The Information: Sources: Ramp is in talks to raise $350M led by Iconiq at a ~$21B valuation, after raising $200M at a $16B valuation in June — Ramp, a six-year-old corporate card and expense management startup, is in discussions with investors to raise $350 million at a valuation of about $21 billion with the investment …
Stephanie Palazzolo / The Information: Sources: GPT-5 shows improved performance in coding, particularly in practical software engineering tasks, outperforming prior OpenAI models and Claude Sonnet 4 — GPT-5 is almost here, and we're hearing good things. The early reaction from at least one person who's used the unreleased version was extremely positive.
The Information: Sources: the number of Optimus humanoid robots Tesla has made this year is in the hundreds, well behind the pace needed to meet Musk's goal of producing 5K+ — Elon Musk says humanoid robots will be the future of Tesla. The company has a long way to go. — Tesla is well behind …
Qianer Liu / The Information: Sources: after Trump let Nvidia resume H20 chip sales to China, Nvidia told Chinese customers it has limited stocks and doesn't plan to restart production — President Donald Trump's recent decision allowing Nvidia to resume sales of the H20 artificial intelligence chips to China sent its Chinese customers …
The Information: Sources: OpenAI and Windsurf talks ended after Windsurf raised concerns over how its tech would fit into OpenAI's agreement to share tech with Microsoft — OpenAI's discussions to buy Windsurf, the maker of a popular artificial intelligence coding assistant formerly known as Codeium, have ended.
Catherine Perloff / The Information: Sources: Google told publishers it is hiring new staff to market its ad tech to big advertisers and ad agencies, signaling a renewed focus on publisher ad tech — Google's relations with publishers have suffered lately, as its shift to AI-powered searches has hurt traffic being sent to publishers' web sites.
The Information: Sources: mass production of Microsoft's next AI chip is delayed to 2026 and is expected to underperform Nvidia's Blackwell chip, released in late 2024 — Microsoft has spent years designing its own artificial intelligence chips, in part to reduce its dependence on Nvidia. It isn't going so well.
The Information: Sources: DeepSeek's highly anticipated R2 model faces delays due to a shortage of Nvidia server chips in China, exacerbated by the US ban of Nvidia's H20 chips — The latest round of U.S. chip export controls may have curbed DeepSeek's rise, at least for now.
Sahil Patel / The Information: Sources: Google reduces its Google TV and Android TV budget by 10% and cuts Android TV and Google TV's ~300 employees by up to 25%, as it focuses on YouTube — Google has cut its smart TV budget and trimmed its team—marking the most concrete signs yet of the company's waning interest competing …
Natasha Mascarenhas / The Information: Current and former employees of OpenAI have sold nearly $3B worth of shares in tender offers since 2021, with $1.5B+ going to SoftBank alone — My colleague Sri Muppidi broke the news Wednesday of OpenAI's latest fundraising talks as it seeks to raise an unprecedented $40 billion.
Cory Weinberg / The Information: Source: Chime's IPO is expected to price at ~$11B, down from its $25B private valuation in 2021; every VC-backed IPO in the past 12 months has been a down round — When banking app Chime goes public next month, it will mark the eighth straight venture capital-backed initial public offering …
The Information: Sources on how Apple declined a deal from Elon Musk to use SpaceX instead of Globalstar for its iOS SOS feature and its 2015 plans to build satellite internet — Three years ago, Elon Musk approached Apple with an eleventh-hour offer. — Musk had heard that Apple was about to announce …
Cory Weinberg / The Information: Chime's S-1: MyPay revenue totaled $64.3M in Q1 vs. estimated credit losses from the product of $57.3M, highlighting the risks with the paycheck advance product — Last summer, banking app Chime introduced a lending product that let customers borrow small amounts to get them through to their next paycheck.
Qianer Liu / The Information: Sources: Chinese officials recently told some top local tech companies that the government will be more active in overseeing their AI data centers and AI chips — Chinese officials in the past two months told some of the country's top technology companies that the government …
Erin Woo / The Information: Sources: ahead of I/O on May 20, Google is developing an AI “software development lifecycle agent” to help coders, and a Pinterest-like feature for consumers — After weeks of news about Google's antitrust travails, the tech giant will try to reset the narrative next week …
Stephanie Palazzolo / The Information: Source: Anthropic offers to buy back shares from current and former employees, the first transaction of its kind for Anthropic, valuing the startup at $61.5B — Anthropic is offering to buy back shares from hundreds of current and former employees, the first transaction of its kind for the four-year-old company.
Qianer Liu / The Information: Sources: Nvidia told ByteDance, Alibaba, Tencent, and others that it is tweaking its AI chips so they can be sold in China without breaching US export rules — The U.S. government is steadily tightening the noose on Nvidia's sales to China. But the AI chip giant isn't giving up on the market.
Sri Muppidi / The Information: Sales data: AI evaluation startups have modest revenue; Weights & Biases hit $50M ARR by Dec. 2024, but only 2% of that was from its AI evaluation product Weave — Startups whose products evaluate artificial intelligence to make sure it isn't making things up or delivering unsafe results …
Erin Woo / The Information: A look at Google's efforts to improve Search with AI; sources: its leaders have struggled to articulate a vision for how they want Search features to evolve — Next week, a federal judge will start the process of determining how to fix Google's search engine, which he ruled last summer was an illegal monopoly.
The Information: Sources: Meta asked Microsoft, Amazon, and others over the past year to fund Llama training costs in exchange for incentives, as part of a “Llama Consortium” — Meta Platforms over the past year asked Microsoft, Amazon and others to help pay the costs of training Meta's flagship …
Sri Muppidi / The Information: Sources: enterprise AI search startup Glean is in talks to raise hundreds of millions, including money to buy employee shares, at an estimated ~$7B valuation — Glean, a developer of search chatbots for businesses, is in talks with investors to potentially raise hundreds of millions of dollars …
Kalley Huang / The Information: Sources: Meta aims to release Llama 4 later this month after pushing back its release date at least twice due to underperformance in reasoning and math tasks — Last spring, Meta Platforms was on a tear. It had just released Llama 3, a new generation of its large language model …
The Information: Source: Nvidia is in advanced talks to acquire Lepton AI, which rents Nvidia GPU servers, for several hundred million dollars; Lepton raised $11M in 2023 — Nvidia is in advanced talks to buy Lepton AI, a two-year-old startup that rents out servers powered by Nvidia's artificial intelligence chips …
The Information: Sources: OpenAI has spoken with Reliance about a potential product and sales partnership in India; Meta also plans to work with Reliance on new AI businesses — OpenAI executives in recent months have spoken multiple times with their counterparts at Reliance Industries …
Paris Martineau / The Information: Source: US Senators Dick Durbin and Lindsey Graham plan to introduce a bipartisan bill with wide support that would make Section 230 expire on January 1, 2027 — In June 1995, two young congressmen reached across the aisle to introduce legislation that would become the defining legal protection …
Wayne Ma / The Information: Sources: Apple TV+ is losing $1B+ annually even as its subscriptions grew to ~45M in 2024; one source says Apple has spent $5B+ on content since its 2019 launch — Last year, Apple CEO Tim Cook had questions about several pricey movie deals executives of Apple TV+, the company's video-streaming service …
Qianer Liu / The Information: Sources: Google plans to partner with Taiwanese chipmaker MediaTek on its next-gen TPUs, set for 2026, but will still work with Broadcom — Google plans to work with a new firm to help design and produce some of its artificial intelligence chips: MediaTek.
Anissa Gardizy / The Information: Crusoe, a startup helping build the first data center for Stargate, says it secured a deal with a gas turbine owner to generate 4.5 gigawatts of energy by 2027 — An Nvidia-backed startup building a massive data center for OpenAI has gained access to one of the largest new power sources for data centers in the U.S.
Abram Brown / The Information: How Anthropic monitoring its AI models playing Pokémon games is helping the startup's researchers hone their thinking around the development of its agentic tech — Welcome, Weekenders! In this newsletter: — • The Big Read: Why Runway thinks it can outrun OpenAI and Google
The Information: Source: SoftBank plans to borrow $16B to invest in AI, and might borrow another $8B in early 2026, which could strain its already debt-heavy balance sheet — The biggest risk-taker in tech investing is back to his old playbook, loading up on debt to fund his latest obsession: artificial intelligence.
The Information: Sources: Anthropic expects to burn $3B in 2025, down from $5.6B in 2024, and make up to $3.7B in revenue in 2025, as it seeks to catch up with OpenAI — After burning $5.6 billion in cash last year, Anthropic said it would reduce that amount by nearly half in 2025 and projected up to $3.7 billion …
The Information: OpenAI told some shareholders ChatGPT had 15.5M paid subscribers in 2024, up from 5.8M in 2023, and usage of OpenAI's API increased seven times — Paid subscribers to ChatGPT nearly tripled to 15.5 million last year from 5.8 million a year earlier, OpenAI recently told some shareholders …
The Information: Sources: Meta set up four war rooms to analyze DeepSeek's tech, two focusing on how High-Flyer cut training costs and one on what data High-Flyer may have used — Artificial intelligence researchers at Meta Platforms have been in panic mode. In recent days, leaders of some of the company's …
The Information: Source: Meta is offering creators with large TikTok followings bonuses ranging from $10K to $50K per month to post on Instagram Reels before other platforms — Instagram isn't letting a good TikTok crisis go to waste. — Representatives for the Meta Platforms-owned app in the last week …
The Information: Email: NYC-based Level, which raised a $27M Series A in 2021 to help companies offer staff benefits, shuts down after an effort to sell the company fell through — Benefits startup Level has told its clients that it is shutting down after an effort to sell the company fell through …
The Information: Source: ByteDance keeps using a loophole for US chip sanctions and told suppliers it planned to spend up to $7B to access Nvidia chips outside China in 2025 — ByteDance continues to use Nvidia's most advanced artificial intelligence chips despite U.S. efforts to block Chinese companies from using them.
Stephanie Palazzolo / The Information: An undisclosed 2023 agreement between Microsoft and OpenAI defines achieving AGI as the point when OpenAI develops AI systems that generate $100B+ in profits — Finally, a verifiable, numbers-based description of artificial general intelligence has arrived!
The Information: Source: Microsoft and OpenAI wrangle over Microsoft's stake in the for-profit entity, use of OpenAI's IP, continued collection of 20% of OpenAI's revenue, more — OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wants to convert the artificial intelligence developer, which is governed by a nonprofit, into a for-profit corporation.
The Information: A look at OpenAI's interest in robotics, from investing in startups like Figure and Physical Intelligence to, sources say, considering making a humanoid robot — Over the past year, OpenAI has dropped not-so-subtle hints about its revived interest in robotics: investing in startups developing hardware …
The Information: Two major China-based Amazon merchants say Amazon reps have recently been offering incentives like free ads and lower commissions if they stop selling on Temu — For popular China-based Amazon merchants, bargain site Temu has been an attractive new place to sell their wares.
The Information: Sources detail Anthropic and OpenAI's rivalry: OpenAI boosted ChatGPT's coding skills in response to Claude, Anthropic's safety focus, exec bad blood, and more — OpenAI has a lot of rivals nipping at its heels. None of them has given the company's executives the jitters quite like Anthropic has, though.
The Information: Sources: ByteDance execs fear that launching its own AI models, or apps powered by the models, in the US could give lawmakers another excuse to attack TikTok — TikTok owner ByteDance, whose artificial intelligence chatbot is a major hit in China, wants to compete worldwide in generative AI.
The Information: Source: Amazon's new generative AI model, codenamed Olympus, can process images, video, and text, and could be unveiled at next week's AWS re:Invent — Amazon has developed new generative artificial intelligence that can process images and video in addition to text, according to a person …
The Information: Sources: OpenAI considered making a browser, discussed deals to power AI features on Samsung devices and search on sites and apps from Condé Nast and others — OpenAI is preparing to launch a frontal assault on Google. — The ChatGPT owner recently considered developing a web browser …
The Information: Sources: the jump in quality from GPT-4 to Orion is far smaller than the jump from GPT-3 to GPT-4; Orion may not outperform predecessors in tasks like coding — The number of people using ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence products is soaring. The rate of improvement …
Anissa Gardizy / The Information: Source: Amazon is discussing a second multibillion-dollar investment in Anthropic, but wants Anthropic to use a large number of servers powered by Amazon chips — Amazon is discussing making a second multibillion-dollar investment in OpenAI rival Anthropic, according to a person involved in the discussions.
Martin Peers / The Information: A ~12% stock rally on November 5 lifted Reddit's market cap to $21.5B, making Reddit more valuable than Snap, which has 4x as many users and 4x as much revenue — You're likely distracted right now by election results, which have surely started rolling in as you're reading.
The Information: CoreWeave told investors its signed contracts are worth $17B, including $10B by Microsoft from 2023 to 2030, and it expects revenue to grow 4x to $8B in 2025 — CoreWeave, a fast-growing cloud startup that operates data centers for artificial intelligence developers, pitches itself to investors …
Wayne Ma / The Information: Sources: in a first, Apple is using an Indian factory to do the early manufacturing work for the base model of the iPhone 17; the iPhone 17 Pro remains in China — When Apple CEO Tim Cook visited China last week, he pledged to government officials that the company would continue to increase …
Erin Woo / The Information: Sources: Google plans to preview an AI product codenamed Jarvis, which takes over a user's web browser to complete tasks like booking a flight, in December — Google is developing artificial intelligence that takes over a person's web browser to complete tasks such as gathering research …