← Back to news

T

Techmeme RSS Feed

Waymo says its fleet hit 170M+ miles as of December 2025, and its Waymo Driver system was involved in 92% fewer serious-injury crashes than human drivers (Andrew J. Hawkins/The Verge)

Cursor launches Composer 2, an AI agent trained solely on coding-related data to perform autonomous, lengthy coding tasks, to compete with Anthropic and OpenAI (Rachel Metz/Bloomberg)

Alphabet's X spins out Anori, which seeks to streamline building approvals through a unified platform for developers and city regulators, with $26M in funding (Connie Loizos/TechCrunch)

DoorDash launches Tasks, a new app that pays delivery couriers in some markets to submit video clips and complete other tasks for training AI models (Natalie Lung/Bloomberg)

Letters: industry groups pushed back after India proposed in January that Apple, Google, and others consider pre-installing biometric ID app Aadhaar on phones (Reuters)

Claros, which aims to cut data center energy losses by using voltage regulators that provide power directly to servers' main processors, raised a $30M seed (Ben Geman/Axios)

MLB makes Polymarket its official prediction markets platform, giving it exclusive data access; Polymarket will restrict contracts that pose "integrity risk" (Wall Street Journal)

Adobe launches Firefly Custom Models in public beta, letting users train AI image generators on their own assets; the custom models are private by default (Jess Weatherbed/The Verge)

OpenAI agrees to acquire Astral, which makes Python tools for developers, to integrate its team into Codex, and says Codex has 2M+ users, up 3x since January (Agnee Ghosh/Bloomberg)

The UK CMA launches an investigation into Adobe, saying early membership cancellation fees for certain products might be in breach of consumer protection laws (Mauro Orru/Wall Street Journal)

Google co-founder Sergey Brin raises his total contribution to $45M for the Building a Better California Super PAC, which opposes a proposed 5% billionaire tax (Dara Kerr/The Guardian)

Deeptune, which builds high-fidelity reinforcement learning environments that simulate professional workflows for AI agents, raised a $43M Series A led by a16z (Lily Mae Lazarus/Fortune)

Uber plans to invest $1.25B in Rivian through 2031, contingent on meeting autonomy milestones, starting with $300M at signing, to deploy 50K Level 4 robotaxis (Andrew J. Hawkins/The Verge)

The US NHTSA escalates its investigation into Tesla's FSD to an "engineering analysis", which could result in a recall campaign or other enforcement action (Ryan Felton/Wall Street Journal)

Crypto.com CEO Kris Marszalek says the company cut ~12% of its workforce, or ~180 roles, saying the layoffs target roles that "do not adapt" as it integrates AI (Brian Danga/The Block)

DHL Supply Chain says it will open 10 warehouses in 2026 across North America to serve data center operators and component suppliers, totaling 7M+ square feet (Liz Young/Wall Street Journal)

Ofcom fines 4chan £520K for OSA violations, including £450K for not complying with age check requirements, and gives it until April 2 to implement age assurance (Mizy Clifton/Politico)

The UN-backed World Happiness Report says passively consuming algorithmic social media hurts teens' mental health and heavy use disproportionately affects girls (Kati Pohjanpalo/Bloomberg)

TechInsights: chip manufacturing emissions will climb ~33% to 247M metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent by 2030, roughly the same as Algeria's 2024 volume (Aaron Clark/Bloomberg)

Alibaba reports Q3 revenue up 2% YoY ~$41.3B, vs. ~$42B est., and net income down 67% YoY to ~$2.4B, as it seeks to monetize AI to help offset e-commerce losses (Bloomberg)

An analysis of a NYT article load finds 422 network requests totaling 49MB, triggering a sprawling programmatic ad auction, an example of "hostile architecture" (Shubham Bose)

CISA warns US companies to follow Microsoft's recommendations for fortifying Intune, a tool that manages staff access, after a cyberattack on Stryker last week (Margi Murphy/Bloomberg)

Filing: Samsung says it plans to spend ~$73.3B on capital expenditure and research in 2026, up from ~$60B in 2025, and pay ~$6.5B in regular dividends (Reuters)

Sources: European chip importers are tapping backup stores and paying higher air freight costs as the US-led Iran war disrupts Middle Eastern cargo routes (Kai Nicol-Schwarz/CNBC)

Paris-based Parallel, which develops AI agents for hospitals and is initially focused on medical coding workflows, raised a $20M Series A led by Index Ventures (Tamara Djurickovic/Tech.eu)

Edra, which says it helps companies automate workflows by turning their operational data into a living knowledge base, raised a $30M Series A led by Sequoia (Connie Loizos/TechCrunch)

Chinese cities are offering free apartments and office space to attract and incubate "one-person companies", startups run by a single founder with AI's help (Viola Zhou/Rest of World)

Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth says Horizon Worlds will remain in VR for the "foreseeable future", after Meta said Quest headset users will lose access from June 15 (Janko Roettgers/Lowpass)

Source: Fal, a GenAI model hosting service, is in talks to raise $300M-$350M at an $8B valuation; annualized revenue hits $400M, up from $200M in October 2025 (Katie Roof/The Information)

Chip industry executives say chip testing companies are racing to meet AI chip demand; Advantest, Teradyne, and Chroma shares more than tripled in the past year (Cheng Ting-Fang/Nikkei Asia)

PwC's US boss Paul Griggs says partners who resist AI have no place at the firm, and it plans to convert some services into AI-powered automated tools (Stephen Foley/Financial Times)

Baidu joins Alibaba in raising prices for its AI computing power-related services by ~5% to 30% and its parallel file storage system by 30% from April 18 (South China Morning Post)

Sen. Marsha Blackburn releases a Senate draft of the TRUMP AMERICA AI Act, a federal framework to replace state AI laws, incorporating KOSA and the NO FAKES Act (Oma Seddiq/Bloomberg Law)

Figma's stock closed down ~8% on March 18 after Google updated its Stitch AI coding tool for UI design; FIG is down ~80% since the company's IPO in August 2025 (John Wang/@j0hnwang)

Google updates Stitch, which lets users turn natural language prompts into UI designs, introducing an "AI-native" design canvas and a reasoning design agent (Rustin Banks/The Keyword)

AppMagic: Apple's revenue from GenAI apps grew from ~$35M in January 2025 to a high of $101M in August 2025, with 75% coming from ChatGPT and only ~5% from Grok (Wall Street Journal)

Counterpoint: Apple's China smartphone sales surged 23% YoY in the first nine weeks of 2026, while the overall market fell 4% amid rising Android phone prices (Reuters)

Walmart is embedding its own chatbot Sparky in ChatGPT, after conversion rates via OpenAI's Instant Checkout were 3x lower than those requiring clicking out (Paresh Dave/Wired)

Anthropic releases a survey of 80,508 Claude users' views, hopes, and fears about AI, calling it "the largest and most multilingual qualitative study" (Anthropic)

LinkedIn signs The Trade Desk as its first DSP partner for connected TV ads, allowing ad buyers to layer in LinkedIn data to reach target audiences (Lara O'Reilly/Business Insider)

Google DeepMind appoints Jasjeet Sekhon, Bridgewater's chief scientist and head of AI, as chief strategy officer; Sekhon helped build Bridgewater's AIA Labs (Anirban Sen/Reuters)

Cloudflare says it has appealed the €14.2M fine issued by Italy for refusing to block pirate sites on its 1.1.1.1 DNS service, calling the amount "staggering" (Jon Brodkin/Ars Technica)

Perplexity releases its Comet browser app for iOS and iPadOS with a built-in AI assistant, four months after launching on Android (Laurent Giret/Thurrott)

NYC-based BusRight, which provides an AI-powered platform to help school bus operators manage routes, communication, and more, raised $30M from Volition Capital (Mike Wheatley/SiliconANGLE)

Meta confirms a critical security incident after an internal rogue AI agent's actions led to the exposure of sensitive data to employees without authorization (Jyoti Mann/The Information)

Democratic voters in Illinois rejected most candidates supported by the crypto and AI industries, marking an unexpected defeat after industry PACs spent $18M+ (Bloomberg)

Micron reports Q2 revenue up 196% YoY to $23.9B, vs. $19.7B est., expects 2026 capex to exceed $25B, vs. $22.4B est., and forecasts Q3 revenue above estimates (Dina Bass/Bloomberg)

Compute startup Andromeda raised new funding from Paradigm at a $1.5B valuation, bringing Paradigm's total to $60M; it passed a $100M revenue run rate in 2025 (Upstarts Media)

During a Senate hearing, FBI Director Kash Patel says FBI does purchase "commercially available information" that can be used to track people's location history (Alfred Ng/Politico)

Sources: Polymarket is looking to hire a chief risk officer following a CFTC demand; the company has expanded its legal team in recent months (Bernard Goyder/Bloomberg)