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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Welcome, Weekenders!Quickly, a programming note: The Briefing, the newsletter written by my colleague Martin Peers, is shifting to an altered schedule, and starting tomorrow, itâll appear Sunday through Thursday. Martin on a Sunday eveningâwhat a treat! Among other topics, heâll be applying his inimitable powers of explanation to previewing techâs week ahead.Now, in this newsletter:âą The Big Read: Inside the Meta-fication of OpenAIâą The Arena: Sportsâ gambling habit will be... Read more âș
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The 2025â26 NBA season kicked off this week with loads to get excited about: new broadcasts from NBCâs Peacock and Amazon Prime Video, a blockbuster double-overtime opening matchup between the Oklahoma City Thunder and Houston Rockets, and a career-defining 40-point game by rising star Victor Wembanyama of the San Antonio Spurs. But all of that was overshadowed in the wee hours of Thursday morning, as FBI agents around the country... Read more âș
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OpenAI recently made a splash with artificial intelligence that generates short videos from text promptsâsay, a scene from âLord of the Ringsâ but with Gen Z characters, or PokĂ©monâs Pikachu as âThe Godfather.â Now the company has set its sights on doing the same thing with music. OpenAI staff have been taking steps to develop AI that generates music, according to a person with knowledge of the work. For instance,... Read more âș
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Andreessen Horowitzâs artificial intelligence chip hunter is setting out on his own. Anjney Midhaâan Andreessen general partner who helped the firmâs startups gain access to highly sought-after graphics processing unitsâtold the firmâs staff on Friday that he was setting up an outside venture called AMP to âprovide compute and capital to frontier AI teams.â Midha joined the firm two years ago from social app Discord and was an early personal... Read more âș
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The U.S. National Highway Safety Administration says it has contacted Tesla to gather more information about a new setting on its driver assistance software that makes its vehicles move faster and more aggressively. Tesla added the setting, called âMad Max,â in an update for users of its âFull ... Read more âș
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JPMorgan hired veteran technology banker Kevin Brunner from Bank of America as a global chair of investment banking and mergers and acquisitions, according to a memo viewed by The Information. Brunner spent all his career at Bank of America and was most recently chair of global M&A. He ... Read more âș
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This summer, Fidji Simo wasted no time addressing a concern among many at OpenAI. Leading her first all-hands meeting as the startupâs new CEO of applications, she acknowledged that she and many others at OpenAI shared the same background: Theyâd previously worked at Meta Platforms. And then Simo, whoâd risen to be head of Facebook over a decade at Meta, offered reassuranceâshe wasnât interested in redoing her tenure at Meta... Read more âș
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Chinese humanoid robot maker AgiBot on Friday unveiled a ârobot content creation platformâ that allows users to upload videos of human movements so a humanoid can accurately mimic them. The Shanghai-based startup said that the platform, LinkCraft, will allow end-users with no expertise in ... Read more âș
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The U.S. Commerce Depart. denied that it is âcurrently negotiating equity stakes with quantum computing companies,â according to CNBC, countering a news report earlier in the day that sent shares of several stocks soaring. Earlier Thursday, The Wall Street Journal reported that the department is ... Read more âș
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On Intelâs third-quarter earnings call, CEO Lip-Bu Tan and CFO David Zinsner said the chipmaker is expecting a boost as more companies shift their spending from training AI models to inference, the process of using trained models to power AI applications. âIt is increasingly clear that CPUs play ... Read more âș
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For cryptoâs offshore giants these days, thereâs nothing more important than figuring out their Trump playbook. Most are succeeding, as President Donald Trumpâs pardon of Binance co-founder Changpeng Zhao today demonstrated. The pardon of Zhao, who was convicted of violating antiâmoney-laundering laws and served a four-month sentence last year, could ease Binanceâs path to taking on the U.S. market. Other offshore crypto firms, notably Tether and Polymarket, have already overcome... Read more âș
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Anthropic on Thursday said it plans to use up to 1 million Google Tensor processing units to power its artificial intelligence, implying the startup would spend tens of billions of dollars renting TPU servers. The announcement is a show of confidence in Googleâs chip as an alternative to Nvidiaâ ... Read more âș
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Over the last few days our reporters have broken news about two merger discussions that fizzled: Adobe, which was interested in buying video startup Synthesia, and SoftBank, which talked with humanoid robotics maker Agility about a takeover. In both cases, the startups ended up pursuing more venture capital funding at higher valuations.These are just the latest instances of aborted acquisition talks involving artificial intelligence startups that weâve broken over the... Read more âș
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OpenAI on Thursday said it bought Software Applications Inc. for an undisclosed sum. The two-year-old artificial intelligence startup develops Sky, which allows Mac users to take action on their screens and within apps using text-based prompts. âWith Sky, AI works alongside you, whether youâre ... Read more âș
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President Donald Trump has called off plans to send the National Guard on Saturday into San Francisco, after he said friends who live in the area urged him not to go ahead with it. âGreat people like Jensen Huang, Marc Benioff, and others have called saying that the future of San Francisco is ... Read more âș
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Battery materials company Redwood Materials said Thursday it had raised $350 million to expand of its new line of business repurposing used batteries to power AI data centers. Its new valuation, of more than $6 billion, is 20% higher than its last fundraising in 2023. The funding, led by ... Read more âș
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Welcome back! At its developer conference earlier this month, OpenAI showed a forthcoming feature that lets ChatGPT users access services from Expedia, Uber and Spotify directly in the chatbot. Some consumer apps might view such a feature as a threat because it bypasses their sites, preventing them from showcasing other products.For his part, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky told Bloomberg Wednesday he wonât let people use his companyâs travel booking service... Read more âș
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SoftBankâs Masayoshi Son has long predicted a future where robots would outnumber people and take over many jobs from humans. But some of SoftBankâs bets in robotics over the past 10 years, such as robot companion Pepper, have not panned out. Now the company is renewing its robot ambitionsâparticularly in robots that resemble humans. Late last year Son met with representatives from Agility Robotics, a 10-year-old startup led by former... Read more âș
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Satellite company Globalstar shares surged nearly 8% on Thursday following The Informationâs report that the company has been looking to sell itself for more than $10 billion. The company has been owned by investor James Monroeâs Thermo Companies since 2004 when he acquired the then beleaguered ... Read more âș
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Synthesia, a London-based maker of artificial intelligence software that generates video avatars of people, is in talks to raise a new round of funding led by early investor GV, an investment arm of Google-owner Alphabet, at a $4 billion valuation including the investment, according to two ... Read more âș
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09.05.2026 21:33
Last update: 21:05 EDT.
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