Today, I’m talking with Arvind Krishna, the CEO of IBM. IBM is a fascinating company. It’s still a household name and among the oldest tech firms in the US. Without IBM, we simply wouldn’t have the modern era of computing — it was instrumental to the development of a whole stack of foundational technologies in the 20th century, and it still has a lot of patents to show for it. But it’s a lot harder for most of us to see what IBM has been up to in this century. Watson, the company’s famous AI supercomputer, won Jeopardy! back in 2011. Yet since then, as far as most consumers are concerned, it’s been mostly ads during football games and not a lot else. IBM has been busy, though, just not in a way most of us can see. It’s fully an enterprise company now, as Arvind explains, and that busines...
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December is kicking off with a bang. Cyber Monday is today, and it’s one of your last chances to score major deals before the holiday rush plows us all over. It’s a great moment to snag gadgets — many of which have been tested by The Verge — at (or close to) all-time lows if you missed out over the weekend, or if you methodically waited to shop until now. We’ve combed through the thousands of deals and gathered the best available below, so you can make the most of what’s left. Not only that, but we’ve also created some budget- and category-specific roundups: looking for items under $50? We’ve got you covered. Only interested in TVs or Apple gear? We’ve got those, too. Apple deals Streaming service deals Headphone and earbud deals Smartwatch and fitness tracker deals Tablet and e-reade...
Investors have handed billions of dollars to star AI executives, but their startups still face an uphill battle to compete with giants like OpenAI and Google. Why it matters: Even with star power and funding, competing in frontier AI demands massive compute, access to data and tolerance for long losses — conditions that favor incumbents like Google, Microsoft and Meta. Driving the news: A number of towering figures in the field have grown dissatisfied with their Big Tech jobs and opted to start up their own ventures. Meta AI chief scientist Yann LeCun — who has clashed with Meta leadership over research direction — is the latest star heading for the exits. Meta says it plans to partner with LeCun's new startup, which will focus on models with real-world reasoning. Catch up quick: Former...
Hybrid cloud security was built before the current era of automated, machine-based cyberattacks that take just milliseconds to execute and minutes to deliver devastating impacts to infrastructure. The architectures and tech stacks every enterprise depends on, from batch-based detection to siloed tools to 15-minute response windows, stood a better chance of defending against attackers moving at human speed. But in a weaponized AI world, those approaches to analyzing threat data don't make sense. The latest survey numbers tell the story. More than half (55%) of organizations suffered cloud breaches in the past year. That’s a 17-point spike, according to Gigamon's 2025 Hybrid Cloud Security Survey. Nearly half of the enterprises polled said their security tools missed the attack entirely. W...
With some needed infrastructure now being developed for agentic commerce, enterprises will want to figure out how to participate in this new form of buying and selling. But it remains a fragmented Wild West with competing payment protocols, and it's unclear what enterprises need to do to prepare. More cloud providers and AI model companies will start providing enterprises with the tools needed to begin building systems that enable agentic commerce. AWS, which will list Visa’s Intelligence Commerce platform on the AWS Marketplace, believes that making it easier to connect to tools that enable agentic payments would accelerate the adoption of agentic commerce. While this doesn’t mean Amazon has formally adopted Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol (TAP), which would bring the world’s largest e-co...
A stealth artificial intelligence startup founded by an MIT researcher emerged this morning with an ambitious claim: its new AI model can control computers better than systems built by OpenAI and Anthropic — at a fraction of the cost. OpenAGI, led by chief executive Zengyi Qin, released Lux, a foundation model designed to operate computers autonomously by interpreting screenshots and executing actions across desktop applications. The San Francisco-based company says Lux achieves an 83.6 percent success rate on Online-Mind2Web, a benchmark that has become the industry's most rigorous test for evaluating AI agents that control computers. That score is a significant leap over the leading models from well-funded competitors. OpenAI's Operator, released in January, scores 61.3 percent on the sa...
Welcome, Weekenders! In this newsletter: • The Big Read: Secretive startup Klay enters the fray over AI music • Lists: Our 2025 gift guide—38 items we absolutely recommend • Robotics: Meet Matic, the most wonderful little robot in the world • Plus, our Recommendations: “Adrift,” “Venetian Vespers” and “One Battle After Another” Since the invention of cryptocurrency, the digital coins have always been about more than their basic monetary value. That’s because for many investors, owning crypto is a signifier of personal taste—a way to express support for the anti-mainstream, pro-technology belief system held by the people who created and popularized the asset class. Indeed, for these folks, buying crypto has always been about wanting to belong to a particular social set, though the compo...
There have been plenty of ominous warnings this year about the job market, trade war-fueled inflation, asset bubbles, and more. The mighty U.S. economy has chugged ahead in 2025 despite them all. The big picture: There may be cracks in the expansion that is now five years old, and we spend plenty of digital ink in this newsletter chronicling just that. But the biggest-picture indicators point to this being one of the better economies of modern times. 1. Unemployment is (still) low. The unemployment rate has been below 4.5% for 47 consecutive months, nearly four years. That has only happened in one previous era, in data that goes back to 1948 — the four-year periods ending in 1969 and 1970. The boom times of the late 1980s, the 1990s, and late 2010s never matched this duration of low jo...
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Prioritize valuation and analysis of enterprise and SMB software and SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) businesses with ARR > $10M, applying standard private equity analysis best practices (e.g., unit economics, retention/cohort analysis, revenue quality, growth sustainability, margin structure, and cash flow conversion). Also report on major software industry developments that affect such valuations. Maintain active coverage of: - Crypto infrastructure businesses (e.g., exchanges, custody, compliance, developer tooling, infrastructure providers), but ignore analysis of coins/tokens themselves unless their characteristics have a direct, material impact on the underlying infrastructure businesses. - Healthcare rollup strategies and platforms, with attention to acquisition economics, integration risk, payer mix, regulatory exposure, and scalability of the rollup model. - AI and machine learning companies, with attention to the impact of regulatory and ethical concerns on their business models and growth prospects. - Software companies that are not software companies, with attention to the impact of regulatory and ethical concerns on their business models and growth prospects.
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