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Nvidia Hires Google Cloud Marketing Leader as Its First CMO Nvidia has hired longtime Google executive Alison Wagonfeld as its first chief marketing officer. Nvidia is formalizing its marketing leadership for the first time as the company’s role at the center of the AI economy continues to expand.The chipmaker has hired longtime Google executive Alison Wagonfeld as its first chief marketing officer. In a LinkedIn post announcing the move on Thursday, Wagonfeld called the decision a transition “from one AI leader to another,” noting that Nvidia and Google already share a close partnership. She said she would oversee both marketing…
Elon Musk’s AI company has restricted Grok’s controversial AI image-generation feature to only paying subscribers on X, after the tool invited heavy criticism from across the world for letting users generate sexualized and nude images of women and children. In replies to users on Friday, Grok said only paying subscribers on X would be able to generate and edit images on the platform. Notably, these limits do not apply to the Grok app, which, at the time of publication, was letting anyone generate pictures without having to pay for a subscription. Initially available to anyone with daily limits, Grok’s image…
Did California lose Larry Page? The Google and Alphabet cofounder, who left day-to-day operations in 2019, has seen his net worth soar in the years since—from around $50 billion at the time of his departure to somewhere approximating $260 billion today. (Leaving his job clearly didn’t hurt his wallet.) Last year, a proposed ballot initiative in California threatened billionaires like Page with a one-time 5 percent wealth tax—prompting some of them to consider leaving the state before the end of the year, when the tax, if passed, would retroactively kick in. Page seems to have been one of those defectors;…
Andreessen Horowitz just announced the firm has just raised a little more than $15 billion in new funding. The haul represents over 18% of all venture capital dollars allocated in the United States in 2025, according to firm co-founder Ben Horowitz, but even more jaw-dropping is that it brings the organization to more than $90 billion in assets under management, putting it neck-and-neck with Sequoia Capital as among the largest venture firms in the world. Which is fitting, since a16z appears to be very friendly with actual sovereign wealth funds, including at least one from Saudi Arabia. The firm, which…
As age-verification laws continue to dismantle the adult industry—and determine the future of free speech on the internet—a Utah lawmaker proposed a bill this week that would enforce a tax on porn sites that operate within the state.Introduced by state senator Calvin Musselman, a Republican, the bill would impose a 7 percent tax on total receipts “from sales, distributions, memberships, subscriptions, performances, and content amounting to material harmful to minors that is produced, sold, filmed, generated, or otherwise based” in Utah. If passed, the bill would go into effect in May and would also require adult sites to pay a…
Ads of the Week: 8 Campaigns That Caught Our Eye, From Equinox to Dunkin’ This week’s standout campaigns run the gamut of New Year messages, from motivational calls to action to ditching resolutions altogether. While Apple Watch urges people not to quit, Premier Protein suggests big changes can wait. Megan Thee Stallion plays an enthusiastic fitness instructor for Dunkin’, and Equinox cleverly subverts AI slop to inspire self-belief.Plus, our Most Effective Ad of the Week, in partnership with EDO, is an inclusive take on fitness.Keep reading for more of the week’s most notable ads.Equinox | “Question Everything But Yourself” by Angry…
Following the success of TikTok and Instagram Reels, Disney announced that it’s bringing short-form video content to Disney+ in the U.S. this year in a bid to boost daily engagement. Disney made the announcement at its Tech + Data Showcase event at CES 2026. The company said in the blog post that the experience “will evolve as it expands across news and entertainment and delivers a more personalized, dynamic experience that reinforces Disney+ as a must-visit daily destination.” Disney told Deadline that the videos could include original short-form content, repurposed social clips, scenes from TV shows or movies, or a combination.…
Physical AI sounds like a contradiction in terms. A computer, but a body?But for the marketing architects, it’s the latest term of art, a buzzword meant to point us citizens toward a bright and promising technological future.Back here on earth, the term is maybe most useful as a way to understand how automotive companies are thinking about themselves right now: as tech pioneers. It’s also a handy shortcut to understanding how appetizing the automotive industry is for the companies that make chips—what could be a $123 billion opportunity by 2032, up some 85 percent from 2023. The giant CES consumer…
Brands Spent More than $1B on Celebrities in Ads Last Year Getty Images Celebrities are playing a bigger role in advertising than ever before.Brands are significantly increasing their investment in celebrity talent in ads even as they consolidate their number of commercial productions, according to a new report from XR (Extreme Reach), an ad operations and talent payment platform.The XR State of Pay report analyzed thousands of U.S. commercial productions and talent payments worth $8 billion between 2019 and 2025. It found that total spending on paid guarantees (contractually committed compensation) for celebrities including actors, musicians, athletes, and other high-profile talent…
You might think it’s pretty weird to hear the founders of a VR company and a social media platform publicly complaining about how things used to be better back in the dial-up days. Nevertheless, that is what happened at CES on Wednesday, when Oculus creator Palmer Luckey and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian gave a joint talk about the joys of “tech nostalgia.” Luckey, who initially made his fortune in VR and now runs the defense contractor Anduril, and Ohanian both seemed to agree: Stuff was better in the old days. The catch, however, is that Luckey and Ohanian weren’t really…
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AI research lab Anthropic continues to land sizable enterprise deals. Its latest entails bringing its large language models to a legacy German insurance giant. Anthropic on Friday announced a deal with Munich, Germany-based global insurance conglomerate Allianz to bring “responsible AI” to the insurance industry. The parties declined to share financial terms of the deal. The partnership is made up of three specific initiatives. The first is making Claude Code, Anthropic’s AI-powered coding tool, available to all of Allianz’s employees. Anthropic and Allianz will also build custom AI agents for Allianz employees that can execute multi-step workflows with a human…
Since 2018, a group of researchers from around the world have crunched the numbers on how much heat the world’s oceans are absorbing each year. In 2025, their measurements broke records once again, making this the eighth year in a row that the world’s oceans have absorbed more heat than the years before.The study, which was published Friday in the journal Advances in Atmospheric Science, found that the world’s oceans absorbed an additional 23 zettajoules’ worth of heat in 2025, the most in any year since modern measurements began in the 1960s. That’s significantly higher than the 16 additional zettajoules…
OpenAI is kicking off the new year with yet another acqui-hire. The AI giant is acquiring the team behind Convogo, a business software platform that helps executive coaches, consultants, talent leaders, and HR teams automate and improve leadership assessments and feedback reporting. An OpenAI spokesperson said the company is not acquiring Convogo’s IP or technology, but rather hiring the team to work on its “AI cloud efforts.” The three co-founders — Matt Cooper, Evan Cater, and Mike Gillett — will join OpenAI as part of what a source familiar with the matter called an all-stock deal. Convogo’s product will be…
Major wireless carriers: A necessary evil if you travel a lot, have a family, or are just interested in coverage that’s reliably consistent and widespread. AT&T is the third-largest provider in the US (first for 5G), with the largest coverage map. I’ve had various AT&T plans for more than a decade, first for just myself and now for my whole family, even though I only get one cell bar at my house and have to stand in one 5-square-foot patch of yard to make a phone call. And have lost entire days of my life to fighting unexpected random charges…
CES is always chock-full of robots, and this year electronics giant LG announced a new bot, dubbed CLOid, that it claims will revolutionize household chores (as in, you won’t have to do them anymore). CLOid is described as an AI-powered home robot, designed to assist its user with a wide variety of domestic tasks — from folding laundry to making breakfast to patrolling a home for signs of trouble. The company says that, eventually, it envisions the device “evolving into an ambient-care agent that supports everyday life.” The bot was announced during LG’s keynote earlier this week, but it was also available…