Welcome, Weekenders! In this newsletter:• The Big Read: Midjourney’s David Holz was AI’s creative rebel. Then Google pounced. • Plus, Recommendations—our weekly pop culture picks: “Catching the Codfather” “American Reich” and “For All Mankind”The only thing more fluid these days than which AI company has a better model is which ultraexclusive conference techies lust to be invited to.And JPMorgan Chase’s Tech100, at the private Yellowstone Club in Montana, has been... Read more ›
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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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In early 2023, Irish banking regulators contacted ByteDance with a pointed question: Why was the Chinese internet giant and parent company of TikTok moving large sums of money, likely in the tens of millions of dollars, out of its HSBC bank accounts? ByteDance officials quickly sought to assuage their concerns by telling the Irish regulators it was simply moving the money for “liquidity management purposes,” jargon for money transfers designed... Read more ›
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Artificial intelligence wasn’t the stated theme of The Information’s Private Capital Conference on Tuesday at the New York Stock Exchange but it was the topic on everyone’s lips. From the pros and cons of strategic investors to humanoid robotics, here’s what came up: Read more ›
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In the world of generative artificial intelligence startups, chatbots are so 2023. This year, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists are building and backing new applications of the emerging technology, including humanlike robots and voice generators. In the first quarter, venture capitalists plowed more than $2.2 billion into startups tracked by The Information’s Generative AI Database, an increase of more than 11% from the fourth quarter. Figure, which is building humanlike robots... Read more ›
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Investors at The Information’s Private Capital Conference Tuesday said the shakeout in valuations the past two years has given them more opportunities to find attractive deals—even in beaten-down sectors such as e-commerce. But tech founders face higher hurdles to go public and many initial public offerings remain far off, even for most artificial intelligence companies. A cautious note pervaded much of the discussion, with memories of the most recent tech... Read more ›
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The stock market is setting records, partly due to enthusiasm about artificial intelligence, a sector where valuations have soared. The IPO market isn’t back to where it was before interest rates started rising. Yet some investors are more upbeat about investment conditions than they’ve been in a while, judging from comments at our Private Capital Conference in New York on Tuesday. Anton Levy, of General Atlantic, for instance, said, “For... Read more ›
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Mubadala Capital, the investment arm of a giant Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund, is “moving into offense,” according to Ibrahim Ajami, Mubadala’s head of venture investments. “We’re leaning in,” he said, adding that the days of passive investing in vehicles like SoftBank’s Vision Fund are over. Speaking at The Information’s Private Capital Summit on Tuesday, Ajami said that this position means Mubadala will form deeper relationships with fund managers and... Read more ›
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The stock market is near a record high. Six public tech companies are worth more than $1 trillion. Even bitcoin has made a comeback! But the titans of private capital aren’t over the moon with optimism yet. That may be because they’re still working through the hangover of the zero-interest-rate funding boom in their own portfolios. “Twenty-three was a bit of a wipeout,” said Philippe Laffont, founder of New York... Read more ›
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As creators’ popularity has grown, some of the biggest are now raising capital to transform their online followings into long-lasting media and consumer companies.Dude Perfect, the five-person sports and comedy group that started with a popular YouTube channel, on Tuesday announced an investment from private equity firm Highmount Capital. A spokesperson for the group said the investment is between $100 million and $300 million. Read more ›
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Some of the world’s biggest tech investors have a reality check for companies thinking about going public: While the initial public offering market is showing signs of life, smaller companies that made the cut during the last boom cycle don’t have a shot now. “There were a lot of companies that went public in the last cycle when there was a lot of exuberance that were too small,” said Anton... Read more ›
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Two big shareholders in ByteDance made their first public comments on the political challenges facing that company’s subsidiary TikTok on Tuesday. Coatue Chief Investment Officer Philippe Laffont, a board member of TikTok parent ByteDance, said the U.S. and China need to “give clarity” about the future of TikTok. Meanwhile, Anton Levy, co-president of General Atlantic, said a lot of concerns about the dangers posed by TikTok related to “fear of... Read more ›
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Being a startup founder is hard enough. Add to that the unique obstacles facing the generative AI sector—disappointed buyers, slow revenue growth and the high costs of conversational AI—and many AI founders are realizing that it’s not necessarily the land of free-flowing capital and Nvidia chips.Take Tome, the Bay Area startup, which uses AI to create and design presentations. It saw viral growth after the launch of its product in... Read more ›
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Paul Madera’s venture capital firm, Meritech Capital, amassed big returns from betting on private companies such as Facebook and Salesforce that helped power previous technological shifts. But Madera has been steering clear of the tech shift that currently promises to transform the world: generative artificial intelligence. Meritech is one of a number of late-stage investors, including TCV, General Atlantic and Blackstone, that have stayed on the sidelines as $25.6 billion... Read more ›
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David Ellison should be careful what he wishes for. The son of Oracle chair Larry Ellison is reportedly nearing victory in his bid for TV and film company Paramount Global—to be financed with help from his dad—despite competition from Apollo. The last time there was a takeover battle for Paramount was almost exactly 30 years ago, when Sumner Redstone dueled Barry Diller over a period of nearly six months from... Read more ›
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Meta Platforms is planning to launch two small versions of its forthcoming Llama 3 large-language model next week, according to a Meta employee. The models will serve as a precursor to the launch of the biggest version of Llama 3, expected this summer. Release of the two small models will likely help spark excitement for the forthcoming Llama 3, which will be coming out roughly a year after Llama 2... Read more ›
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TikTok’s growth in Europe has slowed down so much that it’s rolling out a new app that gives people financial incentives to watch its videos. The Chinese-owned company is introducing a new app in Spain, France and other countries that will encourage users to watch videos, invite friends to sign up and perform other actions by awarding them points they can redeem as gift cards or digital tips to give... Read more ›
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Haun Ventures raised $1.5 billion to invest in crypto startups just before the market collapsed and venture deals slowed dramatically. Now, as the crypto market shows signs of a recovery, Haun is getting active—quietly grabbing a stake in one of the industry’s most high-profile survivors at a steep discount to its peak valuation. The firm, founded in 2022 by former federal prosecutor and Andreessen Horowitz investor Katie Haun, has been... Read more ›
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When Apple began developing its Vision Pro headset years ago, the project’s leaders believed its future fortunes hinged on the creativity of app developers outside Apple, just as the iPhone’s success had, said former employees who worked on the project. Increasingly, though, those developers are expressing frustration with the restrictions Apple is imposing on what Vision Pro technologies they can use in their apps. Unlike on the iPhone, Apple doesn’t... Read more ›
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As tiny chips and artificial intelligence algorithms become more powerful, a possible future where people control computers just by thinking has become more realistic, according to Brian Otis, the cofounder and former chief technology officer of Alphabet’s Verily life-sciences unit. Otis in February joined Precision Neuroscience as chief technology officer, a move that hasn’t been reported previously. Launched in 2021 by a group of founders including Neuralink cofounder Ben Rapoport,... Read more ›
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30.03.2026 14:55
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