Andy Rubin, creator of Android and a former Google executive, has launched a new startup focused on humanoid robots, said a person with direct knowledge of the venture. His venture is the latest addition to the red-hot and frothy humanoid space, crowded with companies ranging from Tesla to startups such as Figure AI. Rubin’s startup, Genki Robotics, is based in Tokyo, where he is currently living, according to the person.... Read more ›
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Welcome, Weekenders! In this newsletter:A secretive weapons billionaire and his never-ending transformationWhere art insiders and Silicon Valley collectors make their hidden-gem purchasesA power lunch to end all power lunchesPlus: Apple’s latest chase; Spider-Man takes on Big Brother; and a billionaire investor’s favorite book.A week ago, Demis Hassabis, the mastermind behind Google’s artificial intelligence ambitions, was explaining how life works to me. “Proteins—proteins are essential to all life,” he s Read more ›
0
“I had hoped women-only events might be unnecessary by now,” said Joanna Coles, director of the Fallen Journalists Memorial Foundation and Hearst Magazines’ former chief content officer. “But given there are near total bans of abortion in 24 states, IVF and birth control are now threatened, the pay gap still persists, and just recently CNN launched a bizarre national discussion about when women are past their prime, it’s clear we... Read more ›
1
Last December, mayhem seemed to hit an all-time high at Art Basel Miami Beach, the art world’s annual Floridian bacchanal. Traffic choked the streets. No one could get a cellphone signal. And the media seemed more interested in covering the onslaught of celebrity and fashion-brand parties—Leonardo DiCaprio here, Cartier there—than, you know, the art. In other words, pure pandemonium. Art Basel Miami remains the best known art fair and a... Read more ›
10
Greetings!Some people really can’t get past the idea that it’s no longer 2021. After a lot of resistance among private companies to raising money in the past year or two because of concerns about the valuation haircuts that would result, we’ve seen a lot more private funding down rounds and even IPOs at well below peak 2021 valuations (such as Reddit’s). And yet we’ve still got some holdouts. Today my... Read more ›
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I'm just back from New York where it has been a whirlwind week for The Information and, of course, the tech and finance industries. We covered so much of it on the pod—with so much zeal (or was it fatigue?) that Sam called me punchy! Hope you enjoy. Apple Spotify YouTube Read more ›
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Private jets are a common enough sight over Driggs, Idaho, a hamlet 30 miles west of the exclusive resort town of Jackson Hole, Wyo. But one weekend a few months ago, so many chartered flights and luxury SUVs arrived in the small town that the mayor began to receive calls from residents asking what was going on. The commotion, as it turned out, came from dozens of corporate executives and... Read more ›
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My colleague Cory reported Monday that some venture investors are shying away from companies working on generative artificial intelligence because they require a lot of capital, can fetch towering valuations and often face stiff competition. But you wouldn’t know it from the first quarterly tabulation of funding to the companies in our Generative AI Database. That report, which we published Wednesday, showed that total funding for the 154 companies we... Read more ›
0
Online ticketing marketplace StubHub is aiming to go public by late summer, people close to the company said, setting up another sizable internet initial public offering after Reddit’s IPO last month. And as StubHub has more than $2 billion in debt, many times its estimated profits, the company will test investors’ appetite for companies with strained balance sheets. Further complicating matters, StubHub has ambitious hopes for the valuation it would... Read more ›
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In his keynote speech at Google’s annual cloud computing conference Tuesday, Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian outlined a future in which businesses use artificial intelligence agents to automate all manner of tasks, from analyzing data, to creating ad copy, to prodding consumers to spend more money. Now he must get customers to follow his lead—and that’s proving to be a challenge. Many are still just experimenting with AI. Those deploying... Read more ›
0
We’re approaching that time of the year when most public companies hold their annual shareholder meetings, theoretically giving investors both large and small a chance to question management and vote on board members and other matters. That all still happens, but the drama has faded from these events. What used to be in-person gatherings are increasingly online, eliminating any real chance at meaningful interaction. CEO missives to shareholders, meanwhile, seemingly... Read more ›
0
The fintech and e-commerce sectors, two of the hardest hit by the end of the venture capital funding boom, are still showing plenty of carnage. Some investors say it’s the perfect time to go bargain hunting. At the end of 2022, fintech was “probably the most hated area and probably lending within that [sector], and we actually have a couple of lending businesses we’re very excited about,” said Spark Capital... Read more ›
0
This morning, my colleagues Jing, Juro and I reported that TikTok has started to develop an advertising tool that would generate AI avatars to star in advertisers’ videos. The feature is still far from ready, we reported. Still, TikTok’s efforts indicate that the company could try to shake up the way creators make money again. TikTok’s 2020 campaign telling advertisers to “make TikToks, not ads,” encouraged brands to pay influencers... Read more ›
0
OpenAI has fired two researchers for allegedly leaking information, according to a person with knowledge of the situation. They include Leopold Aschenbrenner, a researcher on a team dedicated to keeping artificial intelligence safe for society. Aschenbrenner was also an ally of OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, who participated in a failed effort to force out OpenAI CEO Sam Altman last fall. It’s not clear what information the two fired staffers... Read more ›
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Temu, a China-founded bargain shopping app, has been under fire from U.S. lawmakers, who say it hasn’t done enough to stamp out the use of forced labor in its supply chain. Temu, for its part, has said it keeps close watch on the thousands of small manufacturers that make up its sprawling supplier base. But last year, Temu walked back a short-lived policy requiring suppliers to certify that cotton used... Read more ›
0
For months, venture capitalists have been telling me the same thing: the foundation model game is over. Between OpenAI, Anthropic, Cohere, Google and dozens of open-source model developers, there’s just no way for a company developing a new large language model to break into the market. In recent weeks, though, VCs have modified that stance and become more positive about new kinds of AI models, those that go beyond the... Read more ›
0
TikTok touts itself as a platform where creators can stand out and build a following. But the company has begun discussing with advertisers an artificial intelligence-powered feature that would generate avatars to star in videos—virtual influencers that would potentially compete with human creators for ad deals. The feature, which is still under development and could change, would generate a script for a video ad based on a prompt submitted by... Read more ›
25
Amid grave investor doubts about the viability of next-generation batteries, a half-dozen U.S. companies and seven universities are competing in a government-sponsored contest to quadruple the energy density of the world’s best commercial electric vehicle batteries. Read more ›
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Mark Zuckerberg seems to enjoy stealing Sundar Pichai’s thunder. Close observers of the cloud sector will know that Google Cloud has one of its big annual events in Las Vegas this week, and it’s rolling out lots of announcements, including a new custom-designed chip for cloud computing. It seems Meta Platforms couldn’t resist getting in on the action, announcing today its first internally designed chip for running artificial intelligence models,... Read more ›
0
Last week, we published a deep dive into YouTube, whose leaders are bringing a new focus on financial discipline at the expense of support staff that helped creators grow and manage their accounts. That focus on the bottom line has raised the hackles of creators. But they could justifiably be more outraged about the slim financial payouts they’re receiving from Shorts, the TikTok rival that YouTube launched more than three... Read more ›
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Amazon is giving its mid- and lower-level corporate employees a chance to decide how much they want to tie their future pay to the company’s stock performance. In May, Amazon will give many U.S. corporate employees the option of reducing the amount of stock they receive next year by a quarter in exchange for more cash, according to an internal memo reviewed by The Information. In doing so, Amazon joins... Read more ›
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Most popular sources
Business Insider
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28% 10 |
Gizmodo
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20% 17 |
Tom's Hardware
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17% 4 |
Mashable
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4% 1 |
CNET
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4% 0 |
| View sources » | |
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17.11.2025 04:41
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