PayPal finally addressed the $53bn offer sitting on its table. Its answer was: not at that price. The company gave its first public response on Tuesday’s Q2 earnings call, alongside a beat. Chief executive Enrique Lores would not comment on Stripe and …
Fish Audio, a Palo Alto voice-AI startup, has raised $52m in a round it still calls a seed, first reported by TechCrunch. It arrives at a company with an unusual shape. It gives its best models away, and charges for the wiring around them. The startup …
Apple has a new answer to the complaint that its products cost too much. Do not buy them. Lease them. On Tuesday the company launched Apple Upgrade in the US, a leasing programme run by the buy-now-pay-later firm Klarna. It covers the iPhone, Apple Wat…
Richard Socher’s new AI lab has just made an unusual bet with its money. Recursive has committed about $410m to a single, multi-year cloud contract with Amazon Web Services. That is roughly two-thirds of everything it has raised. The company left steal…
Visa is cutting about 2,600 jobs, roughly 7% of its staff, and it is cutting them mostly from the teams that build its technology. The money it saves is going into the payment methods that could one day make those rails matter less. The payments networ…
More than a thousand of the people building the most powerful AI want a way to slow it down. On Tuesday, 1,134 employees of the leading AI companies signed a letter asking the US government to help build one. The statement is titled Pacing the Frontier…
Google built one of the world’s largest companies by scraping the entire web without asking permission first. This week a court told Google it cannot stop others from scraping Google. On 20 July, a federal judge dismissed Google’s lawsuit against SerpA…
Andrew Ng helped give the AI industry its vocabulary, from “AI is the new electricity” to “agentic AI.” His new company bets against the phrase everyone else is using: that AI will take your job. Ng has founded LearnVector, an AI-native learning startu…
Starbucks told NomadGo on 3 April that it was scrapping the AI inventory tool the Redmond startup had built for it. Within days the 30-person company cut a large part of its workforce, according to GeekWire. The cuts included the technical team that ra…
AI-discovered vulnerabilities are arriving at roughly twice last year’s rate. Almost none of them are being exploited. The US National Vulnerabilities Database recorded 45,207 software flaws between January and 27 July, already approaching the whole of…