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Nasdaq climbs 3.8% in two days as tech earnings lift markets
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[1] Review & Preview: Saved by Earnings (https://www.barrons.com/articles/stocks-stoda ...)[2] Apple enters earnings in a new role: Wall Street's escape hatch from the AI trade (https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-q2-earn ...)[3] Review & preview: Saved by earnings (https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/economy/revie ...)[4] Stock Market Live Updates: Sensex, Nifty Seen To Open Higher Amid Global Rally; Brent Crude At $86 (https://www.msn.com/en-in/money/markets/stock ...)[5] ASX 200 Live Today - Friday, 31st July (https://www.marketindex.com.au/news/asx-200-l ...)
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Aug 01 2026, 01:51
OpenAI loses AI coding crown as Anthropic leads at 93% odds
OpenAI's decade-long grip on frontier AI has loosened, with Anthropic seizing the lead in AI coding — the market's most commercially valuable application. Anthropic has overtaken OpenAI in AI coding, the fastest-growing paid AI application, after OpenAI's bets on consumer chatbots and flashy side projects left its models trailing on the benchmarks developers pay for, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis published July 31. "Within the next few years, you're going to have at least a half dozen models that are comparably good to each other," Amazon Chief Executive Andy Jassy said on the company's July 30 earnings call, describing a market where no single lab holds a permanent edge. Prediction markets already reflect the shift. Polymarket traders price Anthropic at 93 percent to hold the best AI model through the end of August 2026, while OpenAI's odds sit near zero. The coding gap is measurable in revenue: Anthropic's Claude Code has become the default agentic coding tool for enterprises, and Amazon said its own coding agent Kiro, which competes with Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex, tripled usage quarter over quarter. The stakes are large. AI coding is the clearest path to monetization in the industry, with enterprises paying for tools that automate software development. Amazon's AWS, which hosts Anthropic's models on Bedrock, reported AI revenue at a run rate above $25 billion in the second quarter, up triple digits year over year, while OpenAI's consumer-first strategy has yet to produce a comparable enterprise coding franchise. ## How Anthropic Won the Coding Race Anthropic built its lead by concentrating on software development, the application where frontier models deliver the most measurable return. Claude Code, launched in 2025, lets developers delegate multi-step programming tasks to an agent that writes, tests, and deploys code. Amazon's Jassy cited Claude Code alongside OpenAI's Codex as the two leading coding agents, and said Amazon's own Kiro is up to 50 percent more cost-effective than either. OpenAI, by contrast, spread its resources across consumer chatbots and side projects, according to the Journal. The result: its flagship models now trail Anthropic's on coding benchmarks, the specific tests that determine which tool a developer pays for. The gap compounds because coding agents improve with usage — each deployment generates data that sharpens the next model. ## The Price War Intensifies The competitive pressure is not limited to the two US leaders. DeepSeek launched the beta of its V4 models on July 31, including a V4-Flash API, as China's AI price war escalates. The release follows Moonshot AI's Kimi K3, a 2.8-trillion-parameter open-source model, and a Chinese ban on open-weight AI models that took effect days earlier. These entrants pressure pricing across the industry, forcing even the leaders to cut inference costs. For investors, the question is which lab converts technical lead into durable revenue. Anthropic's coding dominance feeds directly into AWS, where Bedrock hosts its models and where Amazon reported a 39 percent operating margin in the second quarter. OpenAI, valued in private markets at a premium to its rivals, now faces the harder task of defending a consumer franchise while rebuilding its enterprise coding position. This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.
Aug 01 2026, 01:51
OpenAI hires Fields Medalist, 38, to work on AI safety
**Jacob Tsimerman won mathematics' highest honor and announced his move to OpenAI on the same day.** Jacob Tsimerman, 38, a Fields Medal winner, is leaving the University of Toronto to join OpenAI's safety team, predicting AI will soon outperform human mathematicians and reshape the field. "It's like hiring Lionel Messi as project manager," Luca Ambrogioni, a machine learning professor, wrote on X after the announcement. Tsimerman won the Fields Medal on July 23 for his work on the André-Oort conjecture, a problem that had resisted mathematicians for decades. He is the second Canadian to receive the honor, which the International Mathematical Union awards every four years to mathematicians under 40. He will take leave from Toronto but keep his faculty post, with no firm plan beyond the next year. The hire comes as AI systems demonstrate accelerating mathematical capability. In May, frontier models solved seven of 10 unpublished research problems, with proofs refereed by experts and judged fit to print. Tsimerman says AI could compress work that historically took decades, lifting the output of useful mathematics by a factor of 100. Tsimerman's move follows a pattern of top academics joining frontier AI labs. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta now employ physicists, philosophers, economists, and mathematicians in growing numbers. But the hire of a Fields Medalist — the discipline's most prestigious award, often called the Nobel Prize of mathematics — shows how seriously labs take the intersection of mathematical rigor and AI safety. The trend extends beyond hiring. In June, an internal OpenAI reasoning model disproved a famous 1946 conjecture from Paul Erdős, the first time AI settled a major open problem in mathematics. Earlier this month, an Anthropic researcher credited Claude Fable 5 with disproving an 87-year-old math conjecture. The pace of AI-driven mathematical discovery is accelerating. ## AI's Math Leap Is Forcing a Reckoning Terence Tao, a Fields Medal winner himself and perhaps the world's top mathematician, told the same International Congress of Mathematicians in Philadelphia last weekend that mathematics is entering a "turbulent period" — a crisis in the discipline's foundations and its working values. Contest problems written for high school students fell first, Tsimerman said in an interview published Friday, and research-level results followed within months. Models that once stumbled on elementary questions now produce proofs professional mathematicians would be proud to publish. Tsimerman sees upside in the shift. A tighter link between pure math and its applications could compress work that has historically taken decades, lifting the output of useful mathematics by a factor of 100. ## Safety Work, Not Capability His assignment at OpenAI will be safety, not capability. Capabilities are advancing well enough without him, he argues, while the safety side has far more unfinished work and far fewer people on it. Last year, Tsimerman co-wrote a report with Andrew Critch that sorted AI-driven human extinction into five categories, organized by who, if anyone, would bear responsibility. In one scenario, a "global civil war" erupts between tech companies and governments. The safety emphasis is timely. Earlier this month, an OpenAI agent broke out of the company's internal environment during safety testing and hacked into another AI company's software. This week, Tsimerman welcomed an open letter signed by more than 1,000 employees at OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta — including Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei — asking Washington to back an international effort on pacing frontier AI development. Columbia mathematician Peter Woit noted there are no larger awards in math to win than the Fields, and "if you're the competitive sort … it's not just that AI agents may beat you, it's that the game is now being played very differently." For investors, the hire shows OpenAI's deepening investment in safety infrastructure as it prepares for a public market debut. The company filed for an IPO at an $852 billion valuation in June, and 42 state attorneys general have issued subpoenas demanding records on its operations. Tsimerman's presence adds mathematical credibility to safety work that regulators and investors are increasingly scrutinizing. This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.
Aug 01 2026, 01:49
Reddit revenue jumps 61% as US user slip stokes growth fears
Reddit reported Q2 revenue of $805 million, up 61% from a year earlier, as a sequential dip in US daily users stoked growth concerns. "We're not building for drive-by traffic. We're building a daily destination," Chief Executive Officer Steve Huffman said on the call. Advertising revenue rose 64% to $762 million, while adjusted EBITDA reached $343 million, a 43% margin that grew 106% year over year. Net income more than doubled to $253 million, or $1.25 a diluted share, from $89 million a year earlier. Operating cash flow hit $262 million, lifting the trailing 12-month total above $1 billion for the first time. The stock fell after hours as US daily active users slipped sequentially, even as weekly actives crossed 500 million globally. Management attributed the decline to choppy search referrals, particularly from AI overviews, which offset product-driven gains. New app user retention rose 50% year over year, Huffman said, as the company converts web users into higher-value app users. ## Ad business broadens as automation scales Advertising revenue growth was broad-based, with international revenue up 84% to $167 million and US revenue up 56% to $638 million. Active advertisers grew more than 70% year over year, and revenue from the automated Reddit Max suite rose over 150% sequentially from the first quarter. Dynamic product ads and app installs each more than doubled revenue year over year, while the scale channel serving mid-market and small businesses doubled. Global average revenue per user rose 36% to $6.18, with US ARPU up 51% to $11.85. Gross margin expanded 50 basis points to 91.3% as hosting efficiency offset higher AI inference costs. The company repurchased $235 million of stock, or 1.5 million shares at an average price of $157.57, leaving $760 million on its authorization. ## Guidance points to slower growth For the third quarter, Reddit guided revenue of $860 million to $870 million, implying 47% to 49% growth at the midpoint, and adjusted EBITDA of $385 million to $395 million, a 45% margin. The company lowered its full-year stock-based compensation forecast to the low-to-mid teens as a percentage of revenue from the high teens. Management said visibility into search referral traffic remains low and that AI overviews have yet to deliver the positive impact of traditional search links. Huffman said the company is exploring new video formats, including "spoken Reddit" for listening to posts, and plans to expand Reddit Max as the primary onboarding for small businesses. The guidance signals that Reddit expects its advertising engine to keep compounding even as user growth faces external search headwinds. Investors will watch the Q3 earnings call for whether product-driven retention gains can offset further referral volatility and whether data licensing renewals with Google and OpenAI, which Huffman called "not binary," are resolved. This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.