31 July 2025
Topic: Companies And Business
Reddit revenue soars as it bets on AI and advertising
Reddit reported its Q2 earnings, and it’s clear that its focus on AI has ramped up significantly....
TL;DR
Reddit reports significant growth in AI-powered features and revenue, with a 24% year-over-year increase in its 'other revenue' category, driven by data licensing agreements with major AI providers.
Key Takeaways:
Key Takeaways:
- Reddit's AI-powered marketing tools generate 93% of its total revenue, with $465 million coming from ads in the second quarter.
- The company's 'other revenue' category, including data licensing, jumped 24% year-over-year to $35 million.
- Reddit's AI-powered features, such as Reddit Answers, have attracted significant user growth, with 6 million weekly users in the second quarter.
Apple plans to ‘significantly’ grow AI investments, Cook says
Apple is open to M&A to accelerate its AI strategy, and says it's made seven acquisitions this year so far....
TL;DR
Apple signals its renewed focus on AI, increasing investments and shifting resources to catch up in the AI race.
Key Takeaways:
Key Takeaways:
- Apple is embedding AI across its devices and platforms and significantly growing its investments in the technology.
- The company has already acquired seven companies this year to accelerate its AI roadmap and plans to acquire more.
- Apple expects AI products to be complementary, not substitutive to its existing iPhone business, according to CEO Tim Cook.
Amazon CEO wants to put ads in your Alexa+ conversations
Andy Jassy's description of an AI-generated ad that Alexa+ delivers in a multistep conversation, which could help users find new products, is uncharte...
TL;DR
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy suggests delivering ads during conversations with Alexa+, a feature that could be available in the future.
Key Takeaways:
Key Takeaways:
- Amazon has rolled out Alexa+ to millions of customers, offering a more natural and conversational AI experience.
- Introducing ads in Alexa+ conversations could help users discover new products, increase shopping, and drive revenue, but raises concerns about AI hallucinations and user privacy.
- Amazon's advertising revenue increased 22% in the second quarter, with a potential target of $31.4 billion in capital expenditures to support AI development.
Tim Cook says Apple is ‘open to’ AI acquisitions
Apple CEO Tim Cook says the company is “open” to mergers and acquisitions as it “significantly” increases its investment in AI, as reported by CNBC. C...
TL;DR
Apple is open to acquiring AI startups and making significant investments in its AI capabilities to catch up with the competition.
Key Takeaways:
Key Takeaways:
- Apple's investment in AI is significantly increasing, with the company 'reallocating' more people to its AI team.
- Apple is open to mergers and acquisitions to boost its AI capabilities, with potential targets including OpenAI and Anthropic.
- The company has seen its AI efforts lag relative to peers, with Meta poaching some of its top engineers.
Amazon DocumentDB Serverless database looks to accelerate agentic AI, cut costs
AWS continues to expand its serverless database offerings, aiming to help improve cost and lower operational complexity....
TL;DR
Amazon Web Services (AWS) launches Amazon DocumentDB Serverless, a MongoDB-compatible document database with automatic scaling, ideal for unpredictable AI workloads and reducing costs by up to 90%.
Key Takeaways:
Key Takeaways:
- AWS claims Amazon DocumentDB Serverless can reduce costs by up to 90% compared to traditional provisioned databases for variable workloads.
- The serverless approach eliminates the need for capacity planning, one of the most time-consuming and error-prone aspects of database administration.
- The operational simplification and automatic scaling of serverless document databases are becoming the baseline expectation for AI-ready database infrastructure.
The two people shaping the future of OpenAI’s research
For the past couple of years, OpenAI has felt like a one-man brand. With his showbiz style and fundraising glitz, CEO Sam Altman overshadows all other...
TL;DR
OpenAI's twin heads of research, Mark Chen and Jakub Pachocki, discuss their approach to keeping the company one step ahead of rivals and the importance of coding and math in AI model development.
Key Takeaways:
Key Takeaways:
- Chen and Pachocki prioritize research over product, focusing on developing more capable AI models through coding and math.
- They emphasize the importance of AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) and the need to develop more sophisticated AI systems.
- The disbandment of OpenAI's superalignment team, set up to prevent a hypothetical superintelligence from going rogue, has raised concerns about the ethics of AI development.
Inside the Summit Where China Pitched Its AI Agenda to the World
Behind closed doors, Chinese researchers are laying the groundwork for a new global AI agenda—without input from the US....
TL;DR
China has released its own AI policy blueprint, 'Global AI Governance Action Plan', emphasizing the importance of global cooperation and safety regulations in the development of AI technology.
Key Takeaways:
Key Takeaways:
- China's AI policy focuses on global cooperation and emphasizes the need for governments to play a role in regulating AI technology.
- The Chinese government is committed to investing in AI safety research and has set up international partnerships with other nations to develop standards and guardrails for frontier AI model development.
- Despite China's industry seeming less enthusiastic about AI safety, the government's efforts may still influence domestic companies to prioritize safety and increase transparency about their AI safety efforts.
Why AI researchers are getting paid like NBA All-Stars
Hello, and welcome to Decoder! This is Alex Heath, your Thursday episode guest host and deputy editor at The Verge. Today, I’m joined by Hayden Field,...
TL;DR
Top AI researchers are receiving job offers with unprecedented salaries, similar to NBA All-Stars, as companies like Meta engage in an intense hiring frenzy.
Key Takeaways:
Key Takeaways:
- Leading technology companies are offering AI researchers massive salaries to lure top talent, with some offers rivaling those of NBA stars.
- Meta, in particular, is at the forefront of this hiring campaign, offering unprecedented job offers to try and keep pace with competitors like Google.
- The AI talent wars are ongoing, with experts suggesting that the competition for top AI research talent has become a major factor in corporate strategy.
Informatica advances its AI to transform 7-day enterprise data mapping nightmares into 5-minute coffee breaks
Informatica's data platform evolution shows how it uses AI to actually serve enterprise needs....
TL;DR
Informatica expands its AI capabilities in its Summer 2025 release, addressing enterprise data challenges through natural language interfaces, AI-powered governance, and auto-mapping capabilities.
Key Takeaways:
Key Takeaways:
- Informatica's Summer 2025 release introduces natural language interfaces that can build complex data pipelines from simple English commands.
- The release includes AI-powered governance that automatically tracks data lineage to machine learning models, addressing enterprise concerns about maintaining visibility and control.
- Auto-mapping capabilities can compress week-long schema mapping projects into minutes, automating tasks that previously required deep technical expertise and significant time investment.
GitHub Copilot crosses 20 million all-time users
One of the most popular AI coding tools on the market added five million users in the last three months....
TL;DR
GitHub Copilot AI coding tool has reached more than 20 million users, representing a significant growth since its acquisition by Microsoft.
Key Takeaways:
Key Takeaways:
- GitHub Copilot now serves 90% of the Fortune 100, marking a significant market presence.
- The tool saw a growth rate of approximately 75% compared to the previous quarter, especially among enterprise customers.
- GitHub's AI coding tool is expected to dominate the market for enterprise AI coding tools, given its strong ecosystem and user base.
Reddit wants to be a search engine now
Reddit knows that it has valuable data from actual people — it’s already reached deals with big AI companies like OpenAI and Google to share its data ...
TL;DR
Reddit is focusing on becoming a 'go-to search engine' with improved search capabilities and an integration of its AI search tool Reddit Answers.
Key Takeaways:
Key Takeaways:
- Reddit's core search has over 70 million weekly active unique users, and its AI search tool Reddit Answers has 6 million weekly users.
- Reddit is expanding Reddit Answers globally and integrating it more deeply into the core search experience.
- The move is a potential hedge against losing traffic from Google, which is increasingly relying on AI for search results.
Meta is playing the AI game with house money
Mark Zuckerberg’s AI hiring spree is costing a lot of money. His investors don’t care. Meta’s stock price shot up over 10 percent on Wednesday after t...
TL;DR
Meta prioritizes AI with a significant investment, shifting focus from the metaverse as its top priority.
Key Takeaways:
Key Takeaways:
- Meta's investment in AI aims to surpass human intelligence and improve its ads business.
- The company's valuation has increased by over $175 billion after reporting better-than-expected earnings.
- Meta is spending heavily on AI research, with the goal of making significant AI model breakthroughs within the year.
The path to ASI (or at least a new stepping stone)
Zuckerberg signaling the end of Meta Open Source Models on Investor Call
Unbelievable: China Dominates Top 10 Open-Source Models on HuggingFace
We just open-sourced an agent-native alternative to Supabase
The Great Deception of "Low Prices" in LLM APIs
Do AI startups have a chance at survival?
Not a lot of people are talking about Microsoft and Meta earnings this Quarter, it is a clear sign that AI adoption is being validated.
Finally fixed the two critical Claude Code issues!
Claude Code constantly says ‘IDE disconnected’
What's your best way to use Sub-agents in Claude Code so far?
Sora censored to the point of being useless
If the subagents are eating your CPU set these env vars