← Back to news

T

Techmeme RSS Feed

Jury deliberations began Friday in the Live Nation antitrust trial, after state attorneys general continued to pursue the case even as the US DOJ settled (Ben Sisario/New York Times)

Waymo and Waze launch a pilot program to send pothole data collected by robotaxi sensors to the Waze for Cities platform and Waze app, starting in five markets (Kirsten Korosec/TechCrunch)

Documents: Amazon is working on "Project Houdini", which aims to cut the time it takes to construct data centers by preassembling core server rooms into modules (Eugene Kim/Business Insider)

Snap announces a partnership between Specs, its AR glasses-focused subsidiary, and Qualcomm, whose Snapdragon XR platform will power Specs' upcoming AI glasses (TechCrunch)

CoreWeave says it has signed a multiyear deal with Anthropic, including a variety of Nvidia chips at data centers in the US; it now has 43 active data centers (Brody Ford/Bloomberg)

YouTube raises YouTube Premium's prices in the US: Lite is $1 more at $8.99/month, Individual is $2 more at $15.99/month, and Family is $4 more at $26.99/month (Dominic Preston/The Verge)

Google News is showing Polymarket bets alongside news articles in the "For you" section; in tests, Polymarket bets also appeared on the Google News homepage (Frank Landymore/Futurism)

Google rolls out end-to-end encryption for Gmail on Android and iOS devices for enterprise users, letting them read and compose emails without additional tools (Sergiu Gatlan/BleepingComputer)

Apple led global Q1 smartphone shipments for the first time, with a 21% share in Q1 2026; overall smartphone shipments fell 6% YoY due to memory chip shortages (Counterpoint Research)

The CIA says it recently used AI to create its first-ever autonomous intelligence report, and plans to build "AI co-workers" into all of its analytic platforms (John Sakellariadis/Politico)

Hong Kong grants its first stablecoin issuer licenses to HSBC and Standard Chartered from a pool of 36 applicants; they are set to issue stablecoins in H2 2026 (Kiuyan Wong/Bloomberg)

Documents: Shenzhen-based computing company Sharetronic bought hundreds of Super Micro systems containing banned Nvidia H100 and H200 chips in 2025, worth ~$92M (Bloomberg)

TSMC reports Q1 revenue up 35% YoY to ~$35.6B, vs. ~$35.2B est., signaling global chip demand stayed intact during the first weeks of the war in the Middle East (Debby Wu/Bloomberg)

OpenAI backs an Illinois bill shielding AI labs from liability, even for "critical harms" like 100+ deaths or $1B+ in damage, if they published safety reports (Maxwell Zeff/Wired)

Sources: Alibaba appointed Cloud CTO Zhou Jingren to lead its AI unit after a pivot from open source to monetizable MaaS models led to Qwen executive departures (Financial Times)

AfterQuery, which sells coding and finance training data to AI labs, says it raised a $30M Series A at a $300M valuation, and has hit a $100M+ annual run rate (Anna Tong/Forbes)

Luminai, an AI-native platform for automating administrative healthcare workflows, raised a $38M Series B led by Peak XV, bringing its total funding to $60M (Seth Joseph/Forbes)

Apple is closing its Towson, Maryland store, the first US location where retail employees unionized; the union says it is "outraged" and exploring legal options (Joe Rossignol/MacRumors)

Sources: US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Fed Chair Jerome Powell warned bank CEOs about risks from Anthropic's Mythos at an urgent meeting on April 7 (Bloomberg)

Alibaba led a ~$293M funding round for ShengShu, just two months after the creator of the Vidu AI video generator raised ~$88M (Bloomberg)

Sources: SpaceX lost just under $5B last year while generating more than $18.5B in revenue; the loss figure includes xAI (Cory Weinberg/The Information)

Sources: Anthropic is weighing the possibility of designing its own chips, but it has yet to commit to a design or put together a dedicated team for the project (Reuters)

How Black Forest Labs, a 70-person startup based in Germany, became a top competitor in AI image generation; sources: it recently declined to partner with xAI (Maxwell Zeff/Wired)

xAI has filed a lawsuit challenging Colorado's landmark AI anti-discrimination law, set to take effect in the summer, saying it violates free speech protections (Financial Times)

A gap in understanding AI is growing, as casual users cite flaws in old free models while power users point to new models' staggering gains in technical domains (Andrej Karpathy/@karpathy)

An OpenAI note to investors after Anthropic announced Mythos says OpenAI's early push to increase computing resources gives it a key advantage over Anthropic (Shirin Ghaffary/Bloomberg)

Internal memo: Meta is pulling top engineers into its new Applied AI Engineering division, as part of a push to improve its models and "compete in the AI race" (Jyoti Mann/The Information)

An Ohio man is the first convicted under the Take It Down Act after pleading guilty to creating and sharing real and AI-generated explicit images of 10+ victims (Ashley Belanger/Ars Technica)

EFF says it is leaving X, as "X is no longer where the fight is happening" and an X post now gets less than 3% of the views a tweet got seven years ago (Kenyatta Thomas/Electronic Frontier ...)

OpenAI launches a $100/month ChatGPT Pro subscription, which offers 5x more Codex usage than Plus; the $200/month Pro plan offers 20x higher limits than Plus (Zac Hall/9to5Mac)

Google says the Gemini app can now generate interactive 3D models and simulations; users must select the Pro model in the prompt bar (Emma Roth/The Verge)

Sources: the White House is pushing back on GOP-led AI bills in Nebraska and Tennessee, putting new pressure on GOP state lawmakers who support AI guardrails (Axios)

Anthropic makes Claude Cowork, previously available as a "research preview", generally available to all paid plans, and adds six features for enterprise use (Zac Hall/9to5Mac)

Florida's AG launches a probe into OpenAI and ChatGPT, saying its data could fall "into the hands of America's enemies" and citing a mass shooter's ChatGPT use (Juby Babu/Reuters)

X brings back Voice Notes to X Chat, supporting one-on-one and group conversations via a new voice input icon, as it tests a standalone X Chat spinoff on iOS (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

Visa unveils Intelligent Commerce Connect, a platform that facilitates payments for AI agents across multiple card networks, including those of Visa competitors (Kelly Tyko/Axios)

Chapter, which uses AI to help seniors enroll in Medicare, raised a $100M Series E, doubling its valuation to $3B and bringing its total funding to $285M (Stephanie Palazzolo/The Information)

RISC-V chip designer SiFive raised a $400M Series G led by Atreides at a $3.65B valuation; CEO Patrick Little says it is the final funding round before an IPO (Stephen Nellis/Reuters)

Elorian, which builds visual AI models with better reasoning capabilities for industries like robotics, emerges from stealth with $55M at a $300M valuation (Bloomberg)

Google and Intel expand their partnership to deploy Xeon chips, including Xeon 6, and co-develop custom Infrastructure Processing Units to improve efficiency (Zaheer Kachwala/Reuters)

Annual letter: Andy Jassy says AWS' AI revenue has hit a $15B annual run rate as of Q1 and that Amazon's internal chips business is generating $20B+ per year (Todd Bishop/GeekWire)

Docs: OpenAI expects ads to generate ~$2.4B in 2026 revenue, to quadruple to nearly $11B in 2027, and to hit ~$102B in 2030, or 36% of its total revenue then (Sri Muppidi/The Information)

In his annual letter, Andy Jassy says Amazon's space-internet service Leo will "launch in mid-2026", after delays; Amazon has FCC approval for 3,236 satellites (Thomas Ricker/The Verge)

Meta begins removing dozens of Facebook and Instagram ads from lawyers seeking clients who claim to have been harmed by social media while under the age of 18 (Dan Primack/Axios)

Researchers: attackers have been exploiting a zero-day vulnerability in Adobe Reader since at least December 2025, and some docs contain Russian-language lures (Sergiu Gatlan/BleepingComputer)

Samsung plans to invest $4B to build a chip packaging plant in Vietnam's Thai Nguyen province to meet rising AI demand; sources say the first phase costs $2B (Bloomberg)

Spotify is adding toggles to stop video from playing inside the app for both music and podcasts, rolling out worldwide on all platforms and devices (Dominic Preston/The Verge)

Sources: Alibaba anonymously released AI video model HappyHorse-1.0, which ranks at the top of Artificial Analysis' AI model leaderboard, above Seedance 2.0 (Juro Osawa/The Information)

Meta commits to spending additional $21B on AI cloud infrastructure from CoreWeave, running from 2027 to 2032, on top of its prior $14.2B deal that ends in 2031 (Jordan Novet/CNBC)

A survey of 1,500 people aged 14 to 29: hopefulness regarding AI has dropped from 27% to 18% over the past year, and 50% report using GenAI daily or weekly (Callie Holtermann/New York Times)