We totally understand the impulse to brag about your work, so we get where OpenAI’s VP of science was coming from when he boasted on X that “GPT-5 just found solutions to 10 (!) previously unsolved Erdős problems,” which are challenging math problems that have stumped scholars for decades. The problem is… GPT-5 literally just found references to the answers online — it didn’t actually solve any of the problems itself. Whoopsie! Naturally, OpenAI’s rivals poked fun at the “embarrassing” mistake.
US stocks rose on Monday in a wide-ranging rally that saw Apple hit a new all-time high, more than 400 members of the S&P 500 advance on the day, and eight S&P sector ETFs up more than 1%. The S&P 500 gained 1.1%, the Nasdaq 100 rose 1.3%, and the Russell 2000 outperformed with a gain of nearly 2%.
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Beyond Meat shares rose a shocking 128% on Monday, closing the day at $1.53. What the heck happened? Retail traders were hoping for a turnaround — or more realistically, a powerful short squeeze — as the embattled plant-based meat producer scrambled to raise cash to protect its viability. |
- As of 7:15 a.m. ET, more money had changed hands trading the faux meat firm in the premarket than the likes of Apple, Microsoft, or Palantir.
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By the end of the session, volumes had hit a point where every share in the company available on the public market could have been sold 2.8 times.
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The stock cratered to an all-time low of $0.50 last Thursday after management completed a deal with nearly 97% of the holders of more than $1 billion in senior convertible notes due in 2027 to exchange those for $196 million in second lien notes due in 2030 and more than 316 million shares.
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That was a massive dilution of existing shareholders that raised the company’s share count by more than 300%. Those noteholders are now far and away the biggest holders of the company’s equity.
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Enthusiasm on the stock appears to have originated on — you guessed it! — Reddit, where some traders were hyping Beyond as an asset with particularly high meme stock potential. |
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The stock was among the most highly shorted US companies heading into the month, with over half its shares sold short, per Bloomberg data. That number likely came down meaningfully in the short term thanks to the issuance of over 316 million shares as part of the aforementioned debt-for-equity-and-other-debt swap last week, which saw those who took the company up on its plans temporarily barred from transferring beneficial ownership or selling a large portion of the new shares. |
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The future of A.I. could impact all technology companies. Why continue to take single stock risk? |
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When Amazon’s cloud service sneezed yesterday, huge chunks of the internet caught a bad cold.
First noted by Amazon Web Services at 12:11 a.m. PT on Monday, the cloud service provider detected an “operational issue” in northern Virginia, a hub for its global data centers, affecting “multiple services” in its US-EAST-1 region.
Aftershocks were felt across the internet worldwide for the rest of the day. |
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What followed was app-based chaos, as users reported that popular websites and services including Snapchat, Reddit, Roblox, United Airlines, and Paypal’s Venmo were suffering from the outage, according to Downdetector data.
- Most AWS services are now back to business as usual, as the “underlying DNS issue” — sometimes referred to as the internet’s phonebook, which directs recognizable website names to unique IP addresses — has been “fully mitigated.”
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Interestingly, investors largely shrugged off the outages; the stock briefly dipped a little over 1%, but it’s since bounced back and finished the day up 1.6%.
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Traders surveying the chaos evidently concluded that if this much falls apart when AWS goofs, it sure seems like it’s an important company in a crucial business, eh?
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Originally developed from the e-commerce giant’s desire to build its own technology stack, AWS rents out its infrastructure to customers that want to make their products and services accessible all over the world without having to drop millions to buy the capital-intensive hardware themselves. AWS is now a major profit driver for Amazon, contributing 53% of its operating income as of the latest quarter, thanks to its dominant market position ahead of competitors Microsoft and Google.
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The long list of major websites that were affected by Monday’s outage reflects just how reliant our modern internet infrastructure is on a few giant tech companies. Data from Built With shows that a whopping 76 million websites are built with AWS infrastructure, including more than 20,000 websites that earn more than $1 million every month. |
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TED — the company that became known as the online go-to for illuminating, if somewhat formulaic, talks on everything from body language to spam emails — has called off its eight-month search for a new boss, announcing that it’s found the “beautiful answer” to who will lead the company into the future.
Meet Sal Khan |
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Cybersecurity spending is soaring. Here’s how investors can harness the sector’s growth. |
Cyber threats aren’t just technical risks. As attacks grow more sophisticated, cybersecurity firms are innovating while governments and corporations commit to spending.
Nasdaq’s cybersecurity indexes tap into this vital growth sector, offering a pathway for investors to make a defensive play within thematic technology. Discover the indexes and how to use them, now on Sherwood News.
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