The Information · Tech & AI
TIER 4 Fri, 03 Oct 2025 22:19:37 +0000 (UTC)
Jeff Bezos made news today, putting his imprimatur on the idea that we’re in an AI bubble, although I think the fact that he’s now sporting a light beard was just as interesting.͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ | | | | Oct 3, 2025 ---|--- | # The Briefing --- | | By Martin Peers ---|--- | | | | Supported by | ---|--- | | _Thanks for reading The Briefing, our nightly column where we break down the day’s news. If you like what you see, I encourage you tosubscribe to our reporting here._ * * * Greetings!Jeff Bezos made news today, putting his imprimatur on the idea that we’re in an AI bubble, although I think the fact that he’s now sporting a light beard was just as interesting. But that’s just me. Bezos’ declaration—at an Italian tech conference—shows that the idea of a bubble is no longer much of a debate. In fact, it’s pretty much conventional wisdom. Last week, Bloomberg reported that hedge fund manager David Einhorn had warned of the chances “that a tremendous amount of capital destruction is going to come through this cycle” of AI spending.Our story last week about Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab seems to epitomize, for some observers, the bubble-like nature of things. Bloomberg columnist Matt Levine was not the only observer to quote the story’s citation of an investor describing the “absurd pitch meeting” where Murati said, “We’re doing an AI company with the best AI people, but we can’t answer any questions.” As Bezos said today in Italy, when “people get very excited as they are today about artificial intelligence, for example, is that every experiment gets funded, every company gets funded...the good ideas and the bad ideas. Investors have a hard time in the middle of this excitement distinguishing between the good ideas and the bad ideas and so that’s also probably happening today.” If the question is no longer whether we’re in a bubble, then the real question now is when it will burst and who will survive. On the first point, that’s very hard to say. You can imagine that the failure of one of the new AI data center firms that have cropped up could trigger a correction, given how interconnected these firms are to investors, lenders and AI firms themselves. Monday’s bankruptcy filing of First Brands Group, a heavily indebted auto parts company, has raised some alarm bells on Wall Street and is the kind of thing that—happening in AI land—would send ripples everywhere.Who’s best positioned to survive? That would be companies like chip giant Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. that are certainly benefiting from AI but would still have a thriving business without it. Nvidia, similarly, would surely come through a correction just fine (albeit with a much lower stock price). The worst positioned are the huge number of AI startups that lack a differentiated product or sustainable business and need to keep raising money to keep the doors open. Consider that aside from OpenAI and Anthropic, only about a dozen AI startups developing models or applications generate more than $100 million in annualized revenue, we reported in August. The list of startups that don’t reach that threshold is long. ### The Information’s Stories of the Week Start your weekend off with our Big Read, a wonderful story we published by our new reporter, Jemima McEvoy, about Reed Jobs, Steve Jobs’ eldest son, and his career path, which has taken him to start his own venture firm, Yosemite, focused on cancer-related startups. It truly is a great read.Meanwhile, the impact of new AI startups on existing software firms, particularly midsize incumbents like Salesforce, has been much discussed in recent months. This week we focused on software startups of a certain age, doing so through the prism of Snyk, a decade-old cybersecurity startup whose hopes for going public have stalled as its revenue growth has slowed. It faces competition from newer AI startups as well as big tech firms adding security tools. It’s worth a read.On that same subject, we broke the news that two data companies facing competition from AI, Fivetran and Dbt Labs, are in talks to merge…Anthropic revealed at our AI Agenda Live event this week that it has used its Claude AI model to create a workplace app like Slack; for more on that event, check out this piece. Meanwhile, Microsoft is hoping Anthropic models can help solve its Copilot problems, we reported.And on the big scoop front, we revealed OpenAI’s first-half results. And we delved into Sam Altman’s power ambitions (electricity, we’re talking about)…We also published an org chart on Elon Musk’s xAI.On a different AI front, the proliferation of data center firms, you have to read our deep dive into Rick Perry’s Fermi America, whose CEO, Toby Neugebauer, has a colorful background.The TikTok drama grinds on. While the outlines of a deal have been announced, much remains uncertain, including who’ll run the new U.S.-controlled venture. Insiders are tipping No. 2 TikToker, Adam Presser, according to this piece.Tensions within Meta Platforms’ AI teams were inevitable after the influx of highly paid newcomers. This week we delved into one point of friction: new restrictions on how AI researchers can publish. Yann LeCun, Meta’s iconic AI scientist, mused to colleagues about quitting. ### In Other News **•** Apple has taken down an app used to track the location of ICE agents from its App Store after pressure from officials from the Department of Justice, Fox News Digital reported.• A group of Tesla shareholders is urging investors to vote against CEO Elon Musk’s proposed pay package, which could be worth up to $1 trillion, at the electric automaker’s annual meeting next month, according to a letter included in a regulatory filing.• BlackRock-owned investment firm Global Infrastructure Partners is in advanced talks to buy Aligned Data Centers, a privately held data center firm, in a deal that could be worth around $40 billion, according to Bloomberg.• Rob Williams, an Amazon executive in the company’s devices division and a member of the company’s elite management group known as the S-team, is leaving the company, Reuters reported Friday. ### Today in The Information’s TITV Check out today's episode of TITV in which our editor in chief Jessica Lessin talks with Anduril CEO Brian Schimpf. ### Recommended Newsletter Dealmaker was named the “Best in Business” newsletter for its insightful coverage of private technology and the AI hype cycle. 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