Hi there, this is your daily ☕️ Techpresso.
In today's Techpresso:
📈 OpenAI plans a $1 trillion IPO
🤖 Zuckerberg says Meta's AI spending is paying off
🤝 Bending Spoons acquires iconic internet brand AOL
🤔 Tens of thousands of layoffs are being blamed on AI
🛰️ Construction firm plans to build data centers in space
🚀 Blue Origin may pass SpaceX for NASA moon lander
🎁 + 14 other news you might like
🔮 + 6 handpicked research papers and tools
📈 OpenAI plans a $1 trillion IPO LINK
An anonymous Reuters report claims OpenAI is planning an initial public offering that could value the company at up to $1 trillion, with a possible timeline for late 2026 or 2027.
A $1 trillion valuation would make OpenAI the 12th most valuable publicly traded firm on Earth, placing it just below Berkshire Hathaway and above JPMorgan Chase and Walmart in market capitalization.
CEO Sam Altman confirmed going public is the most likely path, citing huge capital needs for projects like building new data center capacity projected to cost over $1 trillion per year.
🤖 Zuckerberg says Meta's AI spending is paying off LINK
Mark Zuckerberg defended Meta's spending, including a $14.3 billion investment in Scale AI to overhaul the company's new AI group, which is now known as Superintelligence Labs.
The company's advertising business is seeing returns from AI, with third-quarter revenue rising 26 percent, which justifies boosting this year's planned capital expenditures to between $70 and $72 billion.
If Meta overspends on computing resources, Zuckerberg said the excess data center capacity could be repurposed to profitably improve core recommendation systems for its family of apps and ads.
🤝 Bending Spoons acquires iconic internet brand AOL LINK
Italian software company Bending Spoons, known for buying Evernote and WeTransfer, is acquiring AOL from Yahoo after securing a $2.8 billion debt financing package for the deal.
The deal marks another ownership change for the internet brand, which Verizon bought for $4.4 billion in 2015 before selling it to Apollo Global Management as part of Yahoo.
The new owner has a history of layoffs and price hikes at other acquired companies but states it plans to invest significantly and has never sold a business it purchased.
🤔 Tens of thousands of layoffs are being blamed on AI LINK
Major corporations like Amazon, Walmart, and Salesforce are eliminating thousands of roles, publicly citing expected productivity increases and efficiencies from investing in AI technology.
An economics professor suggests companies might be using AI as a convenient excuse for layoffs, which could really stem from poor profitability or a slowing global economic environment.
Recent studies show minimal returns on AI investment for most organizations, with one report finding sixty percent of firms saw little revenue or cost gains despite substantial spending.
🛰️ Construction firm plans to build data centers in space LINK
Nvidia partner Starcloud plans to build a 5-gigawatt orbital data center with super-large solar and cooling panels approximately 4 kilometers in width and length for artificial intelligence.
This proposed facility would generate vastly more power than the International Space Station’s arrays, making traditional launch and assembly methods too expensive for such a massive structure.
Starcloud announced an agreement with Rendezvous Robotics to explore modular, autonomous assembly, a method for additively constructing and reconfiguring the huge installation's components directly while in orbit.
🚀 Blue Origin may pass SpaceX for NASA moon lander LINK
With SpaceX's Starship HLS facing delays for Artemis 3, NASA is now considering competitors like Blue Origin to provide the crewed lunar lander for the mid-2027 mission.
The company plans to launch its MK1 cargo lander on a demonstration mission soon, a flight that will test critical systems and validate hardware for the crewed MK2 model.
Blue Origin's smaller Blue Moon landers offer a simpler design compared to the complex Starship, a factor that might permit an accelerated development timeline to reach the Moon first.
Other news you might like
- US government is getting closer to banning TP-Link routersLINK
- Meta’s Reality Labs posts $4.4 billion loss in third quarterLINK
- Alphabet quarterly revenue tops $100 billion for first timeLINK
- Gemini app hits 650+ million monthly users as Google/YouTube reports 300M subscribersLINK
- YouTube offers voluntary buyouts as company reorganizes around AILINK
- Mark Zuckerberg is excited to add more AI content to all your social feedsLINK
- Vibe coding platform Cursor releases first in-house LLM, Composer, promising 4X speed boostLINK
- Extropic Unveils Thermodynamic AI Chips to Combat the Industry’s Energy CrisisLINK
- World’s smallest 3D bioprinting robot delivers healing gels to damaged vocal cordsLINK
- Amazon opens $11 billion AI data center in rural Indiana as rivals race to break groundLINK
- How AI labs use Mercor to get the data companies won’t shareLINK
- Family turns to AI to audit $195,000 hospital bill, reducing it to $33,000 after uncovering errorsLINK
- Ex-Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger wants to Christianize Silicon Valley with AILINK
- Meta denies torrenting 2,400 porn movies for AI training – says they were for "personal use"LINK
Latest research and tools
Language models are injective and hence invertible: this paper suggests that language models can be reversed to find the unique input text that created a specific output.LINK
Ventoy: a tool that creates a bootable USB drive, allowing you to simply copy and boot multiple operating system files without needing to reformat the drive for each one.LINK
Hello-World iOS App in Assembly: a project demonstrating how to build a basic "Hello, World!" application for iOS using only Assembly language, without relying on standard development tools.LINK
SQLite Graph Ext: an extension that adds graph database capabilities to SQLite, allowing data to be queried using the Cypher language.LINK
ZOZO's Contact Solver: a scalable solver for large, physically accurate simulations involving deformable objects like cloth, solids, and rods.LINK
Pico-Banana-400K: A Large-Scale Dataset for Text-Guided Image Editing: Apple has created a new large-scale dataset to train AI models that can edit images based on text commands.LINK
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