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 ›
6
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 ›
0
Google has agreed to pay Wall Street Journal owner News Corp between $5 million and $6 million annually to develop new artificial intelligence–related content and products, according to a News Corp staffer and another person close to the deal. The new and previously unreported arrangement follows Google’s recent termination of another content partnership with The Journal, resulting in layoffs at the news organization. The new arrangement, part of a longstanding... Read more ›
32
Frustrated by falling sales and the pace of layoffs carried out by his lieutenants, Tesla CEO Elon Musk is thinning his senior management team and laying off hundreds more employees. In an email late Monday to senior Tesla executives, Musk said Rebecca Tinucci, senior director of the company’s Supercharger group and Daniel Ho, head of new products, would leave the company as of Tuesday morning. Read more ›
24
Maybe Elon Musk should visit China more often. Today’s 15% rally in Tesla stock follows his quick visit there on Sunday (which incidentally also confirmed his statement last week that his seven-day-a-week work schedule means he rarely takes even Sunday afternoons off). The big news that came out of the visit, according to Bloomberg, was that Tesla got tentative approval from the government to deploy its driver assistance tech in... Read more ›
0
Last week, we spent a lot of time talking about Meta Platforms’ new open-source Llama 3 models. However, the one question that still remains unanswered is how Meta and other developers of open-source AI software will make money from it—an uncertainty that likely contributed to Meta’s stock drop on Thursday.Take Paris-based startup Mistral, for example, currently in talks to raise at a $5 billion valuation just months after raising at... Read more ›
0
Last week, Elon Musk told Tesla investors they should think about the electric vehicle maker “almost entirely” in terms of a single goal: figuring out how to make its cars drive themselves, without human supervision. Whether Tesla is successful in that objective could come down to its efforts to perfect autonomous driving in places like San Francisco’s Sunset District, a vast residential neighborhood flanked by the Pacific Ocean and Golden... Read more ›
0
When Tesla’s head of powertrain, Drew Baglino, resigned this month, along with Rohan Patel, vice president of public policy, and Martin Viecha, vice president of investor relations, they joined hundreds of senior and midlevel executives who have left the company over the years. As we show in the searchable Tesla Diaspora Database we are publishing today, if the trio follows the path of the others who have left, they will... Read more ›
17
When Tesla’s head of powertrain, Drew Baglino, resigned this month, along with Rohan Patel, vice president of public policy, and Martin Viecha, vice president of investor relations, they joined hundreds of senior and midlevel executives who have left the company over the years. As we show in the Tesla Diaspora Database we are publishing today, if the trio follows the path of the others who have left, they will likely... Read more ›
22
Welcome, Weekenders! In this newsletter:The great Tokyo gamble.Our favorite interior designers…for rescuing boring offices. Billionaire nerd buys The Onion, thinks he can solve media’s problems (yes, we’re serious!). Plus: Yo-Yo Ma, Apple and global politics; a videogame legend’s unexpected new work; and Michael Douglas as our nation’s original nerd-preneur.Honestly, politics are only one of TikTok’s problems. Assuming the ban bill stands (after the expected lawsuit from TikTok and its users),... Read more ›
0
For quite some time, Jeff Lawson has kept up a running joke among friends and family. “Bezos bought The Post, Benioff bought Time—well, Jeff Lawson is going to buy The Onion,” said Lawson, billionaire founder of Twilio, an unsexy enterprise software company that he ran until a recent series of battles with activist investors played out. Honestly, Lawson’s quip is exactly the type of thing that could make for a... Read more ›
6
When Molly Martell, vice president of brand at San Francisco venture capital firm Headline, was tasked with revamping the company’s offices in 2021, she sought out a design that “felt like the antidote to Zoom” and could fulfill a mandate for a “cozy” space that wasn’t “cold, gridded boxes,” she explained. For a minute, she and Headline considered going avant-garde, perhaps buying and remodeling a house or even a boat.... Read more ›
0
Phew, what a week! We got a blizzard of quarterly earnings updates from tech firms, most of them followed by investor calls that were full of artificial intelligence talk. Much of that was corporate blather, of course, but there were a few moments when actual information was transmitted. Not all of that was relevant to the subject at hand, to be sure. For instance, as Elon Musk was explaining layoffs... Read more ›
1
As the only non-venture capitalist on the More or Less podcast, I sometimes view these episodes as my window into VC therapy. And so, with Taylor Swift on my mind, I felt the angst of my VC compatriots as we recorded this week. We spent most of the time talking about another asset class: hedge funds and why there isn't likely to be another Bobby Axelrod of tech anytime soon.... Read more ›
0
As the market for creators continues to grow, it’s not all about creating engaging videos. As their channels get bigger, creators have become entrepreneurs. So what’s the best way for creators to successfully expand a small business into a larger one—and find new sources of revenue? What technologies exist to help them? And how have large brands jumped at the chance to reach these new audiences? Laura Mandaro, reporter for... Read more ›
50
In February, we launched the Creator Startup Takeover List, listing 45 startups in the sector that are potential acquisition targets. Most companies hadn’t raised any capital since 2021, and, based on our reporting, some were actively seeking buyers. This week, one of those companies struck a deal. On Monday, Snipfeed agreed to sell its link-in-bio tool to Planoly, which sells a tool creators use to schedule social media posts. I... Read more ›
0
Just south of the vast Imperial Palace in downtown Tokyo lies the Kasumigaseki district, with blocks of offices constructed mostly during the last century when the country rose as one of the world’s largest economic powers after World War II. Much of the Japanese government does its work here: A walk through this neighborhood of concrete and steel presents a slideshow of the numerous ministries and agencies that comprise the... Read more ›
12
Venture capitalists should try this fun game at their next (increasingly alcohol-free) game night: artificial intelligence funding mad libs.[VC fund 1] and [VC fund 2] lead funding round for [number]-year-old [type of AI startup], founded by professors at [name of university], at a $[some-billion] valuation.This week, that formula would have yielded announcements about robotics startup Skild one day and coding assistant startup Cognition the next. (To fill in the other... Read more ›
2
Artificial intelligence development may be sucking up vast amounts of money from big tech—but hey, at least business is good! That’s the picture painted by earnings updates from both Alphabet and Microsoft on Thursday—echoing a similar state of play reported by Meta Platforms on Wednesday. All three companies reported strong operating profit growth for the March quarter—46% for Alphabet and 23% for Microsoft, neither as good as Meta’s 91% jump... Read more ›
11
Is it possible that YouTube has figured out how to sell Shorts to advertisers? On a call with investors in parent Alphabet, executives indicated the monetization of YouTube Shorts is showing signs of improvement. That’s good news for creators (and Alphabet shareholders) who have seen advertisers pay far less for YouTube Shorts than longer videos, as we reported here. Executives said the monetization rate of Shorts in the U.S. compared... Read more ›
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Most popular sources
Business Insider
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25% 6 |
The Verge
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9% 3 |
Tech Wire Asia
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8% 1 |
Android Authority
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8% 5 |
Tom's Hardware
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7% 4 |
| View sources » | |
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27.11.2024 11:41
Last update: 11:35 EDT.
News rating updated: 18:33.
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