Welcome, Weekenders! In this newsletter:âą The Big Read: Pickleball is the pastâthe tech elite is obsessed with padel. ⹠Plus, an Americana-themed batch of Recommendationsâour weekly pop culture picks: âThe Americans,â âEast of Eden,â âHigh Desert Daydream,â âLonesome Dove,â USA vs. Belgium, and âThe Twilight Zone.â The yearâs midpoint is an apt moment for some studied reflection, and Iâve been thinking about how much has changed in the last six... Read more âș
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Venture capitalists need to show their limited partners they can make money off their past investments if they have any hope of raising another fund in the future. Thatâs whatâs driving a number of attempted startup stake sales this summer. In two of the latest instances, Tiger Global Management and Chamath Palihapitiyaâs Social Capital are trying to sell positions in their venture portfolios, as The Information reported. In some cases,... Read more âș
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Over the past five years, Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman spent $14 billion buying the pieces of what is now the worldâs second-biggest provider of corporate stock plans. It was a bold bet to get an inside track to people sitting on valuable company equity who one day will be rich. The business now oversees plans with 12 million individual participants at 2,100 public companies and 1,000 private companies, bank... Read more âș
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In a year thatâs seen one out of every four dollars of venture funding go to an artificial intelligence startup, a historically un-sexy breed of investor has dominated the field: corporations.And not just the tech behemoths. Itâs no secret that Microsoft, Google, Nvidia and Oracle have collectively invested billions of dollars into AI startups that turn around and spend the capital on the investorsâ cloud services or chips. But it... Read more âș
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In the hours after JPMorgan Chase bought troubled First Republic Bank for $10.6 billion in a government fire sale, its consumer banking chiefs Marianne Lake and Jennifer Piepszakâboth potential successors to CEO Jamie Dimonâflew to California. What they found when they arrived the morning of May 1 was startling: The business JPMorgan bought was hamstrung by a tangle of old tech systems that held together a patchwork of hundreds of... Read more âș
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When considering an electric vehicle, a motorist will typically focus on its looks, how fast it accelerates and how far the vehicle will go on a charge. What the motorist will almost certainly not contemplate: the average of 58 days they will have to wait for repairs should they wreck that brand-spanking-new car, and the average $6,587 it will cost to fix it, according to auto insurance processing company CCC... Read more âș
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It was a relaxed Marc Benioff who addressed Wall Street analysts on Wednesday afternoon, after Salesforce reported its July-quarter earnings. Not only did he tease a couple of his top executives on the call, but he waxed lyrical about his experience using Googleâs Bard chatbot and talked up the potential of AI startups to revive San Franciscoâs downtown. And of course, there was the usual Benioff serving of superlatives about... Read more âș
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It looks like efforts to ensure young influencers get a share of earnings from their social media work could become more widespread. Earlier this month, the Illinois state legislature passed an amendment to a state law that mandates guardians of children under 16 who appear in monetized social media posts must set aside portions of the childâs total earnings in a trust. Itâs the first U.S. state law that mandates... Read more âș
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AI21 Labs, an Israel-based rival to OpenAI, has neared a new round of funding that would value the six-year-old startup at around $1.2 billion, according to two people familiar with the matter. Itâs the latest sign of investor appetite for firms developing conversational artificial intelligence as the technology becomes a material business for OpenAI. Two of the startupâs existing investors, Walden Catalyst and Israeli firm Pitango, have been in talks... Read more âș
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Valor Equity Partners made a name for itself thanks to early bets on Elon Musk companies such as Tesla, and its repeat investments in Muskâs Space Exploration Technologies have paid off handsomely. Yet despite the Musk glow, Valorâs recent and biggest funds are only performing slightly better than those of its venture capital peers, according to internal data reviewed by The Information. Valorâs most recent two funds, launched in 2017... Read more âș
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Crypto venture funding has cratered since last year, but some startups are bucking the trend by piggybacking off the AI investing craze. The latest example: Niraj Pant, a former general partner at crypto-focused venture firm Polychain Capital, is raising at least $20 million in a seed round for a new startup focused on the intersection of crypto and AI, people familiar with the matter said. Fortune reported last month that... Read more âș
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Google unveiled its next-generation artificial intelligence chip at its annual enterprise software conference, Google Cloud Next, on Tuesday. But it still felt the need to tout a different kind of win: a partnership with Nvidia to offer that companyâs state-of-the-art AI chips through Google Cloud alongside its own hardware. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang even appeared on stage at the conferenceâwearing his signature leather jacket of courseâto field questions from Google... Read more âș
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Long before ChatGPT arrived on the scene last year, Amazon Web Services was developing artificial intelligence software akin to the technology that powers the hit chatbot from OpenAI. AWS had hoped to unveil the software, then known inside the company as Bedrock, at its annual customer conference late last November, but had to postpone it due to technical snags, a person with direct knowledge of the companyâs plans said. That... Read more âș
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If Apple was a country, its annual salesânearly $400 billion last yearâwould make it roughly the 40th biggest economy in the world, ahead of Iran and on par with Denmark. It shouldnât be surprising, then, that Apple appears to have its own foreign policy, one that isnât always totally aligned with U.S. policy, at least when it comes to dealing with China. Even as the Biden administration has been putting... Read more âș
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OpenAI is currently on pace to generate more than $1 billion in revenue over the next 12 months from the sale of artificial intelligence software and the computing capacity that powers it. Thatâs far ahead of revenue projections the company previously shared with its shareholders, according to a person with direct knowledge of the situation. The billion-dollar revenue figure implies that the Microsoft-backed company, which was valued on paper at... Read more âș
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Canadian radio show host Kat Callaghan has become known to tens of millions of TikTok users as Jessie, one of the voices that narrate captions users write into the short-form video app. Now, after becoming something of a TikTok celebrity after revealing her identity in October, sheâs bringing the Jessie voice to meditation app Calm. Callaghan, age 37, started a voiceover company in 2021 and began attracting telephone services and... Read more âș
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Itâs not too often that China-based leaders of major venture capital and private equity firms, including Neil Shen of Sequoia Capital and David Liu of DCP, gather as a group to voice their concerns to Chinaâs securities regulator. But an opportunity arose in late July when the two were among dozens of investors who met with the China Securities Regulatory Commission to discuss challenges facing private investments in China. The... Read more âș
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You may have noticed artificial intelligence researchers have a gift for coming up with new acronyms seemingly every week. Weâre sorry to inform you of another one you need to remember: RAG, which stands for retrieval augmented generation.Itâs a method to help AI software such as chatbots answer questions about information theyâve never seen before. It could be the key to solving pesky issues such as chatbot softwareâs occasional habit... Read more âș
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When Apple dealt with Chinese manufacturers in the past, it was to buy low-level components such as small metal parts, paper boxes and batteries. For advanced parts such as displays and chips, the iPhone maker turned to firms headquartered in the U.S., Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. Times are changing. Apple is currently testing advanced displays made by two Chinese suppliers for possible inclusion in future models of its Vision... Read more âș
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BEIJINGâAfter five minutes of staring at the wrinkle cream and waxing products, it all started to make sense. The U.S. can trade more with China, Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo argued. But it will stick to products that have nothing to do with its national security, like moisturizerâor other items that contribute the vast majority of the $700 billion in goods and services the superpowers share in annual trade. Read more âș
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How are creator economy startups doing during the downturn? Not so hot. How are the creators themselves faring? Much better, as I reported in a story earlier today. Two charts published in the piece sum up the divergence: While VC funding for startups hoping to attract creators as customers has plummeted, spending on influencer marketingâa major way creators make moneyâis expected to increase 14% this year, much faster than other... Read more âș
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07.07.2026 03:14
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