 | Apr 17, 2025 | | | | | | Happy Thursday! Mark Zuckerberg testifies that Meta Platforms' share of the amount of time spent on social media apps has declined. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang visits Beijing after U.S. government ban of more of its chip sales to China. OpenAI is in talks to buy AI coding assistant Windsurf for $3 billion.
| | | | Meta Platforms' share of the amount of time people spend on social media apps has "declined…potentially meaningfully," Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified on Wednesday afternoon, saying that "a lot of the interaction" people have with friends directly has shifted to messaging apps. Zuckerberg was speaking on the third day of the trial of the Federal Trade Commission's antitrust lawsuit against Meta. Earlier on Wednesday, Zuckerberg testified that TikTok and YouTube were both serious competitors to Meta's Facebook and Instagram apps, although the FTC's case defines the social media market dominated by Meta as excluding both firms. Under questioning from a lawyer for the FTC, Zuckerberg said that Facebook's usage had not "collapsed" despite YouTube's growth and size, adding that Facebook was "overall…reasonably healthy." | | | | Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang arrived in Beijing Thursday to reaffirm the company's commitment to China, amid new U.S. restrictions on the sale of Nvidia's H20 artificial intelligence chips to China. In a meeting with Ren Hongbin, head of the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade, a quasi-government trade body, Huang said tighter U.S. chip export controls have significantly impacted Nvidia's operations, according to Chinese state media. He added that Nvidia hopes to cooperate with China, and the company is working to optimize its products to comply with regulations while continuing to serve the Chinese market. Huang also met with Liang Wenfeng, founder of artificial intelligence company DeepSeek, to discuss new chip designs for the local market, and Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng, signaling a willingness to collaborate despite geopolitical tensions, according to the Financial Times, citing people familiar with the matter. This visit follows Nvidia's warning to investors earlier this week about a potential $5.5 billion writedown related to U.S. restrictions on the sale of its H20 AI chip to China. The Information reported that Chinese tech companies have placed more than $16 billion worth of orders for the H20 chips in the first three months of this year. | | | | OpenAI is in discussions to buy Windsurf, the maker of a popular AI coding assistant formerly known as Codeium, for $3 billion, according to a person with knowledge of the discussions. The deal could help the ChatGPT-maker make inroads with developer customers who use conversational AI tools, such as Anysphere's Cursor or ChatGPT itself, to help them code. If it closes, this deal would also be the largest in OpenAI's history. OpenAI declined to comment, and Windsurf didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. In recent months, VC firm Kleiner Perkins has looked to lead an investment round into Windsurf at a nearly $3 billion valuation, including the capital, just months after the company raised at a $1.25 billion valuation. Founded in 2021, Windsurf has also raised capital from General Catalyst and Greenoaks. Bloomberg earlier reported the news. | | | | Software startup Rippling is finalizing a deal to raise hundreds of millions of dollars from investors including Goldman Sachs, Singaporean sovereign wealth fund GIC and venture capitalist Elad Gil at about a $16 billion valuation, people familiar with the matter said. The funding round would largely help finance Rippling's business, which is fast growing and burning cash. The deal would come as Rippling ratchets up a legal fight against rival software firm Deel. Rippling accused Deel of corporate espionage and presented a sworn testimony by the Rippling employee who was allegedly paid by Deel executives to pass on confidential business information. Deel executives have denied hiring the alleged corporate spy, and Deel spokesman said Rippling's claims will be debunked in court. Rippling, founded in 2016, sells software to small- and medium-sized businesses that runs payroll, manages their data and secures their laptops. It has grown quickly by selling existing customers additional tools. The new valuation, which was earlier reported by Bloomberg, would be up from $13.5 billion a year ago. The deal hasn't been finalized and could still change. The new investors haven't been previously reported. | | | | OpenAI on Wednesday released two new models, o3 and o4-mini, in its line of "reasoning" artificial intelligence, which uses more computational resources to solve more complex problems and come up with new ideas. These two models are the first in OpenAI's line of reasoning AI to understand images and be able to use external tools and applications, such as searching on the web or writing and running code. Such tools have helped scientists working in areas like nuclear fusion and pathogen detection come up with hypotheses to test and designs for experiments, The Information has previously reported. OpenAI also released Codex CLI, an open-source coding assistant that runs directly on users' terminals. | | | | Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., the largest chip manufacturer in the world, said on Thursday that it had not observed any changes in customer behavior with regards to new U.S. tariffs. The company maintains a revenue growth target of mid-20% for this year. "We might get a better picture in the next few months," chief executive C.C. Wei said on an earrings call. TSMC's revenue soared 42% to $25.5 billion in the first quarter from a year ago, thanks to strong demand for artificial intelligence silicon. Net profit rose 60% to $11 billion during the same period. The company said the planned $100 billion investments in chipmaking facilities in Arizona will dilute its overall gross profit margin by up to 4% in the future, due to higher cost of labor and the cost to build the factories. Eventually the Arizona plants will be responsible for 30% of the company's currently most advanced 2-nanometer chip production capacity, Wei added. The company declined to comment on impact of the U.S. government's recent ban on the sale of more of Nvidia's AI chips to China. | | | | Tesla's stake as the dominant electric vehicle vendor in California is slipping. Tesla registrations fell 15% in the first quarter from a year earlier, according to the California New Car Dealers Association, while registrations for all other EVs shot up 35%. Tesla's market share dropped to 43.9% from 55.5% in the first quarter of 2024. The New Car Dealers Association, which cited data from Experian Automotive, attributed the downturn to Tesla's "aging product lineup and backlash against Elon Musk's political initiatives." Since January, the Tesla CEO has overseen cost cutting initiatives at the Department of Government Efficiency and served as a close advisor to President Donald Trump, spurring protests at Tesla showrooms around the country and sending the carmaker's stock price plummeting to half what it was in December 2024. Tesla's decline reduced overall adoption of electric vehicles in California in the quarter, according the industry report, undercutting the state's mandates that 35% of new 2026 car models be zero-emission. California accounts for more than a third of all electric vehicle sales nationwide, per the Department of Energy. Tesla's top competitors in the state are Toyota, which makes the Camry and the RAV4 models, as well as Honda, which makes the Civic, though none of these are fully electric, a spokesperson for the dealers association said. No pure electric competitors come close to Tesla's registration numbers. | | | | A U.S. congressional committee is calling for stricter semiconductor export control against China, in light of the technological breakthroughs by Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek. The Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party on Wednesday published a report that alleges DeepSeek's chatbot app "covertly funnels American user data to the Chinese Communist Party, manipulates information to align with CCP propaganda, and was trained using material unlawfully obtained from U.S. AI models." The bipartisan committee also noted that DeepSeek operates Nvidia chips that are subject to U.S. export controls, and sent a formal letter to the chip designer, demanding answers to how the company's chips ended up powering DeepSeek's AI models. The report put forward more than a dozen policy recommendations, including increasing funding to the federal agency that oversees export regulations, imposing remote access controls on all data centers and models trained with the use of U.S.-origin AI chips, establishing a whistleblower program to incentivize reporting of potential violations and an interagency effort to monitor the progress of AI development by adversary countries. | | | | Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday portrayed TikTok and YouTube as Meta's primary competitors, saying that TikTok is "bigger than either Facebook or Instagram," while "people spend more time on YouTube than Facebook and Instagram combined." Zuckerberg was speaking on the witness stand on the third day of the trial for the Federal Trade Commission's antitrust lawsuit against Meta. The FTC has accused Meta of creating a social media monopoly that illegally crushed competition by purchasing Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014. If the government prevails in the case, Meta could be forced to sell one or both of those apps. The FTC has defined the sector of the social media market dominated by Meta as excluding both TikTok and YouTube, an argument Meta is attempting to undercut by pointing to how both firms draw users away from Meta's apps. TikTok and YouTube have posed particularly stiff competition thanks to their abilities to win over creators, as well as recommend content, Zuckerberg said during his testimony. TikTok and YouTube have also tried to mimic Meta in social networking, he said, citing TikTok allowing its users to follow other people on the app and encouraging them to import phone contacts. At the same time, though, Zuckerberg tried to downplay the significance of friend lists and having a lot of people using an app for modern social media. He said Meta's value for users increasing due to how many other people used its products were "not decisive" for Facebook prevailing over MySpace, for example. "Through a lot of hard work, we were able to win," he said. "If you build a better thing, you can win." That led the judge overseeing the case, Judge James Boasberg, to ask Zuckerberg whether having a lot of people using an app was "less significant now because of people's ability to share content outside of [social] networks," like through messaging. "I'm asking how much it matters how much your friends are on a particular platform if you can share content out of it," Boasberg later asked. "Why does it matter that your friends are there?" Zuckerberg answered that it no longer mattered as much that people's friends were on the social media apps that they were using. In another exchange with the lawyer representing Meta, Zuckerberg said that part of his motivation for buying WhatsApp was to guard against Apple and Google imposing rules that would harm Meta. At the time, he said, he thought that buying WhatsApp meant "we have a suite of services that are sufficiently valuable to people that make it so that these companies don't want to mess with us." | | | | Lyft said Wednesday it will buy FreeNow, a European taxi app, for $197 million in cash from BMW and Mercedes-Benz. The deal marks Lyft's entry into the European market and its first acquisition in three years. The ridehailing app currently only operates in Canada and the U.S. Hamburg-based FreeNow, which offers app-based ride-hailing services, operates in nine countries. It's expected to contribute an additional $1.1 billion in annualized gross bookings, or all transactions made on the platform. As of the fourth quarter, Lyft generated $17.2 billion in annualized gross bookings. Lyft said the deal should close later this year. Its stock price rose after the deal was announced, but has since dropped less than 1%. Engine Capital, an activist investment firm that owns just under 1.1 million shares of Lyft, Wednesday said it had nominated two people to Lyft's board of directors. Engine's founder, Arnaud Ajdler, said in a statement that Lyft has underperformed Uber in recent years. Ajdler also pointed out that Lyft's dual class structure gives its co-founders disproportionate control on the company. Lyft said it's in regular communication with its shareholders and has nothing to add at the time. | | | Popular articles
By Stephanie Palazzolo and Amir Efrati
| | | | | Opportunities Empower your teams to stay ahead of market trends with the most trusted tech journalism.
Learn more
Reach The Information's influential audience with your message. Connect with our team | | | | | |
0 comentários:
Postar um comentário