Techmeme RSS Feed

Nintendo's share price has fallen by ~45% since August 2025, as rising memory chip costs drive investor concerns over profit margins for the Switch 2 (David Keohane/Financial Times)

A profile of BlackBerry's QNX division, whose operating system controls safety features in 275M cars and accounts for half of BlackBerry's revenue (Ben Cohen/Wall Street Journal)

An evaluation by NIST's CAISI says DeepSeek V4 Pro lags behind leading US AI models by about eight months and is the most capable Chinese AI model to date (NIST)

A slew of top Boston Dynamics execs have left the Hyundai-owned company in recent months, as sources say it faces pressure to speed the delivery of humanoids (Rachyl Jones/Semafor)

Sources: OpenAI employees have raised alarms internally over failures to alert law enforcement when users describe plans for real-world violence to ChatGPT (Georgia Wells/Wall Street Journal)

Palo Alto Networks agrees to acquire Portkey, which develops AI gateway tech to manage and secure AI agents; sources say the deal values Portkey at $120M-$140M (The Economic Times)

Amadeus IT Group, which operates the world's largest travel booking system, plans to acquire French biometrics company Idemia Public Security, for €1.2B in cash (Javi West Larrañaga/Reuters)

Ask.com shutters, as its owner IAC "continues to sharpen its focus"; a dot-com era icon, Ask Jeeves launched in 1997, a year before Google (Chase DiBenedetto/Mashable)

Maryland becomes the first US state to ban surveillance pricing in grocery stores, as other states including CO, CA, MA, IL, and NJ consider similar bills (Sanya Mansoor/The Guardian)

11h

Analysis: after Trump's World Liberty raised $550M from investors, tokens worth hundreds of millions in USD were privately sold in "white glove" transactions (Olga Kharif/Bloomberg)

14h

Investigation: Nobitex was founded by two brothers from Iran's elite Kharrazi family; the crypto exchange processed hundreds of millions beyond US sanctions (Reuters)

15h

A Chinese court ruled that companies cannot terminate staff just to replace them with AI, following a similar ruling by another Chinese court in December 2025 (Victor Swezey/Bloomberg)

16h

Study: OpenAI's o1 correctly diagnosed 67% of emergency room patients using electronic records and a few sentences from nurses, vs. to 50-55% for triage doctors (Robert Booth/The Guardian)

17h

Sources: Nigerian mobile payments service OPay is preparing for a US IPO at a $4B valuation with Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, and JPMorgan Chase advising (Bloomberg)

19h

Sources: Anthropic is in early talks to buy AI inference chips from UK-based Fractile when they become available in 2027 (The Information)

20h

A look at casino-style games, considered gambling in some US states, where player "whales" spend tens of thousands via IAP on Apple, Google, and Meta platforms (Bloomberg)

21h

A profile of OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar, who sources say helped keep OpenAI's Microsoft deal on track and has privately suggested waiting until 2027 for an IPO (Wall Street Journal)

Ripple Labs investor and exec Chris Larsen plans to spend $3.5M to help Alex Bores, a NY congressional candidate at the center of a proxy war over AI regulation (New York Times)

Sources: GameStop is preparing to make an offer for eBay after quietly building a stake; GameStop had a market cap of ~$11B as of May 1, while eBay had ~$45B (Lauren Thomas/Wall Street Journal)

Avoca, whose AI agents let physical services businesses handle inbound calls and dispatch, raised $125M+ across seed, Series A, and Series B at a $1B valuation (Allie Garfinkle/Fortune)

A UK court orders Samsung to pay ZTE $392M for patents needed to enable phone network access; Samsung faces similar suits from ZTE in China, Germany, and Brazil (Sam Tobin/Reuters)

Waymo says it is continuing to "refine" its system preventing kids under 18 from riding alone, after adult riders reported new age-verification checks (Aarian Marshall/Wired)

xAI launches Grok 4.3, featuring "always-on reasoning", 1M token context window, and low API pricing, and releases a voice cloning suite called Custom Voices (Carl Franzen/VentureBeat)

Servers operated by Ubuntu and its parent company Canonical have been down for more than a day, following a "sustained, cross-border attack" (Dan Goodin/Ars Technica)

Apple has stopped offering a 256GB storage option for the Mac mini globally; Mac mini now starts at 512GB for $799 in the US (Joe Rossignol/MacRumors)

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences issues new rules saying acting and writing must be performed by humans and not AI to be eligible for Oscars (Lisa Richwine/Reuters)

Sources: Cerebras is seeking to raise as much as $4B in its IPO and is targeting a valuation of about $40B (Bloomberg)

How influencers boosting US-based AI and opposing Chinese AI are paid with money tied to Leading the Future, funded by execs from OpenAI, Palantir, a16z, others (Taylor Lorenz/Wired)

"Podslop" is flooding listening platforms like Spotify; Podcast Index: of ~11K new podcast feeds in a recent 9-day span, ~39% were likely for AI content shows (Ashley Carman/Bloomberg)

Pushing back on AI job loss fears, AWS CEO Matt Garman says Amazon plans to hire 11,000 software engineering interns in 2026, a figure in line with recent years (Ben Shimkus/Business Insider)

Some retail traders are training AI agents to buy and sell assets on their behalf, as exchanges like Polymarket and Bybit roll out agent-friendly interfaces (Emily Nicolle/Bloomberg)

The US, UK, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand publish guidance on orgs' use of agentic AI systems, saying many give AI more access than can be safely monitored (Greg Otto/CyberScoop)

The gender gap in AI use may be a matter of visibility more than usage, as data suggests women face more judgment for using AI and are less likely to admit it (Issie Lapowsky/Bloomberg)

The FBI warns of rising cyber cargo theft, where attackers hack freight brokers' accounts and dupe carriers; 2025 cargo theft losses in N. America rose 60% YoY (Pierluigi Paganini/Security Affairs)

Meta acquires Assured Robot Intelligence, a startup developing AI models for robots; Assured Robot Intelligence's team will join Meta Superintelligence Labs (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)

A bug in popular cPanel, WHM, and WP Squared software has reportedly been exploited since Feb.; CISA it gives a 9.8 CVSS score, tells agencies to patch by May 3 (Jonathan Greig/The Record)

Experts say supply chain attacks compromised SAP and Intercom npm packages, plus the PyPI package Lightning, in a campaign that calls itself Mini Shai-Hulud (Jessica Lyons/The Register)

Fun, which builds fiat and crypto payment rails for platforms like Polymarket and Aave, raised a $72M Series A in January, co-led by Multicoin and SignalFire (Ben Weiss/Fortune)

Sources: Coatue formed Next Frontier in 2025 to buy land for data centers; Next Frontier has a JV with neocloud Fluidstack that has raised $5.7B via junk bonds (Wall Street Journal)

The US Navy awards Domino Data Lab a contract worth up to $100M for AI software that teaches underwater drones to identify new mines in the Strait of Hormuz (Mike Stone/Reuters)

Sources: Peter Thiel's Founders Fund raised $6B for a fund to invest in later-stage companies, marking its largest haul ever; $4.5B comes from limited partners (Natasha Mascarenhas/Bloomberg)

Tim Cook says that the Mac Studio and the Mac mini, which many are buying for AI and agentic tools, "may take several months to reach supply demand balance" (Juli Clover/MacRumors)

Amazon debuts "Join the chat", an AI-powered feature that lets users ask questions about products and get conversational audio responses generated in real time (Lauren Forristal/TechCrunch)

The DOD strikes deals with AWS, Microsoft, Nvidia, Oracle, and Reflection AI to use their AI tools on classified military networks "for lawful operational use" (Katrina Manson/Bloomberg)

Cloud computing provider Nebius agrees to acquire Eigen AI, which optimizes the performance of chips that run AI inference tasks, for ~$643M in stock and cash (Dina Bass/Bloomberg)

Apple CFO Kevan Parekh says that "the iPhone 17 family is now the most popular lineup in our history" and "we believe we gained market share during the quarter" (Michael Acton/Financial Times)

China's EV makers are competing on in-car AI features; ByteDance says its Doubao AI is used in 7M+ cars across 145 models, including from Mercedes, Audi, and VW (Evelyn Cheng/CNBC)

Researchers detail CopyFail, a now-patched Linux vulnerability that lets unprivileged users gain admin access, as many distributions have yet to apply the fixes (Dan Goodin/Ars Technica)

Sources: Huawei expects AI chip revenue to hit ~$12B in 2026, up 60%+ from $7.5B in 2025, as orders for its Ascend 950PR chip surge and Nvidia stalls in China (Zijing Wu/Financial Times)

Musk v. Altman: OpenAI lawyers claim Shivon Zilis, a longtime Musk employee and mother to four of his children, acted as a covert liaison between him and OpenAI (Wired)