Anthropic is in talks to raise $750 million in a venture round led by Menlo Ventures that values the two-year-old artificial intelligence startup at $15 billion not including the investment, more than three times its valuation this spring, according to two people with direct knowledge of the matter. The round hasn't finalized. The final price could top $18 billion, according to a third person. The investment adds to commitments secured... Read more ›
0
After a grim year of many layoffs, The Information’s readers expect better days lie ahead for tech workers. A majority of respondents to our most recent survey said they expect their employers to add staff next year. More than a quarter of respondents said they expect their company’s workforce to grow by more than 10% next year. Less than 20% said they expect their companies to end 2024 with fewer... Read more ›
3
The other day, Beeper CEO Eric Migicovsky posted a meme from the Belgian comic “The Adventures of Tintin” on X. In it, a disheveled Captain Haddock asks: “What a week, huh?” To which his friend Tintin responds: “Captain, it’s Monday.” That about sums up Migicovsky’s life since the first week in December, when his startup released its Beeper Mini app, which allows Android users to participate in iMessage chats without... Read more ›
18
If you want to know the extent to which businesses are embracing generative artificial intelligence, look no further than Wall Street. Quants and hedge funds are head over heels for large language models and the researchers who make them, as my colleagues and I have frequently pointed out. The latest sign of the finance industry’s infatuation with LLMs: Big banks, known to be among the stingiest software buyers, also are... Read more ›
20
Instagram chief Adam Mosseri has built a public reputation as someone who is concerned about the safety of young people on Instagram. During an appearance on CBS in 2019, he said user well-being was a “No. 1 priority.” At a Senate hearing in 2021, he described youth online safety as “critically important.” And when pressed about changes to Instagram, he has said Meta Platforms will make decisions that hurt the... Read more ›
6
The loose money that flowed during the SPAC boom gave fledgling companies like Los Angeles–based Fisker a chance to get their electric cars out into the world. Promising investors new, cost-efficient ways of building sustainable SUVs, Fisker topped out at an $8 billion market cap in early 2021, before it had even produced a car.While the SPAC exuberance has long since faded, the fallout is still important to track. Fisker... Read more ›
3
Google plans to reorganize a big part of its 30,000-person ad sales unit, an executive told some staff last week, prompting anxiety that some departments will face job cuts. The planned reorganization comes as Google is relying more on machine-learning techniques to help customers buy even more ads on its search engine, YouTube and other services. Google has offered such tools—which automatically suggest and create new ads that it believes... Read more ›
63
As we’re in the thick of the gift-giving season, plenty of creators are recommending their favorite products and compiling guides of items people should buy for loved ones. But some emerging creators are also encouraging their fans to purchase them a gift. While creators more commonly garner support through tipping, or crowdfunding and donation sites like Buy Me a Coffee and Ko-fi, two-year-old Throne is facilitating sending creators physical gifts.... Read more ›
0
Retired technology executive Gary Stuart’s garage is full of electric cars—a Rivian truck for himself and a Lucid Motors sedan for his wife. He was so eager to own an electric SUV from another fledgling firm, Los Angeles–based Fisker, that he put down a $5,000 deposit for a vehicle last year. He even invested nearly $100,000 in the company’s stock. But Stuart’s enthusiasm has faded. His Fisker SUV, delayed by... Read more ›
115
OpenAI’s technology and revenue is ahead of Anthropic’s, but when it comes to practices aimed at making sure people don’t use generative artificial intelligence to harm society, OpenAI seems to be playing catch-up. In a 26-page document published Monday, OpenAI discussed how it evaluates AI models for “catastrophic risks” before selling them to the public.The move comes three months after Anthropic published its own, 22-page document on how it’s getting... Read more ›
0
Matt Garman, head of sales at Amazon Web Services, plans to reorganize his more than 60,000-person team to address problems that have pierced the world’s biggest cloud provider’s aura of invincibility and created an opening for Microsoft and other rivals. Early next year, Garman will consolidate teams that developed conflicting sales strategies and change how AWS assigns technical staff to help customers, among other things, after some of those clients... Read more ›
17
What would European bureaucrats do without an active U.S. tech industry to bother? On Monday, for instance, Adobe and Figma called off their $20 billion deal in the face of European regulatory opposition. The deal would have led “to higher prices, reduced quality or less choice for customers,” claimed European regulatory czar Margrethe Vestager in a triumphant statement. But that wasn’t all. The Europeans also opened a formal investigation into... Read more ›
0
On Friday, I published my long read on All-In, the podcast that half of Silicon Valley loves—and the other half loves to hate. The hosts, entrepreneurs and tech investors Jason Calacanis, David Friedberg, Chamath Palihapitiya and David Sacks, have successfully used the show to snatch back the mic from a critical press and, arguably, to distract from a less-than-impressive couple of years in their day jobs.The four hosts used the... Read more ›
36
The decision by Adobe and Figma to spike their $20 billion merger on Monday dented the imminent dream of startup riches for Figma investors and employees. But Figma’s business is still growing quicker than that of most mature startups, potentially putting it in position for an initial public offering in 2025 or later. And the billion-dollar breakup fee from Adobe will strengthen Figma’s already robust balance sheet. The design software... Read more ›
9
As the tech industry slowed down for the holidays, thousands of artificial intelligence researchers, engineers, founders and investors revved up in New Orleans at the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems—NeurIPS for short.While researchers presented papers on large language models and diffusion models underlying image generators like Dall-E, attendees we spoke to said they weren’t there for the research. To be featured at NeurIPS, papers had to be submitted by... Read more ›
5
OpenAI has overhauled how it handles the task of rooting out disinformation and offensive content from ChatGPT and its other products, as worries about the spread of disinformation intensify ahead of next year’s elections. In the weeks since Sam Altman’s reinstatement as CEO, the company appears to have quietly abandoned a monthslong effort to find a new leader for its trust and safety team, whose mandate was to prevent OpenAI’s... Read more ›
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In the 1920s, more than 700 U.S. manufacturers vied in a brutal competition to sell a new product—electric washing machines. Cheap electricity had reached urban homes, and American households snapped up the labor-saving washers, which quickly became ubiquitous. But just five U.S. washing machine manufacturers survive. It’s the same with refrigerators and waffle irons. In the 1920s, around 60 U.S. companies made the former and 85 the latter; the two... Read more ›
2
Hi, welcome to your Weekend.The winding path to this week’s must-read cover story on the “All-In” podcast began, for this editor, in August 2022. That’s when I first reached out to one of the show’s co-hosts, Jason Calacanis, to see if he and his fellow “besties” would sit for a profile. I’d met and interacted with Calacanis a few times before, once going on a walk-and-talk around San Francisco’s SoMa... Read more ›
0
Entrepreneurs often describe their business challenges as matters of life and death. William Wang has a different relationship with that phrase. Back in 2000, the Taiwanese-American serial entrepreneur was on board a Singapore Airlines flight from Taipei to Los Angeles that got into a catastrophic accident during take-off. “Sixty thousand gallons of jet fuel exploded,” Wang recalled during a recent Zoom call from his office in Irvine, Calif. “Half the... Read more ›
0
Tyler Bell was encouraging all her clients to “tag your bag.” Every time Bell, a Saks Fifth Avenue stylist in Troy, Mich., closed a sale, she asked the buyer to show off their purchase on Instagram and tag her account, @tyler.saks. Bell posts Saks inventory multiple times a day on Instagram Stories. Her 27,000 followers will message her directly, asking her to buy a pair of shoes, a sweater or... Read more ›
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29.11.2024 00:50
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