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If you tuned into Nvidia’s and Microsoft’s recent quarterly earnings calls, you probably heard their leaders discuss how inference—a fancy word for operating an artificial intelligence model—is becoming a bigger part of the computing workloads in their data centers. In other words, chatbots like ChatGPT Enterprise are serving real customers. That contrasts with what was going on for much of last...
Last fall, Allbirds was preparing to launch an updated version of its popular Wool Runner shoe when its product design team realized there was a problem.
A flaw in the design meant Allbirds had to scramble to remove and replace the fabric inside roughly 30,000 pairs of shoes, two people who worked on the launch said. The last-minute snag underlines the quality issues plaguing the onetime direct-...
How bad is the slowdown in e-commerce growth? Ask Blackstone, one of the world’s largest investment firms.
Two years ago, a division of Blackstone that invests in consumer brands such as Supergoop and Spanx joined a second investor to commit $200 million to an e-commerce startup they had founded together. The startup, Kite, was pursuing a roll-up strategy that aimed to buy small consumer goods...
We’re in one of those news cycles where everything makes way for one dominant story, which right now is TikTok. Don’t worry—if you’re not fascinated by the to-ban-or-not-to-ban debate, it will eventually fade from the headlines. But not just yet: Instead, over the next few days, TikTok will become an even bigger story, as the House of Representatives is scheduled to vote on the ban-or-sell bill...
I’ve spent the past few days at South by Southwest, the annual tech and arts festival in Austin. The most memorable part of my experience was embedding myself with the screaming fans of “Call Her Daddy” podcast host Alex Cooper, who threw multi-day events to celebrate the launch of the Unwell Network, an arm of her production company where she’s signing other top creators including TikToker Alix...
When the Trump administration tried to ban TikTok in 2020, investors in its parent, ByteDance, mobilized to support the app. Now, as a bill to force a ban or sale of TikTok winds its way through Congress, the company is mostly on its own.
With the possible exception of Susquehanna International Group principal Jeff Yass, a Republican donor and big ByteDance shareholder, ByteDance’s U.S....
Tempus, a medical lab testing and data company started by a former co-founder of Groupon, has hired Morgan Stanley to run an initial public offering in the coming months, people close to the process said.
The Chicago-based startup, which has raised more than $1.3 billion in private funding from investors such as Google, New Enterprise Associates and Baillie Gifford, would add to the backlog of...
For all the hype around generative AI, we have yet to see much evidence that this new technology is lifting the top lines of customers who are spending money on it. That’s left many buyers to wonder: When will we see those long-touted returns from AI?My colleagues and I tackled that question in this story today, which reported that customers of cloud providers are being cautious about spending...
In the past year, major technology firms have championed generative artificial intelligence as the next big thing, boosting the stock market to new highs. But behind the scenes, representatives of major cloud providers and other firms that sell the technology are tempering expectations with their salespeople, saying the hype about the technology has gotten ahead of what it can actually do for...
As the Chinese government races to catch up in advanced computer chips, it has found an ally in ByteDance, the owner of TikTok. The Chinese tech company has quietly bought a stake in InnoStar Semiconductor, a Shanghai-based memory chip firm backed by the Chinese government, according to corporate records in China and Singapore.
A ByteDance spokesperson confirmed the previously unreported...