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Mark Zuckerberg introduces the Meta Oakley Vanguard AI glasses at Meta Connect. Photo via Getty

Meta’s AR Presence

By Martin Peers · Sep 18, 2025 5:00pm PDT · 1 comment

If Mark Zuckerberg has his way, in a few weeks you could be talking to a friend wearing Meta’s new “display” glasses (you might call them augmented reality-lite glasses). All of a sudden, your friend will get a glazed look in their eyes and their fingers will start twitching. “Oh no,” you’ll realize. “They got just a text and now they’re... If Mark Zuckerberg has his way, in a few weeks you could be talking to a friend wearing Meta’s...

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Studios Say AI Is Finally Good Enough to Design Videogames

By Catherine Perloff and Aaron Holmes · Sep 18, 2025 10:30am PDT

Without video games, the artificial intelligence boom may not have happened: the Nvidia chips that powered recent AI breakthroughs were originally designed to process video game graphics.Now, game studios are increasingly turning to generative AI to automate the work of developing their games. Without video games, the artificial intelligence boom may not have happened: the Nvidia chips...

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On Quarterly Earnings, Trump Has a Point

By Martin Peers · Sep 15, 2025 5:00pm PDT

Imagine a world where companies report earnings only twice a year, instead of every quarter. As John Lennon put it, “you may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.” Donald Trump reminded us on Monday that he is a big proponent of switching to a half-yearly corporate reporting cadence, away from the quarterly one. His pitch is that doing so... Imagine a world where companies report earnings only twice a year, instead of every quarter. As...

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff via Getty. Art via Clark Miller

Marc Benioff Said AI Was Easy. A Team at Salesforce Proved Him Wrong

By Kevin McLaughlin · Sep 15, 2025 6:00am PDT · 2 comments

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff via Getty. Art via Clark Miller

Marc Benioff Said AI Was Easy. A Team at Salesforce Proved Him Wrong

By Kevin McLaughlin · Sep 15, 2025 6:00am PDT · 2 comments

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff was upset. Last fall, one of his technical teams told large Salesforce customers that using Agentforce, the software firm’s new artificial intelligence for automating customer service and other functions, would require extensive planning. The product information the Salesforce team shared with those customers... Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff was upset. Last fall, one of his technical teams told large...

Atlassian CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes (l) and The Information reporter Akash Pasricha (r).

Atlassian CEO Claims Edge on Glean; Trouble Exporting From Teams

By Kevin McLaughlin · Sep 11, 2025 10:41am PDT

Enterprise search startup Glean has attracted customers and venture capital thanks to an AI search tool that lets employees quickly find corporate files and data in all of the apps their companies use. But Mike Cannon-Brookes, the CEO and co-founder of productivity app Atlassian, thinks his company is ahead of Glean in enterprise search—despite... Enterprise search startup Glean has attracted customers and venture capital thanks to an AI...

Art by Mike Sullivan

Crypto Exchange Sets Off Price War for Stablecoins

By Yueqi Yang · Sep 10, 2025 5:00am PDT · 1 comment

Just two months after Congress passed a cryptocurrency law that gave a big boost to stablecoins, a price war has broken out, potentially wiping away the lucrative profits these tokens could generate. The battle is taking place among users of Hyperliquid, a fast-growing decentralized crypto exchange. They are considering reducing their use of... Just two months after Congress passed a cryptocurrency law that gave a big boost to stablecoins,...

Art via Mike Sullivan

Meet the Google-Scraping Startup Used by ChatGPT, Cursor and Perplexity

By Stephanie Palazzolo · Aug 28, 2025 7:00am PDT

Last week, we wrote about SerpApi, an Austin-based startup that scrapes Google Search results and offers that data through an application programming interface. Among its customers is OpenAI, which uses SerpApi’s services to ensure its ChatGPT can answer user queries with up-to-date information. (SerpApi CEO and founder Julien Khaleghy... Last week, we wrote about SerpApi, an Austin-based startup that scrapes Google Search results and...

Snap CEO Evan Spiegel. Photo via Getty

How Snap Can Turn on the Creator Spigot

By Kaya Yurieff · Aug 26, 2025 1:12pm PDT

Snap CEO Evan Spiegel. Photo via Getty

Creator Economy

How Snap Can Turn on the Creator Spigot

By Kaya Yurieff · Aug 26, 2025 1:12pm PDT

Where does Snap go from here? The nearly fourteen-year-old company is struggling to grow its ad business, particularly compared to larger Meta Platforms and Google’s YouTube. At the same time, CEO Evan Spiegel remains laser focused on his long-time, big bet: the company’s augmented reality glasses, Spectacles. To keep funding the AR project,... Where does Snap go from here? The nearly fourteen-year-old company is struggling to grow its ad...

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Musk’s Litigation-Led AI Strategy

By Martin Peers · Aug 25, 2025 5:00pm PDT · 2 comments

It’s not obvious that filing lawsuits against your competitors is the way to succeed in artificial intelligence, if only because a lawsuit can take years to resolve and AI is evolving extremely rapidly. Nonetheless, litigation is the approach Elon Musk is taking to try to protect his startup, xAI, from bigger rivals. You might wonder if this is... It’s not obvious that filing lawsuits against your competitors is the way to succeed in...

Art via Getty

VCs Bet on AI Chips That Use Light Instead of Electronics

By Rocket Drew · Aug 25, 2025 7:00am PDT

When Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang in March said his company would release hardware that lets an AI data center chip send information directly over optical cables instead of needing to convert to optical from electrical signals, it was a shot in the arm for optics developers that have long wanted a bigger role in data centers.Using light to send... When Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang in March said his company would release hardware that lets an AI...

Cursor CEO Michael Truell. Screenshot via YouTube

The Power of Defaults: Why OpenAI, Anthropic and Google Are Courting App Developers

By Stephanie Palazzolo · Aug 20, 2025 7:00am PDT · 1 comment

The debate around whether it’s better to be an AI-powered app that millions of people use, like Cursor, or an AI model like Claude that powers such apps is getting interesting.While Cursor and other customers of AI models are hurting as OpenAI and Anthropic mostly hold model prices steady rather than cutting them—as they have been doing for... The debate around whether it’s better to be an AI-powered app that millions of people use, like ...

ByteDance’s Singapore headquarters. Photo via Getty

ByteDance’s Upcoming ‘World Model’; Altman’s Thoughts on the GPT-5 Fiasco, Profitability, and Going Public

By Juro Osawa, Qianer Liu and Jing Yang · Aug 18, 2025 7:00am PDT

ByteDance’s Singapore headquarters. Photo via Getty

ByteDance’s Upcoming ‘World Model’; Altman’s Thoughts on the GPT-5 Fiasco, Profitability, and Going Public

By Juro Osawa, Qianer Liu and Jing Yang · Aug 18, 2025 7:00am PDT

Chinese developers of artificial intelligence software have already pulled ahead in domains like open-source and video generation. Now, one such developer is trying their hand at making AI models that can generate realistic worlds that users can explore, like immersive video games.ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, is developing such an AI,... Chinese developers of artificial intelligence software have already pulled ahead in domains like...

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To Court Big Brands, Walmart Throws Some Smaller Merchants Under the Bus

By Ann Gehan · Aug 18, 2025 6:00am PDT · 3 comments

For nearly 25 years, Tracey Shelley, an online merchant who sells products like Olay moisturizer, Coppertone sunscreen and Dr. Squatch deodorant, operated mainly on Amazon’s marketplace. But in the past few years, Shelley said she shifted nearly half her business to Walmart, as the retailer lobbied online sellers to sell on its site. In its... For nearly 25 years, Tracey Shelley, an online merchant who sells products like Olay moisturizer,...

Lip-Bu Tan, CEO of Intel, leaves a meeting at the White House on Monday. Photo via Getty.

Trump’s Intel Play

By Martin Peers · Aug 14, 2025 5:00pm PDT

We’re in a new era of government intervention in corporate America. The latest example is Bloomberg’s report on Thursday that the Trump administration was in talks to “take a stake” in Intel. Just on Monday, President Donald Trump said he and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang had agreed that Nvidia would pay the government 15% of whatever revenues it... We’re in a new era of government intervention in corporate America. The latest example is ...

Secret Snowflake AI Revenue Figure Shows Brand-Name LLMs Reign Supreme

By Kevin McLaughlin · Aug 14, 2025 1:02pm PDT

For all the talk about the rise of low-cost or open-source AI models, enterprises are still gravitating to brand-name models from OpenAI, Google and Anthropic. That’s prompting database providers like Snowflake, Databricks and Oracle to strike deals allowing database customers to use the brand-name AI to build chatbots and search tools that... For all the talk about the rise of low-cost or open-source AI models, enterprises are still...

Replit CEO Amjad Masad. Photo via Getty

Why Flat Pricing for AI Agents Won’t Last

By Aaron Holmes · Aug 12, 2025 10:30am PDT

Replit CEO Amjad Masad. Photo via Getty

Why Flat Pricing for AI Agents Won’t Last

By Aaron Holmes · Aug 12, 2025 10:30am PDT

AI agents are getting more advanced—but they’re also getting more expensive to run. That trend is beginning to force AI agent sellers to change their pricing models to pass on more of the cost of running the agents to their users.Traditionally, AI companies have sold their products to businesses like most other types of software: by charging a... AI agents are getting more advanced—but they’re also getting more expensive to run. That trend is...

Dave Orr, Anthropic's new head of safeguards.

Anthropic’s New Safety Lead; The Startup Making Nvidia’s Software Easier To Use

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

We might be a long way away from sipping Pina Coladas on a beach while AI-powered humanoid robots handle all our work. But we’re already starting to see how AI is upending society. Some ChatGPT users are lamenting that they’ve lost their “only friend overnight” with the latest GPT-5 update, while other headlines suggest AI chatbots can even... We might be a long way away from sipping Pina Coladas on a beach while AI-powered humanoid robots...

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang at the China International Supply Chain Expo in Beijing in July. Photo via Getty

China Demands Companies to Halt Nvidia Chip Orders Over Security Concerns

By Qianer Liu · Aug 12, 2025 5:55am PDT

Just weeks after Nvidia reached a deal with President Trump allowing it to sell AI chips in China, the chipmaker has hit a new hurdle—Chinese authorities. China’s internet regulator in the past two weeks ordered local tech companies including ByteDance, Alibaba Group, and Tencent Holdings to suspend their purchases of Nvidia chips, citing... Just weeks after Nvidia reached a deal with President Trump allowing it to sell AI chips in...

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Creator Economy

Snap’s Ad Slowdown Overshadows Video Gains

By Kaya Yurieff · Aug 5, 2025 3:31pm PDT

Snap’s bleak second-quarter results were a letdown after a parade of upbeat reports from Meta Platforms, YouTube and Reddit. The Snapchat owner’s revenue rose 9% to nearly $1.35 billion during the second quarter, a slowdown from the 14% to 15% growth Snap saw in recent quarters. Snap’s bleak second-quarter results were a letdown after a parade of upbeat reports from Meta...

Art by Mike Sullivan

The Whiz-Bang AI That Hollywood Hates

By Abram Brown · Aug 2, 2025 7:00am PDT

Art by Mike Sullivan

The Whiz-Bang AI That Hollywood Hates

By Abram Brown · Aug 2, 2025 7:00am PDT

Welcome, Weekenders! In this newsletter:• The Big Read: Microplastics are Silicon Valley’s new big worry• Media: Beehiiv, the next billion-dollar newsletter startup?• Plus, our Recommendations: “Camp Shame,” “Algospeak” and “KPop Demon Hunters”Leave it to Las Vegas to stir up tensions between Hollywood and Silicon Valley. The Sphere, the orblike... Welcome, Weekenders! In this newsletter:• The Big Read: Microplastics are Silicon Valley’s new...