Walmart Opens the Door to Shopping Agents, Then Hands Them a Rulebook
The first purchase an AI agent makes at Walmart will not sit in the same place on the account as the ones a customer makes by hand. That separation is…
A Billion Dollars for a Kernel
A Billion Dollars for a Kernel Most artificial-intelligence startups raise a first institutional round to build a product. Flapping Airplanes raised a Series A to make a point about silicon,…
Intel’s Arizona Buildout Reaches the Tooling Stage
Intel’s Arizona Buildout Reaches the Tooling Stage In chip manufacturing, the building is the cheap part. A finished cleanroom shell proves a company intends to make semiconductors; the machines that…
Tesla and Nvidia Fund Substrate Capacity, Betting on a Chip Bottleneck
The scarcest part of an AI system is no longer always the processor. Increasingly it is the laminated rectangle underneath, a package substrate that carries thousands of signal traces from…
Spotify’s Subscriber Growth Holds; Its Earnings Streak Does Not
Spotify Technology SA spent two years telling investors that user growth and profit were no longer a trade-off. On Thursday the streaming company posted the kind of quarter that tests…
Texas Instruments’ Industrial Order Book Sets a Record, and the Forecast Follows
For the first time in four years, Texas Instruments Inc.’s industrial customers bought more chips in a quarter than at any point in the company’s history. The line sat in…
IBM’s Software Unit Carries a Quarter That Beat Forecasts
IBM has spent two years telling investors that artificial intelligence would show up in enterprise software before it showed up anywhere else. On Wednesday the company got to point at…
ChatGPT’s Ad Business Reaches 89 Countries
In Lagos, Buenos Aires, Karachi and Kyiv, a free ChatGPT user will start seeing sponsored links. OpenAI said Wednesday that it expanded advertising to 26 more countries, bringing the total…
The Assistant That Wants to Speak First
At seven in the morning it sends a short brief. Through the day it watches a calendar, an inbox and whatever else has been connected, and it messages only when…
SpaceX Pays a Premium for Six Weeks in Memphis
The email went to every SpaceX employee in early October, and it read less like a human-resources notice than a call for volunteers before a launch window. “We now need…
