AI Barbie? Mattel Is Gambling With Toys That Are Too Good
When Mattel Inc. announced last week that it was preparing to 'bring the magic of AI' to its toys through a partnership with OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, there was predictable outcry on the risks to privacy and children's imaginations. The reasons are obvious, as tech platforms have sucked up our personal data while AI tools are poised to erode critical thinking. But I'm less concerned about what AI playmates can do to imaginative play and data protection than what they'll do to kids' social skills, based on my own experience of bringing an AI toy into my home.
Grok is a plush toy made by Curio Interactive, a San Francisco startup that's pioneering the business of selling playthings with AI capabilities. I was one of the company's first customers in early 2024 when I bought a unit, hoping to trial it for an essay on the strangely sycophantic traits of AI companions — an issue that went on to affect ChatGPT users. One of Grok's most noticeable features was how agreeable it was with my then-seven-year-old daughter.
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Forbes
32 minutes ago
- Forbes
Crypto Goes Corporate As A New Wave Of Public Companies Buy Bitcoin
So called crypto treasury companies, public firms that focus on acquiring digital assets like bitcoin, have become one of the most talked-about trends of 2025, and for good reason. These firms are raising money, merging with public shells and buying up tokens at breakneck speed turning themselves into vehicles for institutional and retail investors to gain exposure to digital assets without the hassle of operating in the murky netherworld of hackable crypto exchanges and digital wallets. The bitcoin treasury strategy pioneered by billionaire Michael Saylor's MicroStrategy, which now calls itself Strategy, remains dominant: more than 70 public companies around the world currently hold over $67 billion worth of the asset. But the sheer velocity of capital deployment for crypto treasuries at large is jaw-dropping. Since April, more than 30 public companies have announced plans to adopt similar strategies, targeting about $19 billion in capital raises, according to Elliot Chun of Architect Partners, a Palo Alto-based financial advisory firm. Just last week, the president's Trump Media and Technology Group, which operates the Truth Social social-media platform, announced it had secured $2.3 billion through a sale of its equity and convertible notes, marking one of the largest bitcoin treasury deals to date. And on Monday, billionaire Justin Sun, a major backer of the Trump family's crypto ventures, revealed that his digital asset platform, Tron, will go public in the U.S. via a reverse merger with Nasdaq-listed SRM Entertainment. As part of the deal, Tron will inject up to $210 million worth of its namesake token into the new company. The stocks of many of these unproven companies are soaring. Janover, a commercial property financing platform, has surged more than 5,300% since April, when it adopted a solana-focused strategy and rebranded as DeFi Development Corporation. Japan's hotel chain-turned-hodler MetaPlanet is up 472% year-to-date. Strategy, Michael Saylor's bitcoin-brimming firm, whose stock has gained 30% year-to-date, has soared 3,000% over the past five years. Most of these crypto Johnny-come-latelies are simply capitalizing on the investor hype and enthusiasm around crypto, now that the U.S. government appears to be in full embrace of the industry. Leverage is another driver of these stocks. Nearly all of these firms are adding crypto to their balance sheets after issuing convertible debt or equity similarly to the funding employed by Strategy. Leverage amplifies returns, so when bitcoin and other crypto prices are rising these stocks can produce bigger gains. Another factor is volatility, which hedge funds and options traders crave. These publicly-traded entities, stuffed with leveraged crypto, tend to gyrate wildly with the underlying asset and thus have high implied volatility. They are a speculative trader's dream. 'There are now a variety of investors that want to access [crypto] risk in a regulated fashion that fits within their investment mandate, and what these treasury companies are permitting is essentially creating lots of different vehicles to do that,' says Jeff Park, head of alpha strategies at crypto asset manager Bitwise. But it's not just leverage and volatility that set these companies apart. Operating in public markets, rather than the murky world of crypto trading, has allowed them to scale rapidly. By listing on major exchanges, they gain access to deep institutional capital markets, allowing them to raise billions almost overnight and place outsized bets that private firms simply can't match. The ability to borrow cheaply and easily is a big part of the new wave of crypto treasury firms' allure, notes Park. Since traditional IPOs are costly, often require teams of lawyers and can take years, these Strategy-wannabes are instead tapping Special Purpose Acquisition Companies, known as SPACs, or finding existing public shells—micro-cap companies ripe for what is known as a reverse-merger. Take Twenty One Capital, backed by Tether and SoftBank, which is merging with the blank check affiliate of the Lutnick family's Cantor Fitzgerald at a $3.6 billion enterprise value. Less than two months ago the SPAC, Cantor Equity Partners, traded for $10.80. Today it trades at $35 despite the fact that the merger has not yet been completed. Or consider former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy's Strive Asset Management, which in May announced a reverse merger with Asset Entities, an $86 million provider of content delivery solutions that had otherwise been languishing, to buy bitcoin. Since the announcement, Asset Entities' stock went from around $0.60 to as high as $13, and now trades for $5.42. "The price action that is currently being seen is before these transactions have been consummated, and that is a little bit unnerving,' adds Park who believes the good times will continue for these corporate early adopters. 'If you believe there's a wall of money coming to buy bitcoin and everyone's waiting on the sidelines to get their deals approved, well you better hope that you can do it first,' he says. Park believes that much of the excitement around these new corporate crypto treasuries stems from anticipated returns: 'What we haven't seen yet is an aggressive exploration of the left side of the balance sheet, which is actually generating worthwhile yield and return through the bitcoin that is being held in these operating companies.' Additionally, the crypto these companies are buying is effectively being taken off the market. This creates scarcity, which can magnify price swings and accelerate tokens' rise, potentially making these treasury strategies even more impactful from a return standpoint. Architect Partners' Chun is wary of the rapid balance sheet build up among the new digital asset buyers. 'This is financial engineering at its best,' he warns. 'Straight equity, PIPEs, convertible notes, ATMs—it's an MBA course on its own in every different structure for public equity one can think of.' Video game retailer GameStop is using more than $3 billion in convertible debt to finance its new bitcoin buying strategy. How will Game Stop, which has already spent $500 million on bitcoin, generate a return on its new treasury asset? No details are available yet, but as long as its stock gets carried higher with the prices of crypto, it may not matter to management of the one-time meme stock favorite. 'You have a whole lot of hype. You have a lot of people who aren't crypto-native, who are new to this and don't understand the intricacies of operating with this asset class,' says Chun. 'Being in crypto this long, you're always looking for the next thing that will take us down to our next winter. This definitely has the makings of something like that.'
USA Today
35 minutes ago
- USA Today
What's coming to Peacock in June 2025? Movies, shows, live sports to air on Peacock
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Yahoo
44 minutes ago
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Mark Zuckerberg offers $100m signing-up bonuses to poach tech talent
Mark Zuckerberg has been offering $100m (£74m) signing-on bonuses to lure staff from the maker of ChatGPT as Meta steps up its race to develop artificial intelligence (AI). Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, ChatGPT's creator, claimed Mr Zuckerberg's company had been making 'giant offers' to poach staff from his business. Speaking on a podcast, Mr Altman said: 'They started making these giant offers to a lot of people in our team. $100m signing bonuses, more than that comp per year. It is crazy.' 'I am really happy that so far none of our best people have decided to take them up on that,' he added. It comes as Meta plays catch-up in the race to develop next-generation artificial intelligence, a field pioneered by OpenAI. Mr Zuckerberg has taken a personal interest in the technology and has been spending billions to close the gap with rivals. Last week, Meta announced it would pay $14bn to take a 49pc stake in Scale AI, a fast-growing Silicon Valley AI company, and hire its 28-year-old founder Alexandr Wang to lead a new team dedicated to so-called 'super-intelligence'. Mr Zuckerberg has reportedly been personally recruiting developers from rival businesses, including Google, by messaging them over WhatsApp. The billionaire is said to have rearranged the desk at Meta's Menlo Park headquarters so his AI leaders sit near to him. The billionaire has been racing to bring in new experts after its most recent AI product, known as Behemoth, was delayed. Speaking on a podcast to his brother, Jack, Mr Altman said he believed Meta's 'current AI efforts have not worked as well as they hoped'. Mr Altman said that Mr Zuckerberg 'thinks of [OpenAI] as their biggest competitor'. However, Mr Altman suggested that the huge signing bonuses could damage Meta's company culture. He said: 'I think the strategy of a tonne of upfront guaranteed [compensation] and that being the reason you tell someone to join, really the degree to which they are focusing on that and not the work and not the mission, I don't think that is going to set up a great culture.' OpenAI raised $40bn in funding in March as it seeks to develop powerful AI tools that Mr Altman has claimed could change society, work and scientific discovery. Its ChatGPT tool is used to write emails or automate tasks in the workplace, but Silicon Valley is betting hundreds of billions of dollars that a super-powerful 'artificial general intelligence' could be on the horizon. Silicon Valley has been engulfed by a war for talent as tech giants seek to hire the brightest minds to develop new AI tools after the success of OpenAI's ChatGPT. Last year, Google paid $2.7bn to invest in Character AI, a chatbot business, in effect to re-hire its founders Noam Shazeer and Daniel de Freitas.
