Sources | The Verge

AI labs wage a reputational knife fight at Davos

2026-01-25T10:19:39-05:00

Demis Hassabis, chief executive officer of DeepMind Technologies Ltd., during a panel session at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland. | Image: Bloomberg via Getty Images

This is an excerpt of Sources by Alex Heath, a newsletter about AI and the tech industry, syndicated just for The Verge subscribers once a week.

The leaders of the three preeminent frontier AI labs spent this week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, taking shots at each other like candidates in a presidential primary.

I helped start the news cycle. During an interview on Tuesday, I asked Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis about OpenAI's decision to test ads in ChatGPT. "It's interesting they've gone for that so early," he said. "Maybe they feel they need to make more revenue."

The next day, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei piled …

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‘Sideshow’ concerns and billionaire dreams: What I learned from Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI

2026-01-17T08:28:39-05:00

This is an excerpt of Sources by Alex Heath, a newsletter about AI and the tech industry, syndicated just for The Verge subscribers once a week.

Elon Musk first sued OpenAI in February 2024. Despite OpenAI's repeated attempts to throw it out, the case is now headed to a jury trial on April 27th in Northern California federal court.

Musk's main allegation is that OpenAI and its leaders abandoned the company's original nonprofit mission that he funded. In turn, OpenAI has treated Musk's claims as sour grapes. U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers recently decided that the case warranted going to trial, saying in court that "part of this …

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Lenovo is building an AI assistant that ‘can act on your behalf’

2026-01-16T08:02:10-05:00

This is an excerpt of Sources by Alex Heath, a newsletter about AI and the tech industry, syndicated just for The Verge subscribers once a week.

While most attention in the AI race is focused on model builders and cloud platforms, Lenovo sits closer to millions of users than most companies. As the world's top PC maker by volume, Lenovo ships tens of millions of devices every year. What it decides to ship, bundle, and integrate can directly shape how AI shows up in many everyday lives.

That's what made Lenovo's announcement today at CES notable. At a flashy event on Tuesday at The Sphere in Las Vegas, it introduced Qira, a system-level, cro …

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Threads wants to be the app you can’t wait to open in the morning

2025-12-19T07:50:45-05:00

This is an excerpt of Sources by Alex Heath, a newsletter about AI and the tech industry, syndicated just for The Verge subscribers once a week.

By all measures, Meta's Threads app had a very good year. The app was Apple's second-most-downloaded iOS app of the year, trailing only ChatGPT. Threads now has 400 million monthly and 150 million daily active users.

"There are consumers who are ravenous to consume the content."

That growth is still coming mainly from Meta's other platforms. "We do a lot of work in Instagram and Facebook to show off what's going on in Threads," Connor Hayes, the head of Threads, told me this week. The playbook: s …

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The AI industry’s biggest week: Google’s rise, RL mania, and a party boat

2025-12-11T12:44:29-05:00

This is an excerpt of Sources by Alex Heath, a newsletter about AI and the tech industry, syndicated just for The Verge subscribers once a week.

Reinforcement learning (RL) is the next frontier, Google is surging, and the party scene has gotten completely out of hand. Those were the through lines from this year's NeurIPS in San Diego.

NeurIPS, or the "Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems," started in 1987 as a purely academic affair. It has since ballooned alongside the hype around AI into a massive industry event where labs come to recruit and investors come to find the next wave of AI startups.

I was regretfully unable to …

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Anthropic’s AI bubble ‘YOLO’ warning

2025-12-03T16:33:29-05:00

Andrew Ross Sorkin and Dario Amodei speak onstage during The New York Times DealBook Summit 2025 at Jazz at Lincoln Center on December 03, 2025 in New York City. | Image: Getty

This is an excerpt of Sources by Alex Heath, a newsletter about AI and the tech industry, syndicated just for The Verge subscribers once a week.

Dario Amodei took the stage at the DealBook Summit on Wednesday to throw punches without naming names.

The Anthropic CEO spent a good chunk of the interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin drawing a careful line between his company's approach and that of a certain competitor. When asked about whether the AI industry is in a bubble, Amodei separated the "technological side" from the "economic side" and then twisted the knife.

"On the technological side, I feel really solid," he said. "On the economic side …

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Amazon’s bet that AI benchmarks don’t matter

2025-12-02T15:41:04-05:00

Rohit Prasad, Amazon's SVP of AGI.

This is an excerpt of Sources by Alex Heath, a newsletter about AI and the tech industry, syndicated just for The Verge subscribers once a week.

Amazon's AI chief has a message for the model benchmark obsessives: Stop looking at the leaderboards.

"I want real-world utility. None of these benchmarks are real," Rohit Prasad, Amazon's SVP of AGI, told me ahead of today's announcements at AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas. "The only way to do real benchmarking is if everyone conforms to the same training data and the evals are completely held out. That's not what's happening. The evals are frankly getting noisy, and they're not showing the real power …

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AI startups are turning their revenue into recruiting bait

2025-11-21T09:21:25-05:00

Sierra’s Clay Bavor and Bret Taylor. | Photo: Sierra

This is an excerpt of Sources by Alex Heath, a newsletter about AI and the tech industry, syndicated just for The Verge subscribers once a week.

A new trend has quickly emerged for AI startups that want to stand out from the rest: brag about revenue.

Take Sierra, Bret Taylor and Clay Bavor's AI customer support firm that was recently valued at $10 billion. On paper, you'd think Sierra could have its pick of just about anyone who wants to work in AI - both co-founders are well-known names in Silicon Valley, Taylor is also the chairman of OpenAI, and Sierra has raised more than $600 million in less than two years.

But even Sierra feels the …

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What insiders anonymously think about the AI race

2025-11-13T18:27:04-05:00

This is an excerpt of Sources by Alex Heath, a newsletter about AI and the tech industry, syndicated just for The Verge subscribers once a week.

I spent yesterday at Eric Newcomer's Cerebral Valley conference in San Francisco, which is now in its third year. I've attended this event for three years in a row because Eric does a great job curating the speakers and the audience, and the conversations are more substantive than a typical industry event.

This year was no exception; however, I found the most interesting part of the day to be when the results of an anonymous audience survey were shared onstage. The more than 300 attendees who part …

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Election night at Kalshi HQ

2025-11-06T09:18:58-05:00

This is an excerpt of Sources by Alex Heath, a newsletter about AI and the tech industry, syndicated just for The Verge subscribers once a week.

At 8PM on election night in New York City, I arrived at an unmarked office building in the Meatpacking District.

Inside, a few dozen young Kalshi employees moved between clusters of desks, pizza boxes, and a large projector displaying live markets for the day's key races. The vibe was quiet but focused. On the screen, numbers flickered as bets adjusted in real time.

Near the projector, co-founders Tarek Mansour and Luana Lopes Lara chatted with a CBS News crew filming a segment for the next morni …

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