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By Stephanie Palazzolo

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Recent Editions

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Apple Can ‘Distill’ Google’s Big Gemini Model

By Jessica E. Lessin, Amir Efrati and Erin Woo · Mar 25, 2026 7:00am PDT

Before we get to today’s column, we wanted to flag OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s major reorg, the company’s new "Spud” model and its decision to shut down the Sora video app and application programming interface, which we scooped on Tuesday. (For what the company’s organizational structure looks like now after the changes, check out our updated OpenAI... Before we get to today’s column, we wanted to flag OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s major reorg, the...

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Why AI Coding Agents Need Multiple Personalities to Do Their Best Work

By Stephanie Palazzolo · Mar 24, 2026 7:00am PDT · 2 comments

Something curious is happening with AI coding agents. Developers have started telling me they’re asking these coding agents to take on different personas so they behave like more of a team than an individual programmer.For instance, a developer creating a software product feature will first tell their AI coding product—whether it be Gemini or ... Something curious is happening with AI coding agents. Developers have started telling me they’re...

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Claude Code and Codex Are Outpacing Cursor Among Notion's Engineers

By Stephanie Palazzolo · Mar 23, 2026 7:00am PDT · 2 comments

Software engineers embracing the AI coding revolution don’t have much loyalty to any particular coding tool, especially when a new, better one comes out. In the latest example of that, the growth of Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex is outpacing that of Cursor among hundreds of engineers at Notion, a maker of popular... Software engineers embracing the AI coding revolution don’t have much loyalty to any particular...

Giga Energy cofounders Brent Whitehead and Matt Lohstroh. Photo courtesy of Giga.

Meet Giga, a AI Data Center Developer That Has Barely Raised Capital

By Stephanie Palazzolo · Mar 19, 2026 7:00am PDT

Giga Energy cofounders Brent Whitehead and Matt Lohstroh. Photo courtesy of Giga.

Meet Giga, a AI Data Center Developer That Has Barely Raised Capital

By Stephanie Palazzolo · Mar 19, 2026 7:00am PDT

Startups developing data centers to power AI are among the most capital-hungry businesses around right now. Many are raising billions of dollars in equity and debt to build complicated facilities.There are few like Houston-based Giga Energy, however. Founded in 2019 by two Texas A&M juniors studying finance and industrial distribution, Giga... Startups developing data centers to power AI are among the most capital-hungry businesses around...

Jensen Huang speaks during a keynote address at the Nvidia GTC. Photo by David Paul Morris/ Getty Images

Nvidia’s Build-A-Claw Workshop

By Rocket Drew · Mar 18, 2026 9:15am PDT

Nvidia’s developer conference has agent fever. On Tuesday, one of the most popular spots at the company’s GTC convention was Nvidia’s “Build-A-Claw” tent, where attendees could try out Nvidia’s newly unveiled NemoClaw, open-source software for creating AI agents based on the popular OpenClaw.Many of the people who stopped by the Build-A-Claw... Nvidia’s developer conference has agent fever. On Tuesday, one of the most popular spots at the...

Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, speaks during a keynote address at the Nvidia GTC. Photo by David Paul Morris/Getty Images

Nvidia Needed Groq After All

By Wayne Ma and Anissa Gardizy · Mar 17, 2026 7:00am PDT

Greetings from the San Jose Convention Center, where Nvidia is throwing its annual AI conference. The AI craze is palpable here. Humanoid robots offer fist-bumps to conferencegoers, and attendees are buying sweaters with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s face on them. Nebius, a cloud provider that rents out Nvidia graphics processing units, took... Greetings from the San Jose Convention Center, where Nvidia is throwing its annual AI conference....

Elon Musk, left, and Sam Altman. Photos by Getty Images.

What OpenAI Could Owe Elon Musk; An xAI Hiring Spree

By Rocket Drew · Mar 16, 2026 7:15am PDT

Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, the judge hearing Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI, has shown herself in other high profile tech cases—such as Epic Games’ lawsuit against Apple—to be unafraid to skewer arguments or testimony from witnesses in her courtroom.That was clear on Friday, in a hearing in the OpenAI case to determine whether an economist Musk... Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, the judge hearing Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI, has shown herself...

A man wears a lobster hat that represents OpenClaw at Baidu's headquarters in Beijing. Photo by Adek Berry/ Getty Images)

Nvidia, Startups Race to Make OpenClaw Safer to Use

By Stephanie Palazzolo · Mar 12, 2026 7:00am PDT

A man wears a lobster hat that represents OpenClaw at Baidu's headquarters in Beijing. Photo by Adek Berry/ Getty Images)

Nvidia, Startups Race to Make OpenClaw Safer to Use

By Stephanie Palazzolo · Mar 12, 2026 7:00am PDT

Enthusiasm for OpenClaw, the popular open-source software for powering personal AI agents using personal computers, has been tempered by a number of embarrassing security snafus, such as when OpenClaw started mass-deleting emails from Meta alignment director Summer Yue’s inbox.In China, where developers are arguably even more enthusiastic about... Enthusiasm for OpenClaw, the popular open-source software for powering personal AI agents using...

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What’s CXL? The Alternative Memory Technology Embraced by Google, Nvidia

By Qianer Liu · Mar 11, 2026 7:00am PDT

The global memory chip shortage sparked by the AI boom has prompted companies including Google and Nvidia to spend more effort on alternatives that could ease the supply crunch. One of them is a technology that allows servers to share memory across a data center.The technology, Compute Express Link, or CXL, is seven years old but was slow to... The global memory chip shortage sparked by the AI boom has prompted companies including Google...

Unreasonable Labs cofounders Yuan Cao and Markus Buehler. Photos courtesy of Unreasonable Labs.

The Startup Trying a New Trick to Develop AI For Science Discovery

By Stephanie Palazzolo · Mar 10, 2026 7:38am PDT

OpenAI and Anthropic have raised tens of billions of dollars on the promise of artificial intelligence that can make new discoveries in fields like medicine, biology and physics. And yet, we’re nowhere close to that. (You might recall this awkward moment from last fall when a ChatGPT-generated math “discovery” was debunked.) The... OpenAI and Anthropic have raised tens of billions of dollars on the promise of artificial...

Pete Hegseth, left, and Dario Amodei. Photos by Getty.

Anthropic Has a Strong Legal Case Against Trump’s DoD

By Rocket Drew · Mar 9, 2026 7:00am PDT

Anthropic’s lawyers probably spent the weekend preparing a lawsuit the company said it would file against the Department of Defense for designating the Claude AI maker as a “supply chain risk” and cutting off commercial ties to “protect national security.” The designation followed Anthropic’s request for special assurances its tech wouldn’t be... Anthropic’s lawyers probably spent the weekend preparing a lawsuit the company said it would file...

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OpenAI Develops a ‘Bidirectional’ Audio Model to Boost Voice Assistants

By Stephanie Palazzolo · Mar 5, 2026 7:00am PST

Art via Getty Images

OpenAI Develops a ‘Bidirectional’ Audio Model to Boost Voice Assistants

By Stephanie Palazzolo · Mar 5, 2026 7:00am PST

Wow, what a day of news! In case you missed it (which would have been difficult), we broke a number of stories yesterday regarding OpenAI and Anthropic. Most memorable was this piece about the fiery, 1,600-word memo Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei penned to staff last Friday criticizing the OpenAI-Pentagon deal. (You can check out the full memo... Wow, what a day of news! In case you missed it (which would have been difficult), we broke a...

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OpenAI’s Next AI Model Will Have ‘Extreme’ Reasoning

By Stephanie Palazzolo · Mar 4, 2026 7:00am PST · 1 comment

OpenAI’s next GPT model is coming—and soon, according to a person with knowledge of it.Among the highlights, the new model, GPT-5.4, will have more than double the context window of the current GPT-5.2 model. That means the model can handle queries with many more words or data, up to 1 million tokens compared to 400,000 tokens today, the person... OpenAI’s next GPT model is coming—and soon, according to a person with knowledge of it.Among the...

U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth (left) and Under Secretary of Defense (Research and Engineering), Emil Michael at the Pentagon in July. Win McNamee/Getty Images.

The OpenAI and Anthropic Execs at the Center of the Pentagon Action

By Stephanie Palazzolo · Mar 3, 2026 7:00am PST · 1 comment

OpenAI was on the backfoot on Monday. Current and former OpenAI employees took to social media to share concerns about their employer signing an agreement with the Pentagon that seemed to accept at least some terms Anthropic had rejected. A surge in people uninstalling the ChatGPT app from their phones over the weekend, according to TechCrunch,... OpenAI was on the backfoot on Monday. Current and former OpenAI employees took to social media to...

Sam Altman. Photo by Getty Images

The Loopholes in OpenAI’s Pentagon Deal

By Erin Woo · Mar 2, 2026 7:00am PST

What a weekend! Anthropic is now poised to sue the Pentagon, after being labeled a “supply chain risk,” while OpenAI has its own agreement allowing the agency to use OpenAI’s models in “classified environments.”There are still plenty of unanswered questions, including how big of a business risk being designated a “supply chain risk” poses... What a weekend! Anthropic is now poised to sue the Pentagon, after being labeled a “supply chain...

Image from Getty Images.

A Robot Data Startup Raises $60 Million

By Rocket Drew · Feb 26, 2026 7:00am PST

Image from Getty Images.

A Robot Data Startup Raises $60 Million

By Rocket Drew · Feb 26, 2026 7:00am PST

Companies developing AI models to power humanoid and other robots have been hard at work collecting videos and other data for training their models, even paying people to record themselves completing tasks in homes and workplaces. As these data-collection efforts start to pay off, and robots take on some of those tasks, the robot developers... Companies developing AI models to power humanoid and other robots have been hard at work...

Andrew Feldman, Cerebras Systems. Art by Clark Miller; Getty Images.

Why OpenAI’s Cerebras Chip Deal Matters; What Anthropic Wants to Know About Chinese Rivals

By Stephanie Palazzolo and Rocket Drew · Feb 25, 2026 7:00am PST

OpenAI executives have repeatedly signaled, both publicly and privately, that the only factor limiting the company’s revenue growth is access to computational resources. Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar wrote an entire blog post on this topic earlier this year, and OpenAI executives highlighted the message again in a presentation to investors... OpenAI executives have repeatedly signaled, both publicly and privately, that the only factor...

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Why ChatGPT Faces Language Barriers

By Stephanie Palazzolo · Feb 24, 2026 7:00am PST

Many AI researchers believe AI models that listen and speak to people are trailing text-based models in capabilities and performance. That gap is even bigger when you look at audio models for languages other than English, especially outside the Western hemisphere.That could be a big issue for companies like OpenAI that are aggressively trying to... Many AI researchers believe AI models that listen and speak to people are trailing text-based...

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OpenAI’s GPT-5 Dip; Why Agents Are Hard to Evaluate

By Stephanie Palazzolo and Rocket Drew · Feb 23, 2026 7:00am PST

Before we get into today’s column, Friday’s story from Sri and me confirmed what many had been hypothesizing since OpenAI’s release of GPT-5 in August: ChatGPT’s growth hasn’t been as strong as OpenAI hoped.The story is more nuanced, obviously. The chatbot has hit new highs in terms of weekly active users—910 million, to be exact as of earlier... Before we get into today’s column, Friday’s story from Sri and me confirmed what many had been...

ZaiNar cofounder and CEO Daniel Jacker. Photo courtesy of ZaiNar.

Startup Developing GPS Alternative for Physical AI Earns $1 Billion-Valuation

By Katie Roof · Feb 19, 2026 7:00am PST · 1 comment

ZaiNar cofounder and CEO Daniel Jacker. Photo courtesy of ZaiNar.

Startup Developing GPS Alternative for Physical AI Earns $1 Billion-Valuation

By Katie Roof · Feb 19, 2026 7:00am PST · 1 comment

Over the last two years, investors and researchers have flocked to startups helping bring AI into the physical world, from developing robot hands to the AI models that train robots to software to train self-driving cars. Now one startup says it can solve a perennial problem for robots and other AI-powered systems: getting precise location... Over the last two years, investors and researchers have flocked to startups helping bring AI into...