OpenAI said it is beginning to test ads in ChatGPT for logged-in adult users of its Free and Go plans.

In a blog post, OpenAI said: "Ads do not influence the answers ChatGPT gives you. Answers are optimized based on what’s most helpful to you. When you see an ad, they are always clearly labeled as sponsored and visually separated from the organic answer."

QAD | Redzone inked a strategic partnership with Tata Consultancy Services (TCS). The partnership is focused infusing AI into manufacturing operations in the mid-market. TCS will also provide QAD | Redzone with engineering services.

Kyndryl's third quarter earnings missed estimates, and the company named a new CFO. Separately, Kyndryl said its accounting is being reviewed by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Kyndryl shares were halved.

The company reported third quarter net income of $57 million, or 25 cents a share, on revenue of $3.9 billion, up 3% from a year ago. Non-GAAP earnings were 52 cents a share compared to Wall Street estimates of 60 cents a share. 

In addition, Kyndryl said it has named Harsh Chugh interim CFO. Kyndryl also replaced its general counsel and corporate controller. 

In an SEC filing, Kyndryl said it couldn't file its quarterly report on time. "The Company, through the Audit Committee of its Board of Directors, is reviewing its cash management practices, related disclosures (including regarding the drivers of the Company’s adjusted free cash flow metric), the efficacy of the Company’s internal control over financial reporting, and certain other matters following the Company’s receipt of voluntary document requests from the Division of Enforcement of the Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) relating to such matters," said Kyndryl. "Due to this review, the finalization of the Quarterly Report, including the Company’s assessment of internal control over financial reporting, requires additional time to complete."

Siddhant Khare riffed on AI fatigue from a software developer's view. The upshot is he shipped more code than ever, but is also more drained than ever. 

Before AI, my job was: think about a problem, write code, test it, ship it. I was the creator. The maker. That's what drew most of us to engineering in the first place - the act of building.

After AI, my job increasingly became: prompt, wait, read output, evaluate output, decide if output is correct, decide if output is safe, decide if output matches the architecture, fix the parts that don't, re-prompt, repeat. I became a reviewer. A judge. A quality inspector on an assembly line that never stops.

This is a fundamentally different kind of work. Creating is energizing. Reviewing is draining.

 

Strategy's fourth quarter earnings featured a bevy of interesting tidbits given Bitcoin's fall. 

Here's a look:

• Strategy held 713,502 bitcoin holdings at a total cost of $54.26 billion, or $76,052 per bitcoin. "We now hold 640,808 Bitcoin or over 3% of all Bitcoin ever exist. This reinforces the scale and the dominance of our corporate Bitcoin treasury company," said Strategy CFO Andrew Kang.
• Net loss in the fourth quarter was $12.4 billion, or $42.93 per share. 
• Executive Chairman Michael Saylor said Bitcoin is digital gold and it's just peachy for leverage and credit. "Now what do you do with digital gold? Well, what do you do with gold? You issue credit on gold. For 300 years, the Western world ran on gold-backed credit. Bitcoin is digital gold. What we've realized is that the killer application of digital capital is digital credit," said Saylor. 
• "Clearly, with equity, I would say, if you're going to own Bitcoin you need a four-year or longer time horizon. If you're going to own amplified Bitcoin, a company that aims to be more volatile than Bitcoin, you can't have a lower time horizon. So, you probably need a longer time horizon. So, we manage the company such that we think 10 years from now, we're going to create an insane amount of shareholder value," said Saylor.

He elaborated:

"I want MSTR to stand for monster. We want to create a monster company. We don't want to careen toward the future with an advantage. We don't want to be the talented fighter that kind of wins and loses and mostly wins and is a little bit sloppy on disciplined...

I don't want to be the dude that made a good trade that made $25 billion or made $50 billion by trading Bitcoin by using cheap corporate money.

We don't want to be the company the made $25 billion or $50 billion or a Hail Mary or maybe we lost it by whatever borrowing money, however we can get it to buy Bitcoin. We want to be the company that provided a comfortable retirement to 1 billion people and changed the world."

 

UiPath said it will acquire WorkFusion, a company that specializes in AI agents for financial crime compliance. UiPath said WorkFusion will expand its AI agents for financial services and banking with a focus on anti-money laundering (AML) and know your customer (KYC) processes.

SentinelOne expanded its AI Security Platform with new Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) that secure AI from data ingestion through runtime.

Atlassian reported better than expected fiscal second quarter results. The company said it passed $1 billion in cloud revenue with growth of 26% from a year ago. Atlassian added that it had more than 350,000 customers and Rovo topped 5 million monthly active users. 

The company reported a second quarter net loss of $42.6 million, or 16 cents a share, on revenue of $1.59 billion, up 23% from a year ago. Non-GAAP earnings in the second quarter were $1.22 a share. Wall Street was looking for earnings of $1.14 cents a share on revenue of $1.54 billion. As for the outlook, Atlassian projected third quarter revenue of about $1.69 billion with cloud revenue growth of 23%. For fiscal 2026, Atlassian is projecting revenue growth of 22%. 

Like other SaaS stocks, Atlassian has been hammered over AI fears. Shares are down more than 36% year to date and down another 7% after hours. In a shareholder letter, Mike Cannon-Brookes, Atlassian’s CEO and co-Founder, said:

“We had a fantastic Q2. We’re building a bloody great business. I’m convinced AI is great for Atlassian. Others think software is dead. In this environment, it seems that noise swamps signal, nuance gets lost.  So this quarter I’m going to give you straight signal. The Q2 facts that make me bullish. And let our customers do the talking. “

 

Zscaler said it will acquire SquareX to gain secure browser technology that it can combine with its platform. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. 

Arm's third quarter results were better-than-expected and the follow-up earnings call yielded a few takeaways. Here's what Haas had to say. 

• "Outside the data center, AI is now moving to everyday devices. The edge and physical AI markets are opening up new growth opportunities. These systems operate in real time under strict power, safety and reliability constraints, where efficient and predictable general-purpose compute is essential."
• "In Cloud AI, the shift towards inference is reshaping data center design. And increasingly, that inference is agent-based. These workloads are persistent, always-on and power constrained. This is a fundamental change in how AI systems operate. This is because agent-based AI requires coordination across many agents running continuously, and that the CPU can only do coordination. As this model scales, customers need CPU chips with higher core counts and better power efficiency to operate continuously within tight power and cost constraints."

CoreWeave launched ARENA (AI-Ready Native Applications) to help enterprises test workloads on the AI cloud provider's infrastructure. According to CoreWeave, ARENA replaces traditional sandbox and demo environments and replaces it with production compute for evaluations. 

The general idea is to give CoreWeave customers proof before production with real workloads. 

Indeed, ARENA provides access to an NVIDIA GB300 NVL72 rack. ARENA also features CoreWeave Mission Control, SUNK (Slurm on Kubernetes) and CKS (CoreWeave Kubernetes Service) as well as object storage using  LOTA (Local Object Transport Accelerator). Integration into tools such as Weights & Biases for tracking and understanding model behavior are also available.

Qualcomm's first quarter results were strong, but the outlook fell short of expectations. Qualcomm topped estimates with fiscal first quarter earnings of $2.78 a share on revenue of $12.25 billion, up 5% from a year ago. Non-GAAP earnings were $3.50 a share. Automotive revenue in the first quarter was up 15% and IoT sales grew 9%. Handset revenue was up 3%.

As for the outlook, Qualcomm projected non-GAAP second quarter earnings of $2.45 a share to $2.65 a share with revenue between $10.2 billion to $11 billion. Analysts were expecting $2.90 a share in earnings and $11.1 billion in revenue. 

Memory shortages and customers stockpiling inventory were cited for the outlook. Memory shortages and higher prices for smartphones are going to be a headwind.