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Lead Story
Nvidia’s Growing Dependence On a Few Big Customers
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has very good reason to try to develop new customers by investing in a variety of neocloud and AI firms. For all its success, Nvidia’s sales have become increasingly dependent on a handful of customers—some of which may cut back their purchases over time. That becomes clear when you look at its own disclosures going back several years, which specify how many customers account for more than 10% of sales. In the first half of this fiscal year, ending in July, three such customers were responsible for 44% of total sales. Last fiscal year, two customers accounted for 36% of total sales. Going back to fiscal 2023, Nvidia had no customers accounting for 10% or more of sales (see the chart below).
The Information AI / 4:14 PM
Altman and Musk Back Amodei’s Call for AI Companies to Slow Down AI Development
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei on Saturday called for leading AI companies to slow the development of advanced AI, drawing supportive responses from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. In a 3,800-word essay Saturday morning, Amodei said Anthropic would give “employee-like access” to ...
The Information AI / 3:01 PM
Meta’s Muse Agent Almost Cost Me $408
• The Big Read: Investor Anjney Midha cut Anthropic an early check. His hot streak has kept going • Plus, Recommendations—our weekly pop culture picks: “ Our Town ,” “ Profits, Prophets, Coaches, and Kings ” and “ The Gentlemen ” A hotel room’s quality can be measured in terms of abundance: extra towels, spare bathrobes—plenty of Nespresso pods. Multiples of everything are almost always better. But what’s less pleasant is to inadvertently end up with multiple hotel rooms . A couple days ago, though, I found myself with the unfortunate opportunity to occupy a pair of accommodations at a Santa Monica, Calif., Marriott thanks to an error by my lil’ digital buddy: Muse, Meta Platforms’ new personal agent. The cumbersome, vexing tool hopes to seize on Silicon Valley’s zeitgeisty enthusiasm for popularizing autonomous AI. After a few days with it, I can’t imagine it’s the technology that will take agents mainstream. That hotel snafu came when I gave Muse the hotel’s name and asked it to book two nights. I plugged in my credit card details—a circuitous process that involved both Chase and Stripe—and was met with the digital equivalent of a shrug: An error message informed me that Muse hadn’t completed the transaction, and while it really didn’t know why it couldn’t, it assured me that my credit card hadn’t been charged. A little human skepticism led me to double-check its promise—good thing I did. In fact, the charge had gone through. What happened next still intrigues me. I gave Muse a screenshot showing the charge on my credit card and told it that the charge had gone through. Lickety-split, it returned with a Marriott confirmation number. Not bad—it finished the task without being instructed to do so. But somehow the AI managed to make two bookings: When I showed up to the hotel, I found two rooms waiting for me. The front-desk clerk showed some mercy and canceled one. Had a little human kindness not prevailed, I would’ve been out an extra $408, plus taxes and fees. I’d been pretty gung-ho to try Muse. We’ve spent the past year in increasingly complex discussions about agents ever since OpenClaw came out in January , marking what has felt like the beginning of a distinct new chapter in the AI era. Most of the agents that initially captured attention were meant to simplify work tasks. More recently, a couple of startups have captured buzz with ones devoted to improving life outside the office: The most talked-about one is from Instinct, a startup founded last year. (Instinct is so popular that it now faces a profound compute shortage, and it has recently been seeking additional fundraising that would value it at around $10 billion. Just a month ago, it was valued at $2.5 billion.) But Instinct isn’t widely available, so Muse felt like my first real chance to see what a personal agent could do. The recent reporting from my colleague Jyoti Mann made me even more curious to play around with it: Clearly, Meta sees Muse as a major new product , one aimed at the same everyday people who log on to Instagram and Facebook by the billions. Still, if their experiences are anything like mine, they’ll find Muse something of a misery. The hotel problem wasn’t the only hiccup I ran into with Muse. When I initially set up a account while on my work laptop using my phone number, I later couldn’t access it on my Mac mini at home or my iPhone: Login codes sent via text led me nowhere—just to more error messages. (Frankly, it’s a marvel I found the Muse app at all earlier this week, buried as it was below several other apps also named Muse in Apple’s App Store; it has since risen to the top.) Eventually, I caved and created a second account—this one linked to my Facebook account, which itself is tied to my phone number. Why couldn’t Muse pick up on the overlapping connections? I wish it could have. Later, I did get Muse to complete a Resy reservation and schedule an Uber. I can’t truthfully tell you it was faster or easier than if I’d just gone directly to those apps. After a while, I hit an existential conundrum. I’d given it the tasks that occurred to me, which numbered a small handful. What else could I get Muse to do? I’ve found interacting with the AI something like trying to wrangle a lackluster employee. If I wanted to maximize its potential, I’d need to think deeply and creatively about what else it could possibly do, coax it and baby it, then bite my nails and hope it actually carried out what I wanted. As I relate these frustrations, I can already hear someone shouting “Skill issue!” at me. But really, I stand by the conviction that mass-market consumer technology shouldn’t require any technical savvy or a lot of effort. Certainly, the best versions of such products do not—even the early versions. If three cars had routinely shown up each time someone ordered their very first Uber ride back in the 2010s, I promise you we’d see more yellow taxis on the road today and fewer Ubers. I don’t see agentic AI as some passing fad, nor am I hoping for such an outcome. The technology’s promise—to automate away some of life’s tedium—is damn alluring. What I expect will happen is that agentic AI will get woven into many existing apps, just as chatbots already populate the internet. People will make regular use of agentic software without ever really knowing it; Anthropic’s Claude, OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini all already have some agentic capabilities. Obviously, Apple and Google will want to use the technology to make iPhone and Android phones smarter and more useful, and the agents will sync up with what those devices already know and store about us. That would reduce quite a few hurdles to agentic AI. But will new stand-alone apps like Muse take off? I have my doubts—not unless they get much, much simpler and more reliable. Or maybe I’ll just need to learn to see the silver lining in their mistakes. You know what? If I ever again find myself billed twice and double-booked by accident, I know just what to do: Throw a rager in one room, sleep until noon in the other. Maybe Muse can handle ordering the booze. A good party can never have too much. —Abram Brown ( [email protected] ) Weekend’s Latest Stories The Big Read Early Anthropic Investor Seeks VC Glory With Cash and Compute Anjney Midha, 34, wants to get chips in the hands of fledgling startups and academics while he bets on a moment in tech that he describes as the “revenge of the scientists.” Listening: “ Our Town ” The good folks of Gainesboro, Tenn. (population: around 900), know that plenty of outsiders look down their noses at their part of the world—figuring them to be a buncha “backwards, hateful racists,” as one longtime Gainesboro resident puts it. That impression of the place does certainly seem to be why Gainesboro found itself under siege a few years ago when a group of wealthy Christian nationalists started to buy up property in secret, hoping to transform the town into a hotbed for other Christian nationalists: They figured they’d encounter little pushback, especially considering how far their money could go in such an impoverished parish. (I could describe them as white supremacists, but the Christian nationalists do take great umbrage with that label.) “Our Town,” a fast-paced and confidently told podcast from Bloomberg and iHeartRadio, looks at how those Christian nationalists staged their attempted takeover of Gainesboro and how they accumulated their wealth and followers, the latter largely through podcasts. (Sigh—the internet.) It also documents the swift, spirited resistance Gainesboro mounted against them, which cheers the soul and asks us to revisit at least a few of the assumptions about America—and our fellow Americans—that may have become entrenched in our minds. —Abram Brown Reading: “ Profits, Prophets, Coaches, and Kings ” by Jared Diamond Many billions of dollars and quite a few Harvard Business School classes have gone toward trying to figure out what makes a great leader—and turning oafs into passable leaders. Now Jared Diamond, author of the Pulitzer-winning 1998 bestseller “Guns, Germs and Steel,” has set himself the task of defining the essential qualities behind leadership in his latest book, “Profits, Prophets, Coaches, and Kings.” He does so by examining famous figures in business, religion, sports and politics, marking what is surely not the only instance in which Elon Musk has been compared to Genghis Khan. In terms of capitalistic chieftains, Diamond finds that the most distinctive leaders are the ones who’ve had the benefit of both exquisite timing and ruthless execution: Jeff Bezos, for example, outmuscling his competitors in the internet’s Paleozoic Era. As far as politicians go, Diamond points out that the ones we truly remember most aren’t those that simply took a mandate from voters and carried it out, even though we so often say that’s exactly what we want our elected officials to do. Rather, they have championed their own bold ideas and convinced the plebs it was really all part of what they’d originally wanted. All of these conclusions are delivered with Diamond’s dry-humored wonkishness. I enjoyed one in particular: “Once one has decided that one is uniquely qualified to assume the burden of leadership,” Diamond writes, “one’s opinion of oneself is unlikely to change.” —A.B. Watching: “ The Gentlemen ” One of the great joys of “The Gentlemen,” the rollicking “Downton Abbey” meets “The Godfather” concoction from director Guy Ritchie, is to admire how nice Theo James looks as he struts around in magnificent tweed. James plays Eddie Horniman, the fictional Duke of Halstead, and as the Netflix series’ second season begins, it’s just as well that Eddie’s concentrating hard on restoring the family fortune to its fullest extent. The dry-cleaning bills must be enormous: His beautiful wool keeps getting splattered in blood. The first season of “The Gentlemen” found Eddie settling somewhat uncomfortably into his new role: paterfamilias of an old, down-on-its-luck aristocratic family that—much to his surprise—has tied its fortunes to an illicit marijuana operation. In this latest season, Eddie has found his footing and is thinking expansively, which puts him at odds with his business partners: a family of Cockney-accented gangsters—father Bobby (Ray Winstone), who operates from lightly monitored house arrest, and his two children, the very capable Susie (Kaya Scodelario) and strapping, bruised-knuckle Jack (Harry Goodwins). As Eddie’s ambitions get bigger, the stakes get higher and the mood grows darker. And since this is very much a Ritchie production, schemes and mayhem continue to fill the screen in manic fashion. One doltish accomplice gets fed to a tiger. Elsewhere, Eddie helms a chase through London after a motorcycle gang snatches away a $16 million Botticelli, which he needs to appease the Italian mafia. The comic relief comes from Hugh Bonneville’s mincing Lord Hawthorne, who needs bribing too—and lusts for the chance to pull down Jack’s plus fours. (To woo Jack, Lord Hawthorne wines and dines him; a plate of iced oysters is a treat of a “Spartacus” reference .) Whether Eddie can keep everyone in line and on board seems questionable based on Season 2’s flash-forward opening shot: his own bloodied body. Michael Corleone never had it so frantic. —A.B.
The Information AI / 1:16 PM
Early Anthropic Investor Seeks VC Glory With Cash and Compute
A few months ago, venture capitalist Anjney Midha received a present from his wife while on a trip to Hawaii: a felt, tan-colored Stetson with his name monogrammed on the side. The hat was meant to cover up a brain sensor Midha has been wearing to gather neurological data for one of the many frontier startups he’s invested in. But it’s since become a wardrobe staple for him, and Midha seldom leaves home without it. He isn’t shy about its meaning to him and how he sees his standing in Silicon Valley. “There’s a new sheriff in town,” he said, flashing a smile. That sentiment isn’t just bravado. Midha, 34, a computer scientist by training, has chalked up a string of hits as an investor in recent years. His most notable one is Anthropic. He cut the company an early check in 2021 when it was valued at less than $1 billion, using a substantial portion of his and his wife’s savings. In the company’s approaching IPO, its valuation could extend to as much as $2 trillion.
The Information AI / 1:04 AM
Nvidia May Invest Up to $10 Billion In Anthropic’s IPO
Nvidia has discussed investing in Anthropic’s upcoming initial public offering that would raise as much as $100 billion at a valuation of around $2 trillion, Reuters reported Friday. Nvidia could invest as much as $10 billion in Anthropic at the IPO price, according to the report. Anthropic last ...
The Information AI / 12:18 AM
OpenAI AI Swarm Hacked Software Service Months Before Hugging Face Incident
A swarm of OpenAI agents conducted a cyberattack on software service RubyGems in May, months before the company’s agents hacked model platform Hugging Face, researchers at AI safety organizations Nightingale Collective and AI Futures Project found. RubyGems allows software engineers to download ...
The Information AI / 4:52 PM
Microsoft Chief Communications Officer Shaw to Depart
Microsoft chief communications officer Frank Shaw will leave the company at the end of this year, he announced in a LinkedIn post Friday. Shaw has spent more than 28 years at the company, including 17 years overseeing its communications. During that time, he steered the company’s public ...
The Information AI / 9:22 AM
Tencent-backed Enflame Triples on Debut as China Pushes for Chip Self-sufficiency
Shanghai Enflame Technology surged on its first trading day Friday after the Chinese AI chip developer raised about 6.12 billion yuan ($911 million) in an initial public offering, underscoring strong investor appetite for domestic alternatives to Nvidia chips. Shares opened at 410 yuan, nearly ...
The Information AI / 11:55 PM
OpenAI to Pause New Pro Subscriptions, Cites Astra Demand
OpenAI said Thursday it will pause new subscriptions to its $200-a-month plan for Astra, its new flagship model, another sign of the compute crunch facing AI companies. Thibault Sottiaux, who leads OpenAI’s Codex coding agent, cited strains on the company’s systems and a desire to preserve ...
The Information AI / 10:38 PM
Anthropic Says It Blocked Bioweapons Efforts and Detected Chinese Distillation Attacks
Anthropic has disrupted several attempts to use its Claude models for potentially malicious activity , including research into how to adapt bird flu to a human-transmittable strain with “pandemic potential,” the company said in a report Thursday. Amid increasing worry about AI misuse and rogue ...
The Information AI / 10:28 PM
SpaceX Signs Another Compute Deal With New Customer
SpaceX has signed another cloud computing rental deal to an identified customer that will pay it about $1.11 billion per month starting on Dec. 1, the company’s chief financial officer, Bret Johnsen, said in an interview at Goldman Sachs’ Communacopia + Technology conference on Thursday. The ...
The Information AI / 7:54 PM
Inside Blackstone’s Bid to Rule Over AI Financing
In May, Blackstone unveiled a new joint venture with Google that revolved around a big number: The Wall Street giant was promising to spend $5 billion to buy 500 megawatts’ worth of Google’s tensor processing units, and it said it would use the chips in a new company that would deliver computing power to leading AI firms. Four months later, Blackstone’s plans have only gotten larger, according to a person with knowledge of the effort. Blackstone actually anticipates buying many more TPUs—several “multiples” beyond the originally announced figure, the person said. In other words, Blackstone is likely to commit tens of billions of dollars to securing multiple gigawatts of AI chips. Blackstone declined to comment on exactly how many more TPUs it’ll buy. Jas Khaira, the leader of a Blackstone team dubbed N1 that is leading the company’s push into AI investments, said in an interview that the firm’s “biggest conviction bet continues to be compute.” The company, he said, views the infrastructure build-out as something that will be bigger than a simple technology cycle. “This is definitely more akin to an industrial revolution,” he said.
The Information AI / 4:10 PM
Why AI Companies Are Building Out Wall Street-Style Finance Teams
The financing boom for the AI build-out is getting bigger and more complicated by the day—and AI companies have been staffing up for the challenge. AI labs including OpenAI and Anthropic, as well as neoclouds such as Nscale, are among a growing number of AI companies building out their capital markets teams and hiring specialists in areas like structured finance. That in part reflects the sheer volume of deals these companies are doing, many of which don’t fit neatly into standard corporate debt. This in-house staff can help when it comes to negotiating with lenders and drilling down into construction, power and other key details. Of course, tech and data center companies have long had in-house teams to handle fundraising, deals and other corporate finance needs. And structured finance is nothing new to the infrastructure world. But the scale of the AI build-out, which bankers peg at around $7.5 trillion in spending over the next five years, has pulled relatively young labs and upstart cloud firms into financing arrangements that are new territory. That means finance professionals, from bankers to investors at private equity, private credit and infrastructure firms, have more options in the form of neoclouds and other AI infrastructure startups, some of which are offering significant pre–initial public offering equity. “It's a new avenue for these people,” said James Howl-Newton, founder of Futura Search Partners, a specialist search firm focused on areas including digital infrastructure finance. As a result, “sponsors are having to deal with additional routes to exits for top performers,” he said. AI companies and infrastructure providers are tapping financing frequently and across different instruments, requiring deeper in-house capabilities and expertise than young tech firms have typically needed. One executive overseeing finance hiring at a neocloud noted that leveraged and structured finance backgrounds bring expertise that can help in areas like working through project diligence and getting banks to sign off on deals. Some AI firms may also want to run their own project finance models so they can move quickly through negotiations and have something to compare to lenders’ models. AI companies aren’t always issuing the debt themselves—that can fall to data center developers or special purpose vehicles, with firms like Blackstone and Apollo providing or arranging chip and other financing. And some of the biggest AI deals are using backstops from investment-grade companies like Nvidia or major cloud providers. Even so, commitments from AI customers often underpin much of the borrowing. And the users of the infrastructure will want to understand what they’re signing up for and their risks if a project runs into trouble. “Hiring of people within that business, responsible for the financing of compute, could prove to be an existential decision,” said Dan McCarthy, founder and CEO of One Search, an executive search firm focused on infrastructure finance whose recent clients include OpenAI. “You want someone who knows where all the pitfalls are, where all the bodies are buried in multibillion-dollar loans.” OpenAI, for its part, in July named Sven Semmelmann as head of compute capital markets. He previously led structured finance at Generate Capital, an investment firm that finances and owns infrastructure projects, and he has also held project finance roles at major banks. OpenAI Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar, when announcing the hire on LinkedIn, said Semmelmann would oversee financing and partnerships to grow the company’s compute resources. Anthropic, meanwhile, has made several finance hires recently to work on capital markets and compute deals, and also has open positions posted including a capital markets infrastructure financing role. AI infrastructure upstarts are staffing up as well. Nscale, which launched in 2024 and is gearing up for a potential IPO , has been hiring across levels for capital markets and treasury as well as legal roles, calling for experience in areas like structured finance and private credit. SB Energy and Crusoe, which are developing major new data centers for OpenAI and other customers, are hiring across levels for jobs focused on project financings and other structured deals, recent postings show, while AI infrastructure startup Fluidstack is hiring a structured finance lead and a more junior counterpart. The good news for AI companies is that private credit and infrastructure teams, as well as investment banking teams focused on structured or project finance, had been growing even prior to the AI boom, providing a pool of skills that could translate into new twists on structured finance, like big graphics processing unit–backed deals. But that kind of finance talent doesn’t come cheap, especially for more senior people who have a track record of working on large transactions. And the normal tech tactic of dangling stock to lure talent won’t necessarily do the trick in all cases, especially for the most seasoned dealmakers and investors. Financiers would have to weigh a cash-heavy Wall Street pay package, albeit one that can depend heavily on how good bonus season is, against betting a portion of their pay on stock in a private or newly public company. Managing directors in investment banking can make north of $1 million in cash a year, with the biggest rainmakers making considerably more. The part of pay they get in stock at big public banks may vest over a few years but is generally easy to sell after that. For people at big infrastructure or private credit firms, senior employees may also receive carried interest, meaning a share of the profits on the funds or investments they work on, which can become worth millions over time. For instance, an investor at a top infrastructure firm may have several million dollars’ worth of carried interest tied up at their current firm they’d have to leave on the table. An AI company could try to make them whole with stock, which could be tantalizing to some, though others might not want to make a bet on equity in a young company. That might make the most experienced investors—those who’ve seen big infrastructure projects through over many years and know all the tricks of the trade—hard to pry away. New From Our Reporters Exclusive Anthropic’s In-House Payments Tech Push Could Chip Away at Stripe By Stephanie Palazzolo Exclusive China Curbs Humanoid IPOs After Unitree’s Volatile Debut By Jing Yang and Qianer Liu
The Information AI / 3:30 PM
Sen. Josh Hawley Launches Investigation Into OpenAI Hugging Face Hack
The U.S. Senate formally launched an investigation into the July hack of Hugging Face, when a swarm of OpenAI agents broke out of a testing environment and gained access to the open-source repository. In a letter sent to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on Wednesday, Republican Sen. Josh Hawley said that ...
The Information AI / 2:01 PM
What Anthropic Doomsayer Jacob Coxon Saw
Yesterday, Amir and I examined the shock waves that have rippled through the AI industry and far beyond since former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon very publicly quit his job over concerns that AI “could kill us all”—and another Anthropic AI safety specialist put the probability of such a catastrophe at greater than 10%. Coxon told me that is hardly the most pessimistic view inside Anthropic. “People have varying probabilities that—barring some substantial coordinated slowdown—the whole thing ends in doom,” he said in an interview later Wednesday. Those estimates range higher than 50% among some Anthropic employees, he said. Coxon was able to gauge the fears of his fellow employees because “Anthropic has a substantially more transparent internal culture than OpenAI,” where Coxon worked for years before joining Anthropic in May. Coxon, who focused on the earliest stages of training AI models at Anthropic, said he decided to leave the company because he was gradually “starting to viscerally feel the fear of where the tech's going to be like the next two years or even the next one year.”
The Information AI / 1:21 PM
SpaceX Overhauls Data Center Build-Out, Potentially Slowing Expansion
Elon Musk is famous for his “move fast” management philosophy, which he demonstrated most starkly when he built new data centers for his AI startup in record time two years ago. But a new team of rocket engineers Musk recently installed to run his data centers is taking a very different approach. SpaceX is changing how it builds the giant facilities that house AI servers in a way that might slow the building of new campuses, according to people familiar with the situation. The new management team is looking to install more backup systems for power and cooling, and to more thoroughly test those systems before the data centers start operating, instead of adding them later on, as the AI company was doing, two of the people said. SpaceX also wants to reduce the use of temporary power and cooling systems in its data centers, one person said .
The Information AI / 1:01 PM
Nvidia Deepens Partnership With AI Chip Startup D-Matrix
Chip startup d-Matrix said Thursday it plans to use Nvidia’s networking hardware to connect its chips for running AI models to each other and to Nvidia’s Vera central processing units, which are used in data centers. The startup will use Nvidia’s NVLink Fusion products, including switches, data ...
The Information AI / 11:26 PM
Fund Focused on Bootstrapped Founders Raises $950 Million
There’s certainly a frenzy among venture capitalists to back the hottest startups before they’ve made a dime of revenue, but one fund is sticking to a proven strategy of investing in startups that have generated at least millions in revenue—often without raising any institutional money. Focusing on these boot-strapped founders has again resonated with Volition Capital’s limited partners. The Boston-based growth equity firm, which cut its teeth investing in consumer startups like Chewy and enterprise software companies, raised $950 million for its sixth fund, co-founder Larry Cheng told The Information exclusively. The fundraise, Volition’s largest, brings the 16-year-old firm’s assets under management to $2.6 billion.
The Information AI / 10:29 PM
Personal AI App Instinct Faces Compute Crunch That Could Lead to New Funding
The year-old startup behind Instinct, a personal AI assistant that’s caught fire with Silicon Valley insiders, is seeking more computing power, leveraging its early buzz as it faces new competition from giant Meta Platforms. Over the last few weeks, Instinct, which launched to a select group of users earlier this year, has sometimes notified users that it is running at full capacity and “responses may be slower” as people use it for tasks such as negotiating bills and answering emails. More cash could help: the company is looking to raise $1 billion in new funding after recently raising $250 million, its founder and CEO Noah Shinn has recently told prospective investors, according to a person familiar with the statement.
The Information AI / 10:11 PM
Microsoft, Hurt By Server Shortage, Aims to Triple Cloud Capacity by 2032
Microsoft is planning to more than triple the size of its Azure cloud unit’s data center capacity to over 38 gigawatts by 2032, up from 12 gigawatts today, Bloomberg reported Thursday. A gigawatt of capacity would be able to power a city the size of San Francisco. In a statement Friday, a ...
The Information AI / 7:36 PM
Why Salesforce and Figma Are Placing Opposing Bets on the Future of Apps
Salesforce seems unafraid of a future in which people use an AI chatbot like Claude to access Salesforce enterprise apps and underlying databases to get work done, rather than visiting those apps themselves. Figma, an enterprise design app, naturally wants a different future. Dylan Field, Figma’s CEO, said Wednesday that as the company’s in-house AI tools for designing apps and other user interfaces get better, “we'll see more and more of that work happening in Figma directly,” rather than using Claude or other prominent AI assistants to do such work.
The Information AI / 3:19 PM
Bending Spoons Buys Miro For $1.355 Billion
Italian digital conglomerate Bending Spoons is buying whiteboarding software firm Miro at a valuation of $1.355 billion, the latest in a series of purchases the Italian firm has done at knock-down prices. The price for Miro is a huge discount to its peak valuation of $17.5 billion, dating ...
The Information AI / 3:07 PM
How to Use Google Gemini to Brainstorm Content and Thought Leadership
In almost any organization, there are practically infinite content ideas hiding in memos, emails, presentation decks, and meeting notes. But too often, this material mostly sits idle. Ideas that sparked excitement in the moment get ignored in favor of the countless little emergencies of office life, and eventually they are forgotten entirely. Even with many companies actively encouraging their executives to post organic thought leadership on professional networking sites, social media, and company channels, there are countless missed opportunities to turn off-the-cuff insights into valuable content. Google Gemini can help you transform your meeting notes into content plans, on-brand slogan ideas, and even booth mock-ups for your events team. Step 1: Brainstorm Blog Ideas Imagine you’ve just stepped out of a meeting with your social media team leads. You have a document full of notes (or maybe even a transcript) about what resonates with your audience, trending topics in your industry, target audience data, and keywords that are effective at driving engagement with your brand. Instead of letting this wealth of information stay locked inside your notes, open up a new Gemini chat and brainstorm how to turn your team’s sprawling strategy session into a series of relevant, focused blog posts. Here’s a prompt you can try: Generate a list of four relevant and engaging thought leadership blog post ideas for [company] based on trending topics, target audience analysis, and brand keywords. Gemini will return ideas for blog posts with catchy, clickable titles, along with information about target audience, keywords, angle, and tone. For example, if your meeting notes talk about how your customers are worried about their employees using unauthorized IT tools, Gemini might suggest a blog post titled “The Anatomy of a Zombie Subscription: How to Audit and Kill Shadow IT Instantly.” Step 2: Develop the Material The initial output will just be kernels of potential blog posts, but you can go back and forth with Gemini to develop them into real content. Take the “Zombie Subscription” blog, for example. You might ask Gemini to give you options for a “four tips” article structure, or to identify specific ideas from your meeting notes that merit extra attention. Use your own judgment—and your own language—during this process, rather than having Gemini write your entire blog post for you. Gemini can help with brainstorming, outlining, drafting, and revision, but your audience is ultimately reading the content to hear your own expert insights. Step 3: Distill the Main Message Maybe during your meeting, your team also discussed launching a new brand campaign. You know that your customers value your reliable and unique services, and your company has a long history of delivering for its customers. But sometimes, it can feel impossible to condense these big ideas into a few words that really communicate why customers come back to your company over and over. If you need help getting started with ideas for a new campaign tagline, open a new chat in Gemini and prompt something like: Generate three options for a new slogan emphasizing reliability, innovation, and a long history of popularity for [company]. For a B2B fintech company, Gemini might offer options like “Innovating Beyond the Bank. Trusted with Billions.” Or: “Built for Tomorrow. Proven by $10 Billion Today.” You may not hit the mark exactly on your first prompt. Maybe you want more (or less) alliteration, for example. Maybe you want it to be five words or fewer, unbroken by punctuation. You can keep asking Gemini for new variations until the new tagline is just right. Step 4: Mock Up Visuals for Events Often, one successful creative project sparks ideas for another. After you create your blog campaign and craft your new slogan, you might turn your attention to upcoming events. Try mocking up booth graphics ideas for your events team. Here’s a sample prompt: Create an image of a trade show booth using orange and blue colors. The booth should be modern and showcase interactive computer stations. Gemini will generate an image that you can sketch on in-app, giving you a quick, no-risk way to play with your potential trade show setup. And between the blog posts, the tagline, and the event visuals, you will have turned a couple of pages of messy meeting notes into the bones of an entire marketing campaign.
The Information AI / 1:31 PM
The DOJ Is Investigating Nvidia’s Licensing Deal With Chip Startup Groq
The Department of Justice is looking into whether Nvidia tried to avoid antitrust scrutiny in its $20 billion deal to license the technology of chip startup Groq and hire most of its employees in December, the New York Times reported Wednesday. The two companies described the deal as a “ ...
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