ByteDance might be best known globally as the parent company of TikTok, but the bulk of its money comes from its home base of China, thanks to its Chinese video app Douyin. But previously unreported internal data shows that the tech giant’s red-hot pace of growth in China has slowed markedly, underscoring the importance of TikTok for the company’s future. Last year, ByteDance’s revenue in China grew 25% year on... Read more ›
0
It’s been a tough year for tech startups. In the midst of down rounds and deep layoffs, tech CEOs and VCs have been careful to emphasize profitability and strong financials above all else. Except, that is, for startups having anything to do with generative AI. The most recent example, as my colleagues Natasha Mascarenhas, Erin Woo and I reported yesterday, is AI presentation startup Tome, which has been chatting with... Read more ›
0
Meta Platforms plans to build only around a thousand units of the first generation of its augmented-reality glasses due out next year, a tiny batch that it will just use for internal development and to demonstrate the device to the public. And yet, to build the glasses, Meta is using a convoluted and expensive arrangement involving factories in China, Taiwan and the U.S. That’s due in part to Meta’s decision... Read more ›
0
In May, Michael Shlisky, an analyst with investment bank D.A. Davidson, listened to electric truck and bus manufacturer Proterra’s first-quarter earnings call and was impressed: Just a few months earlier, the Burlingame, Calif., company’s share price had been in free fall, plunging 79% in six weeks, in part because it had been burning through cash. But now, the company reported that it had $296 million in cash on hand at... Read more ›
0
Disney CEO Bob Iger must be wishing he was at Disney’s Magic Kingdom theme park (“a land where fantasy reigns”) in Florida right now. His tone on Wednesday afternoon’s June-quarter earnings conference call was noticeably more sober than in the past, perhaps reflecting the existential crisis facing the entertainment industry. Not only are the writers’ and actors’ strikes freezing TV and film production, but cord cutting and the decline of... Read more ›
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Amazon is rolling out an artificial intelligence tool for sellers on its marketplace that will write copy for product listings, a company spokesperson confirmed, marking one of the first examples of Amazon integrating large-language models into its e-commerce business. While Amazon’s highest-profile AI tools are ones its cloud unit, Amazon Web Services, is selling to other companies, the previously unreported product listing tool is a notable way Amazon is using... Read more ›
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You have to wonder what’s going on with the systems Meta Platforms uses to pay creators. Some this week have seen an alert that their accounts are restricted from making money due to “unusual activity.” That follows a glitch we covered last week that vastly inflated Facebook creators’ estimated earnings from posting Reels with licensed music. And I’ve learned about a previously unreported problem some creators encountered earlier this year,... Read more ›
6
Tome, a startup that uses artificial intelligence to make it easier to create and design presentations, has talked to investors about raising new money that could double its valuation to up to $600 million, according to two people with direct knowledge of the discussions. The new financing could amount to $60 million, according to one of the people, and comes while the nearly three-year-old company has generated barely any revenue.... Read more ›
34
Crypto regulation has been a hot topic in 2023, thanks to the Securities and Exchange Commission’s lawsuits against Coinbase and Binance. But crypto companies have much more to deal with than federal regulators.Case in point: Last week, as CEO Brian Armstrong and other Coinbase executives were discussing second-quarter results with analysts, Coinbase policy leaders were hosting the crypto exchange’s first policy town hall at the Roxy Hotel in downtown Manhattan.... Read more ›
30
AI founders need to watch out. It’s no secret that publishers and writers are sensitive about large-language models using their data for training. But just how sensitive became clear in the recent shuttering of a six-year-old publishing dataset called Prosecraft.The service, created in 2017 by Benji Smith, founder and CEO at word processor Shaxpir, was intended to be a helpful resource to authors. It ranked titles based on how passive... Read more ›
6
Adobe jumped into the generative artificial intelligence race in March by releasing a beta version of Firefly, which generates images based on text prompts. As it competes with smaller startups such as OpenAI and Runway, the 41-year-old software giant—which has more than 28,000 employees—is leaning on its practice of having teams report to multiple leaders instead of a single manager, said three current and former employees. Adobe calls this organizational... Read more ›
0
Part of the fun of business reporting is reading between the lines. When you follow a company or industry closely, eventually you pick up on very subtle shifts. And often those lead to even bigger ones. That’s happening at TikTok right now. The company has swung hard from being a little languid and consumed by political pressures to overhauling the business. Today, Erin broke the news of a significant shake-up.... Read more ›
0
YouTube is getting ready to release generative AI tools for creators. But unlike rivals such as Facebook-parent Meta Platforms, it’s less interested in chatbots—the conversational software that can take on a persona such as Tony Soprano. Instead, it’s focusing on tools that will power video editing or help creators generate ideas, said Tara Walpert Levy, YouTube’s vice president of Americas, in a recent interview. “What’s most exciting about generative AI... Read more ›
38
TikTok has hired two retail veterans who worked at Amazon and Meta Platforms to help oversee its ambitious push to build a giant U.S. ecommerce business. At the same time, TikTok’s U.S. ecommerce general manager, Sandie Hawkins, is leaving the company, according to a person with direct knowledge of the situation. The shakeup comes as TikTok’s CEO Shou Zi Chew is trying to build a big TikTok ecommerce business, including... Read more ›
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One of the biggest complaints that ChatGPT users have is the lack of up-to-date information from the web in its models and chatbot. OpenAI’s announcement on Monday night of GPTBot, a web crawler that scrapes sites for data that may be used to improve its future models, could be the company’s answer.It might not be a coincidence that the announcement follows recent news that the number of people using ChatGPT... Read more ›
0
A nearly decadelong truce between Microsoft and Google is over—and the rivalry could reshape tech regulation for decades to come. The tech behemoths are at an escalating stand-off in Washington, with both companies deploying large lobbying teams to chip away at each other’s competitive advantages in software licensing, search and artificial intelligence. Microsoft is helping regulators argue that Google’s dominance in search is illegal, while Google is trying to stop... Read more ›
35
Talk about a missed opportunity. Paramount Global said today it would sell its Simon & Schuster book business, which publishes author Stephen King, among others, to private equity firm KKR for $1.6 billion. Paramount CEO Bob Bakish should have thrown a few other assets into the deal, like some of its once-valuable cable channels (MTV, VH1, BET). They’re now more of a drag on the company’s bottom line than anything... Read more ›
0
Creators are lending their online influence to social causes. Alix Earle, a creator with 5.6 million followers on TikTok, is one of the most recent. This June she started a scholarship at the University of Miami for juniors and seniors pursuing a business degree at the University of Miami’s Herbert Business School. The 22-year-old, who recently graduated from the university with that degree, told the Miami Herald she wanted to... Read more ›
2
When Apple’s next iPhone goes on sale in September, its upgraded core processor will be more powerful than that of any rival smartphone. That’s possible because of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., which makes all of Apple’s custom chips. TSMC is using a new process to make smaller, faster and more power-efficient chips, which it refers to as 3 nanometer, for Apple roughly a year before it makes them for anyone... Read more ›
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Like many others, I dream of having my own personal artificial intelligence-powered assistant to answer texts I’ve been avoiding or land that impossible-to-get reservation at a restaurant blowing up on TikTok. So like seemingly everyone else in AI-land, I was excited when a young startup, HyperWrite, publicly launched an AI-powered assistant last week, promising to help with tasks that take multiple steps, such as booking airline flights or purchasing clothes... Read more ›
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22.06.2026 01:15
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