One of the things I loved about this week's episode is that it got out of abstract questions about the future of AI and into the here and now implications. That led the gang to TikTok and the future of the app. A big thanks to Brit for moderating this week's episode as my one hour at the DMV turned into two and a half and I missed the taping.... Read more ›
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Only minutes after Sam Altman was fired by the board of OpenAI on the afternoon of November 17, Vinod Khosla got a call from a major OpenAI investor. “What is going on?” the person asked. In the ensuing days, puzzled calls and texts from various principals continued streaming in. But even Khosla, one of OpenAI’s earliest investors and a man renowned for his powers of prescience, couldn’t predict what would... Read more ›
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Last week’s drama at OpenAI is still fresh on the minds of founders leading artificial intelligence startups in our Generative AI database. Several of them told me this week the saga has spurred reflections about their own boards, discussions with directors and new priorities around AI safety.Sasha Orloff said that Puzzle, the AI accounting startup he co-founded, is accelerating the addition of a third director to its board, which now... Read more ›
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For the past few years, Shein has seemed untouchable. The secretive e-commerce firm had exploded into one of the world’s most valuable private companies by shipping trendy apparel directly from Chinese manufacturers to shoppers around the world, offering rock-bottom prices in exchange for longer delivery times. But last year, Shein’s hot streak seemed in danger of ending as customer spending slowed sharply. In a pitch to investors late last year,... Read more ›
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It was once common to wonder whether businesses were too big to fail. I think it is time we start worrying about business leaders who think they are too big to fail—and what we should do about that. I had this thought as I was listening to Elon Musk tell The New York Times’ Andrew Ross Sorkin that businesses pulling their ads from X were blackmailing him. “Let’s see how... Read more ›
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This holiday shopping season is acting as a coming out party for TikTok Shop, the video app’s new shopping feature, which has been wooing shoppers with big discounts. To get a sense of how the first Black Friday weekend for brands using TikTok Shop went, I caught up with Paul Jauregui, the cofounder of BK Beauty. The Austin-based seller of makeup brushes has caught fire on TikTok over the past... Read more ›
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Many would argue that today marks the one-year anniversary of the investor frenzy for generative artificial intelligence startups. It was exactly this time last year that OpenAI introduced ChatGPT, one of the most transformative new tech products in recent history. Investors had already gotten a taste for AI deals before then, thanks to breakthroughs by OpenAI and others. Then ChatGPT came along, lighting the fuse for dealmaking that transformed a... Read more ›
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There’s much speculation about the reasons for the abrupt removal and subsequent return of Sam Altman as the CEO of OpenAI. Irrespective of who leads the company going forward, OpenAI faces a fundamental challenge in reconciling its mission with its choice of corporate structure and business model. To solve it, we can learn from the history of tech innovations. Much of the discourse on OpenAI’s dysfunction has focused on tribal... Read more ›
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In the lucrative world of artificial intelligence, data are king. Model developers like OpenAI have inked multi-million dollar deals with companies such as The Associated Press to get access to hard-to-find data with which to train their AI models. And startups like Amsterdam-based Adaptive have landed eight-figure sums of capital just with the promise of developing another form of training data. Adaptive claims to be working on a product to... Read more ›
1
Several months ago, executives at Alibaba tried to persuade some big investors to take a stake in its cloud unit—which Alibaba was then planning to spin off as a separate company—at a $40 billion valuation. Alibaba’s idea was that the outside investments could signal to the stock market the appeal of the cloud unit ahead of its public debut. The plan flopped. Investors balked at the valuation Alibaba sought. They... Read more ›
2
Traditional and next-generation electric vehicle battery companies have laid off hundreds of employees in the U.S. and Europe in the last couple of weeks, a symptom of a new industry malaise triggered by lower-than-expected EV sales growth. The layoffs are part of a broad move by the battery makers to conserve cash as costs have soared and investors that have been willing to tide startups through bad stretches have turned... Read more ›
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Microsoft is to become a non-voting observer on the non-profit board that governs OpenAI, newly reinstated CEO Sam Altman told employees on Wednesday, while confirming he had officially rejoined the firm. Microsoft’s new status will give it some insight into the board’s deliberations, but it won’t have a vote, thereby limiting its ability to influence decisions. Microsoft is the biggest shareholder in OpenAI, with a more than 49% stake in... Read more ›
0
Woof! There is deal-making going on out there that doesn’t have to do with artificial intelligence (unless of course you mean animal intelligence). Blackstone’s $2.3 billion purchase of pet-sitting marketplace Rover Group, unveiled Wednesday, demonstrates that Rover is that rarest of gems, a company that went public via a SPAC merger and turned out not to be a dog. SPACs, as you might remember, are those cashed-up shell firms known... Read more ›
0
Creators have started using generative artificial intelligence to make their jobs easier, and more startups are looking to provide those tools. At least 19 creator startups center on AI, according to our Creator Economy Database.Still, creators are worried they won’t get credit for their work. Already, some like comedian Sarah Silverman have sued Meta Platforms and OpenAI over alleged copyright infringement. Earlier this month, Kaya moderated a discussion on how... Read more ›
0
Sequoia Capital has finalized a key aspect of its landmark breakup with its Chinese and Indian affiliates one month ahead of schedule. The Menlo Park, Calif.-based venture firm has completed the process of separating IT systems and other back-end functions such as finance and accounting from the Chinese and Indian entities, formerly known as Sequoia Capital China and Sequoia Capital India, according to two people familiar with the matter. The... Read more ›
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A congressional committee is preparing to question officials from the federal banking regulator, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, over the appointment of its first chief financial technology officer, who The Information reported fabricated his work history to get the $300,000-a-year job. The House Financial Services Committee’s Subcommittee on Digital Assets, Financial Technology and Inclusion has asked representatives of the OCC to appear at a hearing on Tuesday.... Read more ›
0
Barry Silbert’s Digital Currency Group announced last week that it sold its crypto news subsidiary CoinDesk to the crypto exchange Bullish. Silbert said in a tweet that the sale made CoinDesk, which DCG bought for $500,000 in 2016, “one of our best investments of all time,” but the sale price was not disclosed and could not be learned.What is clear, though, is that CoinDesk has seen its business slow dramatically... Read more ›
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Clem Delangue‘s got some hot takes on AI, and he’s not afraid to share them.Yesterday, the cofounder and CEO of Hugging Face, a popular large-language model repository, joined the company’s chief ethics scientist Margaret Mitchell and head of global policy Irene Solaiman to share their thoughts during a press briefing on the past year of AI and what’s coming next. The highlights included what comes after LLMs, the open-source versus... Read more ›
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Microsoft-backed cloud startup Rubrik, which has been preparing for an initial public offering, may have the same problem that complicated the recent IPOs of Instacart and Arm: unusually slow revenue growth. Rubrik’s revenue grew about 8% year over year during the six months that ended in July, to nearly $290 million, a person familiar with the matter said. That was a slowdown from about 18% growth the previous year. But... Read more ›
2
In 2017, SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son gathered a group of executives from Arm Holdings, the British chip designer SoftBank had just bought, to complain about one of its most important customers: Apple. In a conference room in Tokyo, Son told the group that Apple paid more for the piece of plastic that protects the screens of new iPhones than it did to license Arm’s intellectual property, according to a person... Read more ›
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29.11.2024 01:53
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