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1.	Circle Files for IPO Publicly By Yueqi Yang Source: The Information

Crypto company Circle, the second largest stablecoin issuer, has filed publicly for an initial public offering.

The company is seeking to list on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol "CRCL." It had filed confidentially in January 2024. JPMorgan, Citigroup, Barclays, BNY Capital Markets are among its advisers. In 2024, it generated $1.68 billion in total revenue and reserve income and $156 million in net income.

Circle issues USDC, a dollar-pegged stablecoin that has $60 billion in market circulation, following the biggest stablecoin Tether, which has $144 billion in circulation.

Stablecoins are pegged to the dollar and are backed by Treasurys and other assets. They generally don't pay interest to their holders. Nearly all of Circle's revenue came from interest generated by those assets.

Circle is planning to go public as Congress deliberates legislation on stablecoins, which will determine how Circle and other issuers will be regulated.

View The Information's IPO Tracker.

2.	Andreessen Horowitz In Talks With Oracle-Led TikTok Bid By Kaya Yurieff Source: The Financial Times

Andreessen Horowitz is in talks to invest in TikTok as part of a bid led by Oracle and other U.S. investors, The Financial Times reported.

The venture capital firm is in discussions to add new outside investment to the offer. It is not currently a shareholder in TikTok parent company ByteDance. Andreessen Horowitz was an early investor in Facebook and also backed Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter in 2022.

Blackstone Group and other large asset managers have also been approached as part of late-stage talks to divest TikTok from its Chinese parent company ByteDance, the FT reported. President Trump extended the deadline to negotiate a deal until Saturday, though he said he could push the deadline again.

3.	Meta's Head of AI Research Resigns By Kalley Huang Source: The Information

Joelle Pineau, the head of Meta Platforms' Fundamental Artificial Intelligence Research lab, will leave the company in May, she said on Tuesday in a post on Facebook. Pineau, who is also a professor of computer science at McGill University, has been at Meta since May 2017 and since March 2023 has led FAIR, which works on longer-term AI research projects.

"As the world undergoes significant change, as the race for AI accelerates, and as Meta prepares for its next chapter, it is time to create space for others to pursue the work," Pineau said in the post.

FAIR has undergone significant changes in recent years. In 2023, it lost staff, including researchers who worked on Meta's now flagship open-source large language model Llama, to Meta's new generative AI group. Last year, Meta moved FAIR to Chief Product Officer Chris Cox's organization, from Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth's.

"We thank Joelle for her leadership of FAIR," a spokesperson for Meta said in a statement. "She's been an important voice for open source and helped push breakthroughs to advance our products and the science behind them."

4.	Alibaba Prepares to Launch New Flagship AI Models By Juro Osawa Source: The Information

Chinese tech giant Alibaba Group plans to start rolling out a new generation of its flagship artificial intelligence foundation models as soon as this month, according to a person with knowledge of the plan.

The upcoming launch of Alibaba's next-generation family of AI models, known as Qwen 3, will be an important test of the company's ability to remain one of the leaders in China's AI race. Alibaba's latest effort comes at a time when competition has been heating up in the industry due to the rapid rise of DeepSeek, whose AI model released in January shocked the world with its high performance and low cost.

Bloomberg earlier reported Alibaba's release plan for Qwen 3, which will be the successor to the company's existing Qwen 2.5 models.

Alibaba, an e-commerce juggernaut that also operates China's biggest cloud computing business, has been ramping up its effort to develop its own AI models. Last week, the company launched a small-size multimodal AI model that can run locally on mobile phones, tablets and laptops to process images and videos.

5.	Arm Pursues Acquisition of Alphawave for AI Chip Tech By Qianer Liu Source: Reuters

Arm Holdings is exploring an acquisition of Alphawave, which develops and licenses chip designs, to enhance its ability to design artificial intelligence chips, Reuters reported, citing three people familiar with the matter.

SoftBank-owned Arm licenses the build blocks for chip designs to prominent clients such as Apple, Qualcomm and Nvidia, which then design chips based on Arm's intellectual property. Recently, Arm has started to design its own AI chips to boost profit margins and develop a new revenue source, even if that means competing with some of its own customers.

Arm lacks the critical technology necessary for improving AI performance across chips that are linked together, which the acquisition of Alphawave could address. Alphawave is known for technology that can significantly improve the speed of data transmission between chips, known as the serializer-deserializer. The technology is the cornerstone of the custom chip designs from Broadcom and Marvell Technology, which generate billions in revenue for them.

Alphawave operated a joint venture called WiseWave in China, but its joint-venture partner Wise Road Capital was placed on a U.S. blacklist last year due to national security concerns, which might complicate Arm's acquisition efforts.

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