AI, according to two people who spoke to executives involved in the discussion. Winning Anthropic as a customer would be a coup for…
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Anthropic Projects Turning an Operating Profit in Second Quarter
Anthropic expects to generate $559 million in operating profit at the end of the June quarter, becoming profitable on an operating basis for the first time, according to a person with knowledge of the financials. A spike in revenue will drive the profit swing, which will take…
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Nvidia’s Blowout and SpaceX’s Blue Sky Ambitions
Nvidia, wow. The AI chip giant did it again, delivering better than projected 85% revenue growth for its April quarter, the first in its 2027 fiscal year. Even better, Nvidia forecast 95% growth for the second quarter. Its fiscal 2027 is shaping up to be a firecracker, with…
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SpaceX’s Revenue Growth Slowed to 15% in First Quarter
SpaceX showed a deteriorating financial profile in the first quarter after it absorbed xAI and prepared to go public. The company lost $4.3 billion in the quarter that ended in March, while generating $4.7 billion in revenue. Its revenue growth slowed to about 15% in the…
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Anthropic and SpaceX Detail Compute Deal Worth Up to $40 Billion
Anthropic could pay SpaceX up to $40 billion over the next several years to use compute from data centers, but either company has the power to call off the deal early, SpaceX revealed when it filed for an initial public offering on Wednesday. SpaceX is receiving $1.25 billion…
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SpaceX Reveals Up to $40 Billion Anthropic Deal—With a Catch
SpaceX’s long-awaited public offering paperwork revealed fresh details about its unlikely partnership with Anthropic that are representative of the overall IPO story for Elon Musk’s company: Enormous potential, with risks everywhere. The company said Anthropic agreed to pay…
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Intuit Lays Off 17% of Staff as Revenue Growth Sinks to Lowest Level Since 2024
Intuit shares dropped around 14% in extended trading on Wednesday as the maker of QuickBooks and TurboTax reported revenue growth dipping to its slowest pace since 2024. Revenue in the fiscal third quarter, which ended April 30, climbed 10% from the previous year to $8.6…
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Nvidia Projects 95% Sales Growth in the Current Quarter, Its Fourth Consecutive Increase
Nvidia’s revenue grew 85% to $81.6 billion in the three months that ended April 26, the company said Wednesday. That’s 12 percentage points higher than the blistering growth the AI chip designer reported in the January quarter. It also projected revenue would grow 95% in the…
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Mercury Hits $5.2 Billion Valuation After Funding Round
Fintech startup Mercury said it raised $200 million at a $5.2 billion valuation shortly after receiving conditional approval from regulators for a bank license. The neobank, led by CEO and co-founder Immad Akhund, drew investment from TCV and existing venture firms such as…
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White House Briefs AI Companies on Plan to Review Models Before Release
The White House’s Office of the National Cyber Director hosted a briefing Tuesday for companies including OpenAI , Anthropic and Reflection AI on a planned executive order on AI that will empower intelligence and other government agencies to review advanced models before the…
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OpenAI Prepares to File for IPO in Coming Weeks
OpenAI is preparing to file for an initial public offering in the coming weeks, according to people familiar with the matter. The filing could potentially speed up the offering for the pioneer of conversational artificial intelligence, accelerating a race with rival Anthropic to…
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Fintech Lenders are Still Learning the Hard Way
The recent bankruptcy of Parker, a corporate card startup that catered to e-commerce customers, is a good reminder that lending is one of the toughest ways to make money in fintech. Parker had been among the dwindling number of standalone, tech-heavy lenders geared toward small…
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As Anthropic Costs Mount, Businesses Pressure Software Firms to Shorten Contracts
Businesses are spending more on Anthropic and other AI providers, and the additional budget has to come from somewhere. One natural target for cuts is other software. While businesses aren’t abandoning their enterprise applications outright, they’re putting themselves in a…
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GitHub Says Hackers Breached Company Systems, Stole Data
Hackers broke into GitHub’s internal systems and stole data from thousands of its internal repositories, the Microsoft-owned company disclosed Tuesday night. While GitHub said it didn’t find any evidence that customer data was stolen, the hackers were able to access over 3,800…
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James Murdoch Buys New York Magazine and Vox Podcasts
Vox Media is splitting in two and James Murdoch, son of media mogul Rupert Murdoch, is buying the half that owns New York magazine, Vox.com and the Vox podcast network, Vox announced. The rest of Vox, including websites Popsugar, SB Nation, The Dodo and The Verge, will become…
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Google Pitches Its AI Coding Tools as the Cost-Effective Option
Google came into its flagship developer conference, Google I/O , on Tuesday with a big question to answer: Does it have a counter to Anthropic’s dominance in coding? The takeaway, after a sweltering day in Mountain View, Calif.: Google wants to redefine the competition. Google…
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Starship Launch and IPO Filing Mark Critical Week for SpaceX
SpaceX’s draft prospectus, which could become public as soon as later on Wednesday, has prominently positioned a photograph of its Starship rocket, in the very early stages of liftoff, with bright orange flames emerging from its engines and smoke plumes underneath. The photo…
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Meta Begins Cutting 8,000 Jobs
Meta Platforms has begun notifying thousands of employees that they are being laid off, as it embarks on its latest effort to cut costs and offset the heavy investment in artificial intelligence. Meta had said last month it would lay off about 8,000 people on Wednesday, about…
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Alibaba Unveils New AI Chip as China Accelerates Adoption of Domestic Chips
Alibaba Group’s semiconductor design unit on Wednesday unveiled a new chip that can be used to train and run AI models. The move comes as the Chinese government pushes to accelerate the adoption of homegrown AI chips to reduce the country’s dependence on Nvidia. Alibaba said the…
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Sam Altman Offers YC Founders $2 Million in OpenAI Tokens For Equity
OpenAI cofounder and CEO Sam Altman late Tuesday offered to invest $2 million in every startup currently in the Y Combinator startup accelerator program—not in cash, but in OpenAI tokens. “I am excited to see what will happen with tokenmaxxing startups, both for how they work…
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Goldman Sachs to Lead SpaceX IPO
SpaceX tapped Goldman Sachs for the top role on its initial public offering next month, according to the Wall Street Journal. The “lead left” position would put Goldman in the driver’s seat for what will likely be the largest IPO ever. Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Citi and…
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Investors Fall Back in Love With IPOs
For the past two days, I’ve been at JP Morgan’s annual tech conference in Boston. As usual, AI has dominated most of my conversations with investors. But in a change from the past few months, it’s not Anthropic and OpenAI driving those discussions—but hardware and utility…
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Google’s AI Search Leap Forward
If you pay attention to one thing in AI this week, it should be Google’s I/O presentation on Tuesday. The tech giant unveiled a bunch of AI tools, most significantly the addition of new AI features such as agents to Google Search. Any distinction that existed between Google’s…
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SpaceX to Acquire Cursor 30 Days After IPO
SpaceX and Cursor expect to proceed with their planned acquisition 30 days after SpaceX begins trading publicly, according to someone familiar with the matter. SpaceX is expected to go public in mid-June in the largest IPO in U.S. history. The Elon Musk-founded rockets-and-AI…
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Google Unveils Expanded Lineup of AI Shopping Tools
Google unveiled an expanded lineup of AI shopping tools Tuesday at its annual I/O developer conference, including a “Universal Cart” that allows users to add products from multiple retailers and sites across multiple Google products including search, Gmail, Gemini and YouTube.…
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Google DeepMind Hires Staff, Licenses Technology from Contextual AI
Google DeepMind agreed to pay between $80 million and $90 million to hire employees from AI agent startup Contextual AI and to license its technology, according to a person with knowledge of the deal. Douwe Kiela, Contextual’s cofounder and CEO, is expected to join DeepMind…
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5 Charts That Make Sense of SpaceX’s IPO Numbers
SpaceX’s initial public offering prospectus will read like a kaleidoscope when it’s unveiled publicly in the coming days. There will be a dazzling mixture of storylines and figures that show huge financial losses, exciting promises, impressive growth and unmet expectations.…
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Google Unveils New Video Model, Search Upgrades
Google on Tuesday announced a new video model, upgrades to search and a slightly streamlined coding agent offering at its annual conference. The Google I/O event is officially a developer conference, but in practice Google has also used it in recent years to showcase new…
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SpaceX IPO Could Return More Than $60 Billion Each for Founders Fund, Valor
SpaceX’s initial public offering, expected to be the largest in history, is also set to yield the largest venture returns ever at the time of the IPO. Among those set to win big are Founders Fund, Valor Equity Partners and Sequoia Capital. Valor Equity Partners, whose founder…
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How Microsoft, Meta, xAI Get AI Training Data From Their Employees
Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot may have lost much of its early lead in the AI coding race to rivals like Anthropic and Cursor, but Microsoft thinks it has an advantage over those companies: roughly 100,000 software engineers who work for Microsoft. As we reported Monday , Microsoft…
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Andrej Karpathy Joins Anthropic
Andrej Karpathy, a founding member of OpenAI and the former director of AI at Tesla, is joining Anthropic, he posted on X on Tuesday. “I think the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative,” he wrote. The hire is a coup for Anthropic, given Karpathy’s…
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Is the Gap Widening Between Anthropic and Open-Source Models?
Some developers have told me that the rising costs of frontier AI models from Anthropic and other firms could prompt them to shift to cheaper open-source AI. After all, when companies as sophisticated as Uber are accidentally blowing through their entire year’s AI budget in a…
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Amazon’s Nvidia Alternative Starts Winning Over AI Developers
Amazon’s yearslong effort to build a serious alternative to Nvidia’s dominant AI chips is starting to gain traction. Anthropic and OpenAI, which have struck multibillion-dollar investment and infrastructure deals with Amazon, have already committed to renting large amounts of…
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Analog Devices Near Deal to Buy AI Power Chip Startup for $1.5 Billion
Chipmaker Analog Devices is in advanced talks to buy startup Empower Semiconductor for about $1.5 billion, in a deal that reflects demand for technology that can manage the intense energy needs of AI chips, The Information reported Monday . A deal could be announced as soon as…
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AMD CEO Lisa Su Meets With Chinese Vice Premier
Lisa Su, Chair and CEO of Advanced Micro Devices, met with Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng in Beijing on Monday, two days after U.S. President Donald Trump wrapped up his state visit to China. He, China’s No.1 official in charge of economy and trade, said multinational companies,…
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Analog Devices in Talks to Buy AI Power Chip Startup for $1.5 Billion
Chipmaker Analog Devices is in advanced talks to buy startup Empower Semiconductor for about $1.5 billion, in a deal that reflects demand for technology that can manage the intense energy needs of AI chips, according to people familiar with the discussion. The acquisition of the…
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Google and Blackstone to Create TPU Cloud Provider
Google and Blackstone are creating a cloud computing company that will rent out Google’s tensor processing units to artificial intelligence developers, according to a person with direct knowledge. Google has been pushing for many months to expand the reach of its TPUs, in an…
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Meta Shifts Thousands of Workers to New AI Groups as Layoffs Loom
Meta Platforms is making broader organizational changes along with impending mass layoffs to better suit its structure to AI, a top executive told staff on Monday. The owner of Facebook and Instagram plans to detail cuts on Wednesday to about a tenth of its nearly 78,000…
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Musk Loses in Court; Uber Buys More of Delivery Hero
Elon Musk’s big week isn’t starting out too well. Firstly, the all-important test launch of Starship got delayed by a day. Meanwhile, news broke that a worker died on Friday at SpaceX’s Starbase complex in Texas, where the rocket will launch. Separately, Musk on Monday lost the…
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Seagate Stock Falls on CEO Comments Suggesting Manufacturing Pullback
Shares in Seagate Technology, which makes hard disk drives for data storage, fell 7% Monday after CEO William Mosley suggested the company was more focused on increasing capacity on its individual hard drives than “building new factories or bringing up new machines that would…
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Anthropic Buys Developer Tools Startup Stainless
Anthropic announced on Monday that it has acquired developer tools startup Stainless, confirming an earlier report from The Information. The model maker did not disclose any terms of the deal, but The Information had previously reported it was in talks to acquire Stainless for…
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Uber Spends $1.8 Billion Increasing Stake in Delivery Hero to 19.5%
Uber lifted its stake in Germany-based food delivery firm Delivery Hero to 19.5%, with options to go to 25%, a sign the ride-hailing and delivery firm may be contemplating expanding further in Europe. Uber told a German regulator it “currently…has no intent” of buying…
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Musk Loses OpenAI Lawsuit in Victory for Altman
Jurors rejected Elon Musk’s claims against OpenAI , delivering a major victory to CEO Sam Altman in Silicon Valley’s biggest grudge match. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers agreed with the jury’s decision on Monday that Musk waited too long to bring his lawsuit. The decision came…
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Musk Loses OpenAI Lawsuit
Jurors rejected Elon Musk’s claims against OpenAI, delivering a major victory to CEO Sam Altman in Silicon Valley’s biggest grudge match. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers agreed with the jury’s decision. The nine-member jury’s decision on Monday, following three weeks of testimony…
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The ‘Price is Right’ for GPUs: The Startup Turning Nvidia Chips Into ‘Boring’ Bankable Assets
Good morning, Anissa here! The AI boom requires an enormous amount of new power plants, chips and data centers. But it also requires something that’s less visible: new financial plumbing that makes it possible to lend against this costly hardware. Miami fintech startup Barkr is…
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