Welcome, Weekenders! In this newsletter:• The Big Read: The brains behind Bernie’s AI sovereign wealth fund? A Silicon Valley law professor  • The Takeaway: How I learned to love Mark Rober• E-commerce: The fast-growing Thiel-backed startup defying a creator economy slowdown• Plus, Recommendations—our weekly pop culture picks: “Foul Play,” “The Feather Wars” and “Portobello”A couple days ago, I snagged a red-hot invite: David Holz, the Midjourney founder, was throwing a... Read more ›
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Before we turn the page on 2024, we should acknowledge the winners (and losers) in tech news: those stories that provided plenty of entertainment and those that reminded us of the enduring promise of new technologies. So, without further ado, here are our annual awards:Best soap opera: Entrants in this category had a tough act to follow, given 2023’s OpenAI–Sam Altman blockbuster. The folks at Klarna did their best: Klarna... Read more ›
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Alibaba is cutting pricing for its most advanced cloud-based visual large language model, called Qwen-vl-max, by up to 85%, the South China Morning Post reported. This is Alibaba’s second LLM price cut this year and highlights the growing competition between it and rivals like ByteDance, Baidu, ... Read more ›
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Accel has raised $650 million for a fund focused on backing startups in India, according to a securities filing. The fund’s close, which has not been previously reported, marks Accel’s eighth fund focused on India. Its last India-focused fund, closed in 2022, was also $650 million. Some of Accel ... Read more ›
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Here’s a deal scoop to wrap up the year: RetailNext, a 17-year-old startup that sells smart cameras to bricks-and-mortar retailers for measuring foot traffic, sold earlier this month to multistage investment firm Battery Ventures, people familiar with the matter said. The transaction might sound small, but it could have bigger implications for what’s to come in venture-backed mergers and acquisitions.Battery’s private equity arm paid between $100 million and $200 million... Read more ›
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Nearly four years ago, we started this newsletter because we saw more influencers making careers out of their online followings. While that’s still the case, the year 2024 marked a high for their influence in politics, business and culture. It really felt like creators were everywhere, from becoming a key part of political campaigns to inking big traditional entertainment deals and eating up a bigger share of advertising. It’s a... Read more ›
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Netflix said nearly 5 million more viewers tuned in from overseas to watch its live telecasts of two Christmas Day NFL games. Overall, Netflix said the first game between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Pittsburgh Steelers averaged 30 million viewers per minute worldwide, and the second game ... Read more ›
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When we looked into the future a year ago, we saw a period ahead full of exciting new AI gadgets, dealmaking at Netflix and trouble in a burgeoning corner of the retail world. But even the best clairvoyants don’t always get it right, and our crystal ball clearly was picking up some static interference when we gazed through it last year. Still, we were pretty correct about that retail guess,... Read more ›
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A 20-year-old US Army Soldier has been arrested and charged with selling stolen phone records, federal prosecutors said in an indictment filed last week. The soldier, Cameron John Wagenius, was associated with hackers who broke into Snowflake’s systems and stole phone records from AT&T, ... Read more ›
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In October, on a panel at an investor conference in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, futurist Peter Diamandis congratulated a technology entrepreneur sitting next to him, Jack Hidary, on the success of his startup, SandboxAQ. “I’ve never seen a company scale revenues as quickly as you have,” said Diamandis, founder of the nonprofit XPrize Foundation. Also on the panel was Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, who has similarly shown his enthusiasm... Read more ›
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What a year! 2024 toned down some of the AI hype from the previous year, as buyers of AI software began asking when they’d start seeing returns from their purchases. Meanwhile, several well-funded AI developers like Inflection, Adept and Character.AI scrambled to safety in the arms of larger tech giants. Still, there was plenty to be excited about: OpenAI is on track to generate a whopping $4 billion in revenue... Read more ›
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The Information’s readers spent a lot of time this year on Elon Musk. And on the artificial intelligence wars. They were early to what’s happening at Apple, too—a foldable phone!—and displayed a deep interest in how tech and politics are increasingly colliding. Read more ›
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Elizabeth MacBride, an author and the owner of a small publishing company, was celebrating a belated Christmas with her daughters on Friday morning when she glanced at her phone and saw an e-mail from her accounting firm, Bench. The Vancouver, British Columbia–based startup said it was shutting down services for customers, effective immediately. MacBride found she couldn’t access her company’s financial information, including loan statements and tax returns, through Bench’s... Read more ›
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The deaths in recent days of former Time Warner CEO Richard Parsons and Cablevision Systems founder Chuck Dolan seemed, in a way, symbolic of the slow death of the traditional television industry. Both Time Warner and Cablevision were, until a decade or so ago, major forces in cable TV and entertainment. Both now have been swallowed up by other entities, their value dissipated, a victim of video streaming. You might... Read more ›
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Cariad, a Volkswagen subsidiary that develops automotive software, left the personal and geolocation data of some 800,000 electric vehicle owners open to public view for several months due to a misconfiguration in Amazon Web Services’ cloud storage, the German magazine Der Spiegel reported. ... Read more ›
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Venezuela’s top court has fined TikTok $10 million and ordered the company to open an office in Venezuela after three young people died participating in popular TikTok “challenges” that involved ingesting chemical substances. According to the Voice of America, the court found that ... Read more ›
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The Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission have expanded a lawsuit alleging banking fintech Dave misled customers and charged hidden fees, adding the company’s CEO Jason Wilk as a defendant. The lawsuit, filed on Monday, said Dave misled customers by charging hidden fees and ... Read more ›
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Nvidia has completed its acquisition of Run:ai, an Israel-based startup whose software speeds up training of AI models by giving organizations more control over their usage of graphics processing units, the startup said in a blog post. The deal—previously reported to be worth $700 million— ... Read more ›
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Accounting and bookkeeping fintech Bench, which shut down Friday and notified staff that it had filed for insolvency, is now finalizing a deal to get acquired by Employer.com – and seeking to rehire the laid off staff, according to Matt Charney, Employer.com chief marketing officer. The deal, ... Read more ›
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In many ways, artificial intelligence defined 2024. Nvidia’s perch as the dominant seller of the graphics processing units that power much of AI propelled it past $3 trillion in market capitalization, making it the world’s second most valuable company as of Dec. 27, trailing only Apple. Despite a growing legion of rivals and would-be rivals (see our AI Chip Database), Nvidia’s sales actually grew faster than those of Advanced Micro... Read more ›
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While the rest of us were recovering from heavy Christmas dinners and too much time with relatives, Chinese quant trading firm High-Flyer Capital Management dropped the latest update on Thursday to DeepSeek, its open-weight large language model. Senior researchers at American firms including OpenAI and Meta Platforms almost immediately started investigating the Chinese rival’s technology and its claims about what little hardware it took to produce the model.High-Flyer says it... Read more ›
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23.06.2026 04:39
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