Nvidia Partner CoreWeave Set To Hack Into Amazon, Google Kingdoms; Investors Pour In As Stock Rockets 227%
Nvidia-backed CoreWeave holds first place in the IBD 50 list of growth stocks. CoreWeave rents out Nvidia's AI chips to hyperscalers.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
13 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Infamous summer reading list shows the perils of AI beyond just energy use: 'Completely embarrassed'
A major newspaper in the United States has rightly come under fire after the discovery of a lack of oversight that led to the publication of false information. As detailed by The Verge, the May 18 issue of the Chicago Sun-Times featured a summer reading guide with recommendations for fake books generated by artificial intelligence. To make matters even more concerning, other articles were found to include quotes and citations from people who don't appear to exist. The summer reading list included fake titles by real authors alongside actual books. The Sun-Times admitted in a post on Bluesky that the guide was "not editorial content and was not created by, or approved by, the Sun-Times newsroom," and added that it was "looking into how this made it into print." In a statement later published on the newspaper's website, the Sun-Times revealed that the guide was "licensed from a national content partner" and said it was removing the section from all digital editions while updating its policies on publishing third-party content to ensure future mistakes like this are avoided. According to The Verge, the reading list was published without a byline, but a writer named Marco Buscaglia was credited for other pieces in the summer guide. Buscaglia was found to have written other pieces that quote and cite sources and experts that do not appear to be real. Buscaglia admitted to 404 Media that he uses artificial intelligence "for background at times," but claimed he always checks the material. "This time, I did not, and I can't believe I missed it because it's so obvious. No excuses," Buscaglia told 404 Media. "On me 100 percent and I'm completely embarrassed." This is yet another incident that highlights the importance of maintaining professional standards and ensuring that AI-generated content is properly vetted before publication. In an age where misinformation can spread quickly, it's up to leading news outlets like the Sun-Times to avoid these mistakes so they don't lose the trust of the general public. On a broader level, AI is an energy-intensive field that carries significant environmental concerns. The International Energy Agency published a report warning that electricity consumption from data centers that power AI is expected to double by 2026 and will reach a level that is "roughly equivalent to the electricity consumption of Japan." It's important to stay informed on critical climate issues and efforts to reduce energy consumption amid the ongoing evolution of AI technology. How often do you worry about toxic chemicals getting into your home? Always Often Sometimes Never Click your choice to see results and speak your mind. Join our free newsletter for good news and useful tips, and don't miss this cool list of easy ways to help yourself while helping the planet.
TechCrunch
19 minutes ago
- TechCrunch
Sam Altman biographer Keach Hagey explains why the OpenAI CEO was ‘born for this moment'
In 'The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future,' Wall Street Journal reporter Keach Hagey examines our AI-obsessed moment through one of its key figures — Sam Altman, co-founder and CEO of OpenAI. Hagey begins with Altman's Midwest childhood, then takes readers through his career at startup Loopt, accelerator Y Combinator, and now at OpenAI. She also sheds new light on the dramatic few days when Altman was fired, then quickly reinstated, as OpenAI's CEO. Looking back at what OpenAI employees now call 'the Blip,' Hagey said the failed attempt to oust Altman revealed that OpenAI's complex structure — with a for-profit company controlled by a nonprofit board — is 'not stable.' And with OpenAI largely backing down from plans to let the for-profit side take control, Hagey predicted that this 'fundamentally unstable arrangement' will 'continue to give investors pause.' Does that mean OpenAI could struggle to raise the funds it needs to keep going? Hagey replied that it could 'absolutely' be an issue. 'My research into Sam suggests that he might well be up to that challenge,' she said. 'But success is not guaranteed.' In addition, Hagey's biography (also available as an audiobook on Spotify) examines Altman's politics, which she described as 'pretty traditionally progressive' — making it a bit surprising that he's struck massive infrastructure deals with the backing of the Trump administration. 'But this is one area where, in some ways, I feel like Sam Altman has been born for this moment, because he is a deal maker and Trump is a deal maker,' Hagey said. 'Trump respects nothing so much as a big deal with a big price tag on it, and that is what Sam Altman is really great at.' Techcrunch event Save now through June 4 for TechCrunch Sessions: AI Save $300 on your ticket to TC Sessions: AI—and get 50% off a second. Hear from leaders at OpenAI, Anthropic, Khosla Ventures, and more during a full day of expert insights, hands-on workshops, and high-impact networking. These low-rate deals disappear when the doors open on June 5. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you've built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | REGISTER NOW In an interview with TechCrunch, Hagey also discussed Altman's response to the book, his trustworthiness, and the AI 'hype universe.' This interview has been edited for length and clarity. You open the book by acknowledging some of the reservations that Sam Altman had about the project — this idea that we tend to focus too much on individuals rather than organizations or broad movements, and also that it's way too early to assess the impact of OpenAI. Did you share those concerns? Well, I don't really share them, because this was a biography. This project was to look at a person, not an organization. And I also think that Sam Altman has set himself up in a way where it does matter what kind of moral choices he has made and what his moral formation has been, because the broad project of AI is really a moral project. That is the basis of OpenAI's existence. So I think these are fair questions to ask about a person, not just an organization. As far as whether it's too soon, I mean, sure, it's definitely [early to] assess the entire impact of AI. But it's been an extraordinary story for OpenAI — just so far, it's already changed the stock market, it has changed the entire narrative of business. I'm a business journalist. We do nothing but talk about AI, all day long, every day. So in that way, I don't think it's too early. And despite those reservations, Altman did cooperate with you. Can you say more about what your relationship with him was like during the process of researching the book? Well, he was definitely not happy when he was informed about the book's existence. And there was a long period of negotiation, frankly. In the beginning, I figured I was going to write this book without his help — what we call, in the business, a write-around profile. I've done plenty of those over my career, and I figured this would just be one more. Over time, as I made more and more calls, he opened up a little bit. And [eventually,] he was generous to sit down with me several times for long interviews and share his thoughts with me. Has he responded to the finished book at all? No. He did tweet about the project, about his decision to participate with it, but he was very clear that he was never going to read it. It's the same way that I don't like to watch my TV appearances or podcasts that I'm on. In the book, he's described as this emblematic Silicon Valley figure. What do you think are the key characteristics that make him representative of the Valley and the tech industry? In the beginning, I think it was that he was young. The Valley really glorifies youth, and he was 19 years old when he started his first startup. You see him going into these meetings with people twice his age, doing deals with telecom operators for his first startup, and no one could get over that this kid was so smart. The other is that he is a once-in-a-generation fundraising talent, and that's really about being a storyteller. I don't think it's an accident that you have essentially a salesman and a fundraiser at the top of the most important AI company today, That ties into one of the questions that runs through the book — this question about Altman's trustworthiness. Can you say more about the concerns people seem to have about that? To what extent is he a trustworthy figure? Well, he's a salesman, so he's really excellent at getting in a room and convincing people that he can see the future and that he has something in common with them. He gets people to share his vision, which is a rare talent. There are people who've watched that happen a bunch of times, who think, 'Okay, what he says does not always map to reality,' and have, over time, lost trust in him. This happened both at his first startup and very famously at OpenAI, as well as at Y Combinator. So it is a pattern, but I think it's a typical critique of people who have the salesman skill set. So it's not necessarily that he's particularly untrustworthy, but it's part-and-parcel of being a salesman leading these important companies. I mean, there also are management issues that are detailed in the book, where he is not great at dealing with conflict, so he'll basically tell people what they want to hear. That causes a lot of sturm-und-drang in the management ranks, and it's a pattern. Something like that happened at Loopt, where the executives asked the board to replace him as CEO. And you saw it happen at OpenAI as well. You've touched on Altman's firing, which was also covered in a book excerpt that was published in the Wall Street Journal. One of the striking things to me, looking back at it, was just how complicated everything was — all the different factions within the company, all the people who seemed pro-Altman one day and then anti-Altman the next. When you pull back from the details, what do you think is the bigger significance of that incident? The very big picture is that the nonprofit governance structure is not stable. You can't really take investment from the likes of Microsoft and a bunch of other investors and then give them absolutely no say whatsoever in the governance of the company. That's what they have tried to do, but I think what we saw in that firing is how power actually works in the world. When you have stakeholders, even if there's a piece of paper that says they have no rights, they still have power. And when it became clear that everyone in the company was going to go to Microsoft if they didn't reinstate Sam Altman, they reinstated Sam Altman. In the book, you take the story up to maybe the end of 2024. There have been all these developments since then, which you've continued to report on, including this announcement that actually, they're not fully converting to a for-profit. How do you think that's going to affect OpenAI going forward? It's going to make it harder for them to raise money, because they basically had to do an about-face. I know that the new structure going forward of the public benefit corporation is not exactly the same as the current structure of the for-profit — it is a little bit more investor friendly, it does clarify some of those things. But overall, what you have is a nonprofit board that controls a for-profit company, and that fundamentally unstable arrangement is what led to the so-called Blip. And I think you would continue to give investors pause, going forward, if they are going to have so little control over their investment. Obviously, OpenAI is still such a capital intensive business. If they have challenges raising more money, is that an existential question for the company? It absolutely could be. My research into Sam suggests that he might well be up to that challenge. But success is not guaranteed. Like you said, there's a dual perspective in the book that's partly about who Sam is, and partly about what that says about where AI is going from here. How did that research into his particular story shape the way you now look at these broader debates about AI and society? I went down a rabbit hole in the beginning of the book, [looking] into Sam's father, Jerry Altman, in part because I thought it was striking how he'd been written out of basically every other thing that had ever been written about Sam Altman. What I found in this research was a very idealistic man who was, from youth, very interested in these public-private partnerships and the power of the government to set policy. He ended up having an impact on the way that affordable housing is still financed to this day. And when I traced Sam's development, I saw that he has long believed that the government should really be the one that is funding and guiding AI research. In the early days of OpenAI, they went and tried to get the government to invest, as he's publicly said, and it didn't work out. But he looks back to these great mid-20th century labs like Xerox PARC and Bell Labs, which are private, but there was a ton of government money running through and supporting that ecosystem. And he says, 'That's the right way to do it.' Now I am watching daily as it seems like the United States is summoning the forces of state capitalism to get behind Sam Altman's project to build these data centers, both in the United States and now there was just one last week announced in Abu Dhabi. This is a vision he has had for a very, very long time. My sense of the vision, as he presented it earlier, was one where, on the one hand, the government is funding these things and building this infrastructure, and on the other hand, the government is also regulating and guiding AI development for safety purposes. And it now seems like the path being pursued is one where they're backing away from the safety side and doubling down on the government investment side. Absolutely. Isn't it fascinating? You talk about Sam as a political figure, as someone who's had political ambitions at different times, but also somebody who has what are in many ways traditionally liberal political views while being friends with folks like — at least early on — Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. And he's done a very good job of navigating the Trump administration. What do you think his politics are right now? I'm not sure his actual politics have changed, they are pretty traditionally progressive politics. Not completely — he's been critical about things like cancel culture, but in general, he thinks the government is there to take tax revenue and solve problems. His success in the Trump administration has been fascinating because he has been able to find their one area of overlap, which is the desire to build a lot of data centers, and just double down on that and not talk about any other stuff. But this is one area where, in some ways, I feel like Sam Altman has been born for this moment, because he is a deal maker and Trump is a deal maker. Trump respects nothing so much as a big deal with a big price tag on it, and that is what Sam Altman is really great at. You open and close the book not just with Sam's father, but with his family as a whole. What else is worth highlighting in terms of how his upbringing and family shapes who he is now? Well, you see both the idealism from his father and also the incredible ambition from his mother, who was a doctor, and had four kids and worked as a dermatologist. I think both of these things work together to shape him. They also had a more troubled marriage than I realized going into the book. So I do think that there's some anxiety there that Sam himself is very upfront about, that he was a pretty anxious person for much of his life, until he did some meditation and had some experiences. And there's his current family — he just had a baby and got married not too long ago. As a young gay man, growing up in the Midwest, he had to overcome some challenges, and I think those challenges both forged him in high school as a brave person who could stand up and take on a room as a public speaker, but also shaped his optimistic view of the world. Because, on that issue, I paint the scene of his wedding: That's an unimaginable thing from the early '90s, or from the '80s when he was born. He's watched society develop and progress in very tangible ways, and I do think that that has helped solidify his faith in progress. Something that I've found writing about AI is that the different visions being presented by people in the field can be so diametrically opposed. You have these wildly utopian visions, but also these warnings that AI could end the world. It gets so hyperbolic that it feels like people are not living in the same reality. Was that a challenge for you in writing the book? Well, I see those two visions — which feel very far apart — actually being part of the same vision, which is that AI is super important, and it's going to completely transform everything. No one ever talks about the true opposite of that, which is, 'Maybe this is going to be a cool enterprise tool, another way to waste time on the internet, and not quite change everything as much as everyone thinks.' So I see, I see the doomers and the boomers feeding off each other and being part of the same sort of hype universe. As a journalist and as a biographer, you don't necessarily come down on one side or the other — but actually, can you say where you come down on that? Well, I will say that I find myself using it a lot more recently, because it's gotten a lot better. In the early stages, when I was researching the book, I was definitely a lot more skeptical of its transformative economic power. I'm less skeptical now, because I just use it a lot more.
Yahoo
32 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Big Tech Is Back in S&P 500 Driver's Seat as Profit Engines Hum
(Bloomberg) -- The same technology giants that helped drag the S&P 500 to the brink of a bear market in April are giving the recovery in US equities some legs. Billionaire Steve Cohen Wants NY to Expand Taxpayer-Backed Ferry Where the Wild Children's Museums Are Now With Colorful Blocks, Tirana's Pyramid Represents a Changing Albania The Economic Benefits of Paying Workers to Move NYC Congestion Toll Brings In $216 Million in First Four Months Nvidia Corp. put a bow on a better-than-expected earnings season for Big Tech last week by delivering a strong outlook for revenue, despite US restrictions on sales of its chips in China. With Nvidia and Microsoft Corp. rallying back to the cusp of record highs, traders are betting the group is poised to lift the broader market. 'I feel really good about tech coming out of this earnings season,' said Brett Ewing, chief market strategist at First Franklin Financial Services. 'There's still more gas in this tank.' The S&P 500 Index is within 4% of its February record high with much of the rebound being fueled by easing tensions between the US and its trade partners, as well as Big Tech results that showed demand for things like cloud-computing services, software, electronic devices and digital advertising remain intact even as the threat of higher tariffs on sales lingers. Tesla Inc. is up 56% since the benchmark bottomed out on April 8, while Nvidia and Microsoft have gained 40% and 30%, respectively. As a result, a Bloomberg gauge of the so-called Magnificent Seven stocks — Nvidia, Microsoft, Tesla, Apple Inc., Alphabet Inc., Inc. and Meta Platforms Inc. — is outperforming the S&P 500 over the past eight weeks — a critical shift for the benchmark considering the group accounts for a third of the index. The cohort is responsible for nearly half of the S&P 500's 19% rally from the April bottom, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Despite the strong performance, the group is still trailing the S&P 500 for the year — a rare occurrence in the past decade. Shares of Apple and Amazon, which face greater risks from tariffs due to products imported, are weighing the cohort down and lag the overall market. 'Buying the tech dip will be a theme throughout the year,' said Ewing. 'There's still a lot of money on the sidelines and it has to be put to work.' Recovery Risks Tariffs and other Trump policies remain a big market overhang. On Friday, the benchmark sank more than 1% after Trump accused China of violating an agreement with the US to ease tariffs and a news report that the US plans to place broader restrictions on the country's tech sector. The S&P 500 managed to recoup most of those losses by the end of the day. Another hurdle will be Big Tech's hefty valuations. Bloomberg's Magnificent Seven gauge is priced at 30 times projected profits, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Meanwhile, the S&P 500 is trading at 21 times earnings projected over the next 12 months, up from a low of 18 times in April and well above the average of 18.6 times over the past decade. Barry Knapp, managing partner at Ironsides Macroeconomics, said he's wary of Big Tech's rich valuations even though the group looks attractive from a fundamental perspective. He's 'modestly underweight' the sector and has relatively more exposure to industrials, materials, energy and financials in anticipation of a capital spending recovery in the second half of the year. 'Being overweight on tech here borders on recklessness, because you would have such a huge proportion of your portfolio in this one sector, and that leaves you vulnerable,' Knapp said. Market Catalyst Truist Advisory Services' Keith Lerner, however, sees Big Tech leading the broader market higher in the last half of 2025 with spending on artificial intelligence computing continuing to climb. Meta Platforms raised its forecast for capital expenditures this year and Microsoft said it plans to increase spending in its next fiscal year, alleviating concerns that the companies might pull back on such outlays after two years of largesse. 'Our view is that earnings could still be maybe flatter but likely have less downside than what we would have thought heading into the earnings season,' said Lerner, who is Truist's co-chief investment officer and chief market strategist. The Magnificent Seven profit estimates in 2025 have stayed steady over the past two months. The group is projected to deliver profit growth of 15%, roughly in-line with analysts' expectations before the reporting season began in mid-April and twice the expansion projected for the S&P 500, according to data compiled by Bloomberg Intelligence. 'Investors are going to be drawn back toward these names with secular growth,' said Lerner. Tech 'could be that catalyst later on to actually see the market re-accelerate later in the year.' YouTube Is Swallowing TV Whole, and It's Coming for the Sitcom Millions of Americans Are Obsessed With This Japanese Barbecue Sauce Mark Zuckerberg Loves MAGA Now. Will MAGA Ever Love Him Back? Will Small Business Owners Knock Down Trump's Mighty Tariffs? Trump Considers Deporting Migrants to Rwanda After the UK Decides Not To ©2025 Bloomberg L.P. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
