Chip giant Nvidia beat Wall Street's expectations for revenue and upcoming sales, easing investor concerns about heavy artificial intelligence (AI) spending that have unsettled markets. In its quarterly earnings report on Wednesday, the firm said revenue for the three months to October jumped 62% to $57bn, driven by demand for its chips used in AI data centres. Sales from that division rose 66% to more than $51bn. Fourth-quarter sales forecasts in the range of $65bn also topped estimates, sending shares in Nvidia more than 3% higher in after-hours trading. Nvidia, the world's most valuable company, is seen as a bellwether for the AI boom.

AI researchers have long focused on poker-like games as a testbed for environments characterized by multi-player dynamics, imperfect information, and reasoning under uncertainty. While recent breakthroughs have matched elite human play at no-limit Texas hold'em, the multi-player dynamics are subdued: most hands converge quickly with only two players engaged through multiple rounds of bidding. In this paper, we present Solly, the first AI agent to achieve elite human play in reduced-format Liar's Poker, a game characterized by extensive multi-player engagement. We trained Solly using self-play with a model-free, actor-critic, deep reinforcement learning algorithm. Solly played at an elite human level as measured by win rate (won over 50% of hands) and equity (money won) in heads-up and multi-player Liar's Poker. Solly also outperformed large language models (LLMs), including those with reasoning abilities, on the same metrics. Solly developed novel bidding strategies, randomized play effectively, and was not easily exploitable by world-class human players.

Tesla vehicles line a parking area at the company's factory in Fremont, California. Tesla vehicles line a parking area at the company's factory in Fremont, California. Carmaker exceeded Wall Street's expectations with more than $26bn in revenue, but saw a 37% drop in profits Despite record vehicle sales, Tesla saw a precipitous drop in profit in its most recent quarter. A rush to buy electric vehicles before a US tax credit for them disappears had boosted Tesla's flagging sales, leading to the automaker exceeding some of Wall Street's projections in its most recent financial quarter. Yet the company failed to meet earnings expectations and its stock fell in after-hours trading.

As some financial leaders fret publicly about the stock market falling to earth, Andrew Ross Sorkin's new book recounts the greatest crash of them all. As stocks plummeted on the morning of October 24th, 1929, a large crowd gathered on Wall Street outside of the New York Stock Exchange. Pat Bologna, a local shoeshiner whose life savings were invested in the market, dodged into a packed brokerage nearby. "Everybody is shouting," he later recalled. "They're all trying to reach the glass booth where the clerks are. Everybody wants to sell out. The boy at the quotation board is running scared. He can't keep up with the speed of the way stocks are dropping. The guy who runs it is Irish. I can't hear what he's saying. But a guy near me shouts, 'the sonofabitch has sold me out!' " The stock-market crash of 1929 occupies a dark but indelible place in the national imagination, and for good reason.

Chipmaker Nvidia set a fresh sales record in the second quarter, surpassing Wall Street expectations for its artificial intelligence chips. But shares of the chip giant still dropped 2.3% in after hours trading, in a sign that investors' worries of an AI bubble and the repercussions of Donald Trump's trade wars are not quelled. Nvidia's financial report was the first test of investor appetite since last week's mass AI-stock selloff, when several tech stocks saw shares tumble last week amid growing questions over whether AI-driven companies are being overvalued. On Wednesday, Nvidia reported an adjusted earnings per share of 1.08 on 46.74bn in revenue, surpassing Wall Street's projection of 1.01 in earnings per share on 46.05bn in revenue, according to Fact Set data. But investors had high expectations for the company.

When Jensen Huang, the chief executive of the chipmaker Nvidia, met with Donald Trump in the White House last week, he had reason to be cheerful. Most of Nvidia's chips, which are widely used to train generative artificial-intelligence models, are manufactured in Asia. Earlier this year, it pledged to increase production in the United States, and on Wednesday Trump announced that chip companies that promise to build products in the United States would be exempt from some hefty new tariffs on semiconductors that his Administration is preparing to impose. The next day, Nvidia's stock hit a new all-time high, and its market capitalization reached 4.4 trillion, making it the world's most valuable company, ahead of Microsoft, which is also heavily involved in A.I. Welcome to the A.I. boom, or should I say the A.I. bubble? It has been more than a quarter of a century since the bursting of the great dot-com bubble, during which hundreds of unprofitable internet startups issued stock on the Nasdaq, and the share prices of many tech companies rose into the stratosphere.

Apple has been under pressure this year. It's playing catch-up to its fellow tech giants on artificial intelligence, it's seen its stock fall by double digits since the year began, it closed a store in China for the first time ever this week, and looming US tariffs on Beijing threaten its supply chain. On Thursday, the company released its third-quarter earnings of the fiscal year as investors scrutinize how the iPhone maker might turn things around. Despite the gloomy outlook, the company is still worth more than 3tn, and it beat Wall Street's expectations for profit and revenue this quarter. Apple reported a massive 10% year-over-year increase in revenue to 94.04bn, and 1.57 per share in earnings.

Microsoft, the world's second-most valuable company, is dumping enormous sums of money into its artificial intelligence efforts. At the same time, the company is earning money hand over fist. The enterprise software giant reported fiscal fourth-quarter results that exceeded expectations on Wednesday as the company races to acquire datacenters and talent, which continues to be investigated by investors. The company predicted its capital expenditure for the next fiscal year would top 100bn, a 14% increase from the year prior. It's the fifth quarter in a row that Microsoft has beaten Wall Street's expectations.

Nvidia has notched a market capitalisation of 4 trillion, making it the first public company in the world to reach the milestone and solidifying its position as one of Wall Street's most-favoured stocks. On Wednesday, shares of the leading chip designer rose as much as 2.5 percent to an all-time high of 164, benefiting from the continuing surge in demand for artificial intelligence technologies. The stock's recent rally comes despite a sluggish start to the year, when the emergence of a Chinese discount artificial intelligence model developed by DeepSeek shook confidence in stocks linked to the sector. Nvidia achieved a 1 trillion market value for the first time in June 2023 and tripled it in about a year, faster than Apple and Microsoft, the only other United States firms with a market value of more than 3 trillion. Microsoft is the second-biggest US company, with a market capitalisation of 3.75 trillion.

Apple slightly beat analysts' expectations in its first-quarter earnings for fiscal year 2025 on Thursday. The iPhone-maker's revenue rose by 4%, coming in at 124.30bn, barely above estimates of 124.12bn. Earnings per share were 2.40, just ahead of analysts' expectations of 2.35. Shares rose more than 8% in extended trading after Apple's CEO, Tim Cook, indicated in an earnings call on Thursday that the company was on the trajectory for revenue growth next quarter. Investors have been concerned about decreasing iPhone sales in China, the world's biggest smartphone market, as domestic rivals like Huawei have grown.