The Starting Line
On April 18, OpenAI lost three executives in a single day — Kevin Weil, Bill Peebles, Srinivas Narayanan. The same day, Recursive Superintelligence — a four-month-old lab founded by ex-DeepMind and OpenAI engineers — was reported to have raised $500 million at a $4 billion valuation from GV and Nvidia. OpenAI's 2015 charter was written to prevent a concentrated AGI race. Eleven years later, the charter underwrites the payroll of every frontier lab that competes with it. The org became the starting line it was designed to refuse.
White House says a meeting between Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and Dario Amodei had been “productive and constructive”; source: Scott Bessent joined the meeting
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent joined a meeting on Friday between White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles …
Anthropic launches Claude Design, a new experimental product that lets users create visuals like prototypes, slides, one-pagers, and more using Claude
Anthropic announced on Friday that it's launching Claude Design, a new experimental product that lets users create visuals like prototypes, slides, one-pagers, and more using Claude.
Kevin Weil, OpenAI's former CPO who became VP of OpenAI for Science, is leaving the company; Prism, a web app for scientists launched in Jan., will be shuttered
The former Instagram VP is departing the ChatGPT-maker, which is folding the AI science application he led into Codex.
Salesforce announces Headless 360, an initiative that will give AI agents access to Salesforce's platform capabilities through APIs, MCP tools or CLI commands
Salesforce on Wednesday unveiled the most ambitious architectural transformation in its 27-year history, introducing “Headless 360” …
A deep dive into Dwarkesh Patel's interview with Jensen Huang, including Huang's takes on Nvidia's moat and chip sales to China, and reactions to the interview
Some podcasts are self-recommending on the 'yep, I'm going to be breaking this one down' level. This was one of those. So here we go.
Sources: Meta intends to conduct a first wave of sweeping layoffs planned for this year on May 20, laying off ~10% of its global workforce, or ~8,000 employees
Meta (META.O) intends to conduct a first wave of sweeping layoffs planned for this year on May 20, with more coming later …
Some Mac Mini and Mac Studio models are unavailable or facing up to 12-week wait times in the US, with analysts citing strong demand from AI agent power users
The scarcity of Apple's littlest Mac comes at a time of high interest from AI power users and a potential product refresh
World expands its Tinder partnership and partners with Zoom and others to verify human users, as it continues its pivot from crypto to identity verification
Honestly, what's hotter than a real person? — Sam Altman's iris-scanning, humanity-verifying World project announced at an event …
What some leaders think of using universal income to mitigate AI-fueled layoffs: Musk calls it the “best way”, OpenAI's policy doc mentions a Public Wealth Fund
Topline — Elon Musk on Friday touted what he described as “Universal HIGH INCOME” as a solution to deal …
Cerebras files to go public on Nasdaq and reports $510M in 2025 revenue, up 76% YoY, with a net income of $87.9M, up from a $485M net loss in 2024
Cerebras, a producer of chips that run artificial intelligence models, on Friday filed to go public on Nasdaq under the ticker symbol “CBRS.”
The EC awards a six-year, €180M sovereign cloud contract to four European providers as part of a push to reduce the EU's dependence on non-European tech
The European Commission on Friday awarded a 180 million euro ($212 million) tender for sovereign cloud services to four European providers …
Netflix plans to launch a vertical video feed, to help with content discovery, this month, and plans to use AI for content creation and recommendations
Netflix is going to launch a TikTok-like vertical video feed within its apps this month, and plans to use AI broadly for content creation …
A profile of OpenTable CEO Debby Soo, who shifted its focus from diners to restaurants; it now seats ~2B diners a year across 65K restaurants, an all-time high
The pioneering reservation app was losing marquee restaurant groups before its chief executive made some big changes.
Sources: Cursor is in advanced talks to raise about $2B co-led by a16z at a pre-money valuation of more than $50B, with Nvidia participating
Cursor, a leading artificial intelligence startup for coding, is in advanced talks with investors to raise about $2 billion in a funding round …
Anthropic's Mythos adds to concerns about rising workloads for open-source maintainers, as many have already been dealing with a “crazy” number of bug reports
Anthropic's Mythos and similar AI tools can identify threats and vulnerabilities faster than small teams can fix them, putting the internet at risk.
China's smartphone shipments declined 4% YoY in Q1 amid memory shortages; Huawei's shipments grew 2% YoY for a 20% market share, iPhone grew 20% for a 19% share
An attacker targeting Kelp DAO's LayerZero-powered cross-chain bridge, appears to have drained ~$292M worth of rsETH before Kelp paused all rsETH contracts
Quick Take — An attacker seemingly drained 116,500 rsETH from Kelp DAO's LayerZero-powered cross-chain bridge on Saturday …
Sources: Recursive Superintelligence, a four-month-old start-up developing self-teaching AI and founded by ex-DeepMind and OpenAI engineers, has raised $500M+
Group founded by former engineers at DeepMind and OpenAI secures $4bn valuation in deal with Google's venture arm and Nvidia
Airbnb launches a pilot in NYC, LA, and other cities that lets users to select from a range of boutique hotels alongside private homes in a bid to boost growth
Company expands accommodation options alongside home rentals but analysts warn of stiff competition
Global DRAM supply is likely to meet only 60% of demand through 2027; memory to hit ~40% of low-end smartphone manufacturing costs by mid-2026, up from 20% now
TOKYO/SEOUL — A shortage of memory chips appears likely to continue until around 2027, with the top U.S. and South Korean …
Ad buyers say ad rates for ChatGPT are falling from $60 CPM to as low as $25 and the minimum spend to advertise is down to $50K from $250K at launch
OpenAI updates its Codex desktop app with features like computer control, an in-app browser, image generation, automation memory, plugin support, and more
Chinese lidar maker Hesai, a primary supplier for Nvidia's ADAS, announces EXT lidar, calling it the industry's first to integrate spatial and color detection
Hesai (2525.HK), China's leading maker of lidar, has developed a version of the technology used in autonomous driving that is capable …
Autonomous vehicle startups raised a record $21.4B across 34 deals through April 15, up from $5.9B raised across 99 investments globally in all of 2025
Funding to autonomous vehicle startups has seen a massive resurgence in 2026, more than tripling so far this year compared to all of 2025 globally, Crunchbase data shows.
Sources: xAI plans to let Cursor train Composer 2.5 AI coding model using tens of thousands of xAI's GPUs, a new strategy for xAI in a competitive AI landscape
Cyber experts say the EU's age verification app has glaring privacy and security problems; after saying it was ready, EU officials say the app is “still a demo”
India drops a proposal to require Apple, Google, Samsung, and other smartphone makers to preinstall the country's biometric identification app Aadhaar on phones
Docs: US tech companies successfully lobbied the EU to hide data centers' environmental toll; one of their demands was written almost verbatim into EU rules
In disclosures due to Broadcom CEO Hock Tan's presence on the Meta board, Meta says it paid Broadcom $2.3B in 2025; Tan is leaving the board
Sources: some shareholders are questioning whether Sam Altman should lead OpenAI through the turbulence of an IPO and have floated Bret Taylor as a successor
Kraken parent company Payward agrees to acquire Bitnomial, a digital asset derivatives platform, for up to $550M in cash and stock, which values Payward at $20B
Sources: DeepSeek is in talks to raise outside capital for the first time, seeking at least $300M at a valuation of at least $10B
Charles Schwab unveils its long-awaited crypto investing product, Schwab Crypto, with a 0.75% fee on every crypto trade and plans to launch in the coming weeks
A profile of wealth manager Iconiq, which, sources say, has $100B AUM, with $26B specifically for VC investing; Iconiq invested $3B into AI startups in 2025
Bluesky says a sophisticated DDoS attack is to blame for continued app outages but it has not seen any evidence of unauthorized access to private data
Bill Peebles, the researcher behind Sora, is leaving OpenAI, along with Srinivas Narayanan, OpenAI's CTO of enterprise applications
OpenAI is losing two of the architects of its most ambitious moonshots. Kevin Weil, who led the company's science research initiative, and Bill Peebles …
Sources suggest Anthropic is holding off from a wider Mythos release until it can reliably serve it to customers; Anthropic has suffered outages in recent weeks
Dario Amodei met with Susie Wiles despite lawsuits over whether AI lab is a national security threat
An interview with Dario Amodei, who says the negative narrative around AI is dominant because the industry hasn't yet fully delivered the benefits it promises
Unreformed Silicon neocon: ‘Democratic’ is when the US government does it to other people.Dave Lee /@davelee.me:Dario Amodei has lunch with the FT www.ft.com/content/9e0e...
Figma stock closed down 6.84% on Friday after Anthropic launched Claude Design, a dedicated app powered by its latest model Claude Opus 4.7
I'm the first to hate on Figma (the UX design app with dogshit UX) but this is not at all a replacement for it — Even calling Canva an Adobe replacement would be more accurate [embedded post]Tim Duf...