← Back to news

T

Techmeme RSS Feed

Interview with Rishi Chandra, Google's VP for health and home, about shutting Google Fit by year's end, the rebranded Google Health app, Health Coach, and more (Julian Chokkattu/Wired)

Spotify launches Save to Spotify, a command-line tool that allows AI agents to upload generated audio summaries and personal podcasts to a user's account (Terrence O'Brien/The Verge)

Google rebrands Fitbit Premium as Google Health Premium, adding Gemini-powered coaching and other features, and raises its annual price from $79.99 to $99.99 (Adamya Sharma/Android Authority)

Google launches the $100 Fitbit Air, a Whoop-like screenless wearable, with Gemini-powered features like Google Health Coach, available May 26 (Cherlynn Low/Engadget)

Cologne-based AI translation startup DeepL plans to cut ~25% of its workforce, or ~250 staff, saying adapting to AI "means fewer layers" and "faster decisions" (Amy Thomson/Bloomberg)

Khosla-backed robotics startup Genesis AI unveils GENE-26.5, its first model, which can control robotic hands that it designed in-house to do tasks like cooking (Anna Heim/TechCrunch)

Kraken parent Payward agrees to buy Hong Kong-based Reap, which connects financial systems with digital assets, for $600M, and issues stock at a $20B valuation (Crystal Tse/Bloomberg)

Kalshi raised $1B led by Coatue at a $22B valuation, its third round in seven months after raising $1B and $300M+, and hits $178B in annualized trading volume (Michael J. de la Merced/New York Times)

Researchers: 5,000+ web apps built using AI coding tools like Lovable, Base44, and Replit have little to no authentication, and ~40% exposed sensitive data (Andy Greenberg/Wired)

MediaTek launches the first phase of its Taiwan data center for R&D, powered by Nvidia's B200 AI chip platform and built on Nvidia's DGX SuperPOD infrastructure (Cheng Ting-Fang/Nikkei Asia)

Anthropic's SpaceX deal helps it address a severe compute deficit and comes amid Elon Musk's OpenAI lawsuit; Grok never grew to utilize xAI's Colossus 1 (Axios)

How lidar and other tech developed for autonomous vehicles is now used in smart city systems, in-home elder care services, and major shipyards like in Rotterdam (John R. Quain/New York Times)

Samsung says it is ceasing sales of TVs and appliances in China amid fierce competition from local brands; Samsung's TV and appliance unit lost ~$138M in 2025 (Kwanwoo Jun/Wall Street Journal)

UK-based Quantum Motion, which builds quantum computers on silicon chips, raised a $160M Series C; EU-backed growth fund Kembara made its first investment (Bloomberg)

At Code with Claude, Dario Amodei said Anthropic had planned to grow ~10x in 2026 but could grow 80x, calling its growth rate "crazy" and "too hard to handle" (Natallie Rocha/New York Times)

Elon Musk says he spent time with Anthropic "to understand what they do to ensure Claude is good for humanity"; Musk called Anthropic "evil" and "misanthropic" (Lauren Goode/Wired)

As founders race to make their companies "legible" to AI, they must keep the things that make them hard to copy "illegible", or risk commoditizing their moat (Brian Halligan/@bhalligan)

Swiss pharmaceutical group Roche agrees to acquire US-based PathAI, which makes AI diagnostic tools, for up to $1.05B, with $750M upfront, closing in H2 2026 (Adrià Calatayud/Wall Street Journal)

Specialist chipmaker Silex raised ~$220M in a Stockholm IPO and jumps nearly 160% in trading, the strongest open for a sizable European IPO in almost five years (Bloomberg)

The Pentagon's mishandled blacklisting of Alibaba and Baidu in February shows how the Trump administration is often at odds with itself on how to approach China (Kate O'Keeffe/Bloomberg)

Source: Samsung offered to allocate ~13% of operating profit to chip division staff; unions threaten an 18-day walkout, seeking a 15% share and a 7% wage hike (Daniel Tudor/Financial Times)

Amazon plans to merge MX Player into Prime Video in India, combining free and paid streaming catalogs on a single platform over the next few months (Naman Ramachandran/Variety)

Analysis: South Korea's equity market overtakes Canada's as the world's seventh largest, driven by Samsung and SK Hynix, whose stocks have more than doubled YTD (Sangmi Cha/Bloomberg)

Datacenter to become Arm's biggest business 'soon' (Simon Sharwood/The Register)

Moonshot, the Chinese AI startup behind Kimi chatbot, raised ~$2B at a $20B+ valuation led by Meituan's venture arm; Moonshot's ARR topped $200M in April 2026 (Zheping Huang/Bloomberg)

Bristol Myers Squibb's Massachusetts facility boosted drug production volume for clinical and commercial use by ~40% with AI, a bright spot in US manufacturing (Farah Stockman/New York Times)

Bengaluru-based Pronto, an on-demand home-help service, raised a $20M Series B extension from Lachy Groom at a $200M valuation, up from $100M in March (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)

FanDuel CEO Amy Howe departs after five years, succeeded by President Christian Genetski, as parent company Flutter reports MAUs fell 3% YoY to 14.4M in Q1 2026 (Christopher Kuo/Wall Street Journal)

Anthropic researchers detail "model spec midtraining", which adds a stage between pretraining and fine-tuning to improve generalization from alignment training (Anthropic)

Sources: the US and China are considering recurring talks on AI security risks, with Scott Bessent leading the US side; Trump and Xi Jinping meet next week (Lingling Wei/Wall Street Journal)

Are you there Grok? It's me, Margaret (Jerusalem Demsas/The Argument)

A US appeals court strikes down a 2023 FCC rule banning broadband access discrimination based on income, race, and more; Chair Brendan Carr welcomes the ruling (Jon Brodkin/Ars Technica)

Scale AI wins a $500M DOD contract via the US Chief Digital and AI Office to help sift data and assist in decision-making, after receiving a $100M deal in 2025 (Jen Judson/Bloomberg)

Musk v. Altman: Shivon Zilis testifies her relationship with Musk didn't influence her duties as an OpenAI board member; she left in 2023 after Musk started xAI (Carly Nairn/Courthouse News Service)

Filing: Meta asks a judge to overturn the jury's verdict in the Los Angeles social media addiction trial or order a new trial, citing Section 230 protections (Diana Novak Jones/Reuters)

Snap reports Q1 revenue up 12% YoY to $1.53B, in line with est., and says it ended its $400M Perplexity deal announced in November; SNAP drops 4%+ pre-market (Jonathan Vanian/CNBC)

DoorDash reports Q1 revenue up 33% YoY to $4.04B, below $4.14B est., and forecasts Q2 marketplace gross order value above estimates; DASH jumps 11%+ pre-market (Koyena Das/Reuters)

Arm reports Q4 revenue up 20% YoY to $1.5B and says AGI CPU demand will drive $2B in sales in 2027 and 2028, over 2x its guidance; ARM jumps 11%+ pre-market (Michael Acton/Financial Times)

Google Chrome silently installs a ~4GB Gemini Nano model on desktop devices; Google says it has been offered since 2024 and users can remove it via settings (Ben Schoon/9to5Google)

Corgi, which provides insurance for startups and uses AI to generate quotes, manage claims, and more, raised a $160M Series B led by TCV at a $1.3B valuation (Richard Nieva/Forbes)

Musk v. Altman: Mira Murati testifies that Sam Altman lied to her about the safety standards for a new OpenAI model and that he made her work more difficult (Jay Peters/The Verge)

Instacart reports Q1 revenue up 14% YoY to $1.02B, GTV up 13% to $10.29B, and orders up 10%, compared with a 16% growth a year earlier; CART drops 8.18% (Neil J Kanatt/Reuters)

Anthropic says it signed a deal with SpaceX to use "all of the compute capacity" at Colossus 1, giving it access to over 300 MW of new capacity within the month (Axios)

Google releases Multi-Token Prediction drafters for its Gemma 4 models, which use a form of speculative decoding to guess future tokens for faster inference (Ryan Whitwam/Ars Technica)

Sources: Microsoft is considering delaying or dropping its 2030 goal of matching its hourly power use with renewable energy purchases, amid the data center boom (Bloomberg)

Following its SpaceX deal, Anthropic doubles Claude Code's five-hour rate limits for paid plans and removes peak hours limit reduction for Pro and Max plans (Anthropic)

SpaceX signs an agreement with Anthropic to provide access to Colossus 1, and says Anthropic expressed interest in partnering for orbital compute capacity (xAI)

Anthropic updates Claude Managed Agents with "dreaming", a scheduled process that reviews recent work and updates memory, available in research preview (Frederic Lardinois/The New Stack)

Sources: DeepSeek is in talks to raise $3B to $4B led by China's national AI fund, valuing DeepSeek at up to $50B (Reuters)

London-based Ethos, which lets companies use AI for hiring, including for voice interviews and profile analysis, raised a $22.75M Series A led by a16z (Ana-Maria Stanciuc/The Next Web)