In early 2023, Blackstone CEO Steve Schwarzman gathered with Jas Khaira, the company’s lead AI investor, and other top executives at the finance giant’s Park Avenue headquarters in Manhattan for a debate: Should they give billions of dollars to a little-known data center developer—CoreWeave—that they had turned down just a few months earlier?

CoreWeave had gotten Blackstone to return to the table after landing a multiyear, multibillion-dollar contract to sell cloud computing services to Microsoft. It needed $2.3 billion to buy Nvidia GPUs and secure a data center to house them.

In Blackstone’s discussion of the deal, several executives in the room had deep misgivings, according to a person who attended the meeting. CoreWeave was still something of a mystery, a six-year-old, privately held firm that had generated only $16 million in revenue in the previous year. Schwarzman himself was personally worried his investment team could be making a mistake, the person said.

The U.S. has sanctioned a startup and a venture capital firm from China connected to Linwei Ding, a Chinese national and former Google software engineer sentenced to prison last month for stealing Google’s AI-related trade secrets.

The startup, Shanghai Zhisuan Technology, is an AI company Ding ...

Two of the hardest problems in AI right now are creating models that understand the physical world—so called world models—and making sense of the internal workings of AI models—otherwise known as mechanistic interpretability.

Typically, these are treated as two separate problems: researchers working on world models are often not concerned with their internal workings, and interpretability researchers tend to focus on the language models that power most AI tools we currently use. But Sonia Joseph, the co-founder and CEO of a new startup, World Mechanics, argues that world models and interpretability are two sides of the same coin. Joseph joined the latest episode of AI Deep Dive to explain that connection, which could be key to making AI useful in the physical world, from medicine to manufacturing. (The full episode is available here.)

These days, raising a new venture fund can seem like an uphill battle. First-time managers are competing with much bigger funds that can lure founders with rich valuations—as well as track records that can wow limited partners.

But what if you had unfettered access to some sage advice from a seasoned investor and executive? 

That’s the case for Ayesha Arora-Hughes, the daughter of Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora. Ayesha is raising her own VC fund, Permanent Partners Collective Fund I, according to a securities filing and people with knowledge of the matter—and she counts Nikesh as an adviser to the firm, one of the people said. 

Apple sure takes its own sweet time. On Monday, the company sent out invitations to a product announcement happening next Wednesday, which the company’s marketing chief teased in a message on X: “Can’t wait to pro and tell next week.” That’s likely a reference to a new MacBook Pro from the company, which Bloomberg has reported will be Apple’s first touchscreen laptop.

Apparently pigs really do fly. For over a decade, Apple has treated touchscreen laptops like some kind of mutant offspring of computers and tablets, a category it had zero interest in. On a 2012 earnings call, Apple’s then-CEO Tim Cook had a memorable response to a question about the growing number of touchscreen Windows laptops coming on the market: “You can converge a toaster and a refrigerator, but those things are probably not going to be pleasing to the user.” 

“We’re not going to that party,” Cook added. 

A number of things have changed since then. Touchscreens have become somewhat normalized as laptop features. About one in every five notebook computers sold has such capabilities, by one estimate. More recently, Cook handed off the Apple CEO baton to John Ternus, a longtime hardware engineering executive who is much more of a product guy than his predecessor. 

Clearly, a new touchscreen laptop had to have been in the works long before Apple’s leadership transition. Still, it wouldn’t be a surprise to learn that Ternus’ rising stature within the company had something to do with it. Whoever was behind the decision, the first wave of products from the Ternus administration—the iPhone Duo foldable smartphone, HomeView smart display and now possibly a touchscreen MacBook—seems to be sending the message that Apple is ready to embrace categories it previously ignored. That’s a good thing.

In Other News

• Elon Musk pledged to give every child in the U.S. one share of SpaceX stock next year, a gift that could be worth almost $11 billion in total. 
•  The U.S. Department of Homeland Security ordered all federal civilian agencies to remove DeepSeek from their computer systems and bars those agencies from making future purchases from DeepSeek.
• Federal prosecutors accused the former OpenAI employee who allegedly bugged the company’s offices of having ties to the Saudi royal family.  

Today on The Information’s TITV

Check out today's episode of TITV in which Akash Pasricha speaks to the CIO of Palo Alto Networks Meera Rajavel about the company’s AI agent security strategy.

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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman last week told employees about three proposals the industry has discussed for how to safely develop AI, a stark framing that comes just as the Trump administration sets up its first system for policing “superintelligence” developers like OpenAI.

One path involved developing an international organization, similar to the International Atomic Energy Agency, that would enforce safety standards, a scenario Altman appeared to support, said two people with knowledge of the comments. Another option would involve merging all of the AI labs into a single body to develop new AI safely.

Prosecutors allege that the OpenAI employee accused of bugging OpenAI’s office had ties to the Saudi Arabian royal family, according to a Sunday filing from the U.S. Attorney’s office in San Francisco.

The FBI arrested Saudi Arabian national Abdulrahman Alfozan, 35, on October 9 after OpenAI ...

The Information is pleased to announce new reporters who will carry on the publication’s rich track record of reporting exclusive news on the most important people and companies in business. They’ll report on OpenAI, Google, Asia and finance.

Jemima McEvoy, OpenAI

Jemima McEvoy is changing roles to take on the OpenAI beat.

In just over a year at The Information writing for the Weekend section, Jemima has proven herself to be a resourceful, industrious and sharp-eyed reporter with a flair for colorful features and a knack for breaking news. Her run of illuminating stories includes profiles of Epstein-linked investor Masha Bucher, Midjourney founder David Holz and ultra-secretive investor Zach Frankel. An adept collaborator, she also co-authored great reads on OpenAI President Greg Brockman and his wife Anna, Sequoia’s leadership duo and Anthropic “first lady” Cami Clark—not to mention The Information’s inaugural 50 Most Influential People in Tech list. And she has helped deliver scoops on Valar Atomics and Shield AI and deconstructed trends such as the rise of padel.

Jemima joined The Information after five years at Forbes, where she made her bones writing about billionaires and their businesses. She has also interned for CBS News and was editor-in-chief of Washington Square News, the independent student newspaper at her alma mater, New York University.

Ryan Barwick, Google

Ryan Barwick is joining us to cover Google. Ryan comes to us from Axios, where he spent the past year-and-a-half delivering exclusives as a consumer-industry deal reporter for Axios Pro.

Ryan cut his reporting teeth covering advertising technology, giving him a deep understanding of the economic engine that has long powered Google’s core business. Before Axios, he was the senior reporter for Morning Brew’s advertising vertical, where he landed scoops on companies including Meta, Amazon and Twitter as well as Google, and covered the search giant’s battle with regulators. Prior to that, he wrote about the ad industry at Adweek, was a broadcast associate at CBS News and covered the intersection of policy and technology as a fellow at the Center for Public Integrity.

Claudia Chong, AI and Data Centers (Asia)

Claudia is covering the intensifying AI race from Singapore, where both Chinese and U.S. tech companies are staffing up. She also may report on topics including chip smuggling, crypto and anything else she digs up.

Claudia joins us from S-RM, a UK-based risk advisory firm where she specialized in APAC disputes, investigations, and corporate due diligence. Prior to that, she worked on ByteDance’s LLM training operations in Singapore and spent nearly six years as a correspondent at The Business Times, the premier business publication in Southeast Asia, covering venture capital, tech, and private wealth across the region.

Her journalistic work earned her a Singapore Press Holdings (SPH) Media Award for Excellence in 2024 for the investigation into Singapore’s largest money laundering scandal. Beyond training LLMs and conducting due diligence, her skills also extend to M&A, having conducted research that helped with the SPH’s acquisition of the Tech in Asia publication in 2024.

Alex Eichenstein, Tech Capital Markets

We’re excited to announce that Alex Eichenstein is joining the finance team, covering tech capital markets. Alex comes to us from The Deal, where she spent more than two and a half years covering healthcare deals. She regularly broke PE acquisition news while also writing deeper dives on major investing shifts, including how buyout firms’ struggles to find exits for practice rollups fueled a shift toward health tech investments.

We’re excited for Alex to help deepen our finance coverage in her new role, focusing on the fast-evolving debt and equity markets and deals redefining how tech companies fund themselves. Alex is a graduate of Columbia Journalism School and worked as a social media editor at Protocol prior to that.