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Techmeme

Meta begins laying off 8,000 employees, or 10% of staff, in a push to become an AI-first company; another 7,000 workers will be reassigned to AI initiatives (New York Times)

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Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz has signed the nation's first law banning prediction market sites from operating in the state; the CFTC has sued Minnesota in response (Bobby Allyn/NPR)

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Sources: Google DeepMind has reached a ~$100M deal to hire 20+ researchers from Contextual AI, including CEO Douwe Kiela, and license its technology (Bloomberg)

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Google unveils Pics, an AI image editor in Workspace that lets users edit specific elements and modify text, rolling out this summer to AI Pro and Ultra users (Mat Smith/Engadget)

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Ocean, which uses AI agents to detect email attacks, raised a $20M Series A led by Lightspeed, following an $8M seed in 2024 (Meir Orbach/CTech)

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Sundar Pichai announced at Google I/O that Gemini 3.5 Pro will launch next month; attendees groaned at the model coming out later than they expected (Charles Rollet/Business Insider)

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Hands-on with Google and Samsung's Android XR smart glasses from Warby Parker and Gentle Monster, and with XReal's Project Aura, all set to arrive this fall (Wired)

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Google unveils Universal Cart, a shopping assistant that works "across merchants", built on the Universal Commerce Protocol, rolling out in the US today (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch)

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At a hearing, two of three judges of a federal appeals court appeared skeptical of Anthropic's bid to block the DOD from designating it a supply-chain risk (Jen Judson/Bloomberg)

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Demis Hassabis says companies looking to replace developers with AI may be due to a "lack of imagination and a lack of understanding" of the future (Will Knight/Wired)

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Google's web-based AI Studio now lets users build native Android apps; Google says the apps are for personal use only for now and publishing is on the roadmap (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

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Google introduces Antigravity 2.0, featuring an updated desktop app that lets users orchestrate multiple agents, alongside an Antigravity CLI tool and SDK (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)

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Google says the Gemini app has 900M+ MAUs across 230 countries, up from 400M at I/O 2025, and launches Neural Expressive, a new design language for Gemini (Josh Woodward/The Keyword)

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OpenAI adds support for Google's SynthID watermarks in AI images, and previews a public portal to let users verify if an image was generated by OpenAI's tools (Jess Weatherbed/The Verge)

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Google teases Android Halo, which makes an AI agent's status visible via "subtle communication" at the top of the phone screen, coming later this year (Damien Wilde/9to5Google)

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Google says it is expanding access to CodeMender, an "AI agent for code security" it debuted in October, by inviting select groups of experts to test the API (Hayden Field/The Verge)

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Google launches the Gemini Omni multimodal model, saying it can "create anything from any input", starting with video generation, for Google AI subscribers (Carl Franzen/VentureBeat)

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Google announces Gemini Spark, a "24/7 personal AI agent" that is powered by Gemini 3.5 and supports integrations with Google Workspace apps, including Gmail (Mariella Moon/Engadget)

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Google restructures its AI plans, introducing a $100/month AI Ultra plan for developers and cutting the top-tier Ultra subscription from $250 to $200/month (Lance Whitney/ZDNET)

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Google overhauls its search box, letting users ask longer queries, upload photos and videos, and use Gemini 3.5 Flash-powered agents to automate searches (New York Times)

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Google rolls out Gemini 3.5 Flash, its "strongest agentic and coding model yet", for tackling long-horizon agentic tasks, in the Gemini app and Search's AI Mode (The Keyword)

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Sundar Pichai says Google is now processing 3.2 quadrillion tokens per month, up from 480T tokens per month a year ago and 9.7T tokens per month two years ago (Ina Fried/Axios)

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Google unveils conversational features for Gmail, Docs, and Keep, letting users ask natural language questions, rolling out to AI Pro and Ultra subs this summer (Daniel Cooper/Engadget)

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Spotify launches a "Verified by Spotify" badge for podcasts to help "authenticate creator identity", after releasing it for music in April (Lawrence Bonk/Engadget)

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A livestream of the Google I/O 2026 keynote (Google on YouTube)

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A live blog of the Google I/O 2026 keynote, where the company is set to announce the "latest AI breakthroughs and updates" in Gemini, Android, and more (Abner Li/9to5Google)

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Roku launches a creator hub with licensed creator content and programming from partners like Peacock and HBO Max, alongside new FAST channels from top creators (Alex Weprin/The Hollywood Reporter)

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Andrej Karpathy joins Anthropic to help launch a team focused on using Claude to accelerate pre-training research; he helped found OpenAI and worked at Tesla (Madison Mills/Axios)

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Sources: Apple Chief Hardware Officer Johny Srouji is reorganizing hardware development to integrate silicon teams with product creation and speed up their work (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)

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Polymarket partners with Nasdaq to launch markets tied to private company milestones, including IPO timing, valuations, earnings, and secondary market activity (Kyle Baird/The Block)

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NYSE owner Intercontinental Exchange partners with financial infrastructure company Ornn to launch USD-denominated futures contracts for computing power (Katherine Doherty/Bloomberg)

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Relay, which builds banking and money management software for small businesses, raised $50M; it previously raised ~$51.5M, including a $32.2M Series B in 2024 (Ryan Lawler/Axios)

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Yahoo Finance launches AlphaSpace, a customizable research dashboard with an AI assistant, for subscribers of its $479.40/year or $39.95/month Gold plan (Nick Lichtenberg/Fortune)

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Personal update: I've joined Anthropic. I think the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative. I am very excited to join the team here and get back to R&D. I remain deeply passionate about education and plan to resume my work on it in time. (Andrej Karpathy/@karpathy)

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Plex says the price for the Lifetime tier of its Plex Pass plan will increase from $249.99 to $749.99 in July (Chance Miller/9to5Mac)

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Radar, which helps retailers like American Eagle manage inventory and cut back on theft and lost merchandise, raised a $170M Series B at a $1B+ valuation (Gabrielle Fonrouge/CNBC)

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Viktor, which is developing an AI agent that operates like a virtual coworker embedded inside Slack or Microsoft Teams, raised a $75M Series A led by Accel (Beatrice Nolan/Fortune)

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Microsoft says it plans to bring Snapdragon X2 chips to the new Surface Pro and Laptop later in 2026; sources say the delay is due to component availability (Zac Bowden/Windows Central)

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Microsoft unveils Intel-based business laptops: a 13" Surface Pro for $1,950+, a 13.8" or 15" Surface Laptop for $1,950+, and a 13" Surface Laptop for $1,300+ (Microsoft Devices Blog)

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Unframe, which customizes AI apps for enterprises via pre-built modular components, raised a $50M Series B led by Highland Europe, for $100M in total funding (Chris Metinko/Axios)

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Epic says Fortnite has returned to Apple's App Store globally, after its US relaunch in 2025, signaling confidence in a favorable outcome in an ongoing lawsuit (Zaheer Kachwala/Reuters)

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Apple unveils Apple Intelligence-powered accessibility features, subtitles generated on device, a Vision Pro feature for controlling power wheelchairs, and more (John Voorhees/MacStories)

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CertiK: physical attacks on crypto holders rose 75% YoY to 72 confirmed cases and $41M in known losses in 2025; Coinbase spent ~$7.6M to protect Brian Armstrong (Bloomberg)

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OpenAI's win against Elon Musk leaves it free to continue its IPO plans, but it still faces many issues, like rising competition and dozens of other lawsuits (New York Times)

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Modular data center maker Armada raised a $230M Series B co-led by Overmatch, 8090 Industries, and BlackRock at a $2B valuation, and plans a new Arizona factory (Krysta Escobar/CNBC)

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Chinese flash memory chipmaker YMTC says it started a prelisting tutoring process with two local brokers, marking the first formal step toward an IPO (Bloomberg)

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KPMG partners with Anthropic to embed Claude into its tax and advisory platforms; KPMG's tax and legal services unit saw revenue grow ~8% YoY to $9.3B in 2025 (Mark Maurer/Wall Street Journal)

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Sources: Chinese AI startup Moonshot told investors it would revamp its corporate structure to pave the way for a Hong Kong IPO and comply with Beijing's rules (Bloomberg)

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Standard Chartered plans to cut nearly 8,000 back-office positions by 2030, a 15%+ reduction in support functions in hubs like Bengaluru, amid growing AI usage (Arjun Neil Alim/Financial Times)

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Elon Musk's OpenAI loss is set to speed up the AI juggernaut amid rising opposition; the case offered a rare glimpse into tech's workings, ending with a whimper (New York Times)

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