Welcome, Weekenders! In this newsletter:• The Big Read: The tech elite are using AI to supercharge their cancer battles • Artificial Intelligence: Should AI and Christianity mix? • Tech Culture: Amid AI backlash, billionaires demand new breed of bodyguard—plus, inside the star-studded Breakthrough Prize gala • Plus, Recommendations—our weekly pop culture picks: “Family Lore,” “The Long Run” and “Scream 7”Let’s get straight to one of the biggest happenings at Google... Read more ›
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When AI researcher Sebastian Raschka got married in November 2023, he and his now-wife, Liza, went nontraditional. They wedded in Las Vegas at an Elvis-themed chapel, then celebrated by attending a U2 concert at the Sphere, the futuristic orb-shaped theater on the Strip. The Raschkas also bucked tradition in their selection of wedding rings, eschewing the usual choice between gold and platinum. Rather, they went with Oura rings, the sensor-laden,... Read more ›
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Here’s a cold dose of reality: This year’s ski season in the American West has been pretty bleak. Many of the reliable powder stashes of Utah, Colorado and California have struggled with record-low snowfalls, and the limited amount of terrain resorts have managed to keep open is covered in lackluster artificial snow. Vail Resorts, for instance, reported last month that early-season visits were down 20%, no thanks to the depressing... Read more ›
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Defense tech startup Anduril is in talks to raise billions in new funding at a valuation of at least $60 billion including the new investment, according to a person with knowledge of the plans. The valuation would be roughly double the figure from its last private funding round in June. The funding would give the company more leeway to fund its first major weapons manufacturing facility and the development of... Read more ›
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Anthropic on Friday said it had appointed Chris Liddell, the former chief financial officer of Microsoft, General Motors and International Paper to its board of directors. The appointment is the latest step the company has taken that will prepare it for a public offering, which bankers have said ... Read more ›
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A judge has thrown out global payroll startup Deel’s attempt to dismiss parts of a corporate espionage case brought against the firm by rival Rippling. Rippling last year sued Deel, alleging the company and its senior executives had recruited and paid a spy in Ireland to siphon information about ... Read more ›
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Grafana Labs, a software startup that helps companies monitor cloud and AI activity and spending, is finalizing a new funding round that would value it at about $9 billion, people familiar with the matter said. That’s up from $6.6 billion in a 2024 funding round. The funding talks follow Grafana’s growth in annual recurring revenue, which hit $400 million in September. Grafana’s customers include fast-growing companies such as Anthropic and... Read more ›
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Lightspeed Venture Partners’ Arif Janmohamed, one of the firm’s leading enterprise software investors, is reducing his involvement to launch a new early stage investment firm later this year, he said. Janmohamed joined Lightspeed in 2008 as one of its first employees and became a partner four years later. He is the latest in a wave of veteran VC partners established firms in the last year who have switched gears and... Read more ›
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The Federal Trade Commission has ramped up its scrutiny of Microsoft as it probes whether the company has an illegal monopoly in the cloud and software markets, Bloomberg reported Friday. The FTC sent civil investigative demands to companies competing with Microsoft in recent weeks asking about ... Read more ›
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ByteDance is in talks to sell Shanghai Moonton Technology, the video game studio behind popular game Mobile Legends: Bang Bang, to Saudi Arabia’s Savvy Games Group for more than $6 billion, Reuters reported Friday. ByteDance bought Moonton in 2021 via its gaming unit Nuverse, valuing the studio ... Read more ›
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If there are growing worries about the scale of money pouring into AI, word of that hasn’t reached Marc Lipschultz. He is co-CEO of Blue Owl Capital, a publicly traded investment firm that has struck a series of huge AI data center deals. And he’s gearing up for far more of them. Right now, he says Blue Owl is working on more than $100 billion in new investments to provideboth... Read more ›
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Meta Platforms plans to add a facial recognition feature called “Name Tag” to its smart glasses as early as this year, The New York Times reported. The article confirms a report in The Information from last May that said Meta had revived plans to include the feature in its smart glasses. As The ... Read more ›
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The Motion Picture Association, which represents Hollywood studios, has called on ByteDance to “cease its infringing activity” after videos generated by the Chinese tech giant’s new AI video model, Seedance 2.0, went viral on social media. “In a single day, the Chinese AI service Seedance ... Read more ›
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OpenAI wrote a letter to U.S. lawmakers warning that DeepSeek inappropriately uses responses from the U.S. company’s AI models to improve the Chinese firm’s models in a technique known as distillation. “We have observed accounts associated with DeepSeek employees developing methods to circumvent ... Read more ›
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Chinese AI developer MiniMax launched its latest flagship open-source large language model, M2.5, adding to the recent flood of new model releases from China. Shanghai-based MiniMax said M2.5 offers strong performances in coding and agentic tasks, at significantly lower prices than major U.S. ... Read more ›
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The “rough vibes” at OpenAI have gotten less choppy, allowing SoftBank boss Masayoshi Son to shed some personal financial risk in the company’s big OpenAI investment.A little-noticed disclosure in SoftBank’s earnings report released Thursday said that Son no longer was on the hook for the roughly $1 billion personal guarantee he had pledged so a SoftBank-managed investment fund could invest tens of billions in OpenAI. But he retains a longstanding... Read more ›
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Instacart stock rose 15% after it reported 12% higher fourth quarter revenue of $992 million. The company’s gross transaction volume, or the total value of orders on its platform based on prices shown on Instacart’s app, was up 14% in the December quarter, which executives said was its fastest ... Read more ›
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It’s been more than a month since Nvidia entered an agreement, made public on Christmas Eve, to license the technology of chip startup Groq and hire its top executives including CEO Jonathan Ross. Now the terms of the deal are coming into focus.  Groq told shareholders last month it expected to receive $17 billion in cash from Nvidia based on the licensing agreement, paid out in three installments by the... Read more ›
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Airbnb’s revenue growth accelerated to 12% in the fourth quarter, while free cash flow rose 13.7% to $521 million. Shares of the accommodation-rental platform rose 5.7% in after-hours trading. The company reported 10% higher volume of nights and seats booked, and a 16% lift in gross booking ... Read more ›
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Pinterest shares plummeted almost 20% after the company reported its slowest quarterly revenue growth in two years and said it could see a further deceleration in the current quarter. CEO Bill Ready said the company wasn’t satisfied with its fourth quarter performance and didn’t reflect what the ... Read more ›
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The Federal Trade Commission sent a letter to Apple on Wednesday warning the company to not suppress conservative news outlets on its Apple News app, the company’s news aggregation app that comes preinstalled on iPhones and Macs. In the letter, FTC chair Andrew Ferguson cited research from ... Read more ›
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03.05.2026 13:24
Last update: 13:15 EDT.
News rating updated: 20:11.
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