Perplexity to join the AI coding wars
AI millionaires rewrite the luxury playbook
Perplexity to join the AI coding wars
AI millionaires rewrite the luxury playbook
AI giants are handing out tons of free computing
Making AI actually work day to day is becoming its own job.
On July 16, hear from three people doing it: Simone Santiago Broad (Yoco), Yelva Espinoza (Zumba Fitness), and Fin’s Dave Lynch. They’ll share what the role really looks like, how it came to exist, the skills worth hiring for, and the challenges they’re tackling right now. Bring your questions, since the best moments happen live.
Perplexity to join the AI coding wars
Perplexity could be the latest entrant to the red-hot AI coding wars. The San Francisco-based AI search startup has built an internal AI coding tool that it may launch publicly later down the line, a person familiar with the matter said. For now, Perplexity has codenamed the tool “Teammate,” and its engineers have been using it since May, according to screenshots obtained by Business Insider.
It’s unclear exactly if or when Perplexity, which was valued at $20 billion in a funding round last year, will launch the product. If it does, it would put Perplexity — originally focused on an AI-powered search engine that competes with Google — much closer to vying for supremacy with Cursor, Anthropic, and OpenAI, all of which have built widely-used AI coding products.
Teammate is meant to oversee software projects from start to finish, according to an internal announcement seen by Business Insider. “It’s built for long-horizon engineering work: owning projects, investigating issues, and monitoring services,” the announcement reads. A Perplexity spokesperson declined to comment. The AI tool is model-agnostic, meaning that it’s not built on any particular chatbot, the person familiar with the matter said....
AI millionaires rewrite the luxury playbook
Sitting on roughly $3.5 million in SpaceX shares, Chip, a former data scientist at Elon Musk’s aerospace behemoth, has recently bought meteorites worth $10,000 and a $5,000 fire truck. The 50-year-old space enthusiast is not sure how he will use the truck - maybe as an attraction for his 3-year-old kid’s birthday party. But his new wealth tied to SpaceX’s initial public offering in June has given him the freedom to buy “silly” things, he told Reuters. Despite the excitement, the jury is still out on whether an estimated 440,000 U.S. millionaires minted by stock market gains last year and, more recently, AI companies’ public listings, will translate into a new golden era for the global luxury goods sector.
As they try to sell to new tech millionaires, brands have to reckon with their unique taste and competing interests that deflect attention from traditional luxury items. “I played volleyball in high school and college,” said AI strategist Zack Kass, who led ChatGPT creator OpenAI’s go-to-market unit until 2023 and owns an undisclosed stake in SpaceX. “I literally took my OpenAI winnings and bought a professional sports team,” he said, referring to a volleyball team.
The newly wealthy spend about one-third less on smart outfits and leather goods compared to those with generational wealth, said Filippo Bianchi, who leads the global luxury team at BCG. Instead, their top spending priority is durable assets....
AI giants are handing out tons of free computing
Hans Ibarra, a founder building an AI-voice startup, has found himself on the receiving end of a big opportunity: Top artificial-intelligence companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic and others desperate to win his business are ramping up discounts. Across Silicon Valley, startup founders like Ibarra are enjoying a wave of computing credits and fielding competing offers from AI-model makers racing to land new enterprise customers. Cursor, the AI-coding company bought by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, offered a 75% discount.
The offers from growing AI-sales armies at companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic are so rich that some early-stage startup founders say they won’t need to raise money as soon as they expected, and others have been able to play AI companies off one another. Startups have received offers that in some cases amounted to more than $3 million in credits from multiple companies for cloud computing and tokens, the central units used to measure and charge for AI usage, founders say.
Alphabet’s Google Cloud is giving some startups up to $500,000 in cloud credits and early access to Gemini models. Microsoft and Amazon Web Services also offer startups special perks. The pitched battle for business users comes as AI companies seek lasting streams of revenue. They hope that by winning startups as customers early in the life of new companies, their tools will become integral to the venture’s growth over time….