Most readers of The Information support the U.S.’s pending ban of TikTok, the Chinese-owned social media app, though a significant minority oppose the ban scheduled to take effect early next year, according to our latest reader survey. Opinions about the ban divided sharply based on whether a respondent said they use the app. The roughly one-third of respondents who said they use TikTok disapproved of the ban by a more... Read more ›
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EssilorLuxottica might not be a household name in the U.S. But the eyeglass giant, maker of Meta Platforms’ smart Ray-Ban glasses as well as dozens of other eyewear brands, is suddenly a company tech firms want to buddy up with. Rocco Basilico, the 34-year-old Italian head of EssilorLuxottica’s wearables business, revealed in an interview that the company had been getting approaches from some big tech companies interested in “smart eyewear.”... Read more ›
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Finally, there’s good news from the never-ending quest to evaluate how good a large language model is. LMSYS, an organization that benchmarks LLMs, released findings last month on how the performance of LLMs changed between normal queries and harder ones that require more reasoning capabilities. LMSYS uses “Elo rankings,” a measure of relative performance—so you’d expect the performance metrics to remain the same in both cases. Instead, it found that... Read more ›
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In March, a group of VIPs piled into Qasr Al Sarab, a luxury resort two hours’ drive from Abu Dhabi, for an invite-only event co-hosted by Mubadala Investment Co., a $300 billion sovereign wealth fund based in the United Arab Emirates. It was the same hotel where, two years earlier, cast members of “Dune: Part Two” had gotten their beauty sleep when they weren’t shooting the sci-fi epic in the... Read more ›
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Its cash reserves dwindling, electric vehicle maker Fisker last year obtained $510 million in funding from Heights Capital Management, a San Francisco–based investor in distressed assets. But when Fisker missed a November deadline for a securities filing, Heights gained the rights to all the company’s assets. Read more ›
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Beauty startup investors began this year with high hopes. In December, personal care giant Unilever said it was buying hair care brand K18, a star on TikTok since its 2020 launch. The industry took that as a sign that trendy brands had a fresh shot at selling to big conglomerates, which had mostly paused acquisitions after a deal binge in 2021. At least five beauty startups have hired advisers to... Read more ›
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Chinese tech companies are facing more scrutiny in the U.S. than ever before. Yet some of China’s artificial intelligence startups are making a rush to grab U.S. customers. The reason: it’s too hard to make any money in China. One example is Beijing-based Moonshot AI, one of China’s most valuable AI startups. Its employees have been working on products that were recently launched in the U.S., including Ohai, an AI... Read more ›
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Nvidia is No. 1! A 3.5% rally in the artificial intelligence chipmaker’s stock on Tuesday, as most other tech stocks fell, catapulted its market capitalization above that of both Microsoft and Apple for the first time. It ended the day worth $3.34 trillion, while Microsoft was valued at $3.31 trillion and Apple was at $3.29 trillion. Those are big numbers: By comparison, the collective value of all stocks in the... Read more ›
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The last time I wrote about a startup—outside artificial intelligence—raising money at a higher valuation than in its last round was in May 2022, when blockchain analytics startup Chainalysis raised funds at an $8.6 billion valuation. That’s why I was intrigued to hear about a round that doubled the valuation of Zepto, an Indian rapid-delivery company, in a round co-led by a new venture capital fund. Finally, some variety!The company,... Read more ›
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Big brands are really coming around to influencer marketing after years of only dabbling in it, I reported in this story on Friday. The shift is causing even 187-year-old John Deere to rethink its marketing plans. In April, the company announced it would hire a creator to run its short-form video strategy for a one-year contract that pays $200,000. This new hire, dubbed the first “chief tractor officer,” will also... Read more ›
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Elon Musk’s X, formerly known as Twitter, has lost so many big-name advertisers that it’s starting to look attractive—at least for smaller marketers focused more on luring new customers than burnishing their brand name. But even that may not be enough to turn around X’s much-shrunken ad business. One advertiser who is seeing good results on X is Sean Frank, CEO of wallet maker Ridge, who says ads he has... Read more ›
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Apple has told at least one supplier that it has suspended work on its next high-end Vision headset, an employee at a manufacturer that makes key components for the Vision Pro said. The pullback comes as analysts and supply chain partners have flagged slowing sales of the $3,500 device. The company is still working on releasing a more affordable Vision product with fewer features before the end of 2025, the... Read more ›
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American pundits like former Google CEO Eric Schmidt like to say China is behind the U.S. in artificial intelligence by several years. But American AI researchers increasingly tell me that these people underestimate Chinese researchers. Instead, by restricting Chinese access to American tech, the U.S. has pushed the country to forge its own path in AI development (or find workarounds to the U.S. export rules, as in the case of... Read more ›
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Around Christmas last year, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang called a series of meetings with company executives to discuss a growing concern: whether Nvidia’s biggest customers were going to run out of data center space to install its artificial intelligence chips, which could hurt sales, according to someone who attended the meetings. Huang told colleagues he was worried cloud server providers such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft, which collectively have... Read more ›
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Call me crazy, but a product that has to carry a health warning label seems like it might have a bit of a problem attracting customers. And yet that’s the situation social media platforms—such as Meta Platforms’ Instagram and Facebook, Snap’s Snapchat and TikTok— might be in if the surgeon general has his way. As he opined in this New York Times op-ed on Monday, labels need to state that... Read more ›
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The old adage that you should never get into a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel load doesn’t resonate in the digital age as well as it used to. But there’s no doubt news publishers’ complaints about AI startups pirating their copyrighted material has drawn plenty of coverage. There may be a solution. A growing number of startups are emerging to try and help publishers, and other... Read more ›
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Didi Global, the Chinese ride-hailing giant whose U.S. initial public offering in 2021 upset Chinese regulators so much the company delisted less than a year later, is coming out of its shell after two years of seclusion. Hoping to go public again in Hong Kong next year, Didi is telling investors that it is back in Beijing’s good graces and its business performance has been improving. Didi representatives led by... Read more ›
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Apple released AI functions for the iPhone15 Pro. Photo: Graham Hughes/Bloomberg/GettyApple CEO Tim Cook and his lieutenants spoke for two hours last week about the jazzed-up artificial intelligence features they plan to integrate into the newest iPhone. But they left out what ought to be one of the most critical words in the consumer AI revolution: battery. As in, “This is how we intend to power all these energy-sucking cool... Read more ›
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Welcome, Weekenders! In this newsletter:The AI cold war heats upThe best wedding planners for a tech mogul blowoutPlus: Netflix’s “Jaws”; Paul Giamatti’s peculiar podcast; and how Toyota caused toilet paper shortages.Lately, misinformation researchers have expended a considerable amount of energy sounding the alarm about fake online content manipulated by artificial intelligence. They worry that as AI proliferates, more people with nefarious intentions will produce fake content so sophisticated that we... Read more ›
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After 15 years as a high-end wedding planner in California, Ashley Smith often feels like she has seen and heard it all. That’s why she especially enjoys when a tech founder or a venture capitalist calls her up: They often have a vision that challenges her. “Silicon Valley–type clients have seen it all. They go to events often, they travel often, and they have access to social clubs and high-priority... Read more ›
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14.06.2026 21:09
Last update: 20:50 EDT.
News rating updated: 04:01.
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