Welcome, Weekenders! In this newsletter:âą The Big Read: Inside ZaiNar, the secretive startup hoping to power the physical AI era ⹠Policy: Meet the Trump official who wants to deliver a win to prediction markets ⹠Plus, Recommendationsâour weekly pop culture picks: âExpanse: The Nannup Four,â âThe Infinity Machineâ and âBeefâWatching the Elon Musk versus OpenAI trial from inside the courtroom gave me a front-row seat to the AI boomâs... Read more âș
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Online education firm Chegg is laying off 388 employeesâaround 45% of its workforceâdue to the ânew realities of AI,â which includes reduced website traffic and revenue stemming from Googleâs practices of including AI summaries atop search results. Itâs the latest sign of trouble for Chegg, ... Read more âș
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Another day, another chip company-A deal. This time, itâs Qualcomm, best known for its mobile phone chips (such as the modem in most iPhones). What Qualcomm is not known for is selling chips for data center servers, despite its valiant attempts to do so in the past. Will this time be different? Weâll see. At least Qualcomm has a customer for its AI chipsâHumain, the Saudi Arabian AI startup thatâs... Read more âș
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Forge Global, a publicly traded platform for trading stakes in privately held startups, is exploring a sale, the Financial Times reported. Shares of Forge Global jumped more than 13% on Monday. The company is working with Financial Technology Partners, an investment bank that specializes in ... Read more âș
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Shares in Qualcomm soared more than 12% after the semiconductor company said it would make artificial-intelligence chips and struck a deal to provide them to Saudi Arabiaâs Humain. The announcement on Monday, the first day of Saudi Arabiaâs annual Future Investment Initiative conference, made ... Read more âș
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Amazon is preparing to cut as many as 30,000 corporate jobs beginning this week, Reuters reported Monday. The cuts are meant to help compensate for overhiring during the pandemic and to cut expenses, the report said. An Amazon spokesperson didnât immediately respond to a request for comment. The ... Read more âș
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As artificial intelligence models improve, the companies developing them are seeking more sophisticated ways to measure how good they are at a wide range of tasks. As a result, they are developing internal benchmarks to test modelsâ capabilities, rather than relying on publicly available tests.Cognition, which has created the Devin coding agent, is one of the startups thatâs developed internal benchmarks. Its tests for agentic coding capabilities measure an AI... Read more âș
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Defense tech company Anduril expects to burn through $800 million to $900 million in cash this year in an aggressive bid to win giant Pentagon contracts. Investors big and small are unperturbed, lining up to back the fast-growing seller of drones, missiles and border surveillance towers. The company appears to be the most coveted stock in the private markets, with small investors on the secondary market willing to pay nearly... Read more âș
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Chinese artificial intelligence startup MiniMax launched a new open-source large language model on Monday whose performance is ranked the highest among such models on some leaderboards. The new model, M2, is particularly suitable for AI agents and coding, according to the company. On the AI ... Read more âș
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Andreessen Horowitz general partner Anjney Midha is launching AMP, a new venture to provide âcompute and capital to frontier AI teams.â Midha, The Information reported. Midha, who previously helped Andreessen startups access Nvidia GPUs, will remain a part-time venture partner, retaining board ... Read more âș
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OpenAI is developing artificial intelligence to allow people to generate music using text and audio prompts, The Information reported. The startup is collaborating with Juilliard School students to annotate music scores, which can be used as training data for the music generating tool. The ... Read more âș
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SoftBank is set to complete its $30 billion investment in OpenAI, after its board approved a $22.5 billion second installment on the deal, The Information reported. The remainder of its investment is contingent on OpenAIâs corporate restructuring, which would pave the way for a public offering ... Read more âș
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Artificial intelligence chip startup SambaNova Systems is exploring a sale after it was unable to complete a fundraising round, The Information reported. The Palo Alto, Calif., company, last valued at $5 billion in 2021, has faced sales growth challenges against competitors like Nvidia. As a ... Read more âș
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Google is investigating a security breach involving a contractor who took nearly 2,000 screenshots and sensitive internal files related to the Google Play store, The Information reported. The contractor, working in the Philippines for Accenture, sent the images to an unidentified outsider via ... Read more âș
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This is our first of what we plan to be a regular Sunday evening Briefing, looking out at the coming week. And what a week this promises to be. Nvidia is holding one of its GTC events for developers and customers in Washington Monday through Wednesdayâwhich leather jacket will Jensen Huang wear onstage this time? (For more on GTC, see below.) Weâve also got a flood of earnings reports. Meta... Read more âș
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Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Sunday that President Donald Trump and Chinaâs leader, Xi Jinping, could this week âconsummateâ a long-anticipated deal to keep TikTok operating in the U.S., as the leaders prepare to meet Thursday in South Korea. President Trump recently ... Read more âș
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Vinod Khosla thinks companies which say theyâre struggling to get a return on their spending on artificial-intelligence services may be doing it wrong. In an interview with The Informationâs TITV this past week, he said âmost enterprises who are executing AI are doing it with their people who are not qualified to execute.â In contrast, when businesses hire an AI specialist firm to help them, âit goes swimmingly well.â Khosla... Read more âș
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Netflixâs quarterly earnings reports have lately lacked the drama that once made the updates a must-watch for investors and reporters. For the past eight quarters, the video streamer has routinely posted quarterly revenue growth averaging around 15%âhardly hypergrowth but a big improvement on the 2% to 4% growth rate it recorded between late 2022 and late 2023. Nowadays the results are so predictable that it would be easy to tune... Read more âș
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SoftBank has taken the next step to complete its gargantuan $30 billion investment in OpenAI. The Japanese conglomerateâs board has approved a second installment of $22.5 billion on that investment, as long as the artificial intelligence startup completes a corporate restructuring that would pay the way for an eventual public offering, according to a person with knowledge of the decision. The approval signals SoftBankâs expectation that OpenAI will succeed in... Read more âș
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Google is investigating a breach of its security systems involving a contractor who took almost 2,000 screenshots and sensitive internal files, including information related to Googleâs Play store systems and guardrails, according to a person with knowledge of the situation. The contractor sent the images to an unidentified outsider, the person said. The screenshots and documents the contractor had copied included software code, information on certain developer accounts and information... Read more âș
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Artificial intelligence chip startup SambaNova Systems is exploring a sale, after it struggled to complete a fundraising round, according to people with direct knowledge of the matter. The Palo Alto, Calif., startup was last valued at $5 billion in 2021. SambaNova and other AI chip startups have had difficulty growing sales in the face of giant competitors like Nvidia. Read more âș
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09.05.2026 20:03
Last update: 19:50 EDT.
News rating updated: 02:50.
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