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Hello! Jessica Lessin here. Every AI executive I talk to these days wants to tell me what their models can now do. James Sagan, the low-profile investor who just bought 16% of OnlyFans at a $3 billion valuation, spent most of our interview telling me what his platform is betting AI can't do. In a wide-ranging exclusive interview about the deal, and how he plans to evolve the company, I asked him the obvious question: Does AI disrupt OnlyFans? (You can see the full transcript of the interview here. As a disclosure, my husband invested alongside Sagan in the deal.) AI has been upending the pornography industry. AI-generated adult content has been flooding all sorts of services, including the leading AI platforms. But Sagan doesn’t see it as a threat to his new investment. He went even further and told me OnlyFans is “probably the least likely platform to be disrupted by AI.” He pointed to how OnlyFans’ revenue mix has shifted over time: subscriptions, the original product, have been overtaken by pay-per-view content and direct messaging. In other words, a fan pays specifically to talk to creators. “You know, there‘s a loneliness epidemic that we’re all aware of. This is the only place on the internet where you can authentically communicate with a human, and that's why people pay for this content,” he said. While that makes sense, I wonder whether people will have less time for OnlyFans as they’re confronted with more AI-generated content elsewhere. It’s a similar dynamic facing other parts of media. There are only so many hours in the day. When I pressed, Sagan was vague about what AI tools OnlyFans would roll out to help creators. “I’d rather not get into specifics yet because we don‘t exactly know. But what I will say is that you know LLMs are particularly useful tools in terms of …capturing somebody’s personality and helping them scale that personality and authentic capacity,” he said. Here’s what else is going on… Google’s Gemini reached 1 billion monthly users, making it the fastest-growing product in the company’s history, CEO Sundar Pichai said Tuesday on X. The announcement indicates Google is continuing to grow its share of the market for consumer chatbots that’s been dominated by OpenAI’s ChatGPT. AI startup Manus said on Tuesday that it will “soon return to operating as an independent company,” implying it is close to finalizing the reversal of its acquisition by Meta Platforms. The Chinese government in April ordered the deal be unwound. In a blog post, Manus said some users need to back up their data generated on and after Dec 29 by Aug 23, as part of regulatory compliance. Brad Lightcap, who most recently led OpenAI’s special projects division and formerly was its chief operating officer, told staff on Tuesday that he is leaving the company, according to a copy of the memo viewed by The Information and a post from Lightcap on X. CoreWeave, the highest profile of a group of neoclouds taking on established cloud firms, reported that revenue more than doubled in the second quarter to $2.575 billion. But CoreWeave’s cash burn also more than doubled, to $5.7 billion. See The Information’s Generative AI Database for an exclusive list of private companies and their investors. Cognition, the AI coding startup, is in early talks to raise a new funding round that could boost its valuation to at least $40 billion, Bloomberg reported. The company’s annualized revenue is approaching $1 billion, according to Bloomberg. Anton Levy, the former co-president and chair of the global technology group at General Atlantic, has raised more than $1.1 billion for his inaugural fund, a sign that he has been able to compete with some of the biggest names in venture and growth equity during a challenging environment for first-time fund managers, according to The Information. River AI, a startup that lets developers and companies customize and run open-weight AI models, raised $1.1 billion in a funding round led by General Catalyst and AMP PBC. Flagler Health, a startup whose AI software helps musculoskeletal clinics run their operations, raised $50 million in a Series B funding round led by Bessemer Venture Partners. Blacksmith, which helps companies build, test and verify software before it reaches production, raised $45 million in Series B funding at a $550 million valuation led by Peak XV Partners. ApartmentIQ, a company whose AI software helps apartment landlords set rents, research their local market and automate property marketing, received a $25 million investment from Susquehanna Growth Equity. Axle, a startup that uses AI to automate insurance paperwork, raised $17.5 million in a Series A funding round led by Base10 Partners. Legio, a startup whose AI software runs safety and security operations for colleges and universities, raised $5 million in a seed funding round from Klass Capital. Fisent Technologies, a startup whose AI software helps heavily regulated companies turn documents and other unstructured content into automated, hands-off workflows, raised $4.3 million in a funding round led by FINTOP. Former Alibaba star researcher Junyang Lin announced that he had started a new AI company, confirming The Information’s earlier reports. BMG, a major international music company, and AI music app Suno announced on Wednesday a partnership establishing a licensing deal that covers BMG's recorded and publishing repertoire, settles past use of its works and sets up opt-in structures and financial compensation for participating artists. Uber divested its stake in Serve Robotics, a maker of sidewalk delivery robots, during the second quarter, according to regulatory filings — an unwinding of a long-running partnership as the two companies clashed over how to deploy delivery robots, Bloomberg reported. OnlyFans and its new investor Architect Capital plan to introduce custom financial services to the adult content platform, Architect founder James Sagan said in an interview on The Information TITV Tuesday. SpaceXAI announced it had released an AI agent product called “Grok Bot” on Tuesday. The product was jointly developed by SpaceXAI and Cursor as a part of their larger partnership for AI development, according to people familiar with the project. OpenAI launched a dedicated ChatGPT app for Linux.
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