Good morning, Quartz readers!
HERE’S WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW
Three Nvidia customers have spent at least $10 billion on computer chips this year. The trio accounted for more than a third of the company’s revenue.
Apple is giving Siri a makeover. Its assistant is getting an LLM-stuffed renovation to keep up with the likes of OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
America’s airports are going to be really crowded this week. The TSA is expecting to screen a record 18.3 million passengers over the Thanksgiving holiday.
Bitcoin is nearly at $100,000. Investors in the cryptocurrency are expecting it to take flight with SEC foe Gary Gensler leaving his post.
Hyundai and Kia are having an existential EV recall. More than 200,000 cars from the manufacturers have trouble holding a charge.
Amazon and Anthropic, sitting in a tree
Following huge, multi-billion investment rounds touted by OpenAI and Elon Musk’s xAI, Amazon is also cutting a nine-figure check to its favored startup in the sector, Anthropic. The retail giant just announced a $4 billion infusion for the company behind the Claude model.
In addition to the money, Amazon will use data from its Amazon Web Services subsidiary to help train Anthropic products. The investment doubles down on a March sum that was Amazon’s biggest-ever stake in an outside company.
What’s got Amazon so excited about the goings-on at Anthropic? Quartz’s Britney Nguyen breaks down the nine-figure news.
Be careful shopping for a new card this holiday season
Like Michelle Obama, retailers have been living by the phrase, When they go low, we go high. The “they” in question is Federal Reserve’s interest rates, and the “we” is store credit card interest rates.
The debt instruments, which are easier to attain than traditional bank credit cards, can sometimes come with rates as high as 35.99%. Those rates provided some fat margins when borrowing costs for the retailers themselves looked set to subside.
How expensive is that card in the window? Quartz’s Francisco Velasquez gets into the proliferation of pricey plastic.
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SURPRISING DISCOVERIES
The British want to remember slavery forever. A recent poll found that a majority of U.K. residents want the British Museum to have a permanent exhibit about the country’s role in the transatlantic trade in human beings.
Judges in Argentina are using ChatGPT to write their rulings. The Buenos Aires Public Prosecution Service is using it in place of a home-grown legal AI, PROMETEA, that apparently wasn’t automating casework quickly or cheaply enough.
In some corners of the world, an olive branch brings more hostility instead of less. Farmers in the West Bank have been facing increasing — sometimes life-threatening — danger when trying to harvest their olives.
Chili’s is selling eye masks for some reason. The restaurant chain included the bedtime accessory in its holiday merchandise collection.
Ghost writers are spookily well-paid. One publishing survey found that the top echelon of bestseller authors-behind-the-author make more than $300,000 a year.
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