LG calls it quits: LG is pulling the plug on its smartphone business

4/6/21 8:00PM

After 26 years of business, LG Electronics has announced its plans to shut down its smartphone division.

‍Another one bites the dust

‍Like Nokia, Blackberry, Motorola and many other phone manufacturers that were once heavyweights, LG has struggled to carve out a significant piece of the smartphone market as competition has intensified since 2010.

According to Counterpoint research, LG smartphones accounted for just 2% of the global market last year, a significant drop from 2013-2014 when LG was making waves with its "G Series" of phones. We couldn't get our hands on the full market share data, but like so many trends, Google searches often tell the same story.

‍Life's (still) good

‍LG may have given up on its smartphone business, but it's far from going out of business — its mobile communications business only made up around 8% of its total revenue last year.

Indeed, the more you look into LG, the more you realise that smartphones are probably going to be the one electrical product they don't sell. TVs, computer screens, washing machines, solar panels, refrigerators, camera equipment, sensors, speakers and air conditioners are just some of the products sold by the South Korean giant, which in total brought in more than $55bn of revenue last year.

Jon Keegan15h

Meta jumps after it releases Superintelligence Labs’ first model: Muse Spark

The first big release from Meta’s Superintelligence Labs is here — a new multimodal reasoning model called Muse Spark. Shares of Meta spiked on the news, extending gains it had made earlier in the day on optimism over the ceasefire with Iran. The stock was recently up about 9%.

Meta has been playing catch-up in the generative-AI race, watching startups OpenAI and Anthropic leap ahead with ever more capable models, after the bungled rollout of its Llama 4 models.

After Meta went on an expensive hiring spree assembling an all-star team of AI researchers, investors have been eager to see the fruits of this team, and to see if the accompanying billions of capex dedicated to power it — $115 billion to $135 billion this year alone — were worth it.

Meta says the release is the first in a Muse family of models, which it says it will scale up over time. The benchmark scores released by Meta show Spark to be capable, with solid scores among popular benchmarks, but not any huge leaps over leading models from Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, and Google.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a post on Threads:

“Looking ahead, we plan to release increasingly advanced models that push the frontier of intelligence and capabilities, including new open source models. We are building products that don’t just answer your questions but act as agents that do things for you. I am optimistic that this will support a wave of creativity, entrepreneurship, growth, and health. I’m looking forward to sharing more soon.”

Introducing Muse Spark: Scaling Towards Personal Superintelligence

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a post on Threads:

“Looking ahead, we plan to release increasingly advanced models that push the frontier of intelligence and capabilities, including new open source models. We are building products that don’t just answer your questions but act as agents that do things for you. I am optimistic that this will support a wave of creativity, entrepreneurship, growth, and health. I’m looking forward to sharing more soon.”

Jon Keegan17h

Alibaba launches new data center powered by 10,000 of its custom chips

Alibaba announced a new data center in southern China, in a partnership with China Telecom powered by its own Zhenwu chips. The new data center will contain 10,000 of the homegrown chips, and may scale up to 100,000 over time. The data center will be used for both inference and training.

China is racing to build out its own sovereign AI capabilities, and is making significant progress.

While Chinese companies and labs have released many competitive AI models, such as Alibaba’s Qwen, Z.ai’s new GLM-5.1, and the disruptive DeepSeek R1, China is still behind the US when it comes to AI chips, and it has struggled to get hold of the latest Nvidia GPUs due to US export controls.

Alibaba launches data center with 10,000 of its own chips as China ramps up AI push

China is racing to build out its own sovereign AI capabilities, and is making significant progress.

Hyunsoo Rim

Anthropic

21h

Anthropic’s revenue run rate just topped $30 billion — that’s ahead of OpenAI, depending on how you count

The Claude maker’s revenue run rate has tripled in three months, as Dario Amodei’s firm takes the software world by storm.

Anthropic: Our new Mythos model is so powerful, we can’t release it

The unusual announcement of the model highlights its alarming new cybersecurity capabilities.

Jon Keegan4/7/26

Bloomberg: Apple’s foldable iPhone is on track for September after all

Scratch that... Actually, Apple’s foldable iPhone may be on track to debut later this year after all.

Hours after a report from Nikkei Asia said Apple was encountering engineering problems with the novel design that could lead to a delayed launch, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports that sources within Apple say the premium foldable iPhone is still on track to launch in September, alongside the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Max.

Shares of Apple had plunged more than 5% on word of a possible delay, but pared losses on Gurman’s story.

According to the report, the foldable iPhone will cost more than $2,000 and will be a key part of the company’s plan to revamp the iPhone lineup.

Apple’s Foldable iPhone Remains on Track for September Debut