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 ›
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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 ›
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Apple fired at least five employees who worked in the company’s 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 ›
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Prosecutors expect to rest their case in the criminal trial of Sam Bankman-Fried next week (after the trial won’t meet for four consecutive business days), setting up the defense’s 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 ›
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We are 14 months out from our first ‘AI’ presidential election. Everyone knows that this is going to be a misinformation disaster. How bad will it be? This cycle is going to make 2016’s issues with “Russian bot farms” look downright quaint. Unlike the techno-fever-dream of the risk posed by Artificial General Intelligence, even today’s “crude” AI is a clear and present danger in its ability to destroy trust in... Read more ›
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It seems like Silicon Valley’s golden child isn’t 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 ›
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Amazon is approaching brands that already buy search ads on its e-commerce website with an unusual pitch: if you buy streaming TV ads, we’ll 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 don’t have the money or expertise to make video commercials, and that typically makes... Read more ›
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Earlier Tuesday, we published this year’s edition of The Information 50, our annual list of startups to watch. The list is intended as a guide to companies that haven’t 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 ›
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On Tuesday, we released The Information’s 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 ›
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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 Amazon’s confidence in the advertising prospects of Prime Video. In meetings with one big... Read more ›
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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 ›
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When staff working on Google’s ChatGPT rival, Bard, hear from managers that they need to work at “Bard speed,” 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 ›
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It’s 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. That’s unless, of course, the startup is working in generative artificial intelligence, where... Read more ›
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Greycroft, a New York venture capital firm that has backed Bumble, Venmo and Axios, is laying off five investors, the firm confirmed, after it failed to reach fundraising targets earlier this year. It’s also backing away from healthcare and fintech investing. The firm disclosed in April that it had raised a total of $980 million for two new funds, about 40% less than its initial target set in early 2022.... Read more ›
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Whatever job security existed in tech appears to have disappeared. On Monday, LinkedIn said it was cutting 668 people, the third round of layoffs at the Microsoft-owned unit this year. Meanwhile, developer forum Stack Overflow said Monday it would cut its staff by 28%—which, according to the Verge, amounts to 100 jobs. And that’s just today: late last week, Flexport cut 20% of its staff, or 660 people, following a... Read more ›
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The Israel-Hamas war that erupted over the past week has been a test of social media companies’ ability to handle content moderation in a crisis. In Europe, it’s also been a chance for the European Commission to flex its muscle under the Digital Services Act for the first time. Over the past week, Thierry Breton, the EU commissioner for the internal market, has sent strongly worded letters to X and... Read more ›
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High-profile venture capitalists, including Y Combinator’s Garry Tan and Sequoia Capital partner Ravi Gupta, are withdrawing from a major gathering of tech leaders after conference CEO Paddy Cosgrave made comments that appear to refer to Israel’s retaliatory strikes in Hamas-controlled Gaza as “war crimes.” At least five speakers said they would no longer participate at the November Web Summit conference, which draws tens of thousands of founders and executives to... Read more ›
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In the last year, Nvidia’s AI chips—GPUs in technical parlance—have become the hottest commodity that people are desperate to get a hold of. Lately, we’ve seen the emergence of startups known as GPU resellers or serverless GPU providers. These startups rent GPU servers from cloud providers or other companies that own such servers, including universities and crypto miners, and rent them out to AI developers at a slight markup. The... Read more ›
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When times get tough, companies try diversifying into new areas—efforts that can be high risk for those who lead those initiatives. Several of the people on our latest list of Free Agents can testify to that, having departed their companies after new business ventures failed to immediately pay off. Jeremi Gorman spent a year at Netflix, trying to turn the video-streaming giant into a force in the ad world, while... Read more ›
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Since 2014, Apple has worked on a quasi-secret project it calls Titan—an effort to create an electric vehicle worthy of the company’s name. The company has cycled through four Titan leaders, changed its vision for the car, changed it back again, spent more than $1 billion in some years on the project—and still produced no EV. Adding insult to the ordeal, Apple’s vaunted tradition of secrecy has broken down, leaving... Read more ›
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Hi, welcome to your Weekend.This wasn’t an easy week for anyone. But if you’re on a trust and safety team of a social media company, this was likely the worst week in memory. In just three days after Hamas committed its depraved terrorist attacks in Israel last Saturday, Meta reported removing nearly 800,000 pieces of content labeled as “disturbing.” That is seven times more than the daily averages over the... Read more ›
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05.07.2026 10:06
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