Welcome, Weekenders! In this newsletter:âą The Big Read: Inside ZaiNar, the secretive startup hoping to power the physical AI era ⹠Policy: Meet the Trump official who wants to deliver a win to prediction markets ⹠Plus, Recommendationsâour weekly pop culture picks: âExpanse: The Nannup Four,â âThe Infinity Machineâ and âBeefâWatching the Elon Musk versus OpenAI trial from inside the courtroom gave me a front-row seat to the AI boomâs... Read more âș
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When OpenAI in October announced âapps in ChatGPT,â allowing people to use external apps like Zillow or Spotify in ChatGPTâessentially bringing the appsâ core functions into the chatbotâsome developers wondered if this would be a blow to consumer apps that would further separate them from their customers. Thatâs a fear DoorDash, for instance, had expressed behind closed doors.But Kareem Amin, the CEO of Clay, which sells software for salespeople to... Read more âș
0
A few weeks ago, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella sent an email to engineering leaders at the company who were working on a consumer version of Copilot, the AI-powered assistant inside several Microsoft products. A Microsoft manager on the email thread noted that Googleâs Gemini chatbot had recently gotten better at connecting with Google Drive for tasks like summarizing the contents of photos stored in folders. Nadella, meanwhile, wasnât pleased with... Read more âș
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OpenAIâs compute margin, or its share of revenue after the cost of running AI models for paying users, has jumped to about 70% in October from about 52% at the end of last year and roughly 35% in January 2024, The Information reported Sunday. These gains compare favorably to rival ... Read more âș
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Weâre heading into the holidays, when a look back at 2025 seems natural (and a good way to make up for the relative lack of news!). Letâs start with Googleâs amazing turnaround in 2025. Not only did it emerge mostly unscathed from the antitrust litigation regarding search, it made a giant leap forward in the AI market. Conspiracy theorists will see a significance in the fact that those two things... Read more âș
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Over the past year, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital and many of Silicon Valleyâs other top venture capital firms have funneled at least $1.2 billion in funding to startups selling technology to city police departments and local public safety agencies. Those companies illustrate the ... Read more âș
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As OpenAI discusses raising an unprecedented investment round of up to $100 billion, it can crow about some key improvements to how it runs its business. While its total computing costs are still high as a percentage of revenue, it is wringing more revenue out of every dollar it spends to run the servers that power ChatGPTâs subscription business and selling access to models to corporate customers. The companyâs compute... Read more âș
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Waymo suspended its self-driving car service in San Francisco after a broad power outage in the city. âWe are focused on keeping our riders safe and ensuring emergency personnel have the clear access they need to do their work,â said Waymo spokesperson Suzanne Philion in a statement. More than ... Read more âș
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Welcome, Weekenders! In this newsletter:âą The Big Read: Inside the Anduril-ization of local crime fighting ⹠The Arena: Sports betting is boomingâand so are prediction marketsâą Plus, Recommendations, our weekly pop culture picksâholiday favorites edition:  â2046,â âThe Holdovers,â âThe Holiday,â âLittle Womenâ (2019), âThe Muppet Christmas Carol,â âNational Lampoonâs Christmas Vacationâ and âThe Pink Pantherâ (1964) In the last year, quite a few of the tech elite have taken up... Read more âș
6
Recently, Nick Noone, co-founder and CEO of Peregrine, was introduced to Candace Parker, sports broadcaster and retired WNBA star, by mutual friends. They hit it off. The two share a passion for athletics. (Noone was a Stanford gymnast.) And both have an interest in startups. (Parker is an active angel investor.) After Noone described how his startup sells Palantir-esque data analytics software to local police and public safety departments, Parker... Read more âș
63
Prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket have gained popularity in the U.S. by letting people bet on everything from elections to Oscar winners to weather trends. But over the past year, a substantial portion of their wagersâand in Kalshiâs case the vast majorityâhave come from sports betting. And now traditional sportsbooks and crypto exchanges are crashing the prediction market party. DraftKings, one of the two largest online sportsbooks in the... Read more âș
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Google on Friday sued SerpApi, a startup used by OpenAI and other tech companies to access Googleâs search data. The suit, filed in federal court in California, accused SerpApi, which scrapes Googleâs search results and sells those results to other companies, of bypassing technology restricting ... Read more âș
0
Elon Muskâs 2018 CEO compensation package at Tesla, which had been overturned by a Delaware judge last year, must be reinstated, the stateâs highest court ruled on Friday. That means Musk will get options on about 304 million shares, worth more than $139 billion today. The grant will increase ... Read more âș
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TikTok employees working for the companyâs U.S. Data Security division will be moved under a U.S. joint venture ownership company in January and will no longer be able to receive Restricted Stock Units from TikTikâs Chinese parent company, ByteDance, staff were told on Friday. The U.S. Data ... Read more âș
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Neobank Mercury has applied for a national bank charter with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the latest in a rush of banking fintech startups to take advantage of an easing in the regulatory environment under the Donald Trump Administration. Mercury was founded in 2017 and serves ... Read more âș
8
Over the past year, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has touted his companyâs main AI product, Agentforce, as a money saver for businesses looking to automate work using the power of large language models. More recently, though, Salesforce executives have delivered a different message to customers: Agentforce sometimes works better when it doesnât rely so much on LLMs, otherwise known as generative AI. Read more âș
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Earlier this year, Google convened a group of its top executives to address what some staffers see as an existential problem: the company doesnât have enough computer chips for everyone who wants them. A shortage of computing capacity was creating internal tensions, as leaders of Googleâs varied product areas struggled to agree on where Google should invest its resources. The gathering was the first meeting of a new council of... Read more âș
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OpenAI is on track to beat its 2025 revenue goal of $13 billion, up from around $4 billion last year, The Information reported. Annualized revenue, or the last monthâs revenue multiplied by 12, by last month topped $19 billion, more than triple the pace in January. The growth comes as ... Read more âș
2
Sometimes peopleâs greatest weakness can be their biggest strength. And in AI, it is turning out that what we thought was a weakness for Googleâthe fact that it had both a search portal and an AI chatbotâis actually an advantage. People use search and AI chatbots interchangeably, to be sure, but itâs become clear through the course of this year that an AI chatbot is not a replacement for a... Read more âș
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TikTok owner ByteDance reached agreements with investors to create a U.S.-based TikTok joint venture majority owned by American investors, according to an internal memo to employees viewed by The Information. ByteDance signed a deal with Abu Dhabi-based MGX, Oracle and investment firm Silver ... Read more âș
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Meta Platforms is working on two new AI modelsâone focused on images and video, and the other on textâfor release in the first half of 2026, the companyâs chief AI officer Alexandr Wang told employees on Thursday. The Wall Street Journal said Wang made his remarks about the video and image ... Read more âș
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09.05.2026 01:47
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