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1 day ago | 
sherwood.news | Tom Jones
The latest funding round could peg Perplexity at a $14 billion valuation. Like a lot of AI startups, Perplexity isn’t having a hard time finding new investors. According to exclusive reporting by The Wall Street Journal, the company is in closing talks for a new $500 million funding round that would see it valued at a whopping $14 billion.
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5 days ago | 
sherwood.news | Tom Jones
The rise of microdramas raises the question:Quibi Founder Jeffrey Katzenberg speaks onstage at CES at the Park Theater in Park MGM on January 8, 2020 (Denise Truscello/Getty Images)Mobile-first, minutes-long scripted content is blowing up around the world.
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1 week ago | 
sherwood.news | Tom Jones
After posting disappointing earnings, most companies vaguely gesture towards the wider economic climate to explain missed estimates to their demanding investors. Gambling giant Flutter Entertainment, on the other hand, has an ace up its sleeve: blame it on the prowess of the customers themselves.
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2 weeks ago | 
sherwood.news | Tom Jones
The company already accounts for more than one-quarter of US parcel volumes. Yesterday, Amazon announced that it is doubling down on small-town America, revealing plans to invest more than $4 billion into its delivery service in rural locations by the end of next year, as it attempts to speed up delivery times across less-populated areas. The announcement — which came a day before the company’s earnings, expected after the bell today — was packed with big-if-true figures.
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2 weeks ago | 
sherwood.news | Tom Jones
Yesterday, Sam Altman’s AI giant announced that it would be rolling back a recent update that made responses from its GPT-4o model “overly supportive but disingenuous.” The ingratiating tone that ChatGPT was taking up had been weirding people out. One user, for instance, got a pretty flattering appraisal of their IQ, despite their many spelling mistakes:This latest update from ChatGPT - Sycophancy 9000 - is fascinating.
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2 weeks ago | 
sherwood.news | Tom Jones
(Adrian Dennis/Getty Images) “Sinners” has been a clear standout in what’s turning into a bumper year for scary movies. Let he who has not seen Sinners…Even taking its $90 million budget, lauded director, and star-studded cast into account, Warner Bros’ vampiric flick “Sinners” is posting some seriously impressive numbers for studio execs to sink their teeth into. The horror movie, the fifth collaboration in 12 years between director Ryan Coogler and star Michael B.
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2 weeks ago | 
sherwood.news | Tom Jones
The list of things that are cheaper than they were 15 years ago is pretty short — plane tickets are on it. Airlines are having a turbulent time of it at the minute, with the CEO of Southwest declaring that the industry is in a recession last week and each of the big four deciding to scrap their outlooks for the year ahead. One beneficiary of the industry’s wider struggles? Cost-conscious globetrotters on the lookout for cheap flights, as fares continue to plummet.
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2 weeks ago | 
sherwood.news | Tom Jones
Unrealized gains from an investment in an unnamed private company gave Alphabet an $8 billion boost. Last night and into this morning, Alphabet investors have been cheering yesterday’s big earnings beat after the tech giant posted revenue and earnings-per-share figures that surpassed Wall Street expectations for the first quarter of the year.
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3 weeks ago | 
sherwood.news | Tom Jones
(Kristian Buus/Getty Images)Shareholders, politicians, and environmentalists want BP to reverse its climate U-turn; an activist investor doesn’t think it’s gone far enough. More than 115 years on from when it was founded as the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, UK oil giant BP is currently caught between a rock and a hard place.
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3 weeks ago | 
sherwood.news | Claire Yubin Oh |Tom Jones
Even with ~$6 billion tea giant Chagee now in the mix, the current landscape still seems to be deterring bigger names. Strange as the timing may seem, given the broader geopolitical picture, many Chinese companies are seeing 2025 as the year to hit the US public market. Last week, tea giant Chagee soared 21% on its Nasdaq debut to hit a $6.2 billion valuation, while a flurry of tech firms are reportedly looking to follow suit, per Bloomberg.
