Robots are no match for American football. The chorus of revolutionary promises about artificial intelligence might lead one to believe that no human activity is safe in an era of silicon smarts. But when it comes to live events – on traditional television, no less — AI can’t beat flesh-and-blood fervor. For the uninitiated, the National Football League broadcast of its championship game, dubbed the Super Bowl, is tantamount to a religious experience for many in the United States. On Sunday, millions gathered to watch the Philadelphia Eagles trounce the Kansas City Chiefs. The draw of the most-watched event

Are the biggest technology firms overinvesting in artificial intelligence? Probably. Meta Platforms’ $40 billion in capital spending this year, for example, will be around double what it allocated in 2021. Shareholders have been broadly supportive of that. But what happens if companies give away the results of their investment for free? That’s effectively what CEO Mark Zuckerburg is promising to do. His $1.1 trillion company says that its new AI models – the latest, Llama 3.1, was released on Tuesday – will be given to developers to tweak and freely use, plugging in their own data without having to share

Snap could be Twitter’s raven. The disappearing-message app abruptly slashed its second-quarter forecasts, sending its shares spiraling some 40%. That’s an ominous sign for Twitter. Elon Musk has an additional reason to bail on buying the social media network. Snap’s admission late on Monday that the economy was deteriorating faster than anticipated came as a shock. Last month, the company run by Evan Spiegel was expecting its revenue to increase between 20% and 25% year-over-year and adjusted EBITDA to break even at worst. Snap now expects its top line and profit to undershoot its guidance range. The warning pulled down other firms dependent on digital advertising.

WindAcre Partnership may be tilting at windmills in its fight against the $10 billion buyout of Nielsen. The agreed purchase by affiliates of Elliott Investment Management and Brookfield Asset Management for $28 per share came after a lengthy process in which Nielsen rejected a lower bid. WindAcre thinks it still isn’t getting enough. WindAcre boss Snehal Amin’s push is aggressive even by standards he set as co-founder of pioneer activist investment firm TCI Fund Management. Unsatisfied with the offer, WindAcre asked for additional equity, bumping its effective price to $40 per share, a whopping extra $1.1 billion, according to Bloomberg. That demand

Intuit, the $154 billion maker of TurboTax and QuickBooks, wants a lot more small bananas. It’s paying about $12 billion for Mailchimp, the digital marketing and automation firm, in an effort to better crack the massive market for small business services. Mailchimp’s record suggests that it has a shot. But Intuit is also busy integrating personal finance site Credit Karma, which it bought last year for $7 billion. The key to success will be avoiding indigestion. Mailchimp is private, and details of the deal are sparse as a result. What is known is that it made $800 million of revenue

Facebook, Alphabet’s Google and Amazon.com are lions on the prowl. Instead of wildebeest, they’re eyeing the fattened-up savings of the U.S. consumer. The tech titans stand to rake in ad revenue as companies compete to woo Americans poised to go on shopping sprees. The result could be a boost in Silicon Valley’s market share, as well as its revenue. The companies run by Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai and Jeff Bezos respectively are expected to report this week that first-quarter revenue rose more than 25% year-over-year, according to Refinitiv. That is impressive because even a year ago they were growing as

The Super Bowl television broadcast traditionally includes high-profile, creative ads from major American companies. Nearly half of Americans (47%) say they look forward to the ads and consider them an integral part of the Super Bowl experience, Refinitiv discovered in a collaboration with Maru/Blue Public Opinion, a panel and data service insight firm. This year, Chipotle will introduce its first Super Bowl commercial, titled “Can a Burrito Change the World?” The ad focuses on making sustainable change to the way the food industry operates, tapping into consumers’ current focus on health and sustainability. In a release, Chipotle said, “The company

The pandemic is bad financially for Twitter today, but it’s good news for tomorrow. Bored consumers flocked to the $29 billion social network in the second quarter as they sought news about protests, the spread of Covid-19 and the upcoming presidential election. What Twitter calls monetizable daily active users surged 34% year-on-year to 186 million in the period. That dragged costs up. Advertisers meanwhile pulled in their horns, so revenue fell 19% compared to the same quarter last year. The result was an operating loss, but investors shouldn’t be too worried. That’s because Twitter’s long-run problem has always been finding

Coronavirus has made Twitter a must-read. But advertisers are bailing, as the virus saps their budgets and fills the social network with the kind of content brands don’t exactly love appearing alongside. Twitter scrapped its revenue forecast for the quarter on Monday and said it would make an operating loss, but at the same time it said that user numbers had grown rapidly. On a net basis, that still leaves Twitter a loser. The $19 billion company lead by Jack Dorsey is struggling to keep revenue coming in because the world is on pause. That’s an issue for all ad-dependent

Companies often turn to Kantar’s figures on consumer tastes before making a big decision. A quick run through the numbers suggests that possible private-equity buyers might need to do some more market research of their own. Mark Read, the boss of 11 billion pound ad group WPP, wants to offload a majority stake in his data analytics business. Reuters exclusively reported on Tuesday that buyout groups including Advent, Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman and CVC Capital Partners are interested, and that a deal may value Kantar at 3.5 billion pounds including debt. There’s reason for the interest. Kantar, whose operating profit

Alphabet is stuck at the letter G. The holding company of Google was created to safeguard against conventionality and let moonshot ideas, like self-driving cars, flourish. Almost three years in, it’s basically still just Google. Which means, in turn, that the A in Alphabet stands mainly for advertising. Back in 2015, Google co-founder Larry Page explained the formation of holding company Alphabet was to keep things “crazy.” After all, products like the Android operating system and Google Maps had become less zany as they attracted billions of users. The purpose of Alphabet was to keep that same spirit alive while