Good morning. Congratulations to readers who support Spain’s national soccer team, condolences to readers who support Argentina’s, and LOL to readers who are customers of Amazon Web Services and recently received a bill for $1 billion, or even $1 trillion, after a global billing glitch.
“I just saw $1.5 trillion on my AWS bill and my soul left my body,” wrote one customer on social media. “My first thought wasn’t, ‘This is a bug.’ My first thought was, ‘Which one of you motherfuckers spun up a training job on the entire internet.’”
Behold our age of intelligence, ladies and gentlemen. Today’s news below; have a glitchless day. —Andrew Nusca
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Kalshi, Polymarket bets on World Cup final tally $5.7 billion
There’s nothing like a mass sporting event to show us just how those prediction market companies are really doing.
Kalshi and Polymarket reportedly took in $5.69 billion in wagers on the FIFA World Cup final between Spain and Argentina on Sunday. (Spain won 1-0.)
Add to that the other 103 matches in this year’s tournament—plus awards like the Golden Ball, Boot, and Glove—and that makes this year’s match “the largest gambling event in history,” analysts told the New York Times.
Good news for the Silicon Valley investors who back either company, among them Andreessen Horowitz, ARK Invest, CapitalG, Founders Fund, General Catalyst, IVP, Paradigm, and Sequoia Capital.
And: No wonder Mark Zuckerberg wants Meta to take a piece of the action via its rival app, still in development, called Arena.
He’s not the only one. DraftKings and FanDuel, the gambling tech unicorns of the 2010s, offer similar services. So does the Winklevoss-backed crypto exchange Gemini, not to be confused with the Google AI of the same name.
The path forward remains fraught. More than a dozen states with sports betting bans on the books have sued Kalshi and Polymarket for allegedly circumventing state laws by running unlicensed, unregulated gambling platforms. The companies argue they’re not illegal gambling operations but derivatives exchanges—futures markets—regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a federal agency. —AN
DoorDash, Uber Eats create competition for big U.S. pizza chains
For all the complaints tossed at delivery apps DoorDash and Uber Eats, they’re apparently helping level the playing field between large corporate pizza chains and smaller shops—at least in the United States.
Haven’t ordered a pie from Big Pizza lately? You’re not alone. After missing sales expectations, Domino’s is trying to juice its revenue by opening more stores rather than selling more at existing locations. Pizza Hut changed hands last month in a $1.5 billion deal between Yum! Brands and the private equity firm Long Range Capital. And Papa John’s? Midway through a plan to shutter 300 stores by the end of next year.
Blame delivery apps, according to a Financial Times report.
“Once, pizza chains’ delivery apparatus was the biggest game in town for hungry consumers who wanted hot food at their door. Now, the likes of Uber Eats and DoorDash mean other types of restaurants have easy access to the capability that once set Domino’s and its peers apart,” the FT notes.
It’s not hard to see why. The delivery apps offer discovery and delivery for their 15% to 30% cut—a useful (if brutally expensive) tool for a family-run shop and a dagger to the pizza chains who once stood out by offering those services in-house.
How to survive? Partner, for one—Domino’s and DoorDash have already done so, for example. But also work the existing advantages: carryout customers, loyalty rewards, and better delivery by staff. Surely we can all agree: A world without tragic cheese sliding incidents is indeed a better one. —AN
Apple pilots ‘Live Notes’ at its Genius Bar
Apple is reportedly testing an AI-based system that records customer conversations at the Genius Bar in its retail stores.
Bloomberg reports that the system, dubbed “Live Notes,” transcribes and summarizes an employee’s conversation with a customer. That information flows to the employee’s iPad as part of the repair system.
It’s reportedly an effort to enable Apple’s store associates—sorry, “specialists”—to spend more time listening and less time scribbling notes.
Hardly a huge technological leap, but the opt-in tool has raised some questions among Apple’s roughly 30,000 retail staffers across more than 500 stores. Will recordings show up in trainings or performance reviews?
According to Bloomberg, no. “The company has indicated that the recordings themselves won’t be saved and managers don’t receive the transcripts,” the publication writes. Phew.
Still, it wouldn’t surprise if Apple’s retail division added some AI-driven sales recommendations to those notes or incorporated some element of the experimental tool to its cocktail of success metrics. Already, the company uses Bluetooth and Wi-Fi to anonymously track foot traffic, sensors to measure staff response times, and point-of-sale gear to measure conversion rates. —AN
More tech
—Alibaba says its Qwen3.8 Max AI model is second only to Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5.
—An agentic AI system hacked Hugging Face’s production infrastructure.
—GameStop now owns 9.8% of eBay, in case anyone’s wondering!
—Anthropic, OpenAI employees are donating to political campaigns more readily than their peers at past post-IPO tech companies.
—CIA spying on the UAE ironically led to the U.S. trusting the nation with advanced AI chips.
—Incoming U.K. PM Andy Burnham is expected to scrap previous plans for digital ID cards.
—Japan will buy 27,500 Nvidia Rubin GPUs to develop a Noetra-led AI factory for “national physical AI.”