← Back to news

T

Techmeme RSS Feed

Internal chats: in March, xAI offered employees $420 in exchange for completed tax filings as training data for Grok, but the bonuses haven't been paid out (Carmen Arroyo/Bloomberg)

Amazon's Alexa+ now produces AI-generated "podcasts" on various topics in the US, featuring chats between two AI "co-hosts", using content from media outlets (Todd Spangler/Variety)

Arkham: Iran's largest crypto exchange, Nobitex, processed $2.3B+ since 2023 via Tron and BNB Chain, including $23M+ since the Iran war started in February (Reuters)

Iranian media: Iran launches "Hormuz Safe", a Bitcoin-backed insurance service for shipping companies transiting the Strait of Hormuz; ~1,500 ships are trapped (Golnar Motevalli/Bloomberg)

The Vatican says Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah will join Pope Leo on May 25 to launch the pope's first encyclical, setting out his views on the AI age (Flavia Rotondi/Bloomberg)

Decart, which offers real-time generative video and GPU optimization tech, raised $300M at a ~$4B valuation, up from $3.1B after raising $153M in August 2025 (Robbie Whelan/Wall Street Journal)

Strategy acquired 24,869 bitcoin for ~$2.01B at an $80,985 average price from May 11 to May 17, taking its holdings to 843,738 BTC, or 4%+ of the total supply (James Hunt/The Block)

Sources: competition for Google's TPUs among its employees and researchers intensified as it prioritizes cloud customers and flagship AI products over research (Julia Love/Bloomberg)

Dust, which helps enterprises design and deploy specialized AI agents that work alongside humans, raised a $40M Series B led by Abstract and Sequoia (Chris Metinko/Axios)

Steve Bannon and 60+ Trump allies sign a Humans First-led letter urging Trump to mandate government testing and approval of powerful AI models before release (Ashley Gold/Axios)

How gambling companies like FanDuel and DraftKings, as well as Meta and a16z's founders, are pouring millions into state-level election campaigns via super PACs (Emily Birnbaum/Bloomberg)

Eric Schmidt faced loud boos during his University of Arizona commencement speech while discussing "rational" fears over the impact of AI and automation on jobs (Lauren Edmonds/Business Insider)

Baidu reports Q1 revenue down 1.1% YoY to ~$4.7B, above ~$4.5B est., and net income down 55% YoY to ~$506.6M, above ~$462.5M est., amid a slow AI payoff (Tracy Qu/Wall Street Journal)

A college senior at Stanford describes how AI has changed classes: cheating using AI "has become omnipresent" with students "fudging just about everything" (Theo Baker/New York Times)

How Amazon, which took a measured tone on AI, went from an AI also-ran to a real contender, thanks to $200B in spending, a bet on custom chips, and savvy deals (Tim Higgins/Wall Street Journal)

Polymarket and Kalshi continue to operate in India despite an April 25 government advisory, addressed to VPN providers, labeling prediction markets as "illegal" (Bloomberg)

After EV maker Fisker's collapse, ~4,000 car owners formed a nonprofit to keep their cars working by reverse-engineering software and building open-source tools (Fred Lambert/Electrek)

In his weekly Linux kernel post, Linus Torvalds says "AI tools are great" but duplicate bug reports have made the security list "almost entirely unmanageable" (Simon Sharwood/The Register)

A look at the new class of jobs created by AI companies: AI storytellers, forward deployed engineers, AI accelerators, AI philosophers, AI gig workers, and more (Brent D. Griffiths/Business Insider)

Companies running bug bounty programs are tightening background checks and building AI agents to triage a flood of low-quality reports generated by AI (Jamie John/Financial Times)

How the AI industry's intense pressure to keep up and its financial rewards are creating "walls of resentment" between Silicon Valley workers and their spouses (Alessandra Ram/Wired)

Security researcher Peter G. Neumann, who criticized the industry's lax attitudes toward computer security and digital privacy, died on May 17 at the age of 93 (John Markoff/New York Times)

Microsoft says it's retiring Teams' Together Mode, debuted in 2020, and plans to simplify meeting layouts and focus on video quality, stability, and performance (Terrence O'Brien/The Verge)

Pwn2Own Berlin 2026: participants earned a total of $1,298,250 for 47 vulnerabilities, with successful exploits of AI products like Codex, Cursor, and LM Studio (Eduard Kovacs/SecurityWeek)

Sources: Anthropic agrees to brief the Financial Stability Board on global financial system vulnerabilities found by Mythos, following a request by FSB's Chair (Financial Times)

Samsung's shares jumped as much as 6.7% after the company resumed talks with its union and a court partially granted an injunction against illegal union actions (Yoolim Lee/Bloomberg)

Chinese chipmaker CXMT reports Q1 revenue up 719% YoY to ~$7.5B, net profit up 1,688% to $3.6B, and says Omdia ranks it No. 4 in DRAM with a 7.67% global share (Cheng Ting-Fang/Nikkei Asia)

Sources: US authorities in recent months have issued multiple information requests to Kalshi and Polymarket, many tied to wagers on events in Iran and Venezuela (Wall Street Journal)

Quebec-based telecom software startup Gaiia raised a CA$54.8M Series B led by JMI Equity, bringing its total funding to ~CA$90M from backers including YC (Madison McLauchlan/BetaKit)

A look at Apple's ongoing strategy to repurpose "binned" chips for cheaper devices; sources: Apple placed new A18 Pro orders for MacBook Neo amid its popularity (Wall Street Journal)

New York City-based GovWell, which uses AI to streamline government processes like permitting and licensing, raised a $25M Series A led by Insight Partners (Chris Metinko/Axios)

AI sales automation startup Monaco raised a $50M Series B led by Benchmark, bringing its total funding to $85M after raising a $25M Series A in February 2026 (Ben Bergman/Business Insider)

Ciridae, which is developing AI to streamline back-office operations for real-economy businesses, raised a $20M seed led by Accel, with a16z participating (Jack Kubinec/Fortune)

Source: Shein is acquiring San Francisco-based DTC clothing retailer Everlane, which focuses on sustainability and "radical transparency", in a $100M deal (Lauren Sherman/Puck)

Analysis: 34 leading AI startups are generating ~$80B in annualized revenue, up 112% from six months ago, with Anthropic and OpenAI capturing 89% of the revenue (The Information)

Grafana says hackers have accessed its GitHub environment and demanded a ransom to prevent the release of its codebase; Grafana refused to pay (The Hacker News)

Analysis: mass adoption of smartphones and social media may be a primary driver of declining birthrates globally, in part by reducing in-person socializing (John Burn-Murdoch/Financial Times)

Publicis agrees to acquire LiveRamp, which allows companies to share and build new data sets and models that can power agentic frameworks, for $2.2B in cash (Alison Weissbrot/Adweek)

Sources: DayOne, the spinoff of China's largest data center operator GDS Holdings, plans dual IPO in Singapore and NY, seeking to raise $5B at a ~$20B valuation (Owen Walker/Financial Times)

Sources: Apple's revamped Siri may launch in beta, and will have an option to auto-delete chats; Apple plans to add Suggested Genmoji to iOS 27 and iPadOS 27 (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)

Developers say Chinese AI labs lead US rivals in video generation, as ByteDance and Kuaishou train models on vast short-form video libraries from their own apps (Eleanor Olcott/Financial Times)

A profile of SAS CEO Jim Goodnight, the 83-year-old who co-founded the 50-year-old analytics firm and holds a ~67% stake worth $13.3B, as AI tests SAS' strategy (Phoebe Liu/Forbes)

Experts: Stuxnet-linked Fast16 malware, designed to subvert nuclear weapons testing simulations, was likely part of a campaign to slow Iran's nuclear ambitions (Kim Zetter/ZERO DAY)

King's Cross, where Google's new UK HQ is due to open later this year, has become London's new tech, VC, and AI hub, attracting OpenAI, Anthropic, and others (John Gapper/Financial Times)

Milan-based Webidoo, which develops an operational layer designed to help SMBs access AI tools, raised $25M led by IXC3 for North American expansion (David Cendon Garcia/EU-Startups)

Filings: in Q1, Trump traded $220M-$750M in NVDA, MSFT, AMZN, META, ORCL, and other stocks; millions of dollars of NVDA were bought shortly before major news (Kevin Breuninger/CNBC)

OpenAI partners with Malta's AI for All initiative to give citizens a free year of ChatGPT Plus if they complete a University of Malta AI literacy course (Cointelegraph)

Nectar Social, which offers an agentic OS for marketers, raised a $30M Series A led by Menlo Ventures, with GV and True Ventures among investors (Dominic-Madori Davis/TechCrunch)

Vietnam's government, which once saw video games as a social risk, named gaming as one of its key cultural industries in 2025 and now promotes them at expos (Bloomberg)

Hill County, which faced eight new data centers, passed what may be Texas' first county-wide ban on them, for one year; the state trails only VA in data centers (Mike Lee/Politico)