Amid the wave of campus protests and encampments, I've been surprised there hasn't been more conversation about activism at tech companies. This week, we dove into why things have been quiet on the corporate front and why everyone is talking about hardware, "boring phones" and games. Enjoy! Apple Spotify YouTube Read more ›
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Up on the roof above corporate headquarters, Will Ahmed eyed the weather as April wind and rain swirled. “We’re going to make this a surgical strike,” he said, and off we trotted toward two giant baths filled with 42-degree water. We slid in, dunking our heads beneath the surface—and were greeted by the kind of cold that knocks the air out of your lungs. “Now, find your breath,” he instructed,... Read more ›
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Monday we published our Tesla Diaspora Database, highlighting 90 former Tesla managers and executives now in key roles at other makers of electric vehicles and batteries. In the following days, we added a 91st manager, Peter Villa, who had eluded our research. From 2014 to 2020 Villa worked at Tesla, where he helped scale up its Texas factory. He has since worked at electric truck maker Rivian and is now... Read more ›
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In March at an event in China, Apple CEO Tim Cook mingled with the founders of several major Apple suppliers in the country, including Lens Technology, which makes the protective glass screens for iPhones. “It’s the partnership between Apple and Chinese companies that really makes things happen,” Cook told Chinese state media in an interview. “We make it where one plus one equals three instead of two.” What Cook didn’t... Read more ›
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After a streak of healthy big tech earnings over the past week, we got a decidedly more downbeat report from Apple tonight. The iPhone maker reported a 4% drop in sales and slightly lower profits. Revenues from its engine, the iPhone, fell 10% on a year earlier, and the company’s June-quarter outlook implied continued weak iPhone sales. All that sets the stage for another stagnant year for Apple, just like... Read more ›
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It’s NewFronts week in New York, when tech companies and digital media firms pitch advertisers by teasing cool initiatives they have planned. Snap, which held a flashy event at Cipriani 25 Broadway in the Financial District Wednesday, unveiled a big investment in sports and creators. At the upcoming Summer Olympics in June, the parent of Snapchat said it will bring some top stars including gymnast Livvy Dunne, reality TV star... Read more ›
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I just landed back in New York after spending the past week in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, two important cities in a region undergoing a remarkable transformation into a global tech hub.Government initiatives are propelling those changes, and those efforts seem to be paying off. Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, has become an important hub for artificial intelligence because of the success of the government-funded Arabic... Read more ›
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The four big tech firms that reported earnings results in the past 10 days—Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta Platforms and Amazon—posted substantially richer operating profit margins than they have in several years. Investors shouldn’t get used to it. That boost to profits, a result of layoffs and other cost-cutting measures last year, is helping fund a massive spending spree by each of the companies on the servers and data centers they need... Read more ›
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Developers have been praising Meta Platforms’ Llama 3, the latest version of its flagship large language model. But, as my colleague Stephanie and I explained, they have one big criticism: Llama 3’s context window is too short, at just over 8,000 tokens. (As a refresher, a context window is how much information a model can accept in a single query and a token is a word or part of a... Read more ›
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A dramatic recovery in bitcoin prices over the past year and a half has powered a comeback for crypto firms like Coinbase. But it’s also benefited one of the most influential companies in traditional finance: BlackRock, the world’s biggest asset manager. BlackRock launched a long-awaited bitcoin exchange-traded fund in January, allowing investors to trade bitcoin as easily as a stock through a regular brokerage account. The fund smashed records for... Read more ›
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On April 23, Tesla CEO Elon Musk told investors that the company would deliver “new vehicles, including more-affordable models” as soon as the end of the year. But people familiar with the matter said that Tesla has only one future model sufficiently developed to meet that time frame—the $25,000 compact SUV dubbed the Model 2 that Musk shelved earlier this year. Read more ›
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The same old adjectives come up again and again in conversations with investors about top tech founders: gritty, visionary, creative. I’m hearing a new one lately that speaks to this moment in tech: vengeful. A number of the founders attracting the most investor enthusiasm right now have something in common: They’ve all made messy exits from their previous companies. Parker Conrad, fired by investors at insurance startup Zenefits eight years... Read more ›
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Last week, we reported ByteDance is internally exploring scenarios for selling a majority stake in TikTok’s U.S. business. Any such sale would happen without a crucial benefit: its powerful recommendation algorithm.That possibility makes creators particularly nervous. TikTok’s algorithm, which quickly figures out a user’s interests, makes it easier for creators to amass views and find relevant audiences. Read more ›
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Earlier this week, Elon Musk laid off a 500-person team overseeing Tesla’s Supercharger Network, a move that stunned many employees and industry observers who consider the electrical charging stations one of Tesla’s key advantages. But just a couple weeks ago, one of Musk’s lieutenants reassured members of Tesla’s energy organization that Musk believed that Superchargers were critical to the company, according to an email viewed by The Information. The email... Read more ›
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When news broke on Tuesday of a new copyright infringement lawsuit filed against OpenAI and Microsoft, this time by eight daily newspapers, I was reminded of a conversation I had a month ago with Rich Skrenta, executive director at the Common Crawl, a nonprofit that supplies open-source web crawl data.He argued that in the future, consumers would discover new content and search the Internet using large language models. And given... Read more ›
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Last week’s rally in stock of Google parent Alphabet was attributed to the company’s introduction of a dividend, its big improvement in its operating profit margin and faster growth at Google Cloud. But investors might have been also responding to another piece of good news that got little attention: Google has managed to lower the cost of showing artificial intelligence–generated answers to queries 80% over the last year, according to... Read more ›
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Take a bow, Andy Jassy! The spate of healthy big tech earnings continued on Tuesday, as Amazon reported what have to be described as robust first-quarter results. Its e-commerce business made money both in North America and overseas—that hasn’t been true since 2021—while cloud giant Amazon Web Services posted accelerating sales growth and much stronger profit margins. Overall operating profits more than tripled. What’s not to like? Amazon—like Alphabet, Meta... Read more ›
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Does it make sense to back rival language model companies Anthropic and OpenAI (and Cohere and Mistral)? Some investors seem to think so, taking an approach to startup investing that looks a little like buying an index fund with an array of tech stocks.Last week my colleagues and I broke the news that Sequoia Capital was among the investors in a new $6 billion fundraising for xAI, Elon Musk’s artificial... Read more ›
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Today we report on more signs that investor appetite for creator economy startups seems to be returning. The latest example: newsletter publishing startup Beehiiv on Tuesday announced it closed $33 million in Series B funding led by NEA earlier this month. Existing investors such as Lightspeed Venture Partners also joined the round. The deal extends a rebound in funding for creator startups from the first quarter of the year, which... Read more ›
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I was catching up with the new AI Index Report from Stanford’s Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence Institute when one section caught my eye. That was a forecast that we’ll likely run out of high-quality language data needed for train AI models sometime this year.That’s a worrying timeline. So far, AI companies have improved their large language models by training them on lots of data combined with increasingly more computing power (a... Read more ›
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27.11.2024 09:27
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