Companies, products, and big moves
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Two numbers landed this morning that say more about where AI money is actually moving than any benchmark table: Microsoft broke out what Azure earns, and Alibaba's Tmall started selling model tokens next to the phone credit. Microsoft disclosed quarterly Azure revenue for the first time ever on
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The agent economy repriced itself again overnight. Cognition, the studio behind the Devin coding agent, is raising around $1 billion at a valuation near $47 billion — nearly double the $26 billion it commanded just four months ago, per Bloomberg. Cognition is raising roughly $1 billion at a valuation near $47
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Two signals tonight about where the money and the machinery are going: a 20-month-old training-data startup is now worth $3.2 billion, and CrowdStrike has decided that the place to stop a rogue AI agent is the laptop it runs on. AfterQuery, an AI training-data startup
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Meta put the "ears" on its personal-superintelligence stack, an action-cam maker rebranded as an AI infrastructure name, and a retiring Tim Cook got the climate legacy post he'd have preferred not to receive. Meta Superintelligence Labs launched Muse Voice Transcribe, its first real-time
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Google spent Tuesday putting two very different bets in front of its users: a design tool that skips the designer, and an Android update that turns Gemini into the thing that remembers where you left your passport. Both are the same play — take a job people currently open a separate
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Two launches and one filing, all inside a few hours: Google shipped a Canva-shaped design tool into Workspace, John Deere put an assistant on top of a decade of farm telemetry, and SoftBank's data center developer filed to go public while admitting it has no operating data
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Waymo lit up paid driverless service in Denver, San Diego and Tampa on Tuesday, taking the U.S. robotaxi count to 14 cities and more than 4,000 vehicles. The detail most coverage skipped: in two of those three cities, the only car in the fleet is the new Zeekr-
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Google is doing something it spent a decade refusing to do: asking Hollywood for permission. After years of lawsuits and cease-and-desists, executives have been quietly approaching Disney, Universal, Warner Bros. Discovery and other studios about licensing characters and films for Google's AI tools, the Los Angeles
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China's listed AI labs are finally producing numbers you can audit, and the morning's filings say the same thing: selling tokens is starting to work. Alongside that, two very different bets on where the next decade of AI data comes from — a wearable rig that records
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Fifteen years, one $4.5 trillion company, and a handover that lands in the middle of Apple's messiest stretch in a decade. Also: the AI labs quietly turned Apple's own desktop hardware into training substrate. Tim Cook worked his last day as Apple's CEO
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Two of the frontier's biggest spenders put fresh numbers on the board on the same afternoon. Anthropic is locking in tens of billions of dollars of Nvidia capacity through a smaller cloud partner it has never bet this big on before, and OpenAI's ad business — barely
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SoftBank just handed OpenAI $5.5 billion in stock warrants to stay in a data center lease, and the most important word in that sentence is "just." This is not a customer buying compute. This is a landlord paying its tenant to remain a tenant, then preparing to