The same edition covered PHP’s security flaw, Apple’s iPhone Duo and Anthropic
The Wall Street Journal’s Technology newsletter, a weekly digest of tech reviews, columns and headlines from Anne Steele and Wilson Rothman, also carries big stories and personal tech advice. It led its latest edition with Meta’s AI spending. Meghan Bobrowsky, a San Francisco-based tech reporter who covers Meta, reported that the company said on Wednesday it plans to keep spending “aggressively” on AI and is creating a new class of nonvoting stock to pay for it. The following morning, Meta disclosed roughly $825 billion in future leases and noncancelable contracts, and investors sent the shares down nearly 8%.
Meta Platforms investors already had big concerns about the company’s AI commitments heading into the week, Bobrowsky noted, and those concerns grew after the announcement. What became clear, she wrote, was that the spending campaign was not stopping anytime soon; the new class of nonvoting stock was the way to pay for it.
Meta brought in record revenue in the third quarter, the newsletter said, and the company also reported negative free cash flow. Bobrowsky wrote that Meta was relying on its ad business to pay for the data-center build-out because revenue from Muse, Meta’s new AI agent, would not be big enough to offset the near-term costs of staying in the AI race.
A separate passage concerned Zuckerberg’s new Meta shares. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg negotiated terms that let him sell some of his new Meta shares to pay off a potential wealth tax bill without losing any of his voting power in the company, Bobrowsky reported. The report said the terms followed Zuckerberg’s threat to list his Palo Alto home for sale. His voting power in the company would remain unchanged under the terms.
The edition’s hardware and mobility items covered extended testing and reader challenges. A column described a few years of torture-testing fancy new electric vehicles on journeys of more than 1,000 miles to unlikely locations, from mountains to Montréal, to see whether the vehicles were suitable for the Great American Road Trip; they were. Readers then challenged the columnist to do something trickier: test a more modest electric car on the least EV-friendly route the columnist could find.
Another column opened with the columnist’s reaction to the first hour with Apple’s iPhone Duo: “The iPhone Duo surprised me.” The columnist wrote: “After my first hour with it, I went from zero desire for a phone-tablet hybrid to picturing myself living with one.” After nearly a week of testing, the columnist concluded: “I’m not ready for Duo, or maybe Duo isn’t ready for me.” A separate report said Apple wanted a major launch of the iPhone Duo to usher in its new chief executive, but the iPhone Duo and the supply chain making it weren’t quite ready.
A security disclosure in the edition said the creators of PHP, a technology that powers as much as 70% of the world’s websites, disclosed a critical security issue. The issue could be leveraged by hackers to take control of any system running the software, which would allow an attacker to steal information or launch a cyberattack on anyone visiting a hacked website.
The edition also described what AI can already do: write code, rewrite emails, summarize meetings, prove abstract math conjectures and figure out why a washing machine keeps making that strange beeping noise. It noted that, in Demis Hassabis’s mind, the whole point of intelligence is to do something with it.
On the business side, the newsletter reported that Anthropic is generating rapid revenue growth but faces a long list of risks, including a narrow customer base and uncertain access to much-needed computing power, as it prepares for a mega-IPO.
Another report concerned the Saudi national accused of bugging an OpenAI conference room. Before his arrest, the Saudi national had allegedly been in touch with a member of the Saudi royal family about job opportunities in the kingdom, the newsletter reported.
Shorter items covered billionaire giving and workplace demands. With public sentiment toward tech souring, billionaires like Elon Musk and Michael Dell are bypassing traditional charities and funding Trump Accounts instead, the newsletter said. A separate fragment described tech bosses who demand that employees be in the office from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. and available at nights and on weekends.