Plus: OpenAI surpasses one billion active users after cutting prices. And Sony Group raises guidance after profit jumps more than expected. Julie Chang hosts.
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[00:00:00] This episode is sponsored by HPE. Today's networks must evolve from simply providing connectivity to harnessing AI to deliver exceptional connected experiences. At the break, HPE's Rami Rahim shares how self-driving networks can make that happen. Here's your afternoon TNB Tech Minute for Friday, July 31. I'm Julie Chang for The Wall Street Journal.
[00:00:22] Apple shares are down about 9%, weighing down a broader tech rally after its latest forecasts disappointed investors. The iPhone maker was recently down about $470 billion in market capitalization, on pace for its largest one-day market cap decline on record, and the second largest of any U.S. company. If the downturn holds, it'll be Apple's biggest since 2020. The tech-heavy Nasdaq is up slightly, at nearly 0.9%.
[00:00:52] Apple's decline is being offset by Amazon's more than 15% rise following its report of accelerating cloud computing sales. OpenAI said it has more than 1 billion active users and 2 million businesses using its AI models. The announcement comes after the GPT maker lowered the price of several of its models earlier this week.
[00:01:13] Cutting prices could threaten profit margins for OpenAI, however, which is already operating on a loss due to the billions it's spending to develop and advance its models. OpenAI is racing to attract more users to keep pace with fast-growing rivals like Anthropic, and its ChatGPT is no longer the clear frontrunner in the AI race. Anthropic now holds a higher private market valuation. News Corp, owner of the Wall Street Journal, has a content licensing partnership with OpenAI.
[00:01:43] And Sony Group raised its annual forecasts after first-quarter net profit climbed faster than expected. It said for the three months ended June, net profit climbed 32% from a year earlier to about $2.15 billion, beating estimates. Revenue rose 8.2%. The Japanese electronics and entertainment companies saw growth in earnings from its music and image sensor businesses, even as its game division remained lackluster.
[00:02:11] And that's a wrap on your TNB Tech Minutes. Tune in tomorrow morning for the first episode of a three-part special series, AI and the Blurring of Reality, featuring our WSJ personal tech columnist, Nicole Nguyen. Here again is HPE's Rami Rahim to explain why it's critical for modern enterprises to use AI-powered self-driving networks.
[00:02:33] Gone are the days where humans can keep up with the complexity and overcoming the cyber attacks that are happening using elbow grease. You must leverage agents and artificial intelligence in order to deliver a seamless connectivity experience to everyone and everything. It's not just people that are connected to the network today. It's AI agents. It's billions of things, in fact. You can't do this manually.
[00:03:03] It must be done using artificial intelligence. And everything from the deployment of the network or speed matters to the identification of issues that inevitably happen to the remediation of those issues needs to be done without human intervention. Find out how a self-driving network can help you deliver exceptional user experiences at HPE.com. .