The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

IAB and PwC: digital ad revenue hit $294.6B in 2025, up 13.9% YoY; social media advertising hit $117.7B, up 32.6%, and digital video hit $78B, up 25.4% (George Winslow/TV Tech) [13d]
The US and the Philippines agree to launch a high-tech industrial hub on the island of Luzon to counter China's supply chains; the US will run it as an SEZ (Wall Street Journal) [13d]
NYC-based Nas.com, an AI platform founded by content creator Nas Daily that helps solo entrepreneurs build online stores, raised a $27M Series A led by Khosla (Robert Scammell/Business Insider) [13d]
Netflix says its 2026 ad revenue remains on track to reach $3B, doubling from 2025, and it now works with over 4,000 advertising clients, up 70% YoY (Bill Bradley/Adweek) [13d]
Google updates AI Mode in Chrome, letting users open links side by side with AI Mode on desktop; users can search across multiple tabs on desktop and mobile (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch) [13d]
Netflix reports Q1 revenue up 16% YoY to $12.3B, vs. $12.2B est., net income of $5.28B, and forecasts Q2 EPS below estimates; NFLX drops 8%+ after hours (Molly Schuetz/Bloomberg) [13d]
Netflix chairman and co-founder Reed Hastings will step down from the company's board after his term expires in June to focus on philanthropy and other pursuits (Isabella Simonetti/Wall Street Journal) [13d]
Sources: Upscale AI, which builds AI networking infrastructure, is in talks to raise $180M to $200M at a $2B valuation, its third funding round in seven months (Bloomberg) [13d]
AI labs are buying Slack, Jira, and email archives from defunct startups to build "reinforcement learning gyms" and train AI agents in simulated workplaces (Anna Tong/Forbes) [13d]
OpenAI launches GPT-Rosalind, an AI model for life sciences research, including drug discovery, as a research preview for customers such as Moderna and Amgen (Megan Morrone/Axios) [13d]
OpenAI's global policy chief, Chris Lehane, calls out AI "doomers" and says "when you put some of those thoughts and ideas out there, they do have consequences" (Caroline O'Donovan/The San Francisco ...) [13d]
Memo: the White House notified Cabinet departments that OMB is setting up protections that would allow their agencies to begin using Anthropic's Mythos model (Bloomberg) [13d]
DeepL, best known for its text translation tools, launches DeepL Voice-to-Voice, which enables real-time spoken translation, with add-ons for services like Zoom (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch) [13d]
The UK unveils Sovereign AI, a £500M fund to invest in domestic AI startups, starting with Callosum, which builds software to help different chips work together (Joel Khalili/Wired) [13d]
OpenAI updates its Codex desktop app with features like computer control, an in-app browser, image generation, automation memory, plugin support, and more (David Gewirtz/ZDNET) [13d]
Google's 2025 Ads Safety Report: Google blocked a record 8.3B ads, up 63% YoY, but suspended 36% fewer advertisers, attributing the disparity to its use of AI (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch) [13d]
Drift Protocol secures $147.5M in funding, including $127.5M from Tether, to replace Circle stablecoin with USDT after a $270M exploit linked to North Korea (Will Canny/CoinDesk) [13d]
The US DOJ says a judge sentenced two US citizens to a combined 16 years in prison for running laptop farms that let North Korean IT workers pose as US workers (Jowi Morales/Tom's Hardware) [13d]
Factory, whose AI coding agents switch between AI models depending on the complexity of the task, is in talks to raise $150M led by Khosla at a $1.5B valuation (Angel Au-Yeung/Wall Street Journal) [13d]
Roblox revamps Roblox Assistant, its plain-language AI tool for game development, with agentic tools to let developers plan, build, and test games (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch) [13d]
Solidroad, which uses AI to evaluate customer interactions with human and AI agents to find risk, skill gaps, and more, raised a $25M Series A led by Hedosophia (Paul Gillin/SiliconANGLE) [13d]
Google announces a Gemini app integration between Personal Intelligence and Nano Banana 2 to let the AI image generator "automatically reflect" users' tastes (Abner Li/9to5Google) [13d]
Sabi, which is developing a brain-computer interface beanie that can decode internal speech into words, emerges from stealth with backing from Khosla and others (Emily Mullin/Wired) [13d]
Anthropic says Opus 4.7 uses an updated tokenizer that "improves how the model processes text", but "the tradeoff is that the same input can map to more tokens" (Zac Hall/9to5Mac) [13d]
Canva unveils Canva AI 2.0, which can generate editable layered designs from conversational prompts using Canva's foundation model built specifically for design (Olivia Poh/Bloomberg) [13d]
Anthropic says Opus 4.7 is "less broadly capable" than Claude Mythos Preview and that its "cyber capabilities are not as advanced" as those of Mythos Preview (Ashley Capoot/CNBC) [13d]
Anthropic releases Claude Opus 4.7, saying it is a "notable improvement" on Opus 4.6 in advanced software engineering and comes with a new "xhigh" effort level (Anthropic) [13d]
Meta is increasing the price of the Quest 3 by $100 to $599.99 and both Quest 3S models by $50 to $349.99 for 128GB and $449.99 for 256GB, starting April 19 (Jay Peters/The Verge) [13d]
Financial services startup Slash, which is building an AI agent, raised $100M led by Ribbit at a $1.4B valuation and reports nearly $300M in annualized revenue (Rebecca Torrence/Bloomberg) [13d]
Apple says a record 30% of material across all products it shipped in 2025 came from recycled content; all Apple-designed batteries now use 100% recycled cobalt (Hartley Charlton/MacRumors) [13d]
Roku says it is in 100M+ homes globally and its devices are used by "more than half of all US broadband households"; Roku had $4.15B in 2025 platform revenue (Chris Welch/Bloomberg) [13d]
Sources: Google is negotiating a deal with the US DOD that would let the Pentagon deploy Gemini AI models in classified settings, reversing its previous stance (Erin Woo/The Information) [13d]
Anthropic secures new London office space for 800 people, days after OpenAI unveiled its first London office; Anthropic currently has 200+ London staff (Kai Nicol-Schwarz/CNBC) [13d]
The NIST narrows its National Vulnerability Database priorities to CVEs in CISA's known exploited catalog, to deal with a backlog after its 2024 funding lapse (Matt Kapko/CyberScoop) [13d]
Bubblemaps analysis: an anonymous Polymarket trader netted $316,346 in profits by correctly betting on Biden's pardons for Hunter Biden, Liz Cheney, and others (Bobby Allyn/NPR) [13d]