Big banks were slow to adopt cloud services, initially nervous about storing their sensitive customer data on other companies’ servers. But when it comes to generative artificial intelligence, banks and other financial services firms have been early adopters. Goldman Sachs, for instance, has more than 1,000 developers using generative AI for coding and plans to expand use of the technology to its entire 12,000-person engineering team by the end of... Read more ›
48
Well, that didn’t turn out to be too much of a fight. Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson on Sunday exited the company he founded, the enterprise software company said today, surrendering to activist Anson Funds with barely a shot fired. It didn’t take much to scare Twilio. Anson had hinted it could mount a proxy fight to win board seats if Twilio didn’t make changes, according to a report by my... Read more ›
0
Vetamer Capital, an investor in public and private tech companies started by a Lone Pine Capital veteran just three years ago with $350 million to invest, has shut down its public-equities hedge fund and returned capital to investors, the firm said in a recent letter to its investors. The San Francisco-based firm is a notable addition to the small but growing number of tech investment firms drastically curtailing ambitions as... Read more ›
0
Funding for global creator economy startups continued its downward spiral in 2023, falling nearly 58% to about $1.7 billion compared to the year before, according to the latest update from The Information’s Creator Economy Database. Funding for just U.S. startups plunged 62% to $1.03 billion year-over-year. A once white-hot sector for investors, creator economy startups have struggled as VC funding dries up in a high-rate environment. Others have failed to... Read more ›
8
Parag Agrawal, who was CEO of Twitter for a year before Elon Musk took over the social media app in late 2022, recently raised about $30 million in funding for an artificial intelligence startup, according to two people familiar with the deal. Khosla Ventures, an early backer of OpenAI, led the funding in Agrawal’s company, which hasn’t been publicly disclosed. Agrawal’s startup is building software for developers of large language... Read more ›
3
It’s not often that a young startup takes on a 25-year-old, $1.8 trillion tech behemoth. But for Aravind Srinivas, cofounder and CEO at Perplexity AI, that’s just an average Tuesday. Perplexity is hoping to create the next Google Search, infused with generative AI. The one-year-old startup has raised $100 million to fund that mission, most recently from IVP at a $520 million valuation. (We previously scooped the round here, and... Read more ›
7
Affirm was among last year’s top stock market performers, as the company narrowed its losses and investors cheered deals with Amazon and Walmart that expanded the lender’s reach with shoppers. That marked a dramatic rebound from 2022, when rising interest rates upended Affirm’s business. But while Affirm’s revenue growth has recently rebounded, the company remains unprofitable, and it is still figuring out the best way to lend money profitably while... Read more ›
0
Welcome back to The Electric!For years, a new breed of mining companies has been heavily lobbying around the world for the right to extract battery metals from the depths of the ocean. Until now, their chances of succeeding seemed an extreme long shot. But this week we report on the probability of a breakthrough in Norway, and the chance of more success this summer.Metals-laden nodules off the coast of the... Read more ›
0
Hi, welcome to your Weekend.We’re nine days away from the official start of the race for the White House, with the Iowa Republican caucuses on January 15th. A lot of people are already on edge about this election for a variety of reasons. At the top of that list are technologists who believe a cataclysmic mash-up of artificial intelligence and elections may finally be nigh. But is it really? As... Read more ›
0
Here’s a question: How much would Apple suffer if it opened up iMessage to Android? The widespread assumption—including within Apple itself—is that by removing a major impediment to people using Android, such a move would boost sales of the devices based on the Google operating system, at the expense of the iPhone. But that may not be as true as it was in the past. Consumers’ attachment to their iPhones... Read more ›
0
Jessica Rosenworcel has me rattled. As a rule, people who run federal agencies in Washington don’t meet reporters in the lobby. They send staff. But Rosenworcel tells me, on a recent December afternoon, that it was something her old boss, West Virginia Democratic Sen. Jay Rockefeller, used to do. And she told herself if she was ever the boss, she’d do the same. Today, Rosenworcel, 52, is the boss—chair of... Read more ›
14
Want to feel old? It was more than five years ago that director Jordan Peele teamed up with BuzzFeed to create a viral deepfake video of Barack Obama uttering a series of improbable lines, a clip meant to serve as a public service announcement for the dangers of how technology could be used to manipulate public opinion. “It may sound basic, but how we move forward in the age of... Read more ›
17
Before the holidays, I spent much of December reporting and updating our Org Charts for OpenAI, Anthropic and Cohere, all of which are now live. This week, we took a step back to examine the backgrounds of the leadership at the three artificial intelligence powerhouses. Sifting through the work histories of each company’s staff, one employer popped up over and over again: Google. We’ve written previously about how OpenAI alumni... Read more ›
0
Early last year, salespeople from a health tech startup, Athelas, gave Rich Schlauch a pitch he couldn’t resist. The salespeople told Schlauch, who runs a behavioral health clinic in South Carolina, that he could increase his practice’s revenue by at least 15% and submit insurance claims faster using Athelas’ new billing software, which employs artificial intelligence and other cutting-edge technologies, Schlauch said. His clinic was doing well at the time—he... Read more ›
0
Wall Street traders need to exercise their brains a bit more. Peloton shares jumped 14% on Thursday after the struggling fitness firm struck a deal to put its workout videos on TikTok. Sure, associating with TikTok can help almost anything and anyone seem cool with the kids. But investors seem to be misreading this situation. The “exclusive partnership,” as Peloton called it, is essentially a giant ad on TikTok for... Read more ›
0
OpenAI’s board and its representatives have started talking to candidates to fill its board of directors in the wake of CEO Sam Altman’s ouster and subsequent return. The candidates include two familiar names: Scale AI CEO and co-founder Alexandr Wang, and former GitHub CEO and startup investor Nat Friedman, according to two people familiar with the discussions. It’s not clear who else the board has approached about joining its ranks.... Read more ›
2
In recent years, creators have made inroads into traditional entertainment through brand partnerships and other collaborations. One sign of that relationship: creators at mainstream media’s marquee events. For the last three years, YouTuber Emma Chamberlain has been a red carpet correspondent for Vogue at the Met Gala. Last year, Amelia Dimoldenberg, who interviews celebrities while eating fried chicken on her internet show Chicken Shop Date, took her act to the... Read more ›
2
We didn’t even make it one week into the new year without a venture capital fund announcing that it’s shutting down. Jai Malik, founder of industrial startup–focused fund Countdown Capital, explained his decision to call it quits in a four-page letter to his limited partners this week. Not once did he mention the downturn in VC that’s made raising capital harder, nor did he talk about rising interest rates or... Read more ›
0
Amazon’s corporate headcount more than tripled over five years to hit around 415,000 by the end of 2022, according to internal figures seen by The Information, far outpacing growth at other big tech companies such as Microsoft and Alphabet. The figures seen by The Information reveal that cloud computing and advertising, which have become two of Amazon’s key profit drivers, were the fastest growing businesses by headcount from the end... Read more ›
11
This is Natasha, doing a guest appearance on the ever fantastic AI Agenda! Legal tech is famously a graveyard of failed startups. But legal AI startups may have a better shot at turning things around.Take one-year old Harvey—supposedly named for a character in the popular legal sitcom “Suits”—which last month raised capital at a $700 million valuation. As we noted at the time of the fundraising, Harvey’s annual recurring revenue... Read more ›
22
Most popular sources
Tech Wire Asia
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30% 24 |
Business Insider
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27% 1 |
CNET
|
8% 3 |
Eurogamer.net
|
5% 1 |
Android Authority
|
4% 1 |
| View sources » | |
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28.11.2024 15:33
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News rating updated: 22:20.
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