Author: GT

Just over three years after taking the reins as the top leader of Sequoia Capital, Roelof Botha is stepping down as senior steward of the storied VC firm. The firm announced Tuesday that partners Alfred Lin and Pat Grady will succeed him as co-stewards. Lin joined the storied firm in 2010, where he has led major investments into category-defining companies like Airbnb, DoorDash, and Kalshi. Meanwhile, Pat Grady has been a partner for nearly 19 years and has led Sequoia’s growth-stage investing since 2015, backing iconic companies such as ServiceNow, OpenAI, and the legal AI platform Harvey. Botha assumed the…

Arvind Krishna, CEO of IBM, arrives for the Inaugural AI Insight Forum in Russell Building on Capitol Hill, on Wednesday, September 13, 2023.Tom Williams | Cq-roll Call, Inc. | Getty ImagesIBM said Tuesday that it will lay off a small percentage of its employees in the current quarter.”In the fourth quarter we are executing an action that will impact a low single-digit percentage of our global workforce,” a spokesperson told CNBC. “While this may impact some U.S.-based roles, we anticipate that our U.S. employment will remain flat year over year.”IBM employed 270,000 people at the end of 2024, according to…

Google announced on Tuesday that it’s launching new agentic capabilities in AI Mode, its feature that allows users to ask complex questions and follow-ups to dig deeper on a topic directly within Search. Users can now get help with booking event tickets and beauty and wellness appointments in AI Mode. For example, you can say, “Find me two cheap tickets for the Shaboozey concert coming up. Prefer standing floor tickets.” AI Mode will then search across multiple websites to find real-time ticket options that meet your specific requests. It will then present you with a curated list of ticket prices…

Nikolas Kokovlis | Nurphoto | Getty ImagesPinterest shares tanked as much as 15% on Tuesday after the company reported third-quarter financial results that missed on earnings per share and provided weak guidance.Here’s how the company did, compared to analysts’ consensus estimates from LSEG:Earnings per share: 38 cents adjusted vs. 42 cents expectedRevenue: $1.05 billion vs. $1.05 billion expectedPinterest’s third-quarter sales grew 17% year over year while net income was $92.11 million, up 201% from $30.56 million a year ago during the same period.The company said fourth-quarter revenue will come in between $1.31 billion and $1.34 billion. The midpoint of the…

Rivian has created its second spinoff company this year: an industrial AI and robotics venture called Mind Robotics. The new effort will be focused around using “industrial AI to reshape how physical world businesses operate and leverage Rivian operations data as the foundation for a robotics data flywheel,” according to a the company’s third-quarter shareholder letter published Tuesday. (That’s a mouthful of buzzwords; we’ve asked Rivian to clarify things a bit more and will update the post if it does.) Rivian said Tuesday it has secured around $110 million in “external seed capital,” but did not immediately offer any other…

Aravind Srinivas, chief executive officer of Perplexity AI Inc., during the Bloomberg Tech conference in San Francisco, California, US, on Thursday, June 5, 2025. David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty ImagesPerplexity AI accused Amazon of “bullying” on Tuesday after it received a letter from the e-commerce giant demanding it prevent people from using its artificial intelligence browser Comet to make purchases on their behalf.In a blog post, Perplexity said users can ask its Comet Assistant to find items and make purchases on Amazon, and that they “love this experience.” But Perplexity said it received “an aggressive legal threat” from…

Saudi Arabia will capitalize on its abundant supply of cheap natural gas and renewables to transform the kingdom into a global leader in artificial intelligence, Aramco CEO Amin Nasser told CNBC in an interview.Aramco, the world’s largest oil company, disclosed in late October that it plans acquire a significant minority stake in the new artificial intelligence company Humain. Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, PIF, is the majority owner of Humain, which launched in May.Humain will become Saudi’s national AI champion and will grow into a leader in the space, Nasser told CNBC’s Sara Eisen in an interview that aired Tuesday.…

How much power is enough for AI? Nobody knows, not even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman or Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. That has put software-first businesses like OpenAI and Microsoft in a bind. Much of the tech world has been focused on compute as a major barrier to AI deployment. And while tech companies have been racing to secure power, those efforts have lagged GPU purchases to the point where Microsoft has apparently ordered too many chips for the amount of power it has contracted. “The cycles of demand and supply in this particular case you can’t really predict,” Nadella said…

Scale AI CFO Dennis Cinelli.Courtesy of Scale AI.After Meta shocked the tech world in June by announcing plans to invest $14.3 billion in Scale AI, primarily as a way to hire the startup’s founder, Alexandr Wang, and a handful of his employees, the future of Scale was immediately thrown in doubt.OpenAI soon disclosed that it had been winding down its work with Scale, which prepares the data that artificial intelligence labs and big tech companies use to train their models. Companies including Google and Elon Musk’s xAI also paused work with Scale after the deal, according to multiple media reports. But…

Locket, a private social networking app for friends, has scored a win with Gen Alpha users following the launch of its latest feature, Rollcall. The app, which lets friends share photos that then appear in home screen widgets, first hit the top of the App Store’s charts in early 2022 by taking advantage of Apple’s widget system to form the basis of its social network. Instead of updates sent via push notifications, the app’s widget would update to show your friends’ newly posted photos. This, in turn, would drive engagement back in the app, prompting users to share their own…