This Week in Tech (Week Ending Aug 22, 2025)
TL;DR - 📉 Markets nosedive with AI expectations; 🤳Google's Pixel 10 event;
Hey folks!
Happy Friday ☀️ Tech news below.
TL;DR -
😬📉 Wall Street’s enthusiasm for AI hit a speed bump this week when it dawned on investors that AI investments aren’t delivering (yet anyway) - gains across the market were wiped
🤳Google hosted its Pixel 10 live event on Wednesday and Jimmy Fallon hosted - but his presence kind of fell flat. Some even called it a cringefest 😬
Introducing the latest rebrand fail - Who’s Ms. Now? MSNBC is rebranding to MS NOW (My Source News Opinion World).
📈 Trending - SPACs again: SPACs accounted for 41 of the 59 companies that went public in the U.S. last quarter.
🤨Trending - Buzzballz and George Dubya?
🌎 Macro (Economic) and Trends
😬📉 Wall Street’s enthusiasm for AI hit a speed bump after an MIT study found that 95% of companies are getting "zero return" from their AI investments. This comes on top of Sam Altman’s admission that investors may be getting "over excited" about the sector's prospects. The reality check sent Nvidia stock down 3.5%, Palantir plummeting 9.4%, and wiped out gains across the tech-heavy Nasdaq.
🇨🇦Air Canada is facing a crisis after its flight attendants walked off the job over the weekend due to a labor dispute and rejected a government order to return to work.
📈It’s inevitable: Prices are going to rise. Companies are raising prices, or signaling that increases are coming, to absorb some of the costs of the Trump administration's tariffs. Why it matters: Americans are already under strain from rapidly rising prices during the Biden administration.
🤡Elon Musk isn’t starting the America Party after all. Now, Musk is telling allies that he wants to focus his attention on his companies and is reluctant to alienate powerful Republicans by starting a third party that could siphon off GOP voter
🌀 Hurricane Erin isn’t expected to make landfall in the U.S. but Hatteras Island in North Carolina has been evacuated. Track the storm here.
📈 California's unemployment rate reached 5.5% in July, the highest in the U.S. The San Francisco Chronicle points to a faltering tech industry as part of the Golden State's problem, especially for younger workers.
😔New graduates are having an especially tough time landing a job right now: The share of unemployed Americans who are new to the workforce is at a 37-year high. Why it matters: It's a sign of how reluctant companies have been to hire amid ongoing economic uncertainty over tariffs and policy.
📰Unexpected - Print makes a comeback: Several publishers, including The Onion, The Cut, Complex, Nylon, Spin, Us Weekly, Swimming World, Sports Illustrated, Saveur and Ebony, have all launched or relaunched print editions amid reader and advertiser demand. Why it matters: It's part of an industrywide print revival in the U.S. as publishers look for more ways to upsell jaded digital advertisers in the AI era.
📺🔌Streaming represented nearly half of all TV viewership in the U.S. last month, according to Nielsen. Why it matters: The shift is mostly attributable to cable's decline and cord-cutting. Broadcast continues to hold steady, thanks to its broad accessibility and sports rights.
🔬 Micro (Tech Companies)
⭐️ Google hosted its Pixel 10 live event on Wednesday and Jimmy Fallon hosted - but his presence kind of fell flat. Some even called it a cringefest 😬. From TC: “Google’s new phones are interesting on their own merits, as they showcase how Google is integrating AI into everyday consumer experiences like taking photos, texting friends, translating phone calls, getting help out in the real world, and more.” See all the products announced here.
🏚️ Opendoor’s CEO, Carrie Wheeler, said she was stepping down effective immediately. Wheeler’s departure followed weeks of blistering criticism of her management online, led by investor Eric Jackson with support from Keith Rabois, a co-founder of Opendoor and a onetime executive chair of the company. Over the past couple of years, Wheeler cut costs and stabilized the business. But her critics argued Opendoor needed a more dynamic leader.
🔡 Grammarly now has a new document-based interface, built on the back of Coda, the productivity startup it acquired last year. The interface also sports an AI assistant, as well as a few AI tools meant for students and professionals, including an AI grader, proofreader, and citation finder.
🎨 Canva launched an employee stock sale that values the Australian design software startup at $42 billion, up from $32 billion in a secondary sale deal last year. The deal allows employees to cash out shares to new and existing investors
🚗Lyft on Friday dissolved its dual-class shareholding structure, eliminating a class of stock that had 20 votes each, so that all shareholders will now have one vote per share. Lyft’s move came the day after Lyft’s two cofounders and the holders of the class B shares, left the board.
Introducing the latest rebrand fail - Who’s Ms. Now? MSNBC is rebranding to MS NOW (My Source News Opinion World). The rebrand is part of a wider effort by NBCUniversal to create a distinction between the cable networks it plans to spin out and the remaining NBCU parent company.
Quibi reborn? Five years after Quibi failed miserably, Hollywood veterans are trying the bite-sized mobile TV thing again. MicroCo will offer 1-3 minute vertical videos with soap opera plots on steroids. Why might it work this time? MicroCo's using AI to make shows for just $1,500 per minute vs Quibi’s premium content that it paid for. The app launches in 2026, just as the micro-drama market is projected to hit $10B globally by 2027.
Bummer I loved this service! Kyte, a car rental service, shut down and sold its customer list to Turo.
Layoffs: Refinery29 has quietly laid off staff as it plans to shutter its U.K. office,
🤖 AI News
Eric Schmidt— CEO of Relativity Space, and former CEO of Google — wrote an op-ed blasting Silicon Valley’s obsession with AGI saying China is doing a much better job getting great AI to work now.
"While some Silicon Valley technologists issue doomsday warnings about the grave threat of A.I., Chinese companies are busy integrating it into everything from the superapp WeChat to hospitals, electric cars and even home appliances….
Being too fixated on artificial general intelligence risks distracting us from A.I.'s everyday impact. We need to pursue both."
Meta is splitting its AI division into four groups and potentially reducing headcount amid a major shake-up. It has current frozen hiring after spending months scooping up 50-plus AI researchers and engineers
OpenAI has launched a special subscription tier for Indian users for 399 rupees ($4.60) a month. The new tier, called ChatGPT Go, gives Indian users higher message limits, image generations, uploads and memory. Why the preferential treatment? India is OpenAI’s second biggest market by users and growth in the South Asian country is vital to the company’s goal of reaching 1 billion daily active users by the end of this year.
Microsoft is bringing AI directly into Excel sheets with a new COPILOT function that lets users perform generative tasks right in their spreadsheets. The function can summarize feedback, categorize data, and even pull information from outside sources — all by typing a simple formula. Currently available to beta users, you'll need the $30/month Microsoft 365 Copilot subscription to access it
Alibaba's Qwen team just dropped Qwen-Image-Edit, a 20B parameter open-source image editing model that tackles both pixel-perfect edits and style transformations while keeping the original characters and objects intact. Why it matters: Image generation has seen a parabolic rise in capabilities, but the first strong AI editing tools are just starting to emerge.
c/o Superhuman newsletter:
🤝 Select M&A, Fundraises, IPO, Partnerships
M&A
Thoma Bravo agreed to buy Dayforce, in a deal that gives the human resources software provider in an all-cash transaction with an enterprise value of $12.3 billion.
Fundraising
Databricks is in the process of closing a fresh round of $1bn in funding at a $100 billion valuation.
SoftBank will invest $2 billion in Intel. Plus, Trump administration officials are discussing taking a 10% stake in Intel in a bid to revive the company’s fortunes and bolster semiconductor manufacturing in the U.S.
Google is increasing its stake in TeraWulf, a bitcoin miner that is pivoting to artificial intelligence data centers.
OpenAI current and former employees plan to sell around $6 billion worth of shares at a $500 billion valuation
Vercel, a cloud startup, has received unsolicited offers from investors to put hundreds8 of millions of dollars into the company at a valuation between $8 billion and $9 billion. The new funding would nearly triple Vercel’s $3 billion valuation from a financing about 15 months ago.
Nuro, which develops self-driving software for delivery and ride-hailing services, raised $203mill in a series E funding.
Eight Sleep said it had raised $100 million in a series D funding round. The new funding will allow the company to pursue AI-powered enhancements to its products, as well as expand internationally and pursue FDA approval for certain features
IPO
📈 Trending - SPACs again: SPACs accounted for 41 of the 59 companies that went public in the U.S. last quarter. At their height in 2020, SPACs accounted for more than half of the new publicly listed U.S. companies. But that boom quickly fizzled as the market turned, and investors lost money. A wave of shareholder lawsuits ensued.
PayPay, a Japanese mobile payment app, has confidentially filed for a U.S. listing.
⚱️ Gold Panning - For those who reached the bottom
Woohoo! Release date for Season 3 of The Diplomat is Oct 13th.
Trending - George Dubya?? Gen Z has turned George W. Bush into an unlikely internet icon, with TikTok edits under the tag #Bushcore reframing him as a goofy, endearing “grandfather” figure. A Gallup poll in January ranked Bush the second-most-popular living president, behind Obama and ahead of Clinton.
The drink of the summer: BuzzBallz has grown to become the US’s biggest-selling single-serve premixed cocktail, and the fastest-growing ready-to-drink brand in terms of sales volume in the UK. “Finding the funds to manufacture her product proved challenging. She was turned down for business loans by every bank in Dallas, until one accepted the cows from her mum’s ranch and her old car as collateral.”
Is it 2005 or 2025? - The top 3 most popular purchases for back to school. See the full list here
💛OK Go walked so ppl like Mark Rober could run: Behind the scenes of OK Go’s latest wild music video for Love featuring tons of robots (full video here). Shot in 1 take!
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