Apple raised its prices, then offered to rent you the phone instead
Apple raised its prices, then offered to rent you the phone instead

Apple has a new answer to the complaint that its products cost too much. Do not buy them. Lease them. On Tuesday the company launched Apple Upgrade in the US, a leasing programme run by the buy-now-pay-later firm Klarna. It covers the iPhone, Apple Wat…

Recursive is spending two-thirds of its funding on one AWS bill, and calls it small
Recursive is spending two-thirds of its funding on one AWS bill, and calls it small

Richard Socher’s new AI lab has just made an unusual bet with its money. Recursive has committed about $410m to a single, multi-year cloud contract with Amazon Web Services. That is roughly two-thirds of everything it has raised. The company left steal…

Visa is cutting 2,600 tech jobs to bankroll the tech that threatens it
Visa is cutting 2,600 tech jobs to bankroll the tech that threatens it

Visa is cutting about 2,600 jobs, roughly 7% of its staff, and it is cutting them mostly from the teams that build its technology. The money it saves is going into the payment methods that could one day make those rails matter less. The payments networ…

1,134 AI insiders just asked Washington for a way to slow AI down
1,134 AI insiders just asked Washington for a way to slow AI down

More than a thousand of the people building the most powerful AI want a way to slow it down. On Tuesday, 1,134 employees of the leading AI companies signed a letter asking the US government to help build one. The statement is titled Pacing the Frontier…

Google scraped the web to build itself. A court just said others can scrape Google.
Google scraped the web to build itself. A court just said others can scrape Google.

Google built one of the world’s largest companies by scraping the entire web without asking permission first. This week a court told Google it cannot stop others from scraping Google. On 20 July, a federal judge dismissed Google’s lawsuit against SerpA…

The man who coined ‘agentic AI’ is betting it won’t take your job
The man who coined ‘agentic AI’ is betting it won’t take your job

Andrew Ng helped give the AI industry its vocabulary, from “AI is the new electricity” to “agentic AI.” His new company bets against the phrase everyone else is using: that AI will take your job. Ng has founded LearnVector, an AI-native learning startu…

Starbucks’ AI tool didn’t die in a pilot. It died in 11,300 stores.
Starbucks’ AI tool didn’t die in a pilot. It died in 11,300 stores.

Starbucks told NomadGo on 3 April that it was scrapping the AI inventory tool the Redmond startup had built for it. Within days the 30-person company cut a large part of its workforce, according to GeekWire. The cuts included the technical team that ra…

AI is finding twice as many software flaws. Almost none get exploited.
AI is finding twice as many software flaws. Almost none get exploited.

AI-discovered vulnerabilities are arriving at roughly twice last year’s rate. Almost none of them are being exploited. The US National Vulnerabilities Database recorded 45,207 software flaws between January and 27 July, already approaching the whole of…

Only 27% of US hospitals can run an EEG. Epitel raised $26m for the rest
Only 27% of US hospitals can run an EEG. Epitel raised $26m for the rest

Epitel has raised $26m in a Series B round to expand a wireless EEG system that patients wear at home. Catalyst Health Ventures and Genoa Ventures co-led the round. The Salt Lake City company says it will spend the money on sales, marketing and distrib…

A quarter of the S&P now claims measurable AI benefits. Last year it was 14%
A quarter of the S&P now claims measurable AI benefits. Last year it was 14%

Wall Street has spent three years paying for the companies that build AI. It is starting to pay for the companies that use it. The rotation has a number behind it. Morgan Stanley ran a systematic analysis of earnings call transcripts. It found that 25%…