Welcome, Weekenders! In this newsletter:• The Big Read: How a Chinese megabillionaire became the Jensen Huang of batteries. • Style and Shopping: Tech invaded Cannes. Then we went shopping.• Plus, Recommendations—our weekly pop culture picks: “Long Buried,” “How to Not Die in Prison” and “Dust Bunny”On Tuesday, a closely watched Congressional primary in New York City ended in defeat for Alex Bores, a former Palantir engineer turned state legislator who... Read more ›
0
More than two-thirds of The Information’s readers think Joe Biden would be a better president for the technology sector than Donald Trump, despite the Biden administration’s aggressive antitrust policies and moves to regulate artificial intelligence. Roughly 68% of respondents to The Information’s latest reader survey said they believe Biden would be better for tech, compared with 32% who think Trump would be better for tech. The Information surveyed readers from... Read more ›
0
There are plenty of reasons generative artificial intelligence hasn’t taken off with businesses as much as pundits expected, including high costs and errors (i.e. hallucinations). One less-discussed reason is that conversational AI is simply hard to use. Big companies outside of tech can’t often hire the kind of technical talent needed to make AI software cheap enough to use at scale or to connect the AI to their private data... Read more ›
43
When one-click checkout startup Bolt told investors it would buy back their shares at what amounted to a 97% discount on the company’s late 2021 fundraising, it wasn’t clear why the company would make such an unusual move. After all, Bolt was burning cash as revenue flatlined. A new lawsuit may provide an answer. Bolt co-founder Ryan Breslow, who stepped down as CEO two years ago, masterminded the lowball offer... Read more ›
0
Mistral, a Paris-based startup developing artificial intelligence that is open source, has been speaking to investors about raising several hundred million dollars at a valuation of $5 billion, according to a person with direct knowledge. The company, which has just recently begun to generate revenue, in December raised $415 million at a valuation of $2 billion. The possible back-to-back financing reflects investors’ continued appetite for certain AI startups and the... Read more ›
8
It’s not only tech companies that see artificial intelligence as a big new moneymaking opportunity. It’s a potential gold mine for investment banks, according to Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon. Using a newer piece of corporate lingo, Solomon “double-clicked”—elaborated, in plain English—on the potential of AI while he was speaking on Monday’s earnings call. The need for companies and governments to finance the infrastructure and power necessary for AI technologies... Read more ›
2
When Elon Musk arrived at Tesla’s Austin, Texas, factory last week to tour an expansion project on the south side of the 10-million-square-foot facility, he was furious. The expansion was part of a high-priority project for Musk: a data center for Dojo, a supercomputer Tesla is developing. Dojo is necessary to make full self-driving capabilities, powered by artificial intelligence, a reality for Tesla’s electric vehicles. But on that day in... Read more ›
33
These days, when I think of startups in the “creator economy,” a subsector propelled by the rise of TikTok and influencers, I think of pricey disappointments like Cameo and Clubhouse, or one of several smaller ventures that shuttered in recent months. And I struggle to come up with any big winners, beyond giants like ByteDance and Instagram, which for years has been part of the Meta Platforms juggernaut. Investors, burned... Read more ›
0
We are so back (sort of). Funding for U.S. creator economy startups increased for the first time in two years, bucking a continued slump in overall funding for American startups. Investments in these U.S. startups more than doubled in the first three months of the year to nearly $341 million year-over-year, according to The Information’s Creator Economy Database. Compare that to last year’s dismal results, when funding dropped at least... Read more ›
0
Some companies like to pit workers against each other to encourage them to pull out all the stops. At Shopify, CEO Tobias Lütke has been rolling out a new employee ranking system that puts that philosophy into action—by making employees compete for pay rises. From now on, Shopify employees will only get a raise if they increase their skill levels at a faster rate than other colleagues at the same... Read more ›
78
Fame can be a double-edged sword—a lesson some artificial intelligence startups are learning the hard way.Take Devin, the AI-powered coding assistant developed by Cognition AI that went viral when it launched last month with an impressive demo showing how it could complete coding jobs on the freelance site Upwork. Techies across X and Reddit declared that software engineering as a career was dead.Over the weekend, though, a YouTube video titled,... Read more ›
0
Venture capitalists are warming to creator economy startups again. Funding for U.S.-based creator startups more than doubled in the first three months of the year to nearly $341 million, according to The Information’s Creator Economy Database. The quarter marked the first year-over-year rise since early 2022 and defied a continued slump in total U.S. startup funding. Music startups and those formed by the creators themselves drove the rise. Dude Perfect,... Read more ›
39
We all know this hasn’t been Apple’s year, between the so-so reaction to its Vision Pro mixed-reality headset, the cancellation of its car project, an antitrust lawsuit from the U.S. government, worries about its lagging status in artificial intelligence and, of course, the reality that iPhone sales are no longer growing. Apple stock is down around 10% for the year. But hey, at least Apple CEO Tim Cook gives the... Read more ›
43
In television, what’s old is new again. After more than a decade of growth in streaming services that make viewers click on shows they want to watch “on demand,” a growing number of streaming services are offering new “channels” that function more like old-style TV, with a continuous, scheduled stream of shows. Disney is the latest to expand in this market. The company plans to create a series of such... Read more ›
232
I’m back in San Francisco after a busy week in Las Vegas, where my colleague Jon Victor and I spent days talking to Google Cloud customers about the difference between generative artificial intelligence hype and reality. At one point during the conference, I was sitting at a table in a chilly Mandalay Bay conference room when I heard a Google Cloud executive utter an all-too-familiar phrase: “We don’t believe one... Read more ›
8
It's the worst-kept secret in artificial intelligence. Many of the AI chatbots developed by startups were likely made using data from OpenAI and other firms, even though these startups are trying to undercut OpenAI, according to developers and founders. This practice has resulted in a startling competitive dynamic: Developers are charging their customers a fraction of what GPT-4 costs, and yet these low-cost services can mimic GPT-4 on some tasks. Read more ›
24
Former President Donald Trump and Jigar Shah, director of the Loan Programs Office in the U.S. Energy Department. Photo: Shutterstock; Energy Department.Virtually no one expects Donald Trump—should he win election in November—to be able to fulfill his threat to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act and other programs supporting the U.S. electric vehicle and battery industries. But Trump’s history and recent statements suggest he might flip the script on the EV... Read more ›
0
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 ›
1
Most popular sources
ScienceDaily
|
0% |
StartupNation
|
0% |
AlleyWatch
|
0% |
Droid Life
|
0% |
150sec
|
0% |
| View sources » | |
LIKE us on Facebook so you won't miss the most important news of the day!
02.07.2026 09:32
Last update: 09:27 EDT.
News rating updated: 16:23.
What is Times42?
Times42 brings you the most popular news from tech news portals in real-time chart.
Read about us in FAQ section.