The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

• AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon sign an "agreement in principle" to form a joint venture aiming to end wireless dead zones in the US, without giving many details (Jess Weatherbed/The Verge) [24m]
• Motorola Razr Fold review: good performance and screen, great battery life, sharp camera, and native stylus support, but heavier than Z Fold 7 and lackluster AI (Sam Rutherford/Engadget) [34m]
• Gallup: 70% of Americans oppose local data center construction, citing water and electricity issues, with opposition higher among Democrats than Republicans (Tim Craig/Washington Post) [43m]
• Klarna reports Q1 revenue up 44% YoY to $1.01B, above est., GMV up 33% to $33.7B, active customers up 20% to 119M, and a $1M profit, up from a $99M loss YoY (Connor Hart/Wall Street Journal) [1h]
• Spotify says it will adopt Apple's HTTP Live Streaming tech for video podcasts later in 2026, helping creators distribute podcasts on Apple Podcasts and Spotify (Zac Hall/9to5Mac) [1h]
• The UK CMA launches an antitrust investigation into Microsoft's business software dominance, focusing on its bundling of Windows, Word, Teams, and other apps (Reuters) [2h]
• Meta President Dina Powell McCormick is traveling with President Trump on his China trip and met King Charles III, indicating she is Meta's new global emissary (Kurt Wagner/Bloomberg) [2h]
• SMIC reports Q1 revenue up 11.5% YoY to ~$2.5B and net profit up 5% YoY to ~$197.4M, below $223.6M est., weighed down by higher operating expenses, up 30% YoY (Sherry Qin/Wall Street Journal) [2h]
• As Meta prepares to lay off ~10% of its staff on May 20, sources say morale is low, and Meta forcibly moved 1,000+ engineers to an AI unit to build GenAI models (Wired) [3h]
• Blackstone Digital Infrastructure Trust raised $1.75B in its US IPO, selling 87.5M shares at $20 each, and plans to acquire data centers worth $250M to $1.5B (Subrat Patnaik/Bloomberg) [3h]
• Zhaopin: Chinese graduates returning home from abroad rose 12% YoY in 2025, fueling Beijing's plans to take on Silicon Valley; China is offering big incentives (Wall Street Journal) [3h]
• Foxconn reports Q1 revenue up 29% YoY to ~$67B and net profit up 19% YoY to ~$1.6B, meeting est., as it boosts AI server production, its largest revenue source (Wall Street Journal) [4h]
• Filing: Jensen Huang's foundation bought $108.3M worth of AI computing time from CoreWeave and is donating it to universities and other nonprofit institutes (Max A. Cherney/Reuters) [7h]
• Canadian legaltech company Clio says its ARR has reached $500M, citing demand for its AI services; it was valued at $5B after a $500M Series G in November 2025 (Marina Temkin/TechCrunch) [7h]
• Sources: the US cleared ~10 Chinese companies, including Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance, and JD.com, to buy Nvidia H200 chips, but no deliveries have been made (Reuters) [7h]
• Riyadh-based Stitch, which develops software for banks and financial services companies, raised a $25M Series A led by a16z, its first investment in the Gulf (Aisha S Gani/Bloomberg) [8h]
• Sources: climate watchdog SBTi drops proposed rules that would limit tech companies' claims that gas-fueled data centers are covered by clean energy investments (Kenza Bryan/Financial Times) [8h]
• Musk v. Altman filing: Sam Altman holds $2B+ in stakes in companies that have done business with OpenAI, including a $1.7B stake in fusion startup Helion Energy (Kenrick Cai/Reuters) [8h]
• LY Corp launches a bid with Bain Capital to buy Kakaku.com, which operates restaurant review and booking site Tabelog, for $4B, challenging EQT's $3.75B offer (Nikkei Asia) [9h]
• ZipRecruiter: IT and CS job postings are up 14.2% YoY in April; entry-level roles fell from 8.1% a year ago to 7.4%, while senior roles grew from 38.8% to 43.1% (Katherine Bindley/Wall Street Journal) [9h]
• Microsoft updates Edge with new AI features, including letting Copilot gather information from open tabs and use browsing history for more relevant answers (Emma Roth/The Verge) [10h]
• OpenAI says it would support a global AI governance body that is led by the US and includes China as a member, similar to the International Atomic Energy Agency (Maggie Eastland/Bloomberg) [10h]
• Sources: Google plans to announce a new Gemini model at its I/O conference next week; the model will land roughly in the class of GPT-5.5, but short of Mythos (Alex Heath/Sources) [11h]
• TikTok launches TikTok GO in the US for users to book hotels, attractions, and experiences directly in the app, partnering with Booking.com, Expedia, and others (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch) [11h]
• OpenEvidence, an AI-powered medical search tool, says it's used by two-thirds of US physicians, or ~650K doctors, and an additional 1.2M doctors internationally (Jared Perlo/NBC News) [12h]
• Sources: Apollo Global, Morgan Stanley, and others are testing Grok internally as part of xAI's finance sector push, but financiers are rarely using it for work (Carmen Arroyo/Bloomberg) [13h]
• Anthropic unveils Claude Agent SDK credits for paid plans, which users can allocate for programmatic use of third-party agents like OpenClaw, starting June 15 (Carl Franzen/VentureBeat) [14h]
• Source: Cerebras priced its IPO at $185 per share, above the expected range of $150 to $160, raising at least $5.55B and valuing it at $56.4B fully diluted (Jordan Novet/CNBC) [14h]
• Netflix says its ad tier now has 250M monthly active viewers, up from 94M in 2025, and is expanding to 15 new countries, as it tests an ad personalization tool (Emma Roth/The Verge) [15h]
• Sources: Microsoft is in discussions to acquire LLM developer Inception; SpaceX also courted Inception, which is looking for a price of over $1B (Reuters) [15h]
• Cisco reports Q3 revenue up 12% YoY to $15.84B, vs. $15.56B est., forecasts Q4 revenue above est., and is cutting almost 4,000 jobs; CSCO jumps 17%+ after hours (Jordan Novet/CNBC) [16h]
• Mythos Preview is the first AI model to complete both of AISI's cyber ranges, which measure models' cyberattack capabilities; GPT-5.5 solved only one of them (AI Security Institute) [16h]
• Q&A with Anthropic CFO Krishna Rao on the "cone of uncertainty" in AI, allocating compute, returns to frontier intelligence, platform vs. application, and more (Invest Like The Best on YouTube) [18h]
• Musk v. Altman: Microsoft executive Michael Wetter testifies that Microsoft has spent $100B+ on its partnership with OpenAI, including its original investments (Bloomberg) [19h]
• LinkedIn says it has "implemented organizational changes"; a source says LinkedIn plans to cut about 5% of its 17,500 full-time workers (Reuters) [20h]
• Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe's Mind Robotics, which is building AI-powered robots for manufacturing tasks, raised $400M, source says at a $3.4B valuation (Sean McLain/Wall Street Journal) [20h]
• Instagram rolls out Instants, which lets users share ephemeral photos, as an in-app feature in Instagram and as a standalone app in select countries (Zac Hall/9to5Mac) [21h]
• Adaption, co-founded by ex-Cohere VP of AI research Sara Hooker, unveils AutoScientist, which can automate the research loop behind model training and alignment (Russell Brandom/TechCrunch) [21h]
• Anthropic launches Claude for Small Business, featuring a host of automated services like bookkeeping functions, business insights, and tools for ad campaigns (Lucas Ropek/TechCrunch) [21h]
• Microsoft unveils MDASH, a security system that can orchestrate 100+ AI agents to find vulnerabilities, and says it identified 16 Windows vulnerabilities (Gyana Swain/CSO) [21h]
• Sources: Mistral has been developing a cybersecurity-focused AI model and held discussions about it with European banks, which don't have access to Mythos (Bloomberg) [21h]
• Sources: Arm and SoftBank expressed preliminary interest to acquire Cerebras weeks before its expected IPO; Cerebras rebuffed them (Bloomberg) [22h]
• The FTC says Shutterstock will pay $35M to settle charges that Shutterstock misled consumers about its subscription plans and made it too difficult to cancel (Jonathan Stempel/Reuters) [22h]
• OpenAI endorses the Kids Online Safety Act and Illinois SB 315, an AI safety bill to create requirements around transparency, incident reporting, and more (OpenAI Global Affairs) [22h]
• Q&A with Alexandr Wang on rebuilding Meta's AI stack, launching Muse Spark, personal superintelligence, acquiring Assured Robot Intelligence, and more (Ashlee Vance/Core Memory) [22h]
• Tencent says it plans to spend significantly more on AI infrastructure in H2 2026 as more China-designed AI chips become available "month by month" (The Information) [23h]
• Investor docs: Anthropic's revenue run-rate is on track to hit $50B by the end of June; Ramp says more of its customers now use Anthropic than OpenAI, a first (Kate Clark/Wall Street Journal) [23h]
• A profile of California Rep. Ro Khanna, who spent years cheering on the tech industry and now supports a 5% billionaire wealth tax and stricter AI regulations (Bloomberg) [23h]
• UK chip startup Fractile raised a $220M Series B led by Factorial Funds, Accel and Founders Fund to make specialized logic and memory chips for inference (Robbie Whelan/Wall Street Journal) [23h]
• WhatsApp launches Incognito Chat, an AI chat mode built on Private Processing that Meta says lets users talk to AI without Meta being able to access the chats (Lily Hay Newman/Wired) [23h]
• German quantum MRI imaging startup NVision raised a $55M Series B led by Abbott at a $250M to $300M valuation, and plans a $100M+ Series C later in 2026 (Katherine Davis/Axios) [23h]
• Apple files an EU submission criticizing draft DMA measures that would require Google to give competing AI services access to Android apps, citing privacy risks (Foo Yun Chee/Reuters) [23h]