First, some breaking news: ByteDance, the parent of TikTok, is planning to buy at least $300 million in stock from current and former employees, a buyback that implies a valuation around $223.5 billion. That’s about 26% lower than the buyback ByteDance announced a year ago. In an unusual move, TikTok is buying back shares at different prices, depending on whether an employee is still working at the company and how... Read more ›
2
TikTok parent company ByteDance is planning to buy at least $300 million worth of stock from current and former U.S. employees in a deal that values the privately-held company at $223.5 billion, down 26% from a similar buyback offer a year ago, according to two people with direct knowledge of the situation. Current and former employees must notify the company of their desire to sell shares by the end of... Read more ›
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Artificial intelligence leaders and policymakers are divided on a key question: Are cutting-edge AI models too powerful to hand to just anyone? That question has pitted companies such as Meta Platforms, which recently made the code for its conversational AI freely available on the internet, against rivals such as OpenAI that sell proprietary AI like ChatGPT but don’t share the code. OpenAI, Anthropic and other proprietary software makers have said... Read more ›
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A reckoning may be coming for once-hot artificial intelligence startups. Among the most vulnerable: consumer apps (think Character.AI) and “thin wrapper” startups like CopyAI that merely provide a nice user interface on top of a third-party model from model developers like OpenAI. We got a sense of the slowdown last week, when Natasha and I reported that Jasper, an early generative AI winner whose $125 million Series A round last... Read more ›
0
Instacart’s first couple of quarters on the public markets could come with slower revenue growth and lower profits than it reported in the first half, according to private forecasts from analysts at banks that underwrote Instacart’s initial public offering this month. The low expectations could further dent Instacart’s stock price, which has still been hovering around its IPO price, if the company can’t surpass the forecasts. Analysts at Goldman Sachs... Read more ›
0
Former President Donald Trump and other Republicans have united around a vow to gut President Joe Biden’s landmark laws supporting electric vehicles, which marshal more than $500 billion to build a U.S. battery industry. Industry hands foresee little threat to the nascent industry, even in a Republican landslide that wins the White House and both houses of Congress. That’s a mistake. Read more ›
2
Adventurer: Strauss Zelnick Escapades: 6 a.m. weightlifting, skiing the mountains of Montana, cycling through the Canadian Rockies Plenty of tech execs flex about their fitness regimen. But few can flex like Strauss Zelnick, CEO of videogame holding company Take-Two Interactive Software, which is responsible for hit games like BioShock, Borderlands and Grand Theft Auto. The ridiculously ripped Zelnick, 66, hits the gym twice a day—Equinox is his venue of choice—and... Read more ›
0
Hi, welcome to your Weekend.To spend time with Daniel Lurie is to understand the true meaning of the word “mensch.” Everyone who knows the San Francisco philanthropist and Levi’s heir says pretty much the same things about him: Daniel is “a really good guy”—affable, smart, egoless and earnest in his desire to improve the lives of the neediest. So earlier this year, when I began hearing that the Tipping Point... Read more ›
12
It’s hard to feel sympathy for Apple, given how much money it makes ($9.2 million in net income every hour in the most recent quarter). But the flood of complaints on social media about overheating in the latest line of iPhones makes you feel a bit for the tech giant and its executives. Here’s a company that wanted to make its high-end phones lighter by using titanium, and what sounds... Read more ›
5
I was about to sit down for coffee in Brooklyn with Meredith Whittaker when she started apologizing for the messages blowing up her phone. “Sorry, we’re launching our post-quantum protocol today,” she said while tapping away in—what else—her Signal app. Whittaker, the president of the Signal Foundation, the nonprofit behind the world’s most heavily encrypted messaging app, came up for air a few minutes later. She explained that while quantum... Read more ›
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Just when I thought I understood the basics of what’s happening in AI, the field moves again. This week we welcomed our first “fifth wheel”—Scott Belsky, who runs emerging products for Adobe and is also its chief strategy officer. Scott has been living and breathing AI and brought us inside the latest on agents, promising (and not-so-promising) startups and more. Plus, a feisty debate about whether the government should break... Read more ›
0
At 11 a.m. last Tuesday, a San Francisco icon stepped up to the podium at the century-old Potrero Hill Neighborhood House. With the Financial District’s half-vacant towers gleaming in the distance and the golden September sun streaming through the windows, the venue seemed stage-designed for a biopic: the room where a political star was born. The speaker, former 49er and NFL Hall of Famer Ronnie Lott, looked out at the... Read more ›
45
TikTok just cannot escape government scrutiny. Even as the hugely popular ByteDance-owned app expands in the U.S. despite a persistent threat of a ban, the Indonesian government has decided on a new regulation to ban online shopping on social media. That would hobble TikTok’s fast-growing shopping service in Indonesia, which is the single biggest market for TikTok Shop, as the service is known. Previously unreported data reveal that TikTok Shop... Read more ›
45
Earlier this month, we asked The Information’s readers how they felt conditions for tech companies would change over the next six months. The results surprised us: Equal numbers of people thought conditions would improve and worsen. That sentiment was less optimistic than we’d seen during the summer and broke a trend of progressively sunnier outlooks since March. We wondered: What gives?The results are less surprising when compared with the recent... Read more ›
0
Next time you try to wipe a smudge off your iPhone screen, take a closer look. See if you can spot one of the two tiny QR codes etched into its glass. Chances are you won’t be able to find them. Both codes are tiny—one is the size of a grain of sand and can only be seen with special equipment, while the other, roughly the size of the tip... Read more ›
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Jasper AI, an early darling of the generative artificial intelligence boom, has cut the internal value of its common shares 20%, according to former employees who were notified by the company. The drop in Jasper’s internal valuation could indicate that the growth of its AI-powered writing tool for marketers has slowed since the company raised venture funding at a $1.5 billion valuation in June. Jasper has long relied on OpenAI’s... Read more ›
2
Here’s a question: How long can someone stay as CEO of a company when the owner of that company is publicly repudiating what they’re saying? Take Linda Yaccarino, CEO of X, previously known as Twitter. On Wednesday, Elon Musk confirmed a report in The Information about layoffs at X’s election integrity team—Musk even went further than what we reported, saying the team was “gone.” Yet in an interview with the... Read more ›
0
Epic Games, the publisher of the popular video game Fortnite, started to talk up its connections with creators a few years ago, most notably during its 2021 antitrust trial against Apple. At the time, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney argued that Apple’s App Store policies were squeezing the kind of small developers that make content for Fortnite. Epic’s program, which pays creators 40% of the revenue from sales of their content... Read more ›
1
For years, Silicon Valley has been trying to figure out if hardware companies can generate venture scale returns, given the example of high-profile, venture capital–backed disappointments like Essential Products and Magic Leap. This challenging environment makes The Information’s recent reporting—that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and iPhone designer Jony Ive are discussing building an artificial intelligence–powered device—all the more intriguing. An Ive and Altman product—potentially bankrolled by SoftBank’s Masa Read more ›
2
Venture capitalists have long flaunted their ties with startup founders. Lately they have been touting a different relationship: their connections with the biggest providers of artificial intelligence chips. VC partners competing to win sought-after investments in AI startups have been highlighting their relationships with Amazon, Microsoft and Google, which can give startups access to servers equipped with hard-to-get chips known as graphics processing units for developing AI software. Some firms,... Read more ›
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Most popular sources
Tech Wire Asia
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28% 11 |
Business Insider
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25% 8 |
Eurogamer.net
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6% 2 |
Android Authority
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5% 1 |
Mashable
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4% 0 |
| View sources » | |
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29.11.2024 20:44
Last update: 20:35 EDT.
News rating updated: 03:30.
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