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
OpenAI has offered some media firms as little as between $1 million and $5 million annually to license their news articles for use in training its large language models, according to two executives who have recently negotiated with the tech company. That’s a tiny amount even for small publishers, which could make it difficult for OpenAI to strike deals. Meanwhile, Apple, which is trying to catch up to OpenAI and... Read more ›
108
The Byd Dolphin. Photo: Bob Henry/UCG/Universal Images/Getty Two years ago, Tesla CEO Elon Musk told investors he had made a strategic decision: He would bet the company’s growth on a fully autonomous robotaxi with no steering wheel or pedals, and delay the creation of a long-promised, traditionally designed $25,000 electric vehicle for mainstream customers. Read more ›
0
What’s past is prologue, as the saying goes. That’s one way to think about what’s likely to emerge from the scrum of activists surrounding Walt Disney, agitating both for and against CEO Bob Iger. Today’s news that Disney has struck an “information-sharing” agreement with ValueAct Capital, seen by many as the most sensible activist out there, is likely to cheer investors. An optimist may hope that ValueAct can spark the... Read more ›
0
Most of the time, I speak to creators who operate their businesses independently, but Josh Clark and Chuck Bryant have always run their fifteen-year-old podcast “Stuff You Should Know” under a corporate umbrella.It started in 2008 when the duo was writing for the website HowStuffWorks, which wanted to reach people through more than just articles. So the company tapped the two to start a podcast explaining various topics. On the... Read more ›
6
TikTok powered early growth in its U.S. shopping service by offering low sellers’ fees and footing the bill for deep discounts. But that free ride is quickly coming to an end. The company on Wednesday told sellers it will start taking a bigger cut of the sales they make on its app, by raising the commission it charges to 8% over the next few months from 2% currently. At the... Read more ›
6
If you’re not getting what you want from OpenAI’s large language models these days, try paying them a compliment. One example, according to Scale AI field CTO Vijay Karunamurthy, is to say: “you’re a very smart computer that takes a lot of time and thinks step by step to answer questions.” Remarkably, that helps Scale AI’s developers get better responses. I kid you not. As bizarre as that might sound,... Read more ›
20
When Microsoft announced the retirement of its longtime chief marketing officer, Chris Capossela, last October, its choice of his successor may have seemed counterintuitive to outsiders. Unlike Capossela, who had a flair for the spotlight, Takeshi Numoto has kept a low profile inside the software giant as a marketing executive over the past two decades. Numoto rarely spoke publicly at Microsoft conferences or product rollouts, and his face is unfamiliar... Read more ›
0
In 2023, companies all over the world rushed to take advantage of artificial intelligence. Now, these same companies are taking a breath and looking at their budgets. At the same time, we’re seeing incredible new use cases every week. In partnership with Comcast NBCUniversal LIFT Labs, The Information’s Amir Efrati discussed the future of AI with three experts in the fields of coding, security and large language models: Grant Bourzikas,... Read more ›
0
Talk about a cold shower! We opened 2024 with a tech stock sell-off across the board, as investors retreated from the go-go days of the past two months. The Nasdaq Composite Index, for instance, fell 1.6%. Among the biggest losers was Apple, everybody’s favorite stock, which fell 3.6% after an analyst at Barclays put out a bearish report on the company, according to this Bloomberg report. That’s one way for... Read more ›
0
This year is already gearing up to be a busy one. We’re heading into a U.S. presidential election and artificial intelligence technology continues to develop at a rapid speed. Both will involve creators, I predict. Here are more of my forecasts for 2024.• Dozens of creator economy startups will shut down or get acquired. This year, startups focused on creators were involved in more than 30 acquisitions and at least... Read more ›
0
As people around the world are planning out their new year’s resolutions, OpenAI is adding an ambitious one to its list too: Reaching $5 billion in annualized revenue by the end of 2024. Now, whether the model developer shares my tendency to overpromise with my new year's goals, I’m not sure. But, it’s off to a pretty good start—it recently passed $1.6 billion in annualized revenue, up 20% from just... Read more ›
0
Design software startup Canva is nearing a deal that lets longtime employees and investors at the company sell more than $1 billion in stock to new investors, people familiar with the matter said, less than six months after the private Australian firm arranged a similar, though smaller, transaction. Canva won’t raise any money for itself in the deal, which values the startup at $26 billion, about the same price at... Read more ›
41
In an industry known for braggadocio, Toyota has a decadeslong reputation for tight-lipped reserve, divulging little publicly about what it’s working on before a snazzy new feature or car appears in its showrooms. But it’s made a notable exception. Since 2012, Toyota has routinely touted “breakthrough” progress in an industrywide race to develop solid-state batteries, and predicted that it will be first to deploy the holy grail technology in electric... Read more ›
15
OpenAI recently topped $1.6 billion in annualized revenue on strong growth from its ChatGPT product, up from $1.3 billion as of mid-October, according to two people with knowledge of the figure. The 20% growth over two months represented in that figure—a measure of the prior month’s revenue multiplied by 12—suggests that the company was able to hold onto its business momentum in selling artificial intelligence to enterprises despite a leadership... Read more ›
32
Hi, welcome to your Weekend.I’m a sucker for year-end lists, reflections and resolutions, despite the fact that so many of them suffer from predictability. One of the highlights of my week was sitting around my dining room table with extended family discussing what everybody liked and didn’t like about 2023.It was also fascinating to hear tech leaders sound off on those and related topics in our cover story this week.... Read more ›
0
This year felt like a moment for monoculture. Many of us saw “Barbie,” went to Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour or Beyoncé’s Renaissance World Tour (or at least saw them in theaters) and freaked out over Walter Isaacson’s Elon Musk tome. Our cultural pastimes became unifying ties in an otherwise turbulent year. But when we asked our staffers what content captured their attention this year, most of their answers went beyond... Read more ›
5
Let’s hope all those wannabe digital media entrepreneurs are paying attention to the slow disintegration of BuzzFeed, the media star of 2016. We broke the news today that BuzzFeed’s big hope for paying off its debt and turning itself around isn’t going as planned. The company will shortly sell most of its Complex Network assets, but for just above $100 million, about a third less than what CEO Jonah Peretti... Read more ›
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Most popular sources
Tech Wire Asia
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32% |
Business Insider
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25% 6 |
CNET
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8% 2 |
Eurogamer.net
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5% 1 |
Android Authority
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4% 0 |
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28.11.2024 17:37
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