Morgan Stanley: Meta’s WhatsApp ads could be worth $3 billion to $5 billion in revenue

Yesterday Meta announced it would be introducing ads to messaging platform WhatsApp for the first time. Today, Morgan Stanley says that move, which will let companies advertise within the Updates tab, could be worth $3 billion to $5 billion a year in revenue — and $6 billion in a bull case — by 2027. Morgan Stanley is estimating the 1.5 billion daily users of the Updates tab are spending two to four minutes in that part of the app and are mostly outside the US, where monetization rates are lower.

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Jon Keegan

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OpenAI pulls out of Stargate Norway, hands data center off to Microsoft

This is the third piece of Project Stargate that OpenAI is retreating from since a flurry of announcements last year.

Rani Molla4h

Barclays says autonomous couriers — think sidewalk robots and drones — could push delivery costs down to as little as $1 per order, from between $5 and $7 today and closer to $9 for traditional deliveries in high-labor-cost markets. If robots save $4 on every delivery, and enough companies start using them, the food delivery industry, including companies like DoorDash and Uber, could end up with $16 billion in extra profit every year, according to Barclays.

The catch: we’re nowhere near that world yet. Robots and drones handle less than 1% of deliveries today. Even by 2035, Barclays only sees penetration hitting around 10%.

Google’s Wing and Amazon have also been trying to crack last-mile product delivery — a reminder that this is part of a broader race to automate the most expensive leg of e-commerce.

Rani Molla

Lyft is building the infrastructure robotaxis can’t avoid

The ride-hailing company is building an 80,000-square-foot Nashville warehouse where humans will help robotaxis with everything but driving.

Person working at Lyft Nashville warehouse

$10B

Rani Molla6h

Uber has long had an asset-light business model: it provided the ride-hailing platform, and its contract workers brought their own vehicles. That’s changing as Uber positions itself at the center of the robotaxi era.

The Financial Times estimates that Uber has committed more than $10 billion to buying robotaxi fleets ($7.5 billion) and investing in the companies that make them ($2.5 billion). That includes yesterday’s announcement that it’s expanding its investment in Lucid, a deal worth about $2 billion, with plans to buy 35,000 vehicles.

This shift pits Uber against industry leaders like Google’s Waymo and Tesla, whose models involve company-owned vehicles running on proprietary platforms. While these autonomous fleets eliminate the need for drivers, they introduce new capital-intensive requirements for charging, cleaning, storage, and repair.

Jon Keegan24h

Report: US Treasury wants to get a look at Anthropic’s Mythos model

Anthropic’s relationship with the US government is complicated — and the Treasury Department is reportedly looking to make it even more so.

The Pentagon has officially deemed the startup a national security supply chain risk after it refused to allow its Claude AI to be used for any and all national security applications, including domestic surveillance and autonomous killing.

But since Anthropic’s unusual announcement of its next model, Mythos, other parts of the US government want to get their hands on it.

Bloomberg reports that the US Treasury is interested in getting access to Mythos for its own security testing. Last week, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent summoned top Wall Street CEOs to Washington to discuss the cybersecurity implications of the new model.

Mythos has not yet been released to the public, as Anthropic has deemed its potential offensive cybersecurity capabilities to be too dangerous for wide release, and has opted to share the powerful new model only with a group of leading tech companies.

Anthropic wants these early access partners to test out the model, hoping to secure any major vulnerabilities before a public release. OpenAI also shared a forthcoming AI-powered cybersecurity tool with a select group of partners to shore up defenses in light of advances in detecting vulnerabilities.

European regulators were apparently left out of the loop from the Mythos announcement, and are also eager to test the new model.

US Treasury Seeking Access to Anthropic’s Mythos to Find Flaws

But since Anthropic’s unusual announcement of its next model, Mythos, other parts of the US government want to get their hands on it.

European regulators were apparently left out of the loop from the Mythos announcement, and are also eager to test the new model.

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