Instacart's Strong Q4 Results and AI's Growing Impact on Tech Industry

Instacart delivered strong fourth-quarter results, reporting revenue of $992 million, up 12% year-over-year and beating analyst estimates of $974 million. The grocery delivery company also saw gross transaction value increase 14% to $9.85 billion. Following the positive results, Instacart shares jumped more than 14% in after-hours trading as the company provided upbeat guidance for the first quarter.

Meanwhile, the broader tech industry continues to be reshaped by artificial intelligence developments across multiple sectors.

AI Reshaping Software Development

OpenAI launched GPT-5.3-Codex-Spark, a smaller version of its GPT-5.3-Codex model that it claims generates code 15 times faster for Pro users. The company targets "conversational" coding rather than slow batch-style agents, with significant performance improvements including 80% faster roundtrip times and 50% faster time-to-first-token.

The new model is OpenAI's first to run on chips from Nvidia rival Cerebras, and the company reports Codex has more than 1 million weekly active users. This comes as internal messages reveal Amazon is steering teams to use its in-house AI coding assistant Kiro for production work, though this has prompted criticism from approximately 1,500 employees who are pushing for Claude Code instead.

However, the productivity gains from AI coding tools come with a cost. Software veteran Steve Yegge noted that AI tools like Claude Opus 4.6 make engineers 10 times more productive but are also addictive and drain developers' energy, leading to increasingly widespread burnout.

AI Competition Heats Up

Google updated Gemini 3 Deep Think to better solve modern science, research, and engineering challenges, expanding it via the Gemini API to some researchers. The company says Gemini has been inundated by "commercially motivated" actors trying to clone its capabilities, with one campaign prompting it over 100,000 times.

Meanwhile, MiniMax released M2.5, claiming the model delivers on the "intelligence too cheap to meter" promise with pricing of $0.30 per million input tokens and $1.20 per million output tokens.

Hardware and Infrastructure Developments

Samsung announced it sent the first commercial HBM4 shipments to customers, seeking to supply Nvidia and compete with memory rivals like SK Hynix and Micron. This comes as Nvidia launched a native GeForce Now app on select Amazon Fire TV sticks, offering up to 1080p and 60fps gaming.

ByteDance's new AI video generation model Seedance 2.0 has gone viral in China, with one state-backed newspaper calling it bigger than DeepSeek's "Sputnik moment." The model has already impressed figures like Elon Musk.

Enterprise AI Adoption

Didero, which provides an agentic AI layer that integrates with ERP systems to automate supply chains, raised a $30 million Series A co-led by Chemistry and Headline. This reflects growing enterprise adoption of AI for business process automation.

Applied Materials delivered surprisingly upbeat sales forecasts, signaling that demand for semiconductor manufacturing equipment remains strong despite broader economic uncertainties.

Market Impact

The AI boom continues to create both opportunities and challenges across the tech sector. While companies like Instacart show strong growth in their core businesses, the underlying technology landscape is being fundamentally altered by AI advancements in software development, hardware optimization, and enterprise applications.

The competition between AI models and platforms is intensifying, with companies racing to improve performance, reduce costs, and capture market share in what many see as a transformative period for the technology industry.