Amazon’s grab-and-go checkout system, Just Walk Out, has been a centerpiece of its ambitions to transform bricks-and-mortar supermarkets. Now Amazon is gearing up to open a new batch of grocery stores after an 18-month pause—and it’s ditching the technology. Tony Hoggett, Amazon’s senior vice president of grocery stores, said in an interview that the next generation of Amazon Fresh stores, the commerce giant’s answer to mass-market grocery chains, will focus... Read more ›
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We got big news today from the world of enterprise software. Microsoft has decided to stop including its Teams feature, a rival to Slack and Zoom Video, by default in its Office suite of software services, at least for new customers. The software giant made this change in Europe last summer, after a regulatory inquiry in its Teams bundling practices began, and has now extended it globally. Perhaps the company... Read more ›
0
After breaking the news on Friday about how Microsoft and OpenAI are drawing up plans for an ambitious data center project costing as much as $100 billion, we were bombarded with questions from people across the artificial intelligence and cloud industries: What part of the country will it be located in? What chips would it use? How would the companies acquire the nearly-unfathomable amount of power needed to run it?Our... Read more ›
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Not long after Mary Ellen Coe joined YouTube as chief business officer in late 2022, leaders at the streaming video behemoth began intensifying their questions about a team of YouTube staffers who provided support to content creators. They wanted to know if the team was worth the money YouTube was investing in it, said a person involved in these meetings. The video service’s business team sifted through data to see... Read more ›
0
In 2020, a mania erupted around next-generation electric vehicle batteries, especially lithium-metal batteries that promised 500 miles of driving range, twice as far as most EVs could go on a charge at the time. Investors mobbed QuantumScape, a California lithium-metal battery developer, whose share price rose almost sixfold in the month following its public listing that year when it predicted, among other things, that its batteries would be powering 1... Read more ›
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Welcome, Weekenders! In this newsletter:The skinny on Kim Kardashian’s Skims—and how it dodged retail armageddon.Beyoncé water and fake Pilsner: Our top 5 favorite New Age canned beverages that thirsty VCs love, too.Plus: The perils of inheritance; a man who could save us from our sinking world; and how a football star, a preacher and an actor shaped modern America.On Thursday, billionaire Josh Kushner and his wife, Karlie Kloss, declared their... Read more ›
0
“We’re not trying to bring back Prohibition—or judge anyone,” promised Bill Shufelt, leading me through a taste test of the fake beer from his seven-year-old Athletic Brewing, recently valued at nearly a half-billion dollars. That money has afforded some fine products: To my immense surprise, Shufelt’s brews tasted nearly identical to actual suds, and had I not been stone sober, I might’ve worried that my sense of taste had fallen... Read more ›
0
Chatbots powered by artificial intelligence, like Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, are cool to experiment with. But it’s becoming clearer by the day just how humongously expensive this kind of AI technology is to develop. Our scoop today about Microsoft drawing up plans to spend as much as $100 billion on a data center project for OpenAI over the next several years puts things in perspective. As the story said,... Read more ›
0
This week's More or Less was an ode to the return of in-person business. Plus, how VCs are breaking down the Reddit IPO and more. Hope you enjoy. Apple Spotify YouTube Read more ›
7
Executives at Microsoft and OpenAI have been drawing up plans for a data center project that would contain a supercomputer with millions of specialized server chips to power OpenAI’s artificial intelligence, according to three people who have been involved in the private conversations about the proposal. The project could cost as much as $100 billion, according to a person who spoke to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman about it and a... Read more ›
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When Skims co-founders Kim Kardashian and Jens Grede were recently considering where to put their very first physical store, they knew right away that New York and Los Angeles wouldn’t work well. Their retail unicorn had previously held pop-up shops in those cities, and they had attracted enormous crowds that limited any chance to observe how customers actually shopped. Instead, they wanted “a store away from the major markets,” Grede... Read more ›
0
My colleagues Natasha and Kate this week published The Next GPs, identifying 19 people in industry and at venture capital firms such as Accel, Andreessen Horowitz and Lightspeed Venture Partners who are likely to become general partners in coming years. As I studied the list, I was struck by the relative youth of its members. At least nine, roughly half the list, are 31 years old or younger. At just... Read more ›
0
When Air Up, a maker of scented water bottles backed by PepsiCo and Ashton Kutcher, was looking to cut costs last year, it decided to stop using warehouses located in California and Ohio, and instead ship its Asia- and Europe-made products out of the border city of Reynosa, Mexico. That change will make it cheaper for Munich-based Air Up to fulfill orders for U.S. customers, largely due to lower labor... Read more ›
0
Venture capital firm Accel, an early investor in the data labeling startup Scale AI, is in talks to lead a new round of funding that would raise the startup’s valuation nearly 80% to about $13 billion, people with direct knowledge of the discussions said. The investment would allow Accel to maintain a large share of a valuable startup that has gotten a boost selling services to OpenAI and other conversational... Read more ›
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Ask most founders, venture capitalists and tech executives how they feel about the state of regulation—from the antitrust case the Justice Department brought against Apple to the executive order regarding artificial intelligence—and you’ll hear a familiar refrain. Most tech leaders ignore regulators because they believe these authorities are inept—too slow or too far behind. They will never catch up.What if regulators weren’t inept over the past decade but just had... Read more ›
0
Fallen crypto mogul Sam Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years by a federal judge after he was found guilty of seven counts of criminal fraud. Facing a possible 110 years, he got off easy; the crypto industry, however, did not. The yearslong saga tarnished crypto’s reputation among institutional investors and sparked an exodus of capital. Lately, however, investors and founders have become more hopeful regarding crypto. The price of bitcoin... Read more ›
0
It’s been a year since YouTube started sharing Shorts ad revenue with creators that meet certain audience requirements, and it’s starting to pay off. Sort of.More than 25% of YouTube channels in its YouTube Partnership Program are now earning revenue on its short-form videos, YouTube said. With more than 3 million creators in that program, that means about 750,000 Shorts creators are receiving money from YouTube. A year ago, there... Read more ›
0
Bolt, the checkout startup that rocketed to an $11 billion valuation during the pandemic e-commerce boom, is embroiled in another legal battle with a high-profile retail partner: sports apparel company Fanatics, which signed a deal in 2022 to offer Bolt’s speedy payment buttons across several of its e-commerce sites. Fanatics filed a lawsuit in California court earlier this month claiming that Bolt improperly reneged on its contract. In the complaint,... Read more ›
12
You may have heard of the saying, “two heads are better than one.” The same could be said about large language models.Yes, developers have figured out that model performance can be improved by combining a couple of LLMs. The concept behind "model merging" is surprisingly intuitive. Developers combine the weights (or the “settings” that determine how a model responds to queries) of two or more models trained for different purposes... Read more ›
0
The meeting last July between officials from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and executives from Choice Financial Group was tense. For most of the two-and-a-half hour session, the FDIC officials delivered the results of the agency’s recent examination of Choice, a once sleepy bank based in Fargo, N.D., for possible violations of anti–money-laundering and counterterrorism financing regulations, according to records of the meeting. Their findings weren’t pretty. The FDIC was... Read more ›
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9% 4 |
The Verge
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Tom's Hardware
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5% 1 |
CNET
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5% 2 |
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27.11.2024 18:48
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