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By Stephanie Palazzolo

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Recent Editions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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....

Photo via Getty

What’s Helping Perplexity’s 60% Gross Profit Margin

By Laura Mandaro and Sri Muppidi · May 19, 2025 7:31am PDT

Earlier today we published a deep dive on Perplexity’s financials. The three-year-old startup’s AI powered search engine has made it one of the most highly valued and fastest growing AI startups. Supporting that growth is expensive. As a sign of its growing popularity, the number of questions people have asked the search engine increased... Earlier today we published a deep dive on Perplexity’s financials. The three-year-old startup’s...

Photo courtesy of K-Scale Labs

The Open-Source Robotics Startup That Caught OpenAI’s Eye

By Rocket Drew · May 15, 2025 7:15am PDT

Photo courtesy of K-Scale Labs

The Open-Source Robotics Startup That Caught OpenAI’s Eye

By Rocket Drew · May 15, 2025 7:15am PDT

In the last year, dozens of new robotics startups have launched. One of them, a recent graduate of the Y Combinator accelerator, is trying to distinguish itself by developing open-source AI models and other software for the humanoid robots it plans to sell, an increasingly popular approach in the sector. The proposition has attracted... In the last year, dozens of new robotics startups have launched. One of them, a recent graduate...

Dario Amodei. Photo by Getty

Anthropic’s Upcoming Models Will Think… And Think Some More

By Stephanie Palazzolo · May 14, 2025 7:00am PDT · 1 comment

The race to develop reasoning models that “think” harder is at full force. At Anthropic, which arrived later than OpenAI and Google to the reasoning race, two upcoming models are taking the concept of “thinking” to the extreme.Anthropic has new versions of its two largest models—Claude Sonnet and Claude Opus—set to come out in the upcoming... The race to develop reasoning models that “think” harder is at full force. At Anthropic, which...

Photo via Shutterstock

Google’s ‘Always-On’ Coding Agent Is Coming. Where Is OpenAI’s?

By Stephanie Palazzolo · May 13, 2025 7:00am PDT

AI coding assistants today have saved software engineers lots of time. The CEOs of Amazon, Google and many others can’t stop talking about it during their earnings calls.But even the most popular AI coding tools today often work side-by-side with human engineers and require a lot of prompting and hand-holding.That’s about to change.Google, for... AI coding assistants today have saved software engineers lots of time. The CEOs of Amazon, Google...

Sam Altman. Photo by Getty

Altman On Dyson Spheres, Colonizing the ‘Light Cone’

By Amir Efrati · May 12, 2025 11:04am PDT

By hiring Instacart CEO Fidji Simo to manage OpenAI’s business, CEO Sam Altman can focus on his primary ambition: attaining artificial superintelligence. The term refers to technology that would help humans solve fundamental scientific challenges around energy and physics to become multiplanetary, colonizing other planets and eventually other... By hiring Instacart CEO Fidji Simo to manage OpenAI’s business, CEO Sam Altman can focus on his...

Robotic arms harvesting crops inside a greenhouse. Photo by Getty.

OpenAI’s Big Hire; Farming Robots Seed New Startups, Despite Setbacks

By Rocket Drew · May 8, 2025 7:42am PDT

Robotic arms harvesting crops inside a greenhouse. Photo by Getty.

OpenAI’s Big Hire; Farming Robots Seed New Startups, Despite Setbacks

By Rocket Drew · May 8, 2025 7:42am PDT

Before we get into today’s column, OpenAI late Wednesday evening announced the hire of Fidji Simo, currently the Instacart CEO and a member of OpenAI’s board, in the newly created position of CEO of OpenAI Applications, to run “the product, business, and other company functions,” reporting to CEO Sam Altman. (My colleagues Jessica Lessin and... Before we get into today’s column, OpenAI late Wednesday evening announced the hire of Fidji Simo...