new: Salesforce has a new COO, Miguel Milano. he's a boomerang who has been chief revenue officer for the past three years. Robin Washington remains COFO, and Srini Tallapragada is leaving www.cnbc.com/2026/08/05/m...

Marc Benioff gets a new operating chief, as Salesforce promotes Miguel Milano

Salesforce promoted revenue head and former Oracle executive Miguel Milano to role of operating chief.

cnbc.com

new: Microsoft has made OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol the default model for employees' internal work in GitHub Copilot. Jay Parikh told CoreAI staff members to try to use the model most of the time in an email on Monday www.cnbc.com/2026/08/05/m...

Microsoft AI exec tells developers to default to OpenAI's top model as part of efficiency push

Microsoft is taking advantage of its intellectual property rights with OpenAI, encouraging employees to use the company's top model.

cnbc.com

"The long and short (and legal) of it is that we have agreed to rebrand and cease use of the Gourmet trademark as part of a confidential settlement agreement with Condé Nast." gourmetmagazine.net/72-hours-ciu...

Street Eating in Juárez

And some big news about this magazine…

gourmetmagazine.net

Semafor@semafor.com · 2mo ago

🟡 Exclusive: Condé Nast, the parent company of the defunct food magazine Gourmet, is not pleased that a group of journalists have revived it on their own. www.semafor.com/article/06/0...

just got an email that starts with "Happy Friday!"

"In the southern city of Guangzhou, A.I. is helping discipline residents who fail to separate food waste from regular trash, by posting their photos to the 'exposure station,' a digital screen near trash bins." www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

The Future, Made in China

Beijing is competing with the U.S. for tech supremacy. Who wins will have huge political implications.

newyorker.com

Today's newsletter: The many-headed hydra of risks facing AI today The hyperscalers are taking on hundreds of billions of dollars of debt to build a profit-challenged product whose global competition could compress margins, while the political backlash grows www.derekthompson.org/p/the-four-h...

The Four Horsemen of the AI Bubble Apocalypse

The smartest reasons to worry about the state of AI in an age of intense volatility—and my best attempt to explain why each of those worries might be wrong.

derekthompson.org

Try to spot when the market started doubting Kevin Warsh. From BofA.

"The fee also echoes the administration’s efforts to pin the same $100,000 price tag on H-1B visas, which have historically funneled global talent, particularly in STEM fields, to US companies." www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Trump Weighs $100,000 Fee for Foreign Students to Work Post-Grad

The Trump administration is weighing a plan to charge international students $100,000 to stay in the country and work after graduating, according to a person familiar with the matter, in a potentially...

bloomberg.com

"A Reuters analysis found the image of the map included in the presentation contained an artificial intelligence watermark that ⁠signals it was made with OpenAI tools." www.reuters.com/world/africa...

US government map of Africa mislabels every country at global conference

A U.S. government map of Africa mislabeled every country during a State Department presentation at ‌a global conference taking place in Brazil this week, causing a stir among attendees who took screen...

reuters.com

new: Microsoft's new Xbox CEO, Asha Sharma, told employees in a memo today that she's looking to deliver industry-leading margins by 2030 www.cnbc.com/2026/07/30/m...

Microsoft's Xbox chief lays out plan to pass rivals on margin by 2030 in memo to employees

Microsoft's gaming unit wants to invest in its Minecraft franchise and expand through partnerships, including in China.

cnbc.com

Ben Horwitz, the guy who created the anti-Grammarly Chrome plugin Sinceerly, took a job at OpenAI this month

Manisha Krishnan@manishakrishnan.bsky.social · last wk.

Authors and journalists are doing more first-person (hello 2010s blogging) and embracing "mistakes" in writing to prove they're not chatbots. There's even an “anti-Grammarly" app that leaves in typos and signs off "sent from my iPhone" to create more authenticity: www.wired.com/story/more-t...

the humble postcard has become an endangered species www.economist.com/britain/2026...

sitting here wondering why Jersey Mike's couldn't get the "MIKE" ticker symbol for its IPO. instead it's going out with "JMKE"? www.barrons.com/articles/jer...

Jersey Mike's IPO Aims to Be A Wall Street Hero

Jersey Mike’s is going public on Thursday. It will test the appetite of investors after blockbuster debuts like Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

barrons.com

Satya says GitHub Copilot now has 50 million users. OpenAI said earlier this month that Codex and ChatGPT Work together reached 10 million per week www.cnbc.com/2026/07/29/m...

Microsoft beats Q4 cloud expectations as full-year Azure revenue tops $100 billion

Microsoft's backlog sat 8% taller than the previous quarter, mainly thanks to contributions from customers other than large artificial intelligence companies.

cnbc.com

Today from me: A.I. companies suddenly have a voracious appetite for electricians and carpenters. I wrote about the hundreds of millions of dollars they're pouring into training as competition sends wages soaring: www.nytimes.com/2026/07/29/b...

A.I. Companies Are Recruiting Electricians and Carpenters by the Thousands

The future of artificial intelligence depends on finding more skilled humans for some very physical jobs.

nytimes.com

long thread with interesting context

Paul Cohen@paulecohen.bsky.social · 2w ago

think what you will of the Amaury family, but the NYT's entirely negative portrait of their alleged greed & lucrative ownership of the Tour de France misses a crucial part of their business model while the Tour is the only cycling race around that generates 1/ www.nytimes.com/2026/07/24/b...

"It's hard to overstate the degree to which publishers relied on traffic from Google referral links and the degree to which that traffic has disappeared in the last year, year-and-a-half, as Google has introduced AI." -AG Sulzberger www.wired.com/story/the-bi...

Can the New York Times Save Journalism From Our AI Overlords?

In 2023, the Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement. They’ve since spent more than $20 million on the case, and publisher A.G. Sulzberger has no plans to stop fighting it.

wired.com

nothing to see here www.cnbc.com/2026/07/28/m...

Microsoft short interest hits decade high ahead of Q2 earnings as AI spending raises new questions

There has been virtually no short covering ahead of Microsoft's earnings report as bearish investors hold their positions.

cnbc.com

best name in public relations that i can remember www.wired.com/story/wellne...

if the New York Times loses Melissa Clark ...

"Mr. Trump controls a $400 million super PAC, and the Republican National Committee is sitting on nearly $130 million. Mr. Martin’s D.N.C. is $2 million in debt." www.nytimes.com/2026/07/26/u...

Inside the Phone-Throwing Drama at the Troubled, Broke Democratic Party

The Democrats should be well positioned to make gains in this year’s midterms. But inside party headquarters, every week brings paranoia, worries about money and, on occasion, emotional eruptions.

nytimes.com

“.. SpaceX has delivered one of the weakest post-debut performances of any major U.S. listing since the end of the 2008-2009 financial crisis.” @barrons.com $SPCX www.barrons.com/articles/spa...

"Of the roughly 1.5bn tourist journeys each year that involve crossing borders, over half are in European countries—a staggering success for a place with but a tenth of the world’s population." www.economist.com/europe/2026/...

Dismissing Europe as a museum is glib. Think of it as a theme park

All the continent’s a stage

economist.com

suddenly shadow libraries are desirable for big technology www.ft.com/content/e6d1...

"The protests represent the biggest youth challenge to Modi since he came to power in 2014." www.reuters.com/world/india/...

Indian activist ends fast but youth protesters still seek minister's ouster

Demonstrations demanding the education minister's resignation are set to continue in the biggest youth-led challenge to Prime Minister Narendra Modi's ‌government.

reuters.com

omg Chrome finally did it

got to see Emeril as part of the live studio audience in New York in the late nineties. at the end of the taping he started walking through the aisles and tossing individually wrapped candies to people in the crowd. people very nearly lost their minds

Oracle wins decade-long contract from US Department of War worth up to $7B www.cnbc.com/2026/07/23/o...

Oracle signs 10-year software contract with Pentagon worth up to $7 billion

Oracle will supply on-premises software to the U.S. Department of Defense.

cnbc.com

shoot. RIP Dvorak mailchi.mp/nashownotes/...

M&A in the coconut water market investors.thevitacococompany.com/news-release...