Author: GT

Yoel Roth, previously the head of Twitter’s Trust and Safety, now at Match, is sharing his concerns about the future of the open social web and its ability to combat misinformation, spam, and other illegal content, like child sexual abuse material (CSAM). In a recent interview, Roth worried about the lack of moderation tools available to the fediverse — the open social web that includes apps like Mastodon, Threads, Pixelfed, and others, as well as other open platforms like Bluesky. He also reminisced about key moments in Trust and Safety at Twitter, like its decision to ban President Trump from…

AI research lab Anthropic’s AI models are now the top choice for enterprises, surpassing OpenAI. Anthropic now holds 32% of the enterprise large language model market share by usage, according to a report from Menlo Ventures released on Thursday. OpenAI holds the second-largest market share by usage among enterprises, with 25%. The figure marks a strong reversal from even just a couple of years ago. Since 2023, OpenAI has seen its market share among enterprises decline sharply, according to the report, as Anthropic’s has steadily risen over the same timeframe. OpenAI held 50% of the enterprise market share by usage…

Will Griffith had only been two months in his job as a venture investor for Iconiq when he met a 19-year-old college dropout named Dylan Field. This would lead to one of his signature seed investments, in a startup called Figma. On Thursday, Figma went public with the stock popping from the $33 IPO opening price to close at $115.50 and a $47 billion market cap. And Griffith could not be more effusive in his praise for the company. “You go to one of these user conferences and you’re like, there’s 15,000 people here and 5,000 have Figma tattoos,” Griffith…

Apple on Thursday signaled that it’s getting more serious about its plans to catch up in the AI race. “We see AI as one of the most profound technologies of our lifetime. We are embedding it across our devices and platforms and across the company. We are also significantly growing our investments,” CEO Tim Cook said on the Q3 2025 earnings call with investors. “Apple has always been about taking the most advanced technologies and making them easy to use and accessible for everyone, and that’s at the heart of our AI strategy,” he added. Cook expanded on those comments…

Apple has sold 3 billion iPhones since the product was launched in 2007, Apple CEO Tim Cook said Thursday during the company’s third-quarter earnings call. It took Apple nine years to sell the billionth iPhone, a milestone the company reached in 2016. This implies that Apple sold 2 billion between 2016 and now — also a nine-year period — marking the product’s growing popularity. While Apple celebrates 3 billion iPhones sold, the company has struggled a bit in the stock market this year, as the tech giant fell behind Nvidia and Microsoft as the market’s most highly valued businesses. So…

Reddit reported its second-quarter earnings on Thursday, and it’s clear that the company’s focus on AI has ramped up considerably. One significant area of investment is growing its advertising business, supported by its AI-powered marketing tools. The results revealed that the majority of Reddit’s revenue continues to come from ads, which brought in $465 million, representing 93% of the company’s total revenue.  Last month, Reddit launched two new features for advertisers: Reddit Insights, a tool that leverages the billions of posts and comments on the platform to spot trends and offer real-time insights for campaign strategies, and Conversation Summary Add-ons,…

Tariffs are projected to cost Apple $1.1 billion in the July-to-September quarter, an uptick from the previous period, CEO Tim Cook said during the company’s earnings call with investors Thursday.  Those cost projections, which are based on current rates and policies, could end up lower than expected as they did in the previous quarter. Apple incurred about $800 million of tariff-related costs for the June quarter, less than the $900 million estimate the company shared in May.  Cook said most of the tariffs levied against Apple stem from the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). Earlier this year, and amid…

If you’ve been hearing about Trump’s AI Action Plan and wondering who it actually benefits, you’re not alone. On today’s episode of Equity, Rebecca Bellan caught up with Amba Kak and Dr. Sarah Myers West from the AI Now Institute, a think tank focused on the social implications of AI and the consolidation of power in the tech industry. Their recent report, dubbed Artificial Power, lays out the political economy driving today’s AI frenzy and what’s at stake for everyone else. Artificial Power pushes back on what AI Now calls the “too big to fail” myth, arguing that AI companies…

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy sees an opportunity to deliver ads to users during their conversations with the company’s AI-powered digital assistant, Alexa+, he said during Amazon’s second-quarter earnings call Thursday. “People are excited about the devices that they can buy from us that has Alexa+ enabled in it. People do a lot of shopping [with Alexa+]; it’s a delightful shopping experience that will keep getting better,” said Jassy on the call with investors and Wall Street analysts. “I think over time, there will be opportunities, as people are engaging in more multi-turn conversations, to have advertising play a role to…

A Singapore-based deep tech startup called SixSense has developed an AI-powered platform that helps semiconductor manufacturers predict and detect potential chip defects on production lines in real time. It has raised $8.5 million in Series A bringing its total funding to around $12 million. The round was led by Peak XV’s Surge (formerly Sequoia India & SEA), with participation from Alpha Intelligence Capital, FEBE, and others. Founded in 2018 by engineers Akanksha Jagwani (CTO) and Avni Agarwal (CEO), SixSense aims to address a fundamental challenge in semiconductor manufacturing: converting raw production data, from defect images to equipment signals, into real-time…