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By Stephanie Palazzolo

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Recent Editions

Art by Mike Sullivan

A Wave of AI M&A Is Coming; The Most Hated AI Startup

By Stephanie Palazzolo and Kevin McLaughlin · Jun 24, 2025 7:00am PDT

Before we get to the column, I’d recommend you check out this story Erin, Rocket and I published on Monday about what sorts of products Thinking Machines Lab, the AI startup founded by ex-OpenAI Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati, is looking to build. It gives a sneak peek into how Murati plans to catch up with OpenAI and other AI rivals,... Before we get to the column, I’d recommend you check out this story Erin, Rocket and I published...

Art by Mike Sullivan

The Great Data-Labeling Debate: Synthetic or Human?

By Stephanie Palazzolo · Jun 23, 2025 7:00am PDT

The news around data-labeling startups is stirring a debate in the industry about whether artificial intelligence developers should improve their models with cheap synthetic data (data that are generated by other AI models) or with a much smaller amount of expensive, human-labeled data via firms such as Scale or Surge.Until recently, AI... The news around data-labeling startups is stirring a debate in the industry about whether...

Photo by Mike Sullivan via Midjourney

Zuckerberg Fills Out His AI Dream Team; Developers Are Cheating on LMArena

By Stephanie Palazzolo · Jun 19, 2025 7:00am PDT

Before we get to today’s column, my colleagues Kalley and Cory broke some important news on Wednesday: Meta Platforms is close to hiring former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, who now moonlights as a prominent AI investor, and Daniel Gross, Friedman’s investment partner and a cofounder of Safe Superintelligence with Ilya Sutskever. In the process,... Before we get to today’s column, my colleagues Kalley and Cory broke some important news on...

Art by Mike Sullivan

AI Startups Continue to Masquerade as SaaS Businesses; OpenAI Lays Off Some ‘Insider Risk’ Employees

By Stephanie Palazzolo · Jun 18, 2025 7:00am PDT · 1 comment

Art by Mike Sullivan

AI Startups Continue to Masquerade as SaaS Businesses; OpenAI Lays Off Some ‘Insider Risk’ Employees

By Stephanie Palazzolo · Jun 18, 2025 7:00am PDT · 1 comment

Today, we’re talking about my favorite topic: sneaky things AI startups do to gussy up their revenue.We previously covered how some AI startups are including non-recurring consulting fees in their annual recurring revenue figures; pitching investors on their “contracted ARR” or “sales pipelines”; and using exploding revenue growth to entice... Today, we’re talking about my favorite topic: sneaky things AI startups do to gussy up their...

Satya Nadella, left, and Sam Altman. Photos by Getty

OpenAI Takes a Red Pen to its Microsoft Contract; AI Startups Fight for Cash

By Rocket Drew and Aaron Holmes · Jun 17, 2025 7:00am PDT

Last night, Sri and I broke the news of some of the latest developments in the negotiations between Microsoft and OpenAI. Chief among them is that OpenAI wants Microsoft to take just a 33% share in its business after the startup completes its conversion to a for-profit entity. That looks like a step down for Microsoft, whose $13.75 billion... Last night, Sri and I broke the news of some of the latest developments in the negotiations...

Image by Mike Sullivan via Midjourney

AI Cleaning Robot Firm Raises $800 Million to Sell Machines For a Low Monthly Cost

By Rocket Drew · Jun 16, 2025 7:00am PDT

Demand is rising for AI-powered robots that can clean offices or roll around moving items from one part of a building to another, allowing businesses to save on labor costs. But the upfront costs of these robots, which can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars apiece, can put them out of reach.Now, financiers are stepping in to front the cost of... Demand is rising for AI-powered robots that can clean offices or roll around moving items from...

Image by Mike Sullivan via Midjourney

The AI Industry’s Swim Lanes Get Even Blurrier

By Stephanie Palazzolo · Jun 12, 2025 7:00am PDT

If your artificial intelligence firm isn’t also a chipmaker and cloud provider, are you even an AI company?That’s what it’s starting to feel like, as more companies try to fill out more parts of the AI “stack” by providing the models, hardware and computational resources businesses need to build or use AI-powered apps. In just the last 24... If your artificial intelligence firm isn’t also a chipmaker and cloud provider, are you even an...

Mark Zuckerberg, left, and Alexandr Wang. Photos by Getty; AP

What Meta Gains From Scale CEO Alex Wang

By Stephanie Palazzolo · Jun 11, 2025 7:00am PDT

Mark Zuckerberg, left, and Alexandr Wang. Photos by Getty; AP

What Meta Gains From Scale CEO Alex Wang

By Stephanie Palazzolo · Jun 11, 2025 7:00am PDT

The cost of acqui-hiring talent keeps rising! Meta Platforms agreed to shell out close to $15 billion for a 49% stake in data-labeling startup Scale AI, whose CEO Alexandr Wang will be joining Meta in a senior position, my colleague Cory Weinberg reported yesterday. I spoke with a number of Scale investors yesterday who shared their... The cost of acqui-hiring talent keeps rising! Meta Platforms agreed to shell out close to $15...

‘AI Native’ Startups Pass $15 Billion in Annualized Revenue

‘AI Native’ Startups Pass $15 Billion in Annualized Revenue

By Amir Efrati · Jun 10, 2025 7:00am PDT · 1 comment

Annualized revenue at “AI native” companies selling artificial intelligence models or apps has passed $15 billion just two and a half years since OpenAI launched ChatGPT, according to The Information’s Generative AI Database.While that’s not the same as $15 billion in actual revenue, it’s still an unprecedented haul for such a short time period... Annualized revenue at “AI native” companies selling artificial intelligence models or apps has...

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, left, and Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang. Photos via Getty

What Meta-Scale AI Deal Could Mean; Cursor’s Explosive Revenue

By Amir Efrati · Jun 9, 2025 7:00am PDT

Before we get to today’s column, here’s something to noodle on.On Friday, word spread widely across the industry that an unnamed public company was going to invest a cool $10 billion in an unnamed private AI firm. On Saturday afternoon, Scale AI’s name popped up as the alleged recipient. By nighttime, Bloomberg reported Meta Platforms was the... Before we get to today’s column, here’s something to noodle on.On Friday, word spread widely...

Art via Getty/Mike Sullivan

The Chinese Tech Behind Amazon’s Humanoid Robots

By Rocket Drew · Jun 5, 2025 7:00am PDT

It was only a matter of time before Amazon, a heavyweight in robotic automation, went full bore into humanoid robots powered by artificial intelligence.As I scooped late Wednesday, the company is almost done setting up an indoor obstacle course to test such robots at one of its San Francisco offices in hopes of eventually setting them loose to... It was only a matter of time before Amazon, a heavyweight in robotic automation, went full bore...

Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch. Photo by Village Global

Revenue at OpenAI Vendor Vercel Nearly Doubles in Past Year

By Natasha Mascarenhas and Rocket Drew · Jun 4, 2025 7:00am PDT

Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch. Photo by Village Global

Revenue at OpenAI Vendor Vercel Nearly Doubles in Past Year

By Natasha Mascarenhas and Rocket Drew · Jun 4, 2025 7:00am PDT

Among privately held firms, there’s no beating OpenAI when it comes to generating revenue from selling artificial intelligence. But startups selling the digital picks and shovels of the AI gold rush, including to OpenAI and other AI developers, are doing OK too. The latest example is Vercel, a cloud service companies use to develop... Among privately held firms, there’s no beating OpenAI when it comes to generating revenue from...

Image via Shutterstock

Stanford Math PhD’s AI Startup Targets $300 Million Valuation

By Aaron Holmes, Natasha Mascarenhas and Stephanie Palazzolo · Jun 3, 2025 7:00am PDT

Mathematicians have been enthralled with artificial intelligence that can solve difficult math problems. And some developers behind these models at OpenAI and elsewhere believe AI that learns to solve hard math can use similar reasoning methods to solve other types of problems.But since today’s AI still hasn’t proven it can beat human experts at... Mathematicians have been enthralled with artificial intelligence that can solve difficult math...

Chris Lehane, head of policy at Open AI. Photo by Getty

OpenAI’s Democrats in Action; China’s Open-Source AI

By Rocket Drew · Jun 2, 2025 7:00am PDT

As OpenAI defends its planned corporate restructuring against a range of nonprofit critics, it’s probably feeling pretty good about its decision last year to hire a number of personnel with deep ties to the Democratic establishment.Those hires, including career Democrat Chris Lehane, who leads OpenAI’s global affairs team, looked like a... As OpenAI defends its planned corporate restructuring against a range of nonprofit critics, it’s...

Image via Getty

VCs Are Keeping an Ear Out for Voice AI Startups

By Stephanie Palazzolo · May 29, 2025 7:21am PDT

Each new month of the AI boom has brought along with it a new “AI startup flavor of the month” for venture capitalists to drool over. The latest one, VCs tell me, are startups building AI voice agents for various verticals, from hotels to hospitals.Up until recently, AI software that can understand and respond with human speech has largely been... Each new month of the AI boom has brought along with it a new “AI startup flavor of the month”...

Image via Getty

China’s Answer to Vibe Coding

By Jing Yang · May 28, 2025 7:00am PDT

Image via Getty

China’s Answer to Vibe Coding

By Jing Yang · May 28, 2025 7:00am PDT

A new front has opened in the AI race between the U.S. and China. A six-month old Chinese startup has jumped into the market for coding assistants aimed at amateurs, hoping to make a global splash the way Chinese firms DeepSeek and Manus did in open-source models and AI that controls web browsers, respectively.YouWare, created by a 20-person... A new front has opened in the AI race between the U.S. and China. A six-month old Chinese startup...

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Chief Product Officer Mike Krieger and Head of Communications Sasha de Marigny at Anthropic's first developer conference in San Francisco. Photo by Getty.

Anthropic’s Tattle-Tale Model Goes Viral But Will Customers Care?

By Stephanie Palazzolo · May 27, 2025 7:00am PDT · 2 comments

Anthropic’s drop on Thursday of its latest generation of models—Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4—landed lots of praise on social media, as early users highlighted how the models were able to stay on track for long-running coding tasks, like creating an entire CRM or complicated video games. (Our readers already knew some of this since we had ... Anthropic’s drop on Thursday of its latest generation of models—Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4...

Jony Ive, left, and Sam Altman. Photos by Getty

The Coming Culture Clash for Jony Ive’s Io and OpenAI

By Stephanie Palazzolo · May 22, 2025 7:00am PDT

OpenAI’s been on a shopping spree.First, a $3 billion bid for Windsurf, the maker of a popular AI coding assistant formerly known as Codeium. And now, a whopping $6.5 billion acquisition of io, the AI device startup OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and former Apple design chief Jony Ive have been working on for a couple of years.That second deal shouldn’t... OpenAI’s been on a shopping spree.First, a $3 billion bid for Windsurf, the maker of a popular AI...

Sundar Pichai on stage at Google I/O. Photo by Getty

Google Gets Its Act Together

By Stephanie Palazzolo and Erin Woo · May 21, 2025 7:00am PDT

Google seems to have finally learned its lesson about announcing products that aren’t yet ready for release to the public. At its annual I/O developer conference on Tuesday, the company launched a flurry of products, many of which—including its chatbot-style search tab AI Mode, its new Veo video model and its coding assistant Jules—were... Google seems to have finally learned its lesson about announcing products that aren’t yet ready...

Elon Musk. Photo via Getty

XAI Moves Closer to Starting an Enterprise and Government Business

By Kevin McLaughlin and Stephanie Palazzolo · May 20, 2025 7:00am PDT

Elon Musk. Photo via Getty

XAI Moves Closer to Starting an Enterprise and Government Business

By Kevin McLaughlin and Stephanie Palazzolo · May 20, 2025 7:00am PDT

How Elon Musk’s xAI plans to make money is one of the big questions in the AI world right now. Musk hasn’t said much and even investors in the company don’t seem to know many details, given the vague statements they made when asked about it at our Financing the AI Revolution conference last month. We have one answer: XAI plans to use... How Elon Musk’s xAI plans to make money is one of the big questions in the AI world right now....