The Information’s Creator Economy Newsletter

1 day ago | theinformation.com | Ann Gehan

Artificial intelligence heavyweights including OpenAI and Perplexity, along with commerce giant Amazon, are painting visions of AI tools acting as personal shoppers that can seamlessly buy stuff across the internet. But the handful of AI agents that have so far been released have had trouble with online shopping, since they’re easily tripped up by variations in retailers’ product listings and checkouts, investors and founders say.

2 days ago | theinformation.com | Kaya Yurieff

Trials are great for airing technology executives’ private ruminations, including some of their most out-there strategies. Among the most extraordinary that have so far come to light in the Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust lawsuit against Meta Platforms is CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s “potentially crazy idea” in 2022 for refreshing Facebook: erasing friend lists on the app—as frequently as every year—and having users start from scratch.

2 days ago | theinformation.com | Kalley Huang

Source: BloombergInstagram could have grown independently without an acquisition by Meta Platforms, Kevin Systrom, the co-founder of the photo-sharing app, testified on Tuesday during the second week of an antitrust trial between the Federal Trade Commission and Meta. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg eventually treated Instagram as a threat and starved it of resources, Systrom said, according to a Bloomberg report on his testimony.

2 days ago | theinformation.com | Stephanie Palazzolo

It’s no surprise that software developers love AI tools. (Just look at the revenue growth of Anysphere, the creator of the popular AI-powered code editing software Cursor, from my colleague Natasha’s feature on the startup last month.)You’ve probably read lots about the most obvious ways that developers are using AI models to speed up software development, including autocompleting lines of code, finding and fixing bugs and writing documentation.

3 days ago | theinformation.com | Stephanie Palazzolo

Google’s role in the AI sector will be in the spotlight this week, as the Justice Department makes its case in a Washington court for how to deal with what the court has already found to be Google’s illegal search monopoly. We’ll keep you updated. Meanwhile, looking back at last week, we had both an AI snafu and—perhaps more importantly—OpenAI’s o3 and o4-mini releases. Developer reactions to the new models were noteworthy.