Stripe reports explosive 41% revenue growth and acquires OpenRouter for $8B while pursuing a massive $53B PayPal deal, all as the payments giant keeps its IPO on indefinite hold and boldly declares January 1st the dawn of 'the singularity.'
AI agents are transforming industries at record speed, with Anthropic's Claude crushing drug design benchmarks at up to 35% success rates, Uber slashing two-day financial reports to 10 minutes using lean AI pods, and Replit scaling usage 30x by offering free access to powerful AI models.
AI chip startup Etched secures $700M at a $21B valuation and ships its first inference rack to Jane Street, backed by Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and Blackstone, as it scales toward Gigawatt-level infrastructure to bring frontier AI models to the masses.
Stripe acquires AI gateway startup OpenRouter in a deal exceeding $7 billion, securing a platform that gives 8 million users unified access to over 400 AI models just months after OpenRouter's $1.3 billion Series B valuation.
Stripe acquires AI startup OpenRouter for over $7 billion, marking a massive strategic pivot beyond payments as the fintech giant moves to dominate the rapidly growing AI infrastructure space.
Writer launches Palmyra X6, a powerful new enterprise AI model built on open-source technology, promising up to 50% cost reductions as CEO May Habib calls out major AI labs for skyrocketing prices and failing to deliver real business value.
Enterprises are ditching expensive, powerful AI models in favor of cheaper alternatives, with Anthropic's most advanced model capturing just 6% of token spend despite leading adoption, signaling a hard cost ceiling that threatens the scaling-law strategies powering Silicon Valley's biggest AI labs.
OpenAI's finance team is ditching spreadsheets for real-time AI-powered forecasting, pushing toward a zero-day close where live tools give leaders an instant, reconciled view of financial data while transforming finance professionals into builders who create custom dashboards using ChatGPT and Codex.
DeepSeek signals a major API price hike coming in 2026, marking a dramatic shift away from China's AI price war as the company moves toward value-based pricing amid real GPU cost pressures and a strategy to filter low-value traffic while generating industry buzz ahead of the formal announcement.
A sophisticated wave of cyberattacks is hitting major Wall Street hedge funds, including Two Sigma, Citadel, and Point72 Asset Management, with Point72 notifying investors Wednesday that it was targeted, though no client data appears to have been stolen as investigations remain ongoing.