The Information — AI
351 articles archived · Visit source ↗ · RSS
-
The Information — AI news-outlet 1mo ago
SpaceX Reveals Up to $40 Billion Anthropic Deal—With a Catch
SpaceX’s long-awaited public offering paperwork revealed fresh details about its unlikely partnership with Anthropic that are representative of the overall IPO story for Elon Musk’s company: Enormous potential, with risks everywhere. The company said Anthropic agreed to pay…
34 -
Intuit Lays Off 17% of Staff as Revenue Growth Sinks to Lowest Level Since 2024
Intuit shares dropped around 14% in extended trading on Wednesday as the maker of QuickBooks and TurboTax reported revenue growth dipping to its slowest pace since 2024. Revenue in the fiscal third quarter, which ended April 30, climbed 10% from the previous year to $8.6…
19 -
Nvidia Projects 95% Sales Growth in the Current Quarter, Its Fourth Consecutive Increase
Nvidia’s revenue grew 85% to $81.6 billion in the three months that ended April 26, the company said Wednesday. That’s 12 percentage points higher than the blistering growth the AI chip designer reported in the January quarter. It also projected revenue would grow 95% in the…
22 -
Mercury Hits $5.2 Billion Valuation After Funding Round
Fintech startup Mercury said it raised $200 million at a $5.2 billion valuation shortly after receiving conditional approval from regulators for a bank license. The neobank, led by CEO and co-founder Immad Akhund, drew investment from TCV and existing venture firms such as…
6 -
White House Briefs AI Companies on Plan to Review Models Before Release
The White House’s Office of the National Cyber Director hosted a briefing Tuesday for companies including OpenAI , Anthropic and Reflection AI on a planned executive order on AI that will empower intelligence and other government agencies to review advanced models before the…
8 -
OpenAI Prepares to File for IPO in Coming Weeks
OpenAI is preparing to file for an initial public offering in the coming weeks, according to people familiar with the matter. The filing could potentially speed up the offering for the pioneer of conversational artificial intelligence, accelerating a race with rival Anthropic to…
9 -
Fintech Lenders are Still Learning the Hard Way
The recent bankruptcy of Parker, a corporate card startup that catered to e-commerce customers, is a good reminder that lending is one of the toughest ways to make money in fintech. Parker had been among the dwindling number of standalone, tech-heavy lenders geared toward small…
30 -
As Anthropic Costs Mount, Businesses Pressure Software Firms to Shorten Contracts
Businesses are spending more on Anthropic and other AI providers, and the additional budget has to come from somewhere. One natural target for cuts is other software. While businesses aren’t abandoning their enterprise applications outright, they’re putting themselves in a…
27 -
GitHub Says Hackers Breached Company Systems, Stole Data
Hackers broke into GitHub’s internal systems and stole data from thousands of its internal repositories, the Microsoft-owned company disclosed Tuesday night. While GitHub said it didn’t find any evidence that customer data was stolen, the hackers were able to access over 3,800…
34 -
James Murdoch Buys New York Magazine and Vox Podcasts
Vox Media is splitting in two and James Murdoch, son of media mogul Rupert Murdoch, is buying the half that owns New York magazine, Vox.com and the Vox podcast network, Vox announced. The rest of Vox, including websites Popsugar, SB Nation, The Dodo and The Verge, will become…
23 -
Google Pitches Its AI Coding Tools as the Cost-Effective Option
Google came into its flagship developer conference, Google I/O , on Tuesday with a big question to answer: Does it have a counter to Anthropic’s dominance in coding? The takeaway, after a sweltering day in Mountain View, Calif.: Google wants to redefine the competition. Google…
36 -
Starship Launch and IPO Filing Mark Critical Week for SpaceX
SpaceX’s draft prospectus, which could become public as soon as later on Wednesday, has prominently positioned a photograph of its Starship rocket, in the very early stages of liftoff, with bright orange flames emerging from its engines and smoke plumes underneath. The photo…
38 -
Meta Begins Cutting 8,000 Jobs
Meta Platforms has begun notifying thousands of employees that they are being laid off, as it embarks on its latest effort to cut costs and offset the heavy investment in artificial intelligence. Meta had said last month it would lay off about 8,000 people on Wednesday, about…
11 -
Alibaba Unveils New AI Chip as China Accelerates Adoption of Domestic Chips
Alibaba Group’s semiconductor design unit on Wednesday unveiled a new chip that can be used to train and run AI models. The move comes as the Chinese government pushes to accelerate the adoption of homegrown AI chips to reduce the country’s dependence on Nvidia. Alibaba said the…
16 -
Sam Altman Offers YC Founders $2 Million in OpenAI Tokens For Equity
OpenAI cofounder and CEO Sam Altman late Tuesday offered to invest $2 million in every startup currently in the Y Combinator startup accelerator program—not in cash, but in OpenAI tokens. “I am excited to see what will happen with tokenmaxxing startups, both for how they work…
13 -
Goldman Sachs to Lead SpaceX IPO
SpaceX tapped Goldman Sachs for the top role on its initial public offering next month, according to the Wall Street Journal. The “lead left” position would put Goldman in the driver’s seat for what will likely be the largest IPO ever. Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Citi and…
23 -
Investors Fall Back in Love With IPOs
For the past two days, I’ve been at JP Morgan’s annual tech conference in Boston. As usual, AI has dominated most of my conversations with investors. But in a change from the past few months, it’s not Anthropic and OpenAI driving those discussions—but hardware and utility…
31 -
Google’s AI Search Leap Forward
If you pay attention to one thing in AI this week, it should be Google’s I/O presentation on Tuesday. The tech giant unveiled a bunch of AI tools, most significantly the addition of new AI features such as agents to Google Search. Any distinction that existed between Google’s…
22 -
SpaceX to Acquire Cursor 30 Days After IPO
SpaceX and Cursor expect to proceed with their planned acquisition 30 days after SpaceX begins trading publicly, according to someone familiar with the matter. SpaceX is expected to go public in mid-June in the largest IPO in U.S. history. The Elon Musk-founded rockets-and-AI…
36 -
Google Unveils Expanded Lineup of AI Shopping Tools
Google unveiled an expanded lineup of AI shopping tools Tuesday at its annual I/O developer conference, including a “Universal Cart” that allows users to add products from multiple retailers and sites across multiple Google products including search, Gmail, Gemini and YouTube.…
19 -
Google DeepMind Hires Staff, Licenses Technology from Contextual AI
Google DeepMind agreed to pay between $80 million and $90 million to hire employees from AI agent startup Contextual AI and to license its technology, according to a person with knowledge of the deal. Douwe Kiela, Contextual’s cofounder and CEO, is expected to join DeepMind…
16 -
5 Charts That Make Sense of SpaceX’s IPO Numbers
SpaceX’s initial public offering prospectus will read like a kaleidoscope when it’s unveiled publicly in the coming days. There will be a dazzling mixture of storylines and figures that show huge financial losses, exciting promises, impressive growth and unmet expectations.…
32 -
Google Unveils New Video Model, Search Upgrades
Google on Tuesday announced a new video model, upgrades to search and a slightly streamlined coding agent offering at its annual conference. The Google I/O event is officially a developer conference, but in practice Google has also used it in recent years to showcase new…
18 -
SpaceX IPO Could Return More Than $60 Billion Each for Founders Fund, Valor
SpaceX’s initial public offering, expected to be the largest in history, is also set to yield the largest venture returns ever at the time of the IPO. Among those set to win big are Founders Fund, Valor Equity Partners and Sequoia Capital. Valor Equity Partners, whose founder…
12 -
How Microsoft, Meta, xAI Get AI Training Data From Their Employees
Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot may have lost much of its early lead in the AI coding race to rivals like Anthropic and Cursor, but Microsoft thinks it has an advantage over those companies: roughly 100,000 software engineers who work for Microsoft. As we reported Monday , Microsoft…
16 -
Andrej Karpathy Joins Anthropic
Andrej Karpathy, a founding member of OpenAI and the former director of AI at Tesla, is joining Anthropic, he posted on X on Tuesday. “I think the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative,” he wrote. The hire is a coup for Anthropic, given Karpathy’s…
37 -
Is the Gap Widening Between Anthropic and Open-Source Models?
Some developers have told me that the rising costs of frontier AI models from Anthropic and other firms could prompt them to shift to cheaper open-source AI. After all, when companies as sophisticated as Uber are accidentally blowing through their entire year’s AI budget in a…
8 -
Amazon’s Nvidia Alternative Starts Winning Over AI Developers
Amazon’s yearslong effort to build a serious alternative to Nvidia’s dominant AI chips is starting to gain traction. Anthropic and OpenAI, which have struck multibillion-dollar investment and infrastructure deals with Amazon, have already committed to renting large amounts of…
16 -
Analog Devices Near Deal to Buy AI Power Chip Startup for $1.5 Billion
Chipmaker Analog Devices is in advanced talks to buy startup Empower Semiconductor for about $1.5 billion, in a deal that reflects demand for technology that can manage the intense energy needs of AI chips, The Information reported Monday . A deal could be announced as soon as…
9 -
AMD CEO Lisa Su Meets With Chinese Vice Premier
Lisa Su, Chair and CEO of Advanced Micro Devices, met with Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng in Beijing on Monday, two days after U.S. President Donald Trump wrapped up his state visit to China. He, China’s No.1 official in charge of economy and trade, said multinational companies,…
15 -
Analog Devices in Talks to Buy AI Power Chip Startup for $1.5 Billion
Chipmaker Analog Devices is in advanced talks to buy startup Empower Semiconductor for about $1.5 billion, in a deal that reflects demand for technology that can manage the intense energy needs of AI chips, according to people familiar with the discussion. The acquisition of the…
13 -
Google and Blackstone to Create TPU Cloud Provider
Google and Blackstone are creating a cloud computing company that will rent out Google’s tensor processing units to artificial intelligence developers, according to a person with direct knowledge. Google has been pushing for many months to expand the reach of its TPUs, in an…
35 -
Meta Shifts Thousands of Workers to New AI Groups as Layoffs Loom
Meta Platforms is making broader organizational changes along with impending mass layoffs to better suit its structure to AI, a top executive told staff on Monday. The owner of Facebook and Instagram plans to detail cuts on Wednesday to about a tenth of its nearly 78,000…
14 -
Musk Loses in Court; Uber Buys More of Delivery Hero
Elon Musk’s big week isn’t starting out too well. Firstly, the all-important test launch of Starship got delayed by a day. Meanwhile, news broke that a worker died on Friday at SpaceX’s Starbase complex in Texas, where the rocket will launch. Separately, Musk on Monday lost the…
10 -
Seagate Stock Falls on CEO Comments Suggesting Manufacturing Pullback
Shares in Seagate Technology, which makes hard disk drives for data storage, fell 7% Monday after CEO William Mosley suggested the company was more focused on increasing capacity on its individual hard drives than “building new factories or bringing up new machines that would…
37 -
Anthropic Buys Developer Tools Startup Stainless
Anthropic announced on Monday that it has acquired developer tools startup Stainless, confirming an earlier report from The Information. The model maker did not disclose any terms of the deal, but The Information had previously reported it was in talks to acquire Stainless for…
29 -
Uber Spends $1.8 Billion Increasing Stake in Delivery Hero to 19.5%
Uber lifted its stake in Germany-based food delivery firm Delivery Hero to 19.5%, with options to go to 25%, a sign the ride-hailing and delivery firm may be contemplating expanding further in Europe. Uber told a German regulator it “currently…has no intent” of buying…
33 -
Musk Loses OpenAI Lawsuit in Victory for Altman
Jurors rejected Elon Musk’s claims against OpenAI , delivering a major victory to CEO Sam Altman in Silicon Valley’s biggest grudge match. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers agreed with the jury’s decision on Monday that Musk waited too long to bring his lawsuit. The decision came…
14 -
Musk Loses OpenAI Lawsuit
Jurors rejected Elon Musk’s claims against OpenAI, delivering a major victory to CEO Sam Altman in Silicon Valley’s biggest grudge match. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers agreed with the jury’s decision. The nine-member jury’s decision on Monday, following three weeks of testimony…
34 -
The ‘Price is Right’ for GPUs: The Startup Turning Nvidia Chips Into ‘Boring’ Bankable Assets
Good morning, Anissa here! The AI boom requires an enormous amount of new power plants, chips and data centers. But it also requires something that’s less visible: new financial plumbing that makes it possible to lend against this costly hardware. Miami fintech startup Barkr is…
38 -
Edge Inference Chip Startup SiMa.ai Raising at $1.4 Billion Valuation
Nvidia might be on a tear, but some investors are still convinced that there’s demand for another kind of specialized chips. And they’re putting their money where their mouth is. For example: San Jose, Calif.-based SiMa.ai , which develops chips that work on devices such as…
14 -
Microsoft Executives Sound the Alarm Over GitHub’s Eroding AI Lead
No part of Microsoft better illustrates its predicament in AI than GitHub. The AI boom has boosted usage and revenue of the code repository as well as GitHub Copilot, an AI coding assistant. But GitHub has struggled to respond to new AI coding competitors that have since…
34 -
Lenovo’s Internal Memo Shows Uncertainty for Nvidia’s H200 Sales in China
Chinese personal computer and server maker Lenovo Group said in an internal memo to staff last week that there have been no new licenses or policies regarding Nvidia’s H200 chips since March, when Washington approved the sales of the chips to some Chinese companies. Last week,…
18 -
Shein Buys Everlane
Everlane, a San Francisco-based startup that soared during the last decade’s e-commerce boom, will sell itself to Shein, a Chinese discount e-retail giant. The deal values Everlane at $100 million, a far cry from the valuations that it once received at its height. Everlane was…
38 -
SpaceX Launch, Google I/O Headline a Big News Week in Tech
This should be an action-packed week in tech news, what with Nvidia’s first-quarter earnings, Google’s annual I/O developer conference and Meta Platforms’ scheduled layoffs of 8,000 employees. But it is Elon Musk who has the biggest week coming up. For one thing, the first test…
18 -
Gates Foundation Sells Remaining Microsoft Stake
Bill Gates’ charitable trust has sold all of its Microsoft stock and no longer owns any shares in the company, it disclosed Friday. The Gates Foundation Trust reported that it had sold around $3 billion worth of Microsoft stock in the first quarter of 2026. Gates, who is the…
32 -
Anthropic and OpenAI’s Share of AI Startup Revenues Rises to 89%
Anthropic and OpenAI are widening the revenue gap between themselves and the rest of the AI startup field. A group of 34 leading startups in that sector, including Anthropic and OpenAI, is generating nearly $80 billion in annualized revenue, or $6.6 billion per month, from…
34 -
BlackRock Weighs Multibillion-Dollar Investment in SpaceX IPO
BlackRock has discussed investing $5 billion to $10 billion in SpaceX’s initial public offering next month, people familiar with the matter said. The massive order, for an offering that could raise as much as $75 billion, would represent a vote of confidence in Elon Musk’s…
4 -
OpenAI Buys AI Voice Startup Weights
OpenAI bought Weights.GG, a small startup that made an AI voice-cloning tool called Replay, in January, according to a person familiar with the acquisition. A half dozen employees joined OpenAI, which bought the startup’s intellectual property but does not plan to integrate the…
36 -
San Francisco’s Robo-Fight Club, General Catalyst’s Divisive Virality
Welcome, Weekenders! In this newsletter: • The Big Read: Why Trump officials and VCs love a nuclear power startup’s brute-force approach • Biotech: The case of the disappearing embryo startups • Plus, Recommendations—our weekly pop culture picks: “ Are We Doomed? ” “ Steve Jobs…
26