What's up: The stories behind Nvidia's rise and why xAI's Grok went rogue; why we can't get disaster alerts right.

Good morning. When was the last time you picked up a landline phone? If you work in hospitality or customer service or medicine or insurance or finance or – well, a lot of areas – the answer is probably: pretty recently.

Hard plastic handsets made a sweeping exodus from consumer homes a while ago, but in the business world, they still seem to be everywhere, WSJ reports. 

Restaurants, stores, call centers and corporate offices across the country are still heavily reliant on these phones, commonly called “landlines,” although many have moved from antiquated copper wire systems to digital systems that use internet protocol, or IP, to send data over a network.

It’s a range of factors, including cost, convenience and, in some cases, regulation and liability concerns, that are extending their shelf life, helping players like Cisco Systems and AT&T maintain a steady phone business. Research firm Synergy Research Group estimates the market for IP phones was worth about $1.3 billion globally in 2024.

“It’s a critical business,” said Zee Hussain, senior vice president of global enterprise solutions at AT&T. Read the full story here for more on why. 

What other old-timey tech has staying power in business? Email me at isabelle.bousquette@wsj.com and let me know!

How Nvidia became the world's first $4 trillion company. The AI chip giant has seen its fortunes surge over the past three years thanks to the rise of generative AI, an emerging technology that promises to revolutionize business and remake how humans interact with technology across the globe, WSJ reports.

Founded by Taiwanese-American engineer Jensen Huang in 1993, Nvidia initially had a much more niche purpose: making personal-computer game graphics better. Its ascendance from a graphics-chip designer catering mainly to videogamers into the digital arms dealer at the red-hot center of the AI boom has been meteoric.

Why xAI's Grok went rogue. Artificial intelligence companies like xAI train their large language models off huge swaths of data collected from all across the internet. As the models have been applied for commercial purposes, developers have installed guardrails to prevent them from generating offensive content like child pornography or calls to violence, WSJ reports. But the way the models generate specific answers to questions is still poorly understood. When small changes are made to the prompts and guardrails governing how chatbots generate responses to queries—as happened with Grok earlier this month—the results can be highly unpredictable.

Linda Yaccarino’s break from Musk was months in the making. Yaccarino told people close to her that the recent return of some advertisers and the merger, which made X a smaller revenue contributor, made it a good time to depart. Current and former employees say her position at the company appeared increasingly tenuous after clashes with management, WSJ reports.

Meanwhile, Musk makes grand promises about Grok 4. Elon Musk’s live demo of Grok 4, the latest big-ticket model from his AI startup xAI, began with high-intensity music, claims of a “ludicrous rate of progress,” and a lot of chatter on X about Grok’s scandal-filled week, The Verge reports.

Indeed and Glassdoor to cut 1,300 jobs in AI-focused consolidation. The cuts will mostly affect people in the U.S., especially within teams including research and development and people and sustainability, Bloomberg reports.

EU rolls out AI code with broad copyright and transparency rules. The code will require developers to provide up-to-date documentation describing their AI’s features to regulators and third parties looking to integrate it in their own products, Bloomberg reports.

Why America still can't get disaster alerts right. Federal, state and local authorities share responsibility for alerting citizens that they are in danger. But despite continued technological advances, the country’s patchwork of digital and physical emergency-alert tools is often a step behind Mother Nature, with deadly consequences, WSJ reports.

Microsoft Outlook hit with hours-long outage. The issue began at 6:20 p.m. Eastern time on Wednesday, according to a dashboard the software company maintains. It affected Outlook.com as well as Outlook mobile apps and desktop programs, CNBC reports.

Hackers target eldercare homes. Several nursing homes and eldercare facilities have suffered cyberattacks in recent months, with hackers stealing the personal, financial and medical information of a vulnerable population, WSJ reports.

Amazon Web Services is building equipment to cool Nvidia GPUs as AI boom accelerates. Nvidia’s GPUs, which have powered the generative AI boom, require massive amounts of energy. That means companies using the processors need additional equipment to cool them down, CNBC reports.

Private-markets tech provider iCapital raises $820 million. The deal values it at more than $7.5 billion, and was last valued at about $6 billion in 2022, WSJ exclusively reports.

The private-equity industry has almost all the pieces in place to start managing Americans’ 401(k) money—everything but the customers.

A failed GOP effort to block a jumble of state AI privacy and security laws has developers calling for “consistent standards.”

Some creators say their work has been wrongly tagged as AI on tech platforms, hurting their reputation, while some all-artificial ads get through undisclosed.

The U.S. will put a 35% tariff on imports from Canada effective Aug. 1, President Trump announced on Thursday evening. But an exemption for goods that comply with the nations’ free-trade agreement, the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, would still apply, a White House official said, stressing that could change. Trump previously applied 25% tariffs to non-USMCA goods and the new rate, announced in a letter to Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and posted on social media, would mean that number rises to 35%, the official said. In a post on X, Carney said Canadian officials would work with their U.S. counterpart in clinching a deal by Aug. 1. (WSJ)

Some of New York’s wealthiest financiers are scrambling to build out a network of outside groups that plan to go to war against Democratic nominee for mayor Zohran Mamdani as a last stand against the surging progressive candidate. (WSJ)

A federal judge on Thursday blocked the Trump administration from enforcing an order ending birthright citizenship, taking a different legal avenue to halt the policy nationwide after a Supreme Court ruling last month limited sweeping injunctions in similar challenges. (WSJ)

Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University protester and former graduate student who spent more than 100 days in immigration detention, is seeking $20 million from the Trump administration. (WSJ)

The WSJ CIO Journal Team is Steven Rosenbush, Isabelle Bousquette and Belle Lin.

The editor, Tom Loftus, can be reached at thomas.loftus@wsj.com.