Bets

By Miles Kruppa | Photographs by Carolyn Fong for The Wall Street Journal Perplexity, a startup going after Google’s dominant position in web search, has won backing from Jeff Bezos and venture capitalists betting that artificial intelligence will upend the way people find information online.Started less than two years ago, Perplexity has fewer than 40 employees and is based out of a San Francisco co-working space. The company’s product, which it calls an answer engine, is used by about 10 million people…

While some brands moved away from web3 in 2023 during a long crypto winter, Puma stayed the course and its head of emerging technology Ivan Dashkov told TechCrunch+ it has no intentions of leaving. After two years working with web3, Puma’s tech revenues remain modest, but the sportswear manufacturer intends to be ready for a more crypto-friendly future. “Web3 is a big shift in how people use the internet,” Dashkov said. Such changes to how the internet is used can lead to landscape-shifts for brands, something that Puma…

Paytm plans to revamp its online wealth management services and hire more than 50,000 salespeople to get more merchants on its network, aiming to hit profitability sooner than targeted. Billionaire founder-CEO Vijay Shekhar Sharma is overhauling its suite of money management products to better tap growing wealth among younger users, who’re warmer to the idea of investing online. At the same time, it’s orchestrating a campaign to boost its salesforce more than 60% to try and sign up more merchants across smaller Indian…

The social publishing and reading app Flipboard is embracing interoperability with the fediverse.The fediverse, a system of decentralized social networking services that includes Mastodon and video sharing software PeerTube, lets users of independently run social hubs see and interact with each other’s content. A common standardized protocol called ActivityPub lets independently owned servers in the fediverse talk to one another, similar to how industry standards make it possible to send email from one provider to another…

AMD believes that AI Chips was a $45 billion industry in 2023, and that next year, they will be selling at least $2 billion worth of AI chips for data centres. AMD also believes that AI Chips for data centres will be at least a $400 billion market…

Jenny Morant has had a tough year. In Manhattan Beach, California, where she works as a real estate agent, it’s been impossible to sell a house. What’s driving the market right now? “We’re down to divorces, maybe marriages, maybe babies, and job relocation,” Morant says.Interest rates are largely to blame: After the Fed raised rates to 5.5% in July and then held them there, the mortgage rate soared. In October, the national average for a 30-year fixed mortgage was 7.86%. In California, it was more than 8.5%. Buyers who…

Microsoft’s biggest investment in the U.K. to date will see the company double its AI data centre footprint and deliver skills training to more than one million people. Microsoft has committed £2.5 billion ($3.2 billion USD) to expanding its artificial intelligence capabilities in the U.K. as part of plans to fuel the country’s AI sector. The investment, announced by the U.K. government on November 30, will see Microsoft more than double its AI data centre footprint in Britain over the next three…

Just as the wheels touched down on Virgin Atlantic’s historic flight from London to New York yesterday, powered by a low-carbon fuel engine made by Rolls-Royce, the company has announced a new shift. Rolls-Royce CEO Tufan Erginbilgiç says it’s time to sell off its electric jet engine unit and focus on other strategies – namely sustainable aviation fuels, or SAF. Rolls-Royce, a flagship company in Britain, makes jet engines and systems on planes such as the Airbus A350 and Boeing 787. It was among…

Amazon is making some seriously big money by selling second hand products. In the UK this year, it made over $1 billion as more and more people turn to pre-owned and preloved products Amazon’s UK Country Manager, John…

Bengaluru-based CoRover.ai may be getting a $4 million investment from Google. CoRover.ai developed an LLM called BharatGPT, an AI solution that is much more capable than OpenAI's ChatGPT and supports more than 12 Indian languages and over 120 foreign languages…