In tech, all software roads eventually lead to hardware. Look no further than OpenAIâs Sam Altman dreaming up an artificial intelligence-powered personal device with ex-Apple designer Jony Ive and SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son. Another topic the three men may have discussed at Iveâs San Francisco studio: existing AI hardware companies that Altman is excited about, given his wide array of investments.So perhaps itâs no coincidence that SoftBank is now in... Read more âș
89
Anyone scrolling quick videos of people making elaborate kinds of spaghetti or sharing dating horror stories may not be in the mood to click on an ad suggesting they buy a new pair of jeans. Thatâs at least what ad executives are saying about Meta Platformsâ efforts to sell ads on Reels, the Facebook ownerâs answer to TikTok. A year after Meta began selling ads on Reels, the company is... Read more âș
3
Hieu Duong, lead inventor of a process touted by Tesla CEO Elon Musk as a way to sharply cut the carmakerâs battery costs, has left Tesla for a startup thatâs pursuing the same advance using a different approach. In a surprising development, AM Batteries, a tiny Chelmsford, Mass., company with no revenue, hired Duong as chief manufacturing officer and Lie Shi, president of battery separator maker Celgard, as CEO. Both... Read more âș
69
Google and its parent company Alphabet has quietly laid off staff, spokespeople for the conglomerate said, as tech firms continue to tighten their belts following a marked slowdown in business growth. Divisions such as Google News, Alphabetâs healthcare analytics subsidiary Verily and self-driving car unit Waymo recently laid off staff, including this week, the spokespeople said. The moves indicate Alphabet is determined to reduce costs even after cutting 6% of... Read more âș
13
Letâs hope the boffins who track inflation are watching video streaming (and not for the entertainment value!). Netflix today raised the price on its premium tier by $3 a month to $22.99, a notably bigger increase than the last time it jacked up prices. Aggressive price increases are becoming standard in streaming, at least among the bigger companies, as we noted here recently. A few days ago, for instance, Disney... Read more âș
0
Despite TikTokâs immense popularity, it still has work to do to help advertisers and the agencies that make ads understand how to best use the short-form video app.The latest effort to address this: Earlier this month, the ByteDance-owned company invited creative agencies to participate in a program focused on upcoming major sporting events, including the Super Bowl and March Madness, according to an email invitation seen by The Information. Read more âș
1
Nikita Bier has done it again. Nine months after he sold anonymous-compliments app Gas to Discord, the app is being shut down. Bier is known in Silicon Valley as the founder of TBH, another anonymous social app which he sold to Facebook in 2017. In mid-2018, Facebook said it was closing the app âdue to low usage.â Bierâs repeat of the feat puts the spotlight on app acquisitions that many... Read more âș
29
Chinaâs government has taken a stake in a domestic subsidiary of Tencent, the operator of WeChat, Chinaâs biggest messaging app, in the latest step by Beijing to tighten its control over the countryâs big tech firms. The government has taken a similar sized stake in the domestic subsidiaries of several other tech giants over the past few years, including ByteDance, Alibaba, Kuaishou and Weibo. Such an arrangement, known as âspecial... Read more âș
26
Digital trucking marketplace Convoy told employees on Wednesday to stop accepting new orders and said that it was canceling existing shipments, promising to share additional details with staff in the coming days, according to an internal message. The abrupt message comes after months of Convoy exploring strategic options including a potential sale, a process that was first reported by The Information in August. Convoy landed a $3.8 billion valuation in... Read more âș
0
Apple fired at least five employees who worked in the companyâs App Store in China following an internal probe into business misconduct, according to people with direct knowledge of the situation. Apple found infractions such as unsanctioned contact with mobile game developers or consultants working on their behalf, these people said. An internal audit uncovered irregularities in 2022, prompting an investigation that concluded around the middle of this year, one... Read more âș
24
Prosecutors expect to rest their case in the criminal trial of Sam Bankman-Fried next week (after the trial wonât meet for four consecutive business days), setting up the defenseâs opportunity to persuade jurors they should not convict him on any of the seven fraud and conspiracy charges he faces.The case was already an uphill battle for Bankman-Fried and his defense team, led by Mark Cohen of the law firm Cohen... Read more âș
0
We are 14 months out from our first âAIâ presidential election. Everyone knows that this is going to be a misinformation disaster. How bad will it be? This cycle is going to make 2016âs issues with âRussian bot farmsâ look downright quaint. Unlike the techno-fever-dream of the risk posed by Artificial General Intelligence, even todayâs âcrudeâ AI is a clear and present danger in its ability to destroy trust in... Read more âș
24
It seems like Silicon Valleyâs golden child isnât perfect after all. In a rare moment of weakness, large-language model developer OpenAI scrapped a new model, codenamed Arrakis, in mid-2023 that would have helped it run its popular chatbot ChatGPT more cheaply, my colleagues Jon Victor and Aaron Holmes reported on Tuesday.OpenAI researchers hoped to use a machine-learning concept called sparsity to help the new model run more efficiently. To create... Read more âș
0
Amazon is approaching brands that already buy search ads on its e-commerce website with an unusual pitch: if you buy streaming TV ads, weâll make them for you. The incentive highlights the lengths Amazon is willing to go to in order to try to build a streaming ad business. Smaller brands that sell on Amazon often donât have the money or expertise to make video commercials, and that typically makes... Read more âș
9
Earlier Tuesday, we published this yearâs edition of The Information 50, our annual list of startups to watch. The list is intended as a guide to companies that havenât yet broken through, but bear watching as candidates for future public listings or big-ticket acquisitions. Our task was complicated this year by the downturn in startup funding: Venture capitalists completed fewer deals in the third quarter than in any quarter in... Read more âș
17
On Tuesday, we released The Informationâs 50 Most Promising Startups, an annual list where we select companies that have the potential to be the most valuable businesses in their sectors based on our reporting, including their revenue and growth prospects. The 50 companies we selected have raised less than $100 million in funding or started operations in the last two years. All are valued at less than $1 billion. The... Read more âș
5
As Amazon gears up to run ads on its Prime Video streaming service early next year, company executives are asking advertisers to commit to spending significant amounts of money on the service in 2024. The requests, which ad executives say are more aggressive than what Netflix asked for when it launched an ad-tier last year, signify Amazonâs confidence in the advertising prospects of Prime Video. In meetings with one big... Read more âș
13
Late last year, around the time ChatGPT became a global sensation, the engineers at OpenAI began working on a new artificial intelligence model, codenamed Arrakis. Although OpenAI was preparing to boost ChatGPT with a different model, now known as GPT-4, which it had completed earlier in the year, the upcoming Arrakis model would allow the company to run the chatbot less expensively. Success with Arrakis would also help OpenAI show... Read more âș
0
When staff working on Googleâs ChatGPT rival, Bard, hear from managers that they need to work at âBard speed,â they know it means moving much faster than they were accustomed to in other parts of the company. Legal reviews of new features can start and end in a day. A feature that might have taken a quarter to prepare in the past now gets done in a week.For a company... Read more âș
0
Itâs been a particularly tough year for startups. Venture funding is on pace for the lowest annual total since 2019, according to the PitchBook-National Venture Capital Association Venture Monitor. Silicon Valley Bank, an important cog in the startup finance machine, failed in March. One-time high-fliers such as Jasper AI, Hopin and Flexport have been humbled or shuttered. Thatâs unless, of course, the startup is working in generative artificial intelligence, where... Read more âș
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01.04.2026 16:12
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