 | Apr 29, 2025 | | | | | | Happy Tuesday! OpenAI adds shopping features to ChatGPT search results. Wall Street banks sold the final tranches of debt lent to Elon Musk in 2022 for his takeover of Twitter. Alibaba unveils a new generation of open-source models, Qwen 3.
| | | | OpenAI is incorporating more shopping features into ChatGPT search results, the company said Monday. For web searches, ChatGPT will now include links to products with images and reviews. The links open up another avenue of competition with Google, whose browser-based shopping feature returns paid product listings above typical search results. Google, which has raced to introduce consumer AI products after the success of ChatGPT, also shows product links to some users in its AI Overview search results. OpenAI said the links won't include ads or paid results, and it isn't taking a cut of purchases for now. Instead, ChatGPT will base its results on a variety of online sources, including traditional publishers like product review and news sites, as well as user forums like Reddit, and users will be able to instruct ChatGPT which kinds of reviews to prioritize. More brands and retailers are starting to revamp their websites and product listings so that chatbots can reference them more easily in their results. While other AI search companies like Perplexity have added the ability to purchase products directly in their search results, users will still have to navigate from ChatGPT to merchants' sites in order to check out. OpenAI's search product lead Adam Fry told Wired that the company's main priority right now is providing high quality recommendations and that the company might test various affiliate revenue models later. OpenAI has forecast that new products including "free user monetization" will generate $25 billion in 2029, or one-fifth of all revenue. | | | | A group of Wall Street banks sold the final tranches of debt it lent Elon Musk in 2022 for his takeover of Twitter, now called X, The Wall Street Journal reported. The $1.2 billion sale marks the end of a long-running headache for the banking syndicate that lent a total of $13 billion to Musk. Interest rates shot up in the period between when Musk launched the deal and when it finally closed, making investors wary of taking on the debt from the banks. Some banks marked down the value of the loans, the newspaper said. Ultimately the group, which included Morgan Stanley and Bank of America, ended up selling the most recent tranche of debt close to the price the banks paid, at 98 cents on the dollar. Banks generally sell leveraged buyout debt to investors in order to avoid holding more capital against the loans for regu\latory purposes, which crimps earnings. Optimism about Musk's corporate empire since the election of Donald Trump as U.S. president, and the return of advertisers to X, helped the banks offload roughly $11 billion in loans since February, the report said. | | | | Alibaba Group on Tuesday released Qwen 3, a new generation of its open-source artificial intelligence foundation models. The company said the largest one among the new models outperforms competitors' popular existing models like DeepSeek's R1 and OpenAI's o1 based on multiple industry benchmarks. The launch of Qwen 3, a suite of eight open-source models that come in various sizes and specifications, is the Chinese tech giant's latest effort to stay competitive after the rapid rise of DeepSeek, whose R1 model released in January shocked the world with its high performance and low cost. Alibaba's new models could further disrupt the global market by offering more open-source alternatives to costly proprietary AI models. Alibaba said the largest of its eight new Qwen 3 models, Qwen3-235B-22B, outperforms DeepSeek's R1 in benchmark evaluations of coding, math and other capabilities. DeepSeek, meanwhile, has been working on the development of new models such as the successor to R1. Alibaba said Qwen 3 can switch between "thinking mode" when performing complex tasks like math and coding, and "non-thinking mode" for quick responses to simpler prompts, depending on users' preferences. The company also said Qwen 3 supports 119 languages, a sharp increase from 29 languages supported by its previous-generation Qwen 2.5 models. | | | | Palo Alto Networks said Monday that it has agreed to buy Protect AI, a three-year-old startup that develops cybersecurity software for artificial intelligence applications. The deal speaks to the growing demand for software that guards against hacks of AI applications. Terms of the deal weren't disclosed, though tech publication Geekwire said Palo Alto Networks was paying more than $500 million. Seattle-based Protect AI raised more than $108 million, most recently at a valuation of $460 million last year, from investors including Evolution Equity Partners and Salesforce Ventures. Palo Alto Networks said in a statement that the acquisition will help the company develop Prism AIRS, a cybersecurity product for AI that it also announced on Monday. Prism AIRS is intended to block prompt injections, or attacks where a large language model is tricked into following malicious instructions, and help developers conduct automated red-teaming to find security vulnerabilities in their AI applications. "You can't have AI deployed at the enterprise without security," said Ed Sim, founder of Boldstart Ventures, which co–led Protect AI's seed funding round and participated in the company's Series A and Series B funding rounds. "I've never seen a market move from nothing to something so fast." | | | | Amazon's efforts to compete with SpaceX's Starlink satellite internet service finally got off the ground. On Monday afternoon, 27 satellites for the Amazon service, known as Project Kuiper, launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, aboard an Atlas V rocket operated by United Launch Alliance. In 2023, ULA launched two test satellites for the project, but Monday's launch represents the first that will be used in the commercial deployment of the Kuiper service. Amazon has a long way to go to achieve its plans for a satellite internet that can compete with Starlink. Amazon has an agreement with ULA to deliver more than half of the 3,200 satellites currently planned for Project Kuiper over 38 launches. The company has agreements with Arianespace, SpaceX and Blue Origin—Amazon founder Jeff Bezos' space company—to deliver the remainder of the satellites to space over 30 other launches. Starlink has over 6,750 satellites currently in orbit. | | | | Around 300 employees at Google's AI research unit Google DeepMind in the United Kingdom are seeking to unionize with the Communications Workers Union, the Financial Times reported. The unionization push follows employee discontent over Google providing cloud computing services to the Israeli Ministry of Defense and changing its AI Principles to remove a ban on developing AI for weapons or surveillance, according to the Financial Times. AI competitors OpenAI and Anthropic have also publicly struck deals to provide technology to the U.S. military, and the Israeli military has reportedly used OpenAI and Microsoft technology as well. Google DeepMind has around 2,000 employees in the UK. While the unionization effort involves only a minority of the unit's staff, it comes as Google and its startup rivals are in a fierce competition for AI talent. DeepMind has also recently faced criticism over aggressive noncompete policies that restrict UK staff trying to move to a rival. In a statement, a Google spokesperson said that Google's "approach is and has always been to develop and deploy AI responsibly. We encourage constructive and open dialogue with all of our employees - it's part of our culture. In the UK and around the world, Googlers have long been part of employee representative groups, works councils and unions." | | | | Spotify said on Monday that it paid out more than $100 million to podcast creators and publishers globally during the first quarter. The company said the payouts include both ad revenue generated by audio and video podcasts as well as payments Spotify makes to certain creators and publishers in its Spotify Partner Program based on the time users spend watching podcasts on its ad-free service. Monthly earnings for creators in the program increased 29% from February to March, the company said. Spotify has been placing a huge emphasis on video podcasts as it tries to convince more podcasters that its platform can generate meaningful revenue. However, it still has a long way to go to catch up to the biggest streaming platform when it comes to revenue sharing: In February 2024, YouTube CEO Neal Mahon said the video giant had paid out $70 billion over the previous three years to creators, media companies and other owners of video channels in its YouTube Partner Program. While Spotify continues to grow its overall business, it has struggled to get ad revenue to take off, as The Information previously reported. Part of the issue is that the popularity of Spotify's ad-free subscription service inherently limits the number of listeners it can deliver ads to. | | | | Splice, a music start-up that uses artificial intelligence to blend audio samples, bought Spitfire Audio for its catalog of tracks and sounds, the companies said Monday. Splice is paying $50 million, according to sources close to the company. The acquisition reflects growing interest in marrying AI with traditional music making. Spitfire Audio's library includes sounds that have been used in shows like Netflix's The Queen's Gambit. Splice, founded in 2013, reached annual revenue of more than $100 million and is profitable, sources close to the company told The Information. It has raised over $160 million from investors including Union Square Ventures, music executive Scooter Braun and Lerer Hippeau. Investments in music startups propelled funding for creator startups in the first three months of the year to its highest level since 2021, according to The Information's Creator Economy Database. | | | Popular articles By Cory Weinberg and Michael Roddan
By Cory Weinberg and Kalley Huang
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