The Brutalist Report - techmeme
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- Former Mercor staffers describe "operational mishaps" at the $10B startup, including employee fraud, a security breach, and suspected North Korean infiltration (Rashi Shrivastava/Forbes) [16d]
- Filings: Caterpillar acquires self-driving electric tractor startup Monarch Tractor's assets, after it raised $200M+ and struggled to pivot to software services (Sean O'Kane/TechCrunch) [16d]
- Sources: Apple plans to send a significant part of its Siri team, known as a laggard, to an AI coding bootcamp; the group is expected to be fewer than 200 (The Information) [16d]
- X users complain that the latest crackdown on bots purged secret accounts they had used for years to watch and curate their favorite porn (Jason Parham/Wired) [16d]
- Objection, which aims to use AI and experts to evaluate claims in news stories, debuts with funding from Peter Thiel, Balaji Srinivasan; evaluations cost $2,000 (Rebecca Bellan/TechCrunch) [16d]
- NY-based Auctor, which uses AI to curate resource plans and process flows to help companies adopt new software, raised $20M in a combined seed and Series A (Chris Metinko/Axios) [16d]
- A jury finds that Live Nation and Ticketmaster illegally maintained monopoly power in the ticketing market, in a case brought by state AGs after the DOJ settled (NBC News) [16d]
- Google rolls out Gemini 3.1 Flash TTS, a text-to-speech model with support for over 70 languages and audio tags that give developers granular speech control (Matthias Bastian/The Decoder) [16d]
- Q&A with Jensen Huang on Nvidia's supply chain moat, competition from ASICs like Google's TPU, investing in AI labs and neoclouds, selling to China, and more (Dwarkesh Patel/Dwarkesh Podcast) [16d]
- WPP, Dentsu, and Publicis settle with the FTC over claims they colluded on misinformation policies that denied ad revenue to conservative publishers (David McCabe/New York Times) [16d]
- Adobe unveils Firefly AI Assistant, which can orchestrate and execute multistep tasks across Creative Cloud apps, available in public beta in the coming weeks (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch) [16d]
- Google launches a Gemini Mac app, featuring a keyboard shortcut, screen sharing for better context, image generation with Nano Banana, and more (Abner Li/9to5Google) [16d]
- The US Energy Information Administration plans to implement a mandatory nationwide survey of data centers focused on their energy use (Molly Taft/Wired) [16d]
- Cal.com, which provides scheduling software, is moving its core open-source codebase to a closed repository, citing the dangers of AI hacking its open code (Steven Vaughan-Nichols/ZDNET) [16d]
- AI cloud infrastructure company Parasail raised a $32M Series A led by Touring Capital and Kindred Ventures, bringing its total funding to $42M (Tim Fernholz/TechCrunch) [16d]
- Filings: Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz donated $25M to pro-AI super PAC Leading the Future, bringing the group's total cash on hand to over $51M (Bloomberg) [16d]
- Hilbert, whose AI software connects data across teams to help companies make decisions from a single system, raised a $28M Series A led by a16z (Madison Mills/Axios) [16d]
- A survey of US teens: ~90% say entertainment is a reason they use TikTok, Instagram, or Snapchat, 57% Snapchat message daily, and 37% say TikTok impacts sleep (Pew Research Center) [16d]
- Artemis, which aims to replace rule-based cybersecurity systems with an AI-driven centralized "brain", emerges from stealth with a $70M Series A led by Felicis (Sharon Goldman/Fortune) [16d]
- London-based Gizmo, which uses AI to turn young students' notes into gamified study materials, raised a $22M Series A led by Shine Capital and reports 13M users (Natalie Breymeyer/Axios) [16d]
- AMD, Arm, and Qualcomm invest $60M in London-based self-driving tech startup Wayve as part of an extension to its $1.2B Series D, announced in February (Kirsten Korosec/TechCrunch) [16d]
- Trainer maker Allbirds, which sold last week for $39M after its valuation fell from $4B in 2021, says it aims to become an AI compute provider; BIRD jumps 150%+ (Bryce Elder/Financial Times) [16d]
- The European Commission issues a supplementary statement of objections threatening Meta with an interim ban on WhatsApp policies that allegedly block rivals (Samuel Stolton/Bloomberg) [16d]
- Accel raised $5B, including a $4B Leaders fund, focused on writing large checks to late-stage startups globally, and a $650M sidecar fund, taking AUM to $36B (Rebecca Torrence/Bloomberg) [16d]
- Survey: only 35% of Virginia voters are comfortable with new data center construction, down from 69% in 2023, and just 37% support data center tax breaks (Washington Post) [16d]
- ASML says South Korea surpassed China as its largest market in Q1 2026, with shipments hitting 45% of net system sales, or €2.84B, up from 22% in Q4 2025 (Sarah Jacob/Bloomberg) [16d]
- Trading firm Jane Street takes an additional $1B stake in CoreWeave, and plans to spend ~$6B to access CoreWeave's Vera Rubin chips to build and deploy AI (Bloomberg) [16d]
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