Good morning. Lean and mean today, like Big Tech’s inventory of premium glass cloth fiber.
Today’s news below. —Andrew Nusca
P.S. My apologies to Anthropic’s Ami Vora, who I mistitled in yesterday’s edition. She’s Head of Product.
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Verizon hit with a major U.S. outage
Verizon customers were forced to endure a substantial service outage on Wednesday that disrupted cellular activity across the U.S.
The issue affected wireless voice and data services, the telecom company said. It didn’t specify what caused the disruptions, but said at 10:20 p.m. Eastern that it had been resolved.
Reports suggest more than 100,000 customers were without service for 10 or more hours, beginning around noon ET and peaking shortly after.
A number of major metros were affected, including New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington D.C., and Houston.
“Today, we let many of our customers down and for that, we are truly sorry,” Verizon wrote in a social media post. “They expect more from us.”
Customers reported that their phones were left in “SOS” or “no signal” mode for the duration. Some cities issued alerts that the outage might disrupt 9-1-1 emergency calls.
“If customers are still having an issue, we encourage them to restart their devices to reconnect to the network,” Verizon said. “For those affected, we will provide account credits.” —AN
Google rolls out Personal Intelligence
Google is launching a feature for its Gemini AI that aims to turn the chatbot into a personalized assistant.
The company’s new Personal Intelligence capability connects Gemini with the rest of the Google ecosystem—such as Gmail, Photos, Search, and YouTube history—to tailor the bot’s responses to a specific user.
While Gemini could already retrieve information from these apps, the new capability allows it to reason across a user’s data and surface proactive insights.
For example, the feature allows users to ask Gemini to find specific photos from past trips, gather information from recent emails, or pull together information scattered across different Google services.
The assistant could retrieve details like license plate numbers from photos or plan a family vacation by analyzing past travel patterns and family interests stored across Gmail and Photos.
The new feature, which is being released in beta, was rolled out on Wednesday to Google AI Pro and AI Ultra subscribers in the U.S., with a wider rollout to all users planned within the week. —Beatrice Nolan
The ‘Magnificent 7’ stocks are dying
The S&P 500 fell 0.19% Tuesday but, interestingly, the “equal weight” S&P 500 was marginally up. That’s because more investors are picking between winners and losers on the index—and many of the losers are the Magnificent Seven tech stocks.
The market as a whole is up 0.48% year-to-date. But only two of the Mag 7 stocks are in positive territory so far: Alphabet and Amazon.
All the others are down, some bad: Tesla has lost 4.73% so far. Apple is down 4.83%.
The collapse of the Mag 7 is important because in the last few years the valuation of those stocks has grown so big that they now form more than 30% of the value of the S&P as a whole.
It created a situation where even if you bought an S&P 500 exchange-traded fund, with the intent of diversifying your investments across 500 companies, your results were mostly affected by the Mag 7.
The dominance of the Mag 7 is likely to come to an end this year, many on Wall Street believe—if only because their valuations can’t exponentially go up forever.
That’s something that traders are pretty happy about because, as Tuesday’s equal weight S&P performance shows, the other 493 stocks are still able to generate gains even if the Mag 7 are crumbling. —Jim Edwards
More tech
—California investigates xAI. All those generated “undressed” images of women and children from Grok? No bueno.
—Digg (yes, that one) returns as a public beta.
—Trump institutes a 25% tariff on chips “transshipped through the United States to other foreign countries.”
—OpenAI and Cerebras do a deal. 750 megawatts of compute over three years.
—Barret Zoph exits Thinking Machines. The CTO returns to OpenAI amid questions about ethics; he’s replaced by Soumith Chintala.
—The year of the mega IPO? Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceX wait in the wings.
—Airbnb hires its CTO from Meta. Ahmad Al-Dahle led the generative AI and Llama team.
