TheChek News Flow

Russia Covets This Ukraine Province Above All. These Maps and Charts Show Why.

Putin wants to win territory in peace talks that he hasn’t managed to seize militarily

Peace talks with President Trump have prompted international discussions around a key aim that has eluded Russia’s Vladimir Putin in more than a decade of war: full control of Ukraine’s industrial eastern province of Donetsk.

The Kremlin leader thinks he can make a hugely significant strategic gain at the negotiating table rather than on the battlefield, where it could take years and cost hundreds of thousands of lives. Taking the territory would make further advances easier by bypassing Ukraine’s main defensive line.

These five maps and charts show why Putin is eager to get his hands on the land.

Russia has failed to fully take any of the four provinces in southeastern Ukraine that it has sought to annex. While Russian forces control almost all of the easternmost Luhansk region, they still don’t hold around a quarter of the other three regions. U.K. military intelligence estimates that seizing all of them would take Russian forces a further 4.4 years of fighting and cost around 2 million casualties in killed and wounded troops—a cost Putin would like to avoid with talks.

If Ukraine were to hand over the rest of the Donetsk region to Russia, it would move the front line of the war beyond the fortified cities of Slovyansk and Kramatorsk that have served as military hubs for Ukraine since 2014. West of Donetsk, the land is much flatter, opening up a swath of territory on the eastern bank of the Dnipro River that the Kremlin could try to make a grab for by resuming its invasion.

Russia has been advancing in eastern Ukraine for months, but the rate of progress has been glacial. Ukraine has successfully slowed down the Russian advance primarily using explosive drones to eliminate vehicles and infantry soldiers. As a result, Russia has been unable to make a breakthrough, and its advance in some areas, such as around the eastern city of Kupyansk, has been slower than the British and French advance at the Battle of the Somme in World War I.

Russia’s wasteful style of warfare, which commits infantry troops to risky assaults in search of incremental advances, has caused heavy losses. The Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank, has estimated that as many as a quarter of a million Russian soldiers have been killed in 3½ years of war. The Kremlin has had to offer huge bonuses to attract volunteers to bolster its army. Ukraine’s losses have been smaller, but its population is also much smaller, around a quarter of Russia’s, meaning it is also struggling for manpower.

Who owns the copyright for AI work?

The US may not think prompts warrant authorship but China disagrees

Generative artificial intelligence poses two copyright puzzles. The first is the widely discussed question of compensation for work used to train AI models. The second, which has yet to receive as much attention, concerns the work that AI produces. Copyright is granted to authors. So what happens to work that has no human author? 

The US has drawn the clearest line in the sand to date. In 2023 the US Copyright Office granted copyright protection to the graphic novel Zarya of the Dawn but rescinded protection for any AI-generated images — protecting only the human-authored text and arrangement. More definitively, a federal appeals court ruled in March that the pretty, purple and green AI-generated artwork “A Recent Entrance to Paradise” could not receive copyright protection because works must be “authored in the first instance by a human being”. The message is unambiguous: AI prompts, however sophisticated, are not enough alone to warrant authorship. 

China has taken the opposite path. In 2023, the Beijing Internet Court ruled that AI-generated images could receive copyright protection, finding that a user’s intellectual investment in selecting prompts and refining outputs constituted human creativity. 

So far, the UK and Ireland occupy a curious middle ground. Both jurisdictions provide copyright protection for “computer-generated works”. But this protection may be on shaky ground. A consultation from the UK government last year asked whether it should be removed. Ireland’s AI Advisory Council has made a similar recommendation.

Global divergence in legal frameworks can create problems for businesses. The same AI-generated content could be legally protected intellectual property in Beijing while residing in the public domain in Boston. That means an AI-generated jingle or AI-generated marketing copy made in the US could, in theory, be used by anyone.

This issue doesn’t just affect writers, graphic artists and composers who use AI for their work. If your business is creating software, you could be even more exposed. In the US and other jurisdictions, any individual lines of code generated by AI would not be protected even if the software product as a whole was. This has the potential to impact corporate transactions where deals pivot on what a company actually owns.  

Contracts with employees and external contractors fall under the same category. Most such documents have provisions noting that any copyright material generated by an employee or contractor is assigned to the company. But you cannot assign something that does not yet exist.

It is unrealistic to stipulate that employees and contractors cannot use new technology like AI. Such a request would be as archaic as asking them to submit handwritten work.

Lawyers need to find alternative solutions. If AI-generated code is not protected by copyright, for example, then new contracts need to be drawn up that treat it as a trade secret. 

The Irish AI Advisory Council on which I sit has gone further — recommending that the government introduce a limited form of IP protection for certain AI-generated works. However, this has been met with pushback from the creative sector. It will be difficult for one country to implement such a policy alone.

Victorian-era copyright rules are breaking under the weight of machines that can compose, code and create at scale. Litigation against AI companies from the likes of Getty Images and The New York Times centre on exploitation of existing works. So far the ownership of AI-created content has remained largely untested before the courts. But that could soon change.

AI is reshaping authorship. Surviving the transition requires rewriting contracts, restructuring IP strategies and building protection through trade secrets and confidentiality. Relying on copyright protection that may no longer exist is not enough.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei strikes defiant note and accuses Washington of seeking Iranian surrender

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has ruled out direct negotiations with the US, accusing Washington of seeking an Iranian surrender.

In his first full public appearance since the 12-day war with Israel in June, Khamenei addressed thousands of people on Sunday, according to local media, after weeks of issuing only brief video messages and making limited ceremonial appearances.

His absence — following Israeli threats to assassinate him — had raised concerns over the stability of the Islamic republic’s leadership, amid growing domestic pressure on the regime to change course and pursue a rapprochement with Washington.

“This person who is currently in charge in the US revealed the essence of their hostility towards Iran — essentially, that they want the Iranian nation and the Islamic republic to surrender,” Khamenei said, without naming US President Donald Trump.

Khamenei criticised Iranian politicians advocating direct negotiations with Washington as “superficial”, insisting that “the Iranian nation will stand firmly against such [US] demands”.

Iran’s foreign minister said last month he had been in touch with US envoy Steve Witkoff, who had proposed resuming talks.

The remarks come at a critical time as reformist voices within Iran increasingly push for a diplomatic reset with the US, including the suspension of Iran’s uranium enrichment and a return to negotiations aimed at de-escalating tensions and ending decades of hostility.

Pro-reform politicians such as political prisoner Mostafa Tajzadeh have argued that engagement could usher in vital economic and political reforms.

Hardline factions, however, have responded sharply, particularly in parliament and during Friday prayer sermons.

Some have even suggested that reformist President Masoud Pezeshkian, elected last year, should be removed.

But Khamenei backed Pezeshkian, warning against internal strife.

“The people should support those who serve the nation, especially the president, who is hardworking and persistent,” he said, in a clear rebuke to hardliners calling for Pezeshkian’s ousting.

Public anxiety remains high following the June war with Israel, which claimed more than 1,000 civilian lives and resulted in the deaths of dozens of senior Iranian military commanders and nuclear scientists. The US joined Israel in bombing Iranian nuclear sites during the conflict.

Although open hostilities have ceased, no formal ceasefire has been reached, and fears persist of renewed conflict. Ongoing reports of fires across the country have further fuelled public concern that a shadow war remains under way, a claim that authorities deny.

Despite mounting pressure, Tehran has shown no intention of curbing its nuclear programme.

On Friday, the E3 — Britain, France and Germany — held telephone talks with Iran’s foreign minister as they reviewed the possibility of invoking a sanctions “snapback” mechanism ahead of the October 18 deadline.

This mechanism, envisaged in the 2015 deal over Iran’s nuclear programme, enables UN sanctions to be reimposed if Iran is found to be failing to comply with the agreement on curbing its nuclear activities.

October 18 is the last date on which the mechanism could be used, but in order to do so, the E3 would need to begin the process weeks beforehand.

The US unilaterally withdrew from the deal in 2018, and Iran claims the agreement is already void because the E3 failed to fulfil commitments to help lift sanctions in exchange for Tehran rolling back most of its nuclear activities.

Tehran has dismissed the E3’s threat and has so far shown no willingness to resume negotiations with the US or restart its co-operation with the International Atomic Energy Agency, which has been suspended since the June war.

Ali Larijani, the newly appointed secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, told domestic media on Friday that Iran would not accept an extension to the current snapback deadline, even if the E3 was considering extending the date as a temporary solution should Iran resume negotiations with the US.

“If we agree today, in six months we will be asked to do the same again. This is not sustainable,” he said.

The race to stop mirror organisms

If created, these versions of the building blocks of life could lead to environmental and ecological disaster

This year I witnessed something I never expected to see in my scientific career: more than 150 scientists, policymakers, science funders and ethicists came together at the Institut Pasteur in Paris seeking to prevent a global threat that does not yet exist.

Within the next few decades, scientists will probably be able to build mirror life — organisms built from molecular components that are mirror images of the versions used in nature.

I am a synthetic biologist. Engineering cells and bacteria is my trade. I was part of the team that, in 2010, created the world’s first living bacterial cell with a chemically synthesised genome. For decades, my colleagues and I have sought to scale the beneficial applications of this technology, helping to create vaccine strains, biofuels, pharmaceuticals and other molecules that could create new sources of clean energy, cure diseases and clean up the planet.

Mirror life represents a profound break from this work. It would be created using entirely different building blocks, not the same molecules that are found in all known life. The organism’s DNA would twist to the left where ours twists to the right; their ribonucleic acids, essential to biological functions, would loop and bulge in the opposite direction.

Research into mirror cells has only been a tiny part of synthetic biology. But efforts to build a mirror ribosome — the cell’s protein factory — are under way. Once it is possible to build a mirror cell, it would be comparatively easy to engineer many more kinds of mirror bacteria — the simplest form of mirror life.

If this is achieved and Pandora’s box opens it could pose extraordinary risks. Mirror bacteria could evade our immune systems, confound our medicines and escape many of nature’s checks and balances.

To the best of our knowledge, our immune systems produce very weak antibody responses against mirror molecules, if any. Having even one immune deficiency can cause a patient to die of overwhelming bacterial infections; a mirror bacterial infection might be like having many immune deficiencies at once.

In the environment, predators including viruses and amoebae control bacterial populations. Mirror bacteria would be resistant to many of these predators. With fewer constraints, they could spread across ecosystems, disrupt food chains and cause fatal infections across species. Contaminated areas could become irreversibly uninhabitable, compromising our agriculture and natural world. Huge numbers of people, animals and plants could be wiped out, with some driven to extinction.

We have realised these dangers well before the point of no return. The Paris conference was a historic gathering: the first time scientists, ethicists, science funders and experts from the WHO and the UN came together specifically to discuss the threat from mirror life. 

Many argued that we need regulation and law to ensure that it is not created. I agree. This will require precision about what research can continue and what should cease. Some research could make it easier to create useful drugs, for example. Each major technological breakthrough offers a chance to assess whether going further increases the risks to people and the planet.

However, developing laws can require years of deliberation. Funding agencies can help create concrete barriers today. The Alfred P Sloan Foundation has already made clear that it will not support research with the goal of creating mirror organisms. Similar commitments from other funders would send a powerful message.

Over the next year, stakeholders will meet at the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, the University of Manchester, the National University of Singapore, Rikkyo University in Japan, Harvard University, Yale University and elsewhere to try to establish these boundaries. What technical milestones towards mirror life require red lines that protect people and planet, while preserving the benefits of synthetic biology that have nothing to do with mirror life?

This moment echoes the best of scientific responsibility, such as when researchers recognised the ozone crisis and united to ban chlorofluorocarbons. We have an even rarer opportunity now to prevent a global threat before it causes any harm. The solution is clear: we should choose not to build mirror life and pass laws to ensure nobody can. The question is not whether we are able to prevent this threat — it is whether we will act while we still can.

Saudis, Emiratis and Kuwaitis are enticed by TikTok campaigns and easy visas as airlines open new routes

Tourists from Gulf states are flocking to Russia as the country deepens its ties with the region after years of western sanctions, enticing visitors with easy visas, cultural riches and even “action packed” military tours.

Cut off from many western travellers and in need of foreign revenue streams to fund its war in Ukraine, Moscow has simplified its online visa process for many countries and Russia has sponsored trips for Arabic-language TikTok and Instagram influencers.

The moves have paid off, with Gulf citizens a growing target market for its tourist destinations as the region plays an ever greater role in the global economy.

Total visits from the Gulf more than quadrupled between 2019 and 2024, according to the Russian tour operators association. The number of Saudi visitors to Russia grew six-fold between 2023 and 2024, Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov said in July.

Tourism has become an important strand of Russian-Saudi efforts to deepen diplomatic ties, and the two were close to agreeing a visa waiver programme, the countries’ foreign ministers said.

Saudi budget airline Flynas began operating three direct flights per week from Riyadh to Moscow in August and state-owned Saudia is planning flights to Russia’s capital this autumn. The United Arab Emirates-based budget airline Air Arabia has also announced it would launch seasonal flights between Abu Dhabi and Yekaterinburg in October.

The two countries’ foreign ministers “spoke highly about the growth of our tourist exchanges” at a July meeting in Moscow, Lavrov said.

The Middle East, Egypt and Turkey are still the top destinations for Gulf tourists, followed by western Europe when escaping the region’s searing summer temperatures. But more and more are now going to Russia for the lower cost and novelty of visiting somewhere new, encouraged by a flood of social media posts from the influencers visiting the country.

“The prices and marketing made me decide to go,” said Aqeel al-Dejani, a 27-year-old Saudi. There was “a lot of promotion for Russian tourism on social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram”.

He spent 10 days in Moscow and Saint Petersburg in June and was particularly impressed by the architecture and history. “The Peterhof Palace with its huge gardens was magnificent,” he said.

Ostrovok, a Russian hotel booking website, said demand from Middle Eastern tourists grew by about a third in the first half of 2025 compared with the same period last year. Those tourists on average spent 30 per cent more per night than European counterparts, with nearly 80 per cent booking 4-star or 5-star hotels, said Daria Kochetkova, Ostrovok’s managing director.

Some are even braving the Russian winter for the thrill of something new.

“We were shocked by the weather,” said Hasan al-Qattan, a Saudi doctor who visited in February and said bundling up in temperatures of -10 Celsius was “part of the experience”.

“We knew it would be cold but we did not expect it to be that cold,” said the 28-year-old. “We come from a desert environment so we are not used to this kind of freezing cold weather.”

Inspired by videos of influencers marching in Russian army gear, Qattan booked a “military tour” that he said was the highlight of the trip. “The one we did is the ‘war experience’, where they give you a ride in a tank, do some light military drills, shoot a Kalashnikov and RPG. It was exciting and action packed.”

Gulf states have taken a neutral stance on Russia’s war with Ukraine. Despite pressure from western allies, the region has continued co-ordinating with Russia on oil production, helping President Vladimir Putin bankroll his war economy while also playing the role of mediators to exchange prisoners and hosting peace talks.

While Gulf visitors said they felt safe due to visible police presence in tourism hotspots, war-related sanctions have required some changes to travel practices. Credit cards such as Visa and Mastercard no longer work in Russia, forcing tourists to carry large amounts of cash and spend carefully for fear of running out of money.

And as Moscow jams GPS signals to prevent drone attacks, apps such as Google Maps and Uber have become unusable in the centre of the capital. “You are dependent on taxis even if the distance is not that far,” said a Saudi tourist.

But the sanctions-enforced absence of global brands did not bother Qattan and his friends, who mainly wanted to buy traditional souvenirs and praised the wide availability of halal food and variety of chocolate.

“We tried the ‘Alyonka’ chocolate with the legendary little girl on the cover, it was delicious,” he said. “We also picked up some Russian matryoshka dolls.”

Under new guidelines, producers must report data on the flow of strategic materials, including those coming from abroad for refining

China on Friday announced tightened rules over the mining and processing of rare earths, extending controls to imported minerals and requiring enterprises to report the flow of the strategic materials monthly.

The rules were released as guidelines on the implementation of the country’s Rare Earth Management Regulations, which took effect in October. The rules specify that China’s quota system applies not only to domestically produced materials but also to those coming from abroad for refining – a change that some fear could put further pressure on global supply.

Rare earth production enterprises should, by the 10th day of each month, enter the previous month’s data on the flow of rare earth products into a newly established information system, according to the document issued by three departments led by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT).

The latest move came as China, the world’s largest rare earth producer and refiner, tightens control over the production and export of the critical materials, which are widely used in hi-tech products ranging from smartphones to electric vehicles.

The document, effective immediately, provides detailed guidelines on how government agencies should manage quotas for designated companies and make the flow of rare earth products traceable.

In an interpretation of the new rules, the MIIT noted that rare earths were important strategic mineral resources, and changes in the industry meant that earlier rules were no longer suitable for current needs.

Rare earth elements are considered a critical bargaining chip for Beijing in its trade talks with Washington.

As in past years, Beijing has allocated an initial set of quotas to two rare earth producers for this year. However, this time it did not disclose details about the decision – a move seen as a deliberate strategy amid the trade war, according to mainland media reports.

“Compared to the previous quota system, which only regulated domestic raw materials, the new measures explicitly regulate imported ones, further enhancing China’s control over the rare earth supply chain,” said Li Chao, chief analyst at Guojin Securities, in a research report in February when the measures were issued for public comment.

In the first half of 2025, China imported 38,600 tonnes of various rare earth smelting and separation products, a year-on-year decrease of more than 12 per cent, according to Chinese customs data.

Imports of rare earth permanent magnets – powerful permanent magnets made from rare earth element alloys that are widely used in mobile phones and robots – reached 1,056 tonnes in the first half of the year, up by 11 per cent year on year.

As the country with the most abundant rare earth resources, China’s rare earth mineral production accounted for over 60 per cent of the global total in 2023, according to data from the International Energy Agency.

The country has mastered key technologies in the rare earth industry over the past few decades, increasing the scale of rare earth raw material imports from abroad while exporting deeply processed products.

From January to June, China’s cumulative exports of rare earth smelting and separation products totalled 32,000 tonnes, a year-on-year increase of 11.3 per cent. Exports of rare earth permanent magnet materials reached 22,000 tonnes, down by 19 per cent from the same period last year.

The technology has sparked enormous excitement among CEOs, founders and investors—and tremendous fear that they could very quickly get left behind in an upended landscape.

Last fall, Howie Liu, CEO and co-founder of Airtable, arrived at a board meeting with an urgent realization: If Airtable, a maker of collaboration software, wanted to stay relevant, it needed to significantly rethink itself. “We started to feel like the incumbent instead of the disruptor and risked becoming one of the dinosaurs,” Liu said.

The board agreed, and Liu sprinted to put a plan into place. In June, Airtable launched its new product: an AI-powered software for making apps. He describes the motivating force behind his decision to alter his company’s direction as a profound sense of paranoia. “Maybe it’s not the most psychologically healthy way to live,” he conceded. Liu then offered a justification: He thinks he’s in wonderful company. “The founders I admire—even Zuck at the very top—are constantly paranoid.”

Almost no one in tech land seems to feel very at ease these days. Brexton Pham, CEO and co-founder of Ohara, has shifted the focus of his Kleiner Perkins–backed startup from HR and finance operations for startups to AI agents with a mindset that he sums up as “fast, ruthless and experimental.”

“Everybody around me is genuinely guessing: ‘Where do we think the future is going?’” Pham said. “It’s not just, ‘Where is the world going to be in five years?’ I don’t even know what the costs are going to be in six months.”

Even the old hands find themselves blinking in surprise. “The rules of these business models are just so different now,” said Box CEO Aaron Levie. “The speed at which companies are scaling—I’ve never seen anything like this.”

As summer comes to a close, and Silicon Valley prepares to hurtle through the final months of the third year in the great AI boom, the industry has arrived at a moment of strange reckoning, one defined by two emotions often impossible to separate: a sense of enormous excitement—and a feeling of immense anxiety, one that was fueled this week by a market selloff over a viral MIT study that purported to show that nearly all AI projects at U.S. businesses have flopped.

Fear is a familiar state in Silicon Valley. In the 1980s, Andy Grove, the former Intel CEO, expressed his philosophy that business leaders ought to be constantly dangling from tenterhooks in his best-selling book, “Only the Paranoid Survive: How to Exploit the Crisis Points That Challenge Every Company.” In the book, Grove described the existential moments that businesses face, which he dubbed strategic inflection points.

Right now, tech is acting like AI could be the mother of all strategic inflection points. It’s a peculiar attitude considering that in some ways, times have never been better.

The tech-heavy Nasdaq sits at an all-time high. The IPO market is finally showing signs of life for the first time since 2022. Eight of the top 10 most valuable companies in the world are from tech, led by Nvidia, a once unremarkable designer of graphics chips.

Meanwhile, OpenAI, which was a little-known research outfit less than five years ago, could quite shortly become the world’s most valuable private company. And these sorts of massive valuations allow the best minds in AI to command salaries that would inspire envy among the most highly compensated film stars.

Yet many of the industry’s leaders seem like they’re on the verge of throwing up in the garbage cans at their desks. Founders and investors are concerned they won’t be able to keep pace with existing competitors who figure out their place in AI—and any newcomers who might unexpectedly materialize. “You’re seeing almost every founder sit there and shiver in their boots that the next ChatGPT model is just gonna do what their entire company and app has done,” investor Adrian Aoun said in an appearance on The Information’s TITV.

“I have a really high sense of urgency,” acknowledged Nicolas Kopp, whose AI startup, Rillet, closed a Sequoia Capital–led $25 million round in May followed by an additional $70 million round two months later. “Every 15-minute slot has a certain price tag in my mind—like, everything’s fàcking urgent.”

The AI anxiety has spread beyond corner offices to the rank and file, too. Tech employers have laid off tens of thousands of staffers as their leaders look for savings to pay for massive spending on AI—or attempt to show customers how efficient AI can make their own businesses. At the same time, the giant paydays for AI researchers are establishing a new caste system that drastically favors anyone with experience in the field—and that is upending the daily rhythms of corporate life.

At Google, for instance, product managers are starting to be asked to vibe-code a prototype rather than just write a document outlining product requirements, according to a Google Cloud employee now in that situation.

At some companies, managers are breathing down the necks of employees to use AI to produce more, even though in practice the technology isn’t quite good enough yet. With the addition of AI coding tools, executives expect product development to be moving far faster—but much of the AI-written code is too buggy to deploy, and many other bottlenecks related to product reviews or other procedural elements can’t just be AI-generated away, according to a current LinkedIn employee.

And even when the riches do arrive, not everyone walks away buoyant. One Windsurf employee was plucked to join Google DeepMind as part of Google’s $2.4 billion deal with the startup, but their direct reports and interns were left behind. They described having mixed feelings when they heard the news. “It’s a weird situation because someone says, ‘Here’s a really good job for the next four years.’ What’s going to happen to all your friends? I don’t know. They’ll figure it out,” they said.

Reid Hoffman, the billionaire venture capitalist, sees the moment as nothing less than a “cognitive industrial revolution” that has forced his peers and colleagues to reconsider everything around them. As he put it: “Transformations are painful.”

Much has been said lately about the apparent decline in alcohol consumption among young people. Among some in Silicon Valley, boozing—along with pretty much any other form of recreation—seems to be now losing out to a relentless, AI-inflected grind.

“I live at the office—I probably work 100-hour weeks,” said Max Marchione, the 25-year-old co-founder and CEO of Superpower, a health startup that hopes to develop the equivalent of an AI-powered physician. “I will say no to more things. I won’t travel. I won’t take vacation.”

He went on. “The thing I say often is that I will sacrifice and give up more in the short term because there’s a sufficiently high chance AGI is here sooner than we think,” he said. “I feel more pressure in life than ever before.”

Masha Bucher, founder and general partner of Day One Ventures, has seen plenty of people acting just like Marchione. “Most of the best companies I’ve invested in work at least six days a week—and a half-day on Sunday. The founders sleep in the office. Some companies will have tents in the office,” she said. “It’s just that competition is so high and the pace is so high.”

While AI has become everyone’s preoccupation, it’s how many businesses are generating substantial, durable revenue from the technology—a paradox undoubtedly fueling additional worries: With so much capital invested in pursuit of commercializing the technology, companies will soon need to show those investors they can actually do so.

That’s been a more elusive goal than the surface-level excitement suggests. On that note, here’s an example of a number that sounds great but isn’t: Annualized revenue for “AI native” firms selling models or apps surpassed $15 billion in June, according to The Information’s Generative AI Database. The figure has surely increased since, but the reality undoubtedly remains that more than 85% of that sum flowed to just two companies: OpenAI and Anthropic.

Keith Rabois, the Khosla Ventures investor, has been wondering aloud lately how many of the businesses running pell-mell toward AI can come away with much—and that presents a challenge to the venture capital industry, which has largely come to focus on little else than AI.

“You have to isolate, if you’re a venture capitalist or an entrepreneur, where your differentiation is,” Rabois said while appearing on The Information’s TITV. “What’s durable? What’s sustainable? And with the rapidly emerging tech landscape, it’s not so obvious.”

Over at Airtable, Liu thinks the company’s altered focus on AI will lead to a more explosive level of growth than if the business had continued to concentrate on collaboration software. The move into AI is important enough that Liu is willing to trade some of the roughly 90% gross margins on his collaboration software in favor of an AI product he acknowledges will be far costlier to sell. “It could hurt our margins as we get more AI usage,” he said. “That’s a trade-off.”

UK chain hit by rising costs and competition from upmarket rivals

Coca-Cola is exploring a sale of Costa Coffee, according to two people familiar with the matter, after rising costs and competition from upscale competitors dented the company’s performance.

Coca-Cola bought Costa, the UK’s largest coffee chain, for £3.9bn in 2018 in an effort to diversify beyond its namesake fizzy drinks business. But soaring coffee bean prices have increased its costs.

Coca-Cola chief executive James Quincey told analysts in July that Costa had “not quite delivered” and was “not where we wanted it to be from an investment hypothesis point of view”.

He added that the drinks maker was “reflecting on what we’ve learned [and] thinking about how we might want to find new avenues to grow in the coffee category”.

Costa is the UK’s largest coffee chain but has faced competition from rivals, which have squeezed established chains with their artisanal offerings. 

Coffee groups such as Costa, Starbucks and Caffè Nero were battered by lockdowns imposed during the Covid pandemic. Then rising inflation and a cost of living crisis hit the chains in the years that followed. In 2022, Costa launched a restructuring programme as a result of the “challenging economic environment and inflationary pressures”.

Coca-Cola said it did not comment on “market rumours or speculation”. News of the sale was first reported by Sky.