In Person
Companies deployed AI to screen candidates. Candidates deployed AI to pass the screens. The arms race destroyed the signal. Now L'Oréal, Google, Cisco, and McKinsey are returning to the most analog assessment of all: meeting people in a room.
Paris-based AI startup Mistral raised $830M in its debut debt financing to build Nvidia-powered data centers across Europe; Mistral plans to spend €4B in total
French company's debut debt financing follows rising demand for alternatives to US groups
Microsoft rolls out Copilot Cowork to its Frontier program for early-stage testing, including a new Researcher Critique tool using Anthropic and OpenAI models
Try Microsoft 365 Copilot — Available on desktop and mobile devices — Microsoft 365 Copilot is your AI for work.
Sources: US prosecutors are exploring whether some prediction market bets, including on the capture of Nicolás Maduro, violated insider trading and other laws
Federal prosecutors in Manhattan are exploring whether certain lucrative bets placed on prediction markets …
Meta is testing an Instagram Plus subscription in a few countries, offering features including anonymous Story viewing and extended 48-hour Story durations
Meta has begun testing a premium subscription on Instagram in a few countries, the company confirmed to TechCrunch on Monday.
Inside the rise and fall of OpenAI's Sora, which worked apart from OpenAI's research team, as the company shuts down Sora and redirects compute to other tasks
When Sam Altman arrived in Los Angeles to attend Vanity Fair's Oscar afterparty earlier this month, his company was just weeks away …
Gurman: Apple pulls Apple Intelligence in China, after accidentally launching it in the country; there is no imminent launch as Apple has no regulatory approval
Apple Intelligence first launched in the US in October 2024, but now after a nearly 18-month wait, Apple's AI features appear to be rolling out in China too.
A Delaware judge reassigns Elon Musk cases over “disproportionate media attention” after allegations she “liked” a LinkedIn post celebrating a Musk legal defeat
Chancellor Kathaleen McCormick denies bias but cites media glare as risk to justice
AI chip startup Rebellions raised $400M in a pre-IPO round at a $2.34B valuation, bringing its total funding to $850M, with $650M in the past six months
Fresh off a successful Series C funding round in November, the South Korean fabless AI chip startup Rebellions has raised an additional $400 million.
Alibaba releases its Qwen3.5-Omni omnimodal LLM with support for 10+ hours of audio input, saying the Plus variant surpasses Gemini 3.1 Pro on audio benchmarks
Qwen3.5-Omni is Qwen's latest generation of fully omnimodal LLM, supporting the understanding of text, images, audio, and audio-visual content.
Match Group agrees to settle an FTC lawsuit claiming it illegally shared user data from the OkCupid app with facial recognition tech company Clarifai in 2014
Match Group (MTCH.O) settled a U.S. Federal Trade Commission lawsuit accusing it of giving an outside company access to personal data …
OpenAI introduces a Codex plugin for Claude Code, letting users invoke Codex from inside Claude Code to review code or delegate tasks
If you already use Claude Code, this Codex plugin gives you a simple way to pull Codex into the same workflow. It is useful for three things …
Uber agrees to acquire Berlin-based chauffeur booking app Blacklane for an undisclosed sum to bolster its Uber Elite service, set to close by the end of 2026
Uber Technologies Inc. has acquired the chauffeur booking app Blacklane, the company's latest move to court a high-end clientele.
Levels.fyi: median base-salary offers for US software engineers at VC-backed startups have risen 25% to $200K since 2022; total compensation has risen just 18%
Young tech companies once might have complemented lower salaries with generous equity packages. Now they're upping base pay.
Leaked January presentation: Coatue estimated that Anthropic would lose $14B in EBITDA on $18B in revenue in 2026 and reach a $1.995T valuation in 2030
We talk about it & more on the Cerebral Valley Show — In a presentation to prospective investors in January, Coatue offered a rare look …
Quinnipiac poll: 55% of Americans say AI will do more harm than good in their day-to-day lives, and 65% oppose building data centers in their community
Americans are increasingly turning against artificial intelligence, with growing majorities saying they fear the fast-moving technology …
After Copilot injected an ad into a pull request on GitHub, referencing Raycast, GitHub says it “disabled product tips entirely thanks to the feedback”
Over 11,000 pull requests have been spotted with the same “tips” injected into descriptions.
Chinese photonic chipmaker Yuanjie reports 2025 revenue up 138.5% YoY to ~$87M and data center revenue up 719% to ~$56.9M, ahead of its April 1 Hong Kong IPO
Yuanjie Semiconductor Technology, a Chinese maker of laser chips for optical communications, has emerged as one of the mainland …
Examining the Smartphone Theory of Everything, which blames phones for anxiety, populism, and polarization, despite harms being concentrated in the Anglosphere
Many people believe that the nexus of smartphones, Internet, and social media is to blame for every modern catastrophe.
Space data center startup Starcloud raised a $170M Series A led by Benchmark and EQT at a $1.1B valuation, and plans to launch Starcloud 2 later in 2026
Starcloud's latest funding round values the space compute company at $1.1 billion, making it one of the fastest startups to reach unicorn status after graduating from Y Combinator.
Some thoughts about companies and people in San Francisco adapting to AI workflows, AI's sycophancy, “cognitive offloading” and “cognitive surrender”, and more
In his classic book “Understanding Media,” Marshall McLuhan dwells on the Greek myth of Narcissus.
Fermi shares drop 12%+ after the data center real estate company reported a $486M YTD net loss, amid concerns over a lack of a tenant for its Texas data center
Data centre property group faces investor concerns around lack of tenant revenue — Shares in data centre real estate group Fermi plunged …
A look at Pretext, a new JS library that solves the problem of calculating multi-line text height without touching the DOM, enabling highly dynamic layouts
Pretext solves the problem of calculating the height of a paragraph of line-wrapped text without touching the DOM.
Valinor, which aims to use smart contracts to replace manual lending processes in the private credit industry, raised a $25M seed led by Castle Island Ventures
Many corners of finance—stock exchanges, banks, and payments firms—are embracing digital assets, but the private credit industry …
State of AI safety: as capabilities grow and models can monitor other models, issues like adversarial robustness persist and society is still not ready for AI
Here is a quick overview of my intuitions on where we are with AI safety in early 2026: — So far, we continue to see exponential improvements in capabilities.
Tel Aviv-based Sett, which builds AI agents to automate game marketing, raised a $30M Series B led by Greenfield Partners, bringing its total funding to $57M
The Israeli startup targets billions spent on user acquisition with agent-based automation. — Sett, which develops …
OpenAI's ChatGPT app store has 300+ app integrations six months after launch, but developers say adoption is sluggish and the apps offer limited functionality
Six months in, ChatGPT's third-party apps offer limited functionality and have been frustrating for developers.
PwC: 76 mainland Chinese companies listed on Hong Kong Stock Exchange in 2025, up from 30 in 2024, despite the city's waning appeal to international investors
In a hotel lobby on Hong Kong Island, a delivery robot pauses outside one of the lifts as the doors open, and a guest steps out.
Hong Kong-listed AI drug discovery company Insilico Medicine and Eli Lilly sign a drug co-development deal worth up to $2.75B, with $115M in upfront payments
A look at why Dotcom Bubble comparisons to the AI boom are off, vertical SaaS is up +3% last 12 months vs. horizontal SaaS down 35%, and other reflections on AI
Sources: E*Trade is in talks to lead SpaceX IPO share sale to retail investors; Robinhood and SoFi have pitched for roles but SpaceX is mulling cutting them out
Morgan Stanley's E*Trade is in talks with SpaceX to take the lead in selling the rocket maker's shares to everyday U.S. investors …
An AI-generated TikTok parody of reality series Love Island, called Fruit Love Island, averaged 10M+ views across its first 21 episodes after debuting last week
Sycamore, founded by former Atlassian CTO Sri Viswanath to let enterprises build, deploy, and monitor AI agents, raised a $65M seed led by Coatue and Lightspeed
Sycamore, an agentic AI operating system founded by former Atlassian CTO Sri Viswanath, raised $65 million in seed funding led by Coatue and Lightspeed.
Q&A with YouTube CEO Neal Mohan on the platform's dominance, its impact on kids, the suspension and reinstatement of Trump's YouTube account, AI slop, and more
ScaleOps, which makes automated cloud spend tools, raised a $130M Series C led by Insight Partners at an $800M+ valuation, bringing its total funding to $210M+
A study finds ~$143M in suspicious profits on Polymarket over two years, using patterns consistent with the use of nonpublic info, as prediction markets boom
Early last Monday, a burst of concentrated trades set off a week in which Wall Street and Washington were abuzz about the possibility …
Analysis: while social media rewards sensationalism and inflammatory content, LLMs guide people away from extreme positions and towards expert-aligned stances
New York-based Qodo, which offers AI agents for code review, testing, and governance, raised a $70M Series B led by Qumra, taking its total funding to $120M
As AI coding tools generate billions of lines of code each month, a new bottleneck is emerging: ensuring that software works as intended.
Vinod Khosla says AI is accelerating a shift of wealth and power away from workers, and an income tax overhaul in the US could offset voter fears about job loss
Finnish startup IQM Quantum Computers raised €50M from BlackRock to accelerate its global growth, ahead of a planned dual US and Helsinki IPO later in 2026
IQM Quantum Computers has secured 50 million euros ($57.64 million) in venture financing from funds and accounts managed …
London-based money transfer company Wise plans to launch UK bank accounts, joining an increasingly crowded market; Monzo reports 15M personal and business users
Wise Plc is rolling out everyday bank accounts in the UK as it seeks to take up more market share from longtime banks and other fintechs.
How Google DeepMind Chief Scientist Jeff Dean has been an outspoken voice on politics, a rare tech leader openly criticizing Trump actions and an ICE shooting
AI pioneer Jeff Dean is a rare tech leader publicly criticizing Trump administration actions — At a moment when much of the tech industry …
Some schools in North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, and Michigan are reevaluating classroom tech usage, including Chromebooks, amid student screen time concerns
No more YouTube or video games on school laptops. Textbooks and pencils are back. Some seventh graders say they prefer learning offline.
Q&A with NYU professor Julian Togelius on his recent paper about LLMs' limitations in playing video games, why coding is a kind of well-designed game, and more
AI models code simple games, but struggle to play them — Large language models (LLMs) have improved so quickly …
Amazon MGM's Project Hail Mary becomes its highest-grossing film ever, crossing $300M globally, including $54.1M just this weekend; the movie cost $200M to make
“Project Hail Mary” is officially Amazon MGM's highest-grossing film ever. — The space odyssey has grossed $300.8 million globally …
Bluesky CEO Toni Schneider talks about Attie, a new agentic social app built on Bluesky's AT Protocol that uses Claude and lets users build custom feeds
The team from Bluesky has built another app — and this time, it's not a social network, but an AI assistant that allows you to design …
AI has led some employers like L'Oréal to return to in-person assessments during recruiting, as senior HR leaders see a steep rise in AI-generated applications
Employers wading through job applications are returning to in-person and practical assessments
A look at Amazon's major push into rural US areas, including building 24-hour delivery distribution centers in recent years, encroaching on Walmart's territory
The turf war between the two retail giants is playing out in towns across the country. — When the blue Amazon box truck rolled …
DeepSeek's chatbot suffered a major outage of over seven hours in China, its biggest outage since debut in 2025 and an unusual downtime for a globally used app
DeepSeek's chatbot suffered a major outage of more than seven hours overnight in China, forcing the AI pioneer to deploy several updates to rectify the issue.
A look at Coinbase One and other insurance-like plans for crypto users that typically exclude coverage for many kinds of account hacks, including phishing scams
An interview with early Twitter executive Jason Goldman on the platform's early free-speech-maximalist decisions, underinvestment in trust and safety, and more
An early Twitter exec reckons with the monster he helped create. — What is Twitter's legacy?
An analysis of four large private-credit funds finds an average of ~25% software share exposure, above the ~19% disclosed, amid investor concerns on SaaS stocks
Emails, texts, and NTSB reports show Waymo and an Austin school district struggled for months to train robotaxis to stop for school buses as required by law
The incidents in Austin raise questions about how self-driving cars “learn” and adapt to their surroundings.
Midjourney CEO David Holz says the company's revenue “significantly surpassed” $200M in 2023, and has “gone up” since then, despite its declining web traffic
Over much of the past year, David Holz, the 37-year-old founder of Midjourney, has devoted himself to a single task …
Some iOS developers say the App Store review process is taking significantly longer, up to multiple weeks, with an influx of vibe-coded apps as the likely cause
- Apple's App Store is seeing an influx of new apps each month. — Developers say the flood of apps is increasing wait times.
Some UK defense tech startups consider relocating to the US due to the UK's military spending delays, as some executives say the UK sector is at a “standstill”
Slow progress on government contracts prompts some groups to consider moving abroadLinkedIn:Ben C.,Paul Perera, andLuke Parker MSc CEng.
Pro-AI group Innovation Council Action, praised by David Sacks, plans to spend $100M+ in the US midterms to drive deregulation and support Trump's AI agenda
A new pro-AI political operation is jumping into this year's midterms with a plan to spend more than $100 million …