The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

Social gaming startup Rec Room is shutting down its service on June 1, saying it could not find a path to profitability; it was valued at $3.5B in December 2021 (Todd Bishop/GeekWire) [32d]
Inside David Sacks' new role shaping Trump's AI agenda; officials say Sriram Krishnan is taking on a position at the National Economic Council to focus on AI (Axios) [32d]
Micron shares closed down 10% on Monday and are now down 30% since Micron's blowout earnings report on March 18; Sandisk fell 7% and Western Digital dropped 9% (Lola Murti/CNBC) [32d]
OpenAI introduces a Codex plugin for Claude Code, letting users invoke Codex from inside Claude Code to review code or delegate tasks (Vaibhav (VB) Srivastav/@reach_vb) [32d]
Leaked January presentation: Coatue estimated that Anthropic would lose $14B in EBITDA on $18B in revenue in 2026 and reach a $1.995T valuation in 2030 (Eric Newcomer/Newcomer) [32d]
Alibaba releases its Qwen3.5-Omni omnimodal LLM with support for 10+ hours of audio input, saying the Plus variant surpasses Gemini 3.1 Pro on audio benchmarks (Qwen) [32d]
Levels.fyi: median base-salary offers for US software engineers at VC-backed startups have risen 25% to $200K since 2022; total compensation has risen just 18% (Katherine Bindley/Wall Street Journal) [32d]
Apple Intelligence is rolling out in China, according to user reports, after launching in the US in October 2024 (Ryan Christoffel/9to5Mac) [32d]
Sources: US prosecutors are exploring whether some prediction market bets, including on the capture of Nicolás Maduro, violated insider trading and other laws (Kara Scannell/CNN) [32d]
Meta is testing an Instagram Plus subscription in a few countries, offering features including anonymous Story viewing and extended 48-hour Story durations (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch) [32d]
Quinnipiac poll: 55% of Americans say AI will do more harm than good in their day-to-day lives, and 65% oppose building data centers in their community (Emily Birnbaum/Bloomberg) [32d]
Fermi shares drop 12%+ after the data center real estate company reported a $486M YTD net loss, amid concerns over a lack of a tenant for its Texas data center (Financial Times) [32d]
Tel Aviv-based Sett, which builds AI agents to automate game marketing, raised a $30M Series B led by Greenfield Partners, bringing its total funding to $57M (Meir Orbach/CTech) [32d]
Valinor, which aims to use smart contracts to replace manual lending processes in the private credit industry, raised a $25M seed led by Castle Island Ventures (Ben Weiss/Fortune) [32d]
Sources: E*Trade is in talks to lead SpaceX IPO share sale to retail investors; Robinhood and SoFi have pitched for roles but SpaceX is mulling cutting them out (Reuters) [32d]
State of AI safety: as capabilities grow and models can monitor other models, issues like adversarial robustness persist and society is still not ready for AI (Boaz Barak/Windows On Theory) [32d]
Match Group agrees to settle an FTC lawsuit claiming it illegally shared user data from the OkCupid app with facial recognition tech company Clarifai in 2014 (Jonathan Stempel/Reuters) [32d]
A Delaware judge reassigns Elon Musk cases over "disproportionate media attention" after allegations she "liked" a LinkedIn post celebrating a Musk legal defeat (Sujeet Indap/Financial Times) [32d]
Sycamore, founded by former Atlassian CTO Sri Viswanath to let enterprises build, deploy, and monitor AI agents, raised a $65M seed led by Coatue and Lightspeed (Lucinda Shen/Axios) [32d]
After Copilot injected an ad into a pull request on GitHub, referencing Raycast, GitHub says it "disabled product tips entirely thanks to the feedback" (Sean Endicott/Windows Central) [32d]
Examining the Smartphone Theory of Everything, which blames phones for anxiety, populism, and polarization, despite harms being concentrated in the Anglosphere (Derek Thompson) [32d]
ScaleOps, which makes automated cloud spend tools, raised a $130M Series C led by Insight Partners at an $800M+ valuation, bringing its total funding to $210M+ (Meir Orbach/CTech) [32d]
Uber agrees to acquire Berlin-based chauffeur booking app Blacklane for an undisclosed sum to bolster its Uber Elite service, set to close by the end of 2026 (Natalie Lung/Bloomberg) [32d]
Microsoft rolls out Copilot Cowork to its Frontier program for early-stage testing, including a new Researcher Critique tool using Anthropic and OpenAI models (Jared Spataro/Microsoft 365 Blog) [32d]
Fabless AI chip startup Rebellions raised $400M in a pre-IPO round at a $2.34B valuation, bringing its total funding to $850M, with $650M in the past six months (Lucas Ropek/TechCrunch) [32d]
New York-based Qodo, which offers AI agents for code review, testing, and governance, raised a $70M Series B led by Qumra, taking its total funding to $120M (Kate Park/TechCrunch) [32d]
OpenAI's ChatGPT app store now has 300+ app integrations six months after its launch, but faces sluggish adoption due to limited functionality for many apps (Natalie Lung/Bloomberg) [33d]
Finnish startup IQM Quantum Computers raised €50M from BlackRock to accelerate its global growth, ahead of a planned dual US and Helsinki IPO later in 2026 (Anne Kauranen/Reuters) [33d]
London-based money transfer company Wise plans to launch UK bank accounts, joining an increasingly crowded market; Monzo reports 15M personal and business users (Aisha S Gani/Bloomberg) [33d]
Space data center startup Starcloud raised a $170M Series A led by Benchmark and EQT at a $1.1B valuation, and plans to launch Starcloud 2 later in 2026 (Tim Fernholz/TechCrunch) [33d]
How Google DeepMind Chief Scientist Jeff Dean has been an outspoken voice on politics, a rare tech leader openly criticizing Trump actions and an ICE shooting (Katherine Blunt/Wall Street Journal) [33d]
A study finds ~$143M in suspicious profits on Polymarket over two years, using patterns consistent with the use of nonpublic info, as prediction markets boom (Bloomberg) [33d]
Some schools in North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, and Michigan are reevaluating classroom tech usage, including Chromebooks, amid student screen time concerns (New York Times) [33d]
Q&A with NYU professor Julian Togelius on his recent paper about LLMs' limitations in playing video games, why coding is a kind of well-designed game, and more (Matthew S. Smith/IEEE Spectrum) [33d]
Amazon MGM's Project Hail Mary becomes its highest-grossing film ever, crossing $300M globally, including $54.1M just this weekend; the movie cost $200M to make (Brent Lang/Variety) [33d]
AI has led some employers like L'Oréal to return to in-person assessments during recruiting, as senior HR leaders see a steep rise in AI-generated applications (Bethan Staton/Financial Times) [33d]
Some thoughts about companies and people in San Francisco adapting to AI workflows, AI's sycophancy, "cognitive offloading" and "cognitive surrender", and more (Ezra Klein/New York Times) [33d]
A look at Amazon's major push into rural US areas, including building 24-hour delivery distribution centers in recent years, encroaching on Walmart's territory (Bloomberg) [33d]
Paris-based AI startup Mistral raised $830M in its debut debt financing to build Nvidia-powered data centers across Europe; Mistral plans to spend €4B in total (Tim Bradshaw/Financial Times) [33d]
DeepSeek's chatbot suffered a major outage of over seven hours in China, its biggest outage since debut in 2025 and an unusual downtime for a globally used app (Bloomberg) [33d]
An interview with early Twitter executive Jason Goldman on the platform's early free-speech-maximalist decisions, underinvestment in trust and safety, and more (Charlie Warzel/The Atlantic) [33d]
A look at Pretext, a new JS library that solves the problem of calculating multi-line text height without touching the DOM, enabling highly dynamic layouts (Simon Willison/Simon Willison's Weblog) [33d]
Emails, texts, and NTSB reports show Waymo and an Austin school district struggled for months to train robotaxis to stop for school buses as required by law (Aarian Marshall/Wired) [33d]
Chinese photonic chipmaker Yuanjie reported 2025 revenue up 138.5% YoY to ~$86.99M, data center revenue up 719% to ~$56.89M, ahead of its April 1 Hong Kong IPO (Wency Chen/South China Morning Post) [33d]
PwC: 76 mainland Chinese companies listed on Hong Kong Stock Exchange in 2025, up from 30 in 2024, despite the city's waning appeal to international investors (Sylvia Chang/BBC) [33d]
Some defense tech startups are considering relocating to the US due to the UK's military spending delays, as some execs say the UK sector is at a "standstill" (Financial Times) [33d]
An analysis of four large private-credit funds finds an average of ~25% software share exposure vs. ~19% disclosed, amid investor concerns about software stocks (Wall Street Journal) [33d]
Inside the rise and fall of Sora, whose team worked separately from OpenAI's core research team, as OpenAI shuts down Sora and redirects compute to other tasks (Wall Street Journal) [33d]
Some developers say the App Store review process is taking significantly longer, up to multiple weeks, with an influx of vibe-coded apps as the likely cause (Business Insider) [33d]
Midjourney CEO David Holz says the company's revenue "significantly surpassed" $200M in 2023, and has "gone up" since then, despite its declining web traffic (Jemima McEvoy/The Information) [33d]