This Week in Tech (Week Ending Aug 8, 2025)
TL;DR - 📣Earnings; ⭐️OpenAI news including GPT-5 and $8bn+ in new investment
Hey folks!
Happy Friday and hope you’re enjoying the last month of summer ☀️ Tech news below.
TL;DR -
📣Earnings were this week for a number of tech companies and themes on earnings calls included how companies will perform amidst worrying economic data, such as a slowdown in hiring, rising inflation and concerns about growth. Plus, consumer companies point to an “emergent divide between the haves and have-nots”.
⭐️On Thursday, OpenAI launched GPT-5, a new flagship AI model that will power the company’s next generation of ChatGPT. GPT-5 is OpenAI’s first “unified” AI model and combines the reasoning abilities of its o-series of models with the fast responses of its GPT series.
OpenAI has secured $8.3 billion of new commitments from investors, exceeding its earlier goal of $7.5 billion. The fundraise comes as ChatGPT continues to anchor OpenAI’s business, which is generating $12 billion in annualized revenue, roughly doubling from the start of the year.
🌎 Macro (Economic) and Trends
🇺🇸💰US tariffs took effect for about 90 countries on Thursday, and Trump said that he will impose tariffs of 100% on chips imported into the country, although the charge will not apply to companies who are “building” in the United States including Apple.
Last Friday, the BLS reported a sharp slowdown in hiring over the past three months, nudging up the unemployment rate to 4.2 percent, contradicting Trump’s assertions on social media that the country was “doing GREAT.” As a result, Trump fired the head of BLS. The weak job numbers could persuade the Fed to lower borrowing costs, something Trump wants. ⭐️The odds of a September cut jumped to 83 percent this morning, nearly double where they were before Friday’s jobs report.
🇰🇵North Korean IT workers are increasingly using generative AI to draft resumes and "deepfake" their appearances to make money for North Korea's sanctioned nuclear weapons program
🛒😢More than half of Americans are stressed about buying groceries — significantly more than affording credit card debt, child care or student debt
🔥Big fires everywhere: The California Gifford fire has burned 65,000 acres in Los Padres National Forest in Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo Counties, while the Grand Canyon (named the Dragon Bravo fire) has been burning for more than a month and has spread more than 126,000 acres.
📰 39% of U.S. adults under 30 regularly get news from TikTok, despite fewer than 1% of accounts followed by Americans being traditional media outlets.
📐Ad measurement is a mess: The measurement landscape that underpins the $1 trillion global ad industry is more crowded and fragmented than ever. According to Axios, there are at least 142 measurement vendors for television and online content in the U.S. Despite the number of vendors, Nielsen remains the default audience measurement vendor
America’s favorite public figures (Axios):
🔬 Micro (Tech Companies)
📣Earnings - themes on earnings calls included how companies will perform amidst worrying economic data, such as a slowdown in hiring, rising inflation and concerns about growth. Plus, consumer companies point to an “emergent divide between the haves and have-nots”.
Palantir said that its revenue rose 48% in the three months ending in June to $1 billion, driven by large deals signed by big enterprises and government agencies buying the firm’s software and consulting services.
Snap’s revenue growth slowed sharply to 9% in the second quarter, with advertising revenue expanding just 4%, highlighting the ad challenges facing the social media firm. Snap stock fell 14% in after-hours trading.
Disney raised its full-year profit outlook even as it reported a worse-than-expected jump in quarterly sales.
Airbnb posted 13% higher revenue for the second quarter, more than double the growth rate of the first quarter and the fastest the travel bookings firm has grown since the start of last year.
DoorDash’s revenue growth accelerated to 25% in the second quarter, as gross-order volume growth also picked up.
Shopify stock jumped 19% after the ecommerce software firm reported 31% revenue growth and said it wasn’t seeing any impact on shopper behavior from President Trump’s tariffs so far.
AppLovin, the large mobile ad tech firm, continued to report gangbusters growth in the second quarter, posting 77% higher revenue of $1.26 billion, above the upper end of the company’s guidance.
Consumer companies: McDonald’s executives expressed concern about spending, especially by those with less disposable income and expressed that lower-income consumers are under strain. Meanwhile, Disney posted stronger-than-expected earnings and raised its profit outlook in two crucial businesses: streaming and “experiences,” because wealthier Americans are still spending on leisure.
🍎Apple:
Not Apple manifesting: Apple CEO Tim Cook held an hourlong all-hands meeting in which he told employees that the company needs to win in AI: "Apple must do this. Apple will do this." Despite its difficulties in AI, Apple reported strong financial results for the June quarter, showing a 13% increase in the sales of the iPhone, the products best performance in years.
Apple has formed a team called “Answers, Knowledge and Information” to build a ChatGPT-like app that can respond to questions using information from across the web.
Apple pledged another $100bn investment into US manufacturing under pressure from Trump. The White House said the money would be used to encourage firms to make more Apple parts in the US and would add to the company's previous pledge to spend $500bn in the US over four years.
🗣️👂Rumor had it that Amazon was shutting down the Wondery podcast studio and cutting 110 jobs but Amazon denied it and said Wondery will continue to develop. What’s changing is that the company is separating the teams that oversee Wondery’s narrative podcast efforts from those developing its creator-led shows.
Microsoft will bring OpenAI's new free and open GPT model, gpt-oss-20b, to Windows 11 users via Windows AI Foundry, its platform that lets users tap AI features, APIs, and popular open-source models on their computers.
🚗Tesla approved a stock award for CEO Elon Musk valued at $23.7 billion. The move comes as the company continues to battle in court over reinstating an even bigger pay package that a Delaware judge struck down.
Amazon and Meta Platforms both said in securities filings last week that they expect their U.S. taxes to drop as a result of President Trump’s tax act.
📌Pinterest has more men than you think: Men now make up a record one-third of Pinterest's total global audience of 570 million active users. What are they searching? Guys' biggest searches on the platform — dressing for Pilates, upping their skincare game and being better parents
Layoffs: Cognition, maker of artificial intelligence coding startup Devin, has laid off roughly 200 employees it acquired from rival Windsurf three weeks ago
A key measure of CEO confidence bounced back this summer, but business leaders are still slightly negative about the economy and business conditions. Why it matters: It's another sign that the business community is coming to terms with tariffs. However, For the first time since 2020, more CEOs said they were planning to shrink their workforce (34%) than expand it (27%) — yet another indicator of a cooling labor market.
🤖 AI News
🤯Can you imagine turning down a billion dollars: In Zuck’s recruiting crusade, he offered to acquire Thinking Machines Lab, the former OpenAI CTO’s startup, and when Mira Murati turned it down, he then proceeded to approach more than a dozen of the company’s 50 employees to poach them. Zuck offered Andrew Tulloch, a leading researcher, as much as $1.5bn over 6 yrs, and Tulloch declined. 🌎The big picture: Many top researchers are driven less by dollars than by a sense of mission and a yearning to be the first to solve a hard problem.
⭐️On Thursday, OpenAI launched GPT-5, a new flagship AI model that will power the company’s next generation of ChatGPT. GPT-5 is OpenAI’s first “unified” AI model and combines the reasoning abilities of its o-series of models with the fast responses of its GPT series.
OpenAI announced the launch of two open-weight AI reasoning models with similar capabilities to its o-series: a larger and more capable gpt-oss-120b model that can run on a single Nvidia GPU, and a lighter-weight gpt-oss-20b model that can run on a consumer laptop with 16GB of memory.
Shots fired: Anthropic has cut off OpenAI’s access to its Claude family of AI models.
ElevenLabs, an AI audio-generation unicorn, announced the launch of a new model that allows users to generate music that's cleared for commercial use.
Alibaba Group has launched a new version of its Amap navigation app, which has 895 million monthly active users, in China that features an artificial intelligence agent. The AI makeover is an important part of Alibaba’s effort to beef up its AI offerings for consumers in an intensely competitive market. I
Character.ai is adding a social feed to its mobile apps that allow users to create AI characters and chat with them.
🤝 Select M&A, Fundraises, IPO, Partnerships
M&A
Disney's ESPN will acquire the National Football League's NFL Network in exchange for the league taking a 10% equity stake in ESPN. Why it matters: The deal brings the country's biggest sports league even closer to the preeminent sports network as streaming upends live TV.
☕ Philz Coffee sold the company to private equity firm Freeman Spogli & Co. for $145 million in a deal that will cancel its common stock and stock options, including for employees who bought stock during or after their years at the company.
🚁Joby Aviation is buying Blade Air Mobility's ride-share business for as much as $125 million.
Fundraising
⭐️OpenAI has secured $8.3 billion of new commitments from investors, exceeding its earlier goal of $7.5 billion. The fundraise comes as ChatGPT continues to anchor OpenAI’s business, which is generating $12 billion in annualized revenue, roughly doubling from the start of the year.
OpenAI is in talks to sell shares held by current and former employees at a price that values the ChatGPT maker at $500 billion.
Vast Data, an AI software and storage startup, is in talks to raise billions in funding from Nvidia and Alphabet’s growth-stage venture arm CapitalG.
Runway and Luma AI, startups developing AI models to generate videos, are in talks with investors to raise large funding rounds. Runway is in talks to raise around $500 million at a valuation of at least $5 billion before the investment. Luma is in talks to raise at least $1.1 billion at a valuation of at least $3.2 billion before the investment,
Clay AI, an AI sales tool, raised $100 million at a $3.1 billion valuation, a large increase from the $1.25 billion level it hit earlier this year.
Decart, a video generation startup, raised $100 million in funding at a $3.1 billion valuation
fal, a San Francisco-based startup that helps companies run image and video models, raised $125 million in Series C
SAFE, a cybersecurity-focused AI company, raised $70 million in Series C funding
Wallarm, which develops security software for APIs and AI agents, raised $55 million in Series C funding
IPO
Firefly Aerospace, a space technology start-up, priced its initial public offering at $45 a share, above already increased expectations, as investor interest in I.P.O.s grows.
⚱️ Gold Panning - For those who reached the bottom
🤨Photos from Jeffrey Epstein’s Manhattan seven-story townhouse. It’s…weird.
🇦🇺🦘Remember Raygun, the Australian break dancer at the Paris Olympics? She has a hit musical about her now. Except the makers want you to know that their show is actually about a “completely fictional” breaker from Australia named Spraygun.
Brain Rot Summer: The “biggest vibe is the lack of actual vibes,” with no defining song, color trend, or cultural moment to unify it.
😎Trending - Millennial Nostalgia: Sold-out Backstreet Boys shows at the Las Vegas Sphere, a Freaky Friday reboot starring Lindsay Lohan, and filming underway for a Devil Wears Prada sequel
💃The Las Culturistas Culture Awards with Bowen Yang and Matt Rogers happened this week and it’s been described as “an awards show that’s really a comedy special disguising itself as an awards show”. Award categories included “Best Movie of All Time,” “Worst Sticky Feeling” and “Harshest Truth About ‘Wicked.’” Nominees ranged from actors and celebrities to inanimate objects and indescribable feelings. Streaming on Peacock.
🏠💅Get the look - for cheap: a WSJ reporter shares how she gets a stylish home inspired by professional designers more affordably
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