Welcome, Weekenders! In this newsletter:Inside Jeff Bezosâ plan for Blue Origin to rocket past Elon Muskâs SpaceXThey counsel Zuckerberg and advise Sam Altman: our picks of the top lawyers for startupsPlus: â3 Body Problemâ; a startupâs glowing Frankenplant; and an unshakable source of American anxietyOver the last few days, Iâve spent much of my time thinking about Jeff Bezos and his ambition to transform life on Earth by extending life... Read more âș
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Anyone who was thinking of taking their company public this year must be feeling more upbeat today. Shares of Reddit, the newest social media firm to go public, finished the week up 35% from the companyâs IPO price, having lost only a bit of Thursdayâs opening-day pop on Friday. Meanwhile, shares of Astera Labs, an artificial intelligence data center that went public a day before Reddit, are now up 94%... Read more âș
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Nvidia isnât the only beneficiary of the unprecedented boom in artificial intelligence chips. One of its key suppliers, memory chip maker Micron, is sold out for this year and into 2025. Yet a senior executive acknowledged that even Micron doesnât know how long the frenzy will last, given the high costs businesses face in using the latest AI. âWeâre all wondering, how much of this is going to be sustained?... Read more âș
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Find the right lawyer and they can fill many roles: advisor, defenderâletâs be realâtherapist. In recent decades, the white-shoe law firms that once mostly catered toâand chasedâblue-chip industrial companies, conglomerates and banks have set up practices targeting startups, and as Silicon Valley has boomed, plenty of tech-focused specialist firms have popped up in the San Francisco Bay Area and elsewhere. Many have long track records of representing companies from seed... Read more âș
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Cameo authorized a $28 million round of funding last week that will drastically reduce its valuation, the company told shareholders, reflecting a big slowdown in the celebrity video shoutout appâs business. The funding, led by existing investor Valor Equity Partners, would value the company at less than $100 million, measured after the investment, an investor said. That would represent at least a 90% drop from its previous value. Its $1... Read more âș
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There are weeks when it is really fun to be a reporter! And then even more fun to discuss what is happening with your friends! This was one of those.  Lots of AI news, a Reddit IPO and more. I hope you enjoy! Apple Spotify YouTube Read more âș
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At some point during the second half of this year, Jeff Bezos, Amazonâs founder, will stuff his feet into a pair of cowboy boots and, if everything goes as planned, watch as a rocket made by his space startup, Blue Origin, blasts off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. The boots are a good luck charm that Bezos wears whenever Blue Origin launches a rocket. For the launch... Read more âș
54
Yesterday, we published the results of our March subscriber survey, in which more than half of the 742 respondents said they had bought goods or services through social media. Another result that interested me: 53% of respondents said a creator had inspired them to buy something, regardless of whether they bought it on social media or not.Jasmine Enberg, a principal social media analyst at market researcher eMarketer, said creators may... Read more âș
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Rippling, a human-resources software startup valued at more than $11 billion, was a relative latecomer to the business of helping companies hire staff overseas. Now its expansion into dozens of countries, including the U.K. and Ireland, is starting to pay off. The eight-year-old startupâs annual recurring revenue roughly doubled to more than $350 million by the end of 2023 compared with a year earlier, according to two people who spoke... Read more âș
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The Justice Departmentâs antitrust lawsuit against Apple completes the set of antitrust cases now outstanding against four big tech firms, also including Amazon, Meta Platforms and Alphabet (which faces two, one of which has gone through a trial and is awaiting a judgment). But the Apple case is symbolically important, given how respected and rich the company is. Perhaps thatâs why DOJ antitrust chief Jonathan Kanter drew a parallel between... Read more âș
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Itâs been a busy week. Reddit went public Thursday, marking a rare initial public offering after a two-year winter for new listings. Shares jumped 48% in its first day trading, earning the company a market cap of over $9 billion.Thatâs a promising sign for IPO-ready, aging unicorns, and good news for Redditâs backers, especially CondĂ© Nast parent company Advance Publications, Tencent and Sequoia Capital, Cory reports. But the more noteworthy... Read more âș
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TikTok has poured hundreds of millions of dollars to coax its U.S. users to shop on the app. But for The Informationâs readers, Instagram is still the number one social media destination, according to a new survey of subscribers.About 35% of the 742 respondents said they have shopped using Instagram and 20% said they have shopped on Facebook Marketplace, where users can buy and sell goods similar to Craigslist. Less... Read more âș
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Microsoft doesnât want its plan to hire two of Inflection AIâs co-founders and most of its 70-person staff to be seen as an acquisition. But itâs still writing a hefty check to the two-year-old artificial intelligence startup. The software giant has agreed to pay Inflection approximately $650 million, mostly in the form of a licensing deal that makes Inflectionâs models available for sale on the software giantâs Azure cloud service,... Read more âș
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More than half of The Informationâs readers say theyâve bought goods or services through social media, most frequently through Instagram, according to our latest subscriber survey. Survey respondents remain optimistic about the outlook for technology companies, though they are less bullish than they were earlier in the year. In total, 742 people answered the survey between March 14 and Tuesday. Read more âș
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Elon Muskâs lawsuit against OpenAI, claiming the ChatGPT creator breached a founding agreement to develop artificial general intelligence for the benefit of humanity, not commercial interests, raises legal questions without clear precedent. It might not get very far.One big question is whether private individuals or companies can sue nonprofit organizations for not following their missions. Musk must establish that he has been harmed and therefore has legal standing to sue.... Read more âș
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The world was a much different place when media titan CondĂ© Nast bought fledgling internet forum Reddit for around $10 million in 2006. Media companies were still figuring out the internetâCondĂ© had just bought the website for Wired, a magazine it already ownedâand glossy print titles like Vogue and an arsenal of newspapers were raking in advertising profits for CondĂ©âs parent company, Advance Publications. Nearly two decades later, traditional media... Read more âș
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In a first sign of a softening of electric vehicle mandates, the Biden administration and the state of California this week both eased the way for carmakers to meet stringent emissions and EV rules, extending timelines and allowing companies to sell plug-in hybrids to comply with regulations. The moves align with a general slowing of the transition to EVs. Read more âș
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The AI startup gold rush has featured a recurring cast of characters from past seasons of Silicon Valley tech booms. Sam Altman! Vinod Khosla! Google! Microsoft! You already know âem, you already love âem. That fact not only has amused me as money poured in over the past year and a half, but has said something about how tech, money and innovation collide. Connections beget connections. Fortunes compound, at least... Read more âș
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The conversational artificial intelligence boom sparked by ChatGPT boosted funding and valuations for startups in the field, but few of them are making much money. In the latest example, Cohere, one of the best-known startup competitors to OpenAI, which has raised $445 million from investors, was generating about $13 million in annualized revenue at the end of last year, according to a person who has viewed the companyâs fundraising pitch... Read more âș
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As new artificial intelligence tools from companies such as OpenAI and Midjourney have exploded, a cottage industry of creators has developed to teach others how to use them. Theyâre offering paid classes on how to craft a better prompt for ChatGPT or use AI for filmmaking. AI-related courses and products are a ârapidly growingâ category for Hotmart, which owns course provider Teachable, according to JoĂŁo Pedro Resende, Hotmartâs Brazil-based co-founder... Read more âș
2
Most popular sources
Business Insider
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26% 2 |
Tech Wire Asia
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16% 11 |
CNET
|
7% 4 |
Eurogamer.net
|
6% 2 |
The Verge
|
6% 2 |
| View sources » | |
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27.11.2024 22:31
Last update: 22:16 EDT.
News rating updated: 05:21.
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