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Thanks for reading The Briefing, our nightly column where we break down the day’s news. If you like what you see, I encourage you to subscribe to our reporting here. Greetings! Artificial intelligence scientists and researchers, make room. You’re about to get an influx of new colleagues from the world of advertising and marketing, as the headlong race for AI dominance moves into a new, more commercial, phase. Exhibit A: As we scooped today, veteran marketing executive Mark D’Arcy, who spent a decade at Meta Platforms helping ad clients figure out ad campaigns to run on its apps, has joined Microsoft to help market the Copilot AI chatbot. Separately, late on Wednesday night, OpenAI announced that it was appointing Instacart CEO Fidji Simo to a new role overseeing its “business and operational teams responsible for how our research reaches and benefits the role” (for more, see here). Simo, who worked for Meta before Instacart, has a lot of experience in building ad businesses. That suggests she will launch an ad sales operation for the ChatGPT creator, giving it a chance to reach its ambitious revenue targets. Given the breadth of her role, though, she also seems likely to supercharge marketing of ChatGPT itself, perhaps by buying ads to promote it on media outlets. Simo has a big job ahead of her. While ChatGPT has a strong lead in the AI chatbot market, it’s now competing with half a dozen other chatbots, including Copilot, xAI’s Grok, Google’s Gemini, Meta’s AI, Anthropic’s Claude and Perplexity. All of them have smartphone apps, and some—such as Gemini, Grok and Meta AI—have an advantage in distribution thanks to their parent companies’ other properties. Gemini, for instance, is now built into Gmail, while Meta AI is on Meta’s social media apps. And as these apps all do essentially the same thing, marketing will become indispensable in differentiating them. Then there’s the matter of building revenue. As we reported in April, OpenAI has projected that it will find a way to make tens of billions of dollars off the millions of people who use the chatbot without a paid subscription. The most obvious source could be advertising, although another possibility is that OpenAI will charge for referring its users to shopping sites. OpenAI might even try to introduce a checkout within the chatbot, allowing a shopper to buy items directly from the app. Simo has a lot to do. You can’t blame Simo for wanting to ditch Instacart for OpenAI. While Instacart has performed well overall under her leadership—shares are up 43% since it went public in September 2023—the job of running a grocery-delivery firm must feel a bit trivial compared to helping steer the future of AI. By departing, Simo may be able to extricate herself from one particularly annoying imbroglio: litigation over its just-launched alcohol-and-snacks delivery app, Fizz. Instacart is targeting Gen Z and millennials through a partnership with the buzzy party-organizing app Partiful, which is integrating Fizz into its own app to sell party essentials like guacamole, tequila and limes. Unfortunately, there’s already a college social networking app called Fizz, which quickly sued Instacart and Partiful on Wednesday for trademark infringement. Further complicating things, New York Magazine this week published a critical piece on Partiful, highlighting that two of its co-founders used to work at Palantir and that it had raised money from Andreessen Horowitz. The thrust of the story seemed to be that Partiful has problematic connections to right-wing causes and the U.S. security state. Singling it out for that is a little ironic, though, given that New York Magazine parent company Vox Media is backed by Accel, which also invests in defense tech startups like killer drone maker Helsing.—Theo Wayt • Pinterest’s revenue rose 16% to $855 million in the first quarter, above the upper end of the range it had projected in early February, while profits rose 36%, measured before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization. The results sent the online scrapbooking firm’s stock up 16% in after-hours trading. • Paramount Global reported a 6% drop in revenue in the first quarter, thanks to a sharp decline in TV ad revenue compared to a year earlier when its CBS network aired the Super Bowl. Meanwhile, its streaming businesses, such as Paramount+ and Pluto TV, lifted revenue 9%. • Warner Bros. Discovery’s revenues fell 10% in the first quarter while net income dropped by about half, as growth in streaming was more than offset by sharp declines in its traditional cable TV business. • Coinbase announced it has agreed to buy Deribit, the world’s biggest crypto options exchange, for $2.9 billion, the largest merger deal ever in the crypto industry. • Bill Gates’ philanthropic giveaways will increase in the coming years as he winds down the Gates Foundation, his philanthropy, over the next two decades. • Shopify shares fell more than 4% Thursday after the e-commerce software giant said revenue and gross profit growth would slow in the second quarter, amid what Shopify president Harley Finkelstein called an “uncertain” macro environment. • Peloton reported a 13% drop in revenue to $624 million, as the fitness equipment maker also suffered a drop in fitness subscriptions. Peloton shares fell 6.7%. • Lyft reported 14% higher revenue and sharply higher free cash flow for the first quarter, a sign that the no. 2 ride hailing firm’s business continues to improve. Start your day with Applied AI, the newsletter from The Information that uncovers how leading businesses are leveraging AI to automate tasks across the board. Subscribe now for free to get it delivered straight to your inbox twice a week. | 
