THE BIG STORY

How Nvidia Became a $1 Trillion Company

Chipmaker Nvidia temporarily became a $1 trillion company on Tuesday morning, boosted by tech companies of all sizes racing to add generative AI tools to their products, The Verge reports. Its shares have nearly tripled in value in 2023.

Only seven American companies—Apple, Alphabet and Microsoft and Amazon among them—have ever been worth a trillion dollars.

Nvidia's roots stretch back 30 years, the Wall Street Journal notes, to a brainstorming session by three engineers at a Denny's in Silicon Valley. From the very beginning, the company has placed early bets on markets such as video games that barely existed at the time. Today, the advanced graphics chips known as GPUs required for AI are made almost exclusively by Nvidia.

Even before the AI boom, demand for Nvidia's chips jumped as cryptocurrency popularity surged, the New York Times reports.

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ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Mozilla’s Crusade for ‘Trustworthy’ AI

As chief of the nonprofit organization behind the Firefox web browser, Mozilla Foundation president Mark Surman has focused most of his team’s efforts over the last five years on urging policymakers worldwide to embrace “trustworthy artificial intelligence” by making pledges to use the technology for good. At Surman’s urging, Politico’s Digital Future Daily reports, Mozilla is now placing bets with its own venture funds and in-house tech incubator to demonstrate there’s a business to be made with trustworthy AI.

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INTERNET

The Upside of Web Apps

The web app, a hybrid of an app and a website, is an underdog technology with definite advantages, the Washington Post reports. Web apps look and function like the conventional apps for your phone or computer, but they grab less space on devices and are less pushy about surveilling users.

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MARKETING

Why Trends No Longer Have Meaning

Brands’ fascination with social-media fads has devalued the rigorous practice of trend forecasting, writes Matt Klein, Reddit's head of global foresight, on Contagious. What is a "trend" has become confused with what is "trending.”  As a result, these trends "are empty—devoid of meaning.” The solution, he says, is to go back to basics.

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SPONSORED

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QUICK HITS

• Marking down its own equity stake, investment giant Fidelity has given its best estimate of how much of Twitter’s value has been lost since Elon Musk acquired the social media company: two-thirds.
• Meta this week threatened to pull news links from Facebook and Instagram in California if state lawmakers moved forward with a bill that would tax them based on their advertising revenues against news content. The tax revenues would be allocated to newsrooms in California.
• Here's one reason why it feels like every new startup is calling itself an AI company, and many existing firms are rebranding along the same lines: Registrations of .ai domain names are up 156 percent over the past year, compared with a 27 percent increase for .com domains.

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QUOTE OF THE WEEK

"Either you’re running for food, or you are running from being food.”

‍—Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang, in a commencement speech encouraging students to “run” hard and seize opportunities from the AI revolution
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