The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

Sources: Recursive Superintelligence, a four-month-old start-up developing self-teaching AI and founded by ex-DeepMind and OpenAI engineers, has raised $500M+ (Financial Times) [12d]
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 (Axios) [12d]
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 (Zvi Mowshowitz/Don't Worry About the Vase) [12d]
Bill Peebles, the researcher behind Sora, is leaving OpenAI as the company consolidates around enterprise AI and its forthcoming "superapp" (Rebecca Bellan/TechCrunch) [12d]
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 (Jordan Novet/CNBC) [12d]
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 (Maxwell Zeff/Wired) [12d]
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 (Reuters) [12d]
Figma stock drops ~7% after Anthropic launched Claude Design, a dedicated app powered by its latest model Claude Opus 4.7 (Jon Keegan/Sherwood News) [12d]
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 (Martin Peers/The Information) [12d]
Sources: Cursor is in advanced talks to raise about $2B co-led by a16z at a valuation of more than $50B, not including the investment, with Nvidia participating (Bloomberg) [12d]
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 (Natasha Mascarenhas/Bloomberg) [12d]
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 (Maxwell Zeff/Wired) [12d]
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 (Krystal Scanlon/Digiday) [12d]
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 (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch) [12d]
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 (Ivan Lam/Counterpoint Research) [12d]
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 (Grace Kay/Business Insider) [12d]
Anthropic launches Claude Design, a new experimental product that lets users create visuals like prototypes, slides, one-pagers, and more using Claude (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch) [12d]
Sources: DeepSeek is in talks to raise outside capital for the first time, seeking at least $300M at a valuation of at least $10B (The Information) [12d]
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 (Wall Street Journal) [12d]
India drops a proposal to require Apple, Google, Samsung, and others to pre-install the country's biometric identification app Aadhaar on phones (Reuters) [12d]
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 (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch) [12d]
Loop, which uses AI to predict supply chain disruptions, raised a $95M Series C co-led by Valor Equity Partners and the Valor Atreides AI Fund (Sean O'Kane/TechCrunch) [12d]
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 (John Thornhill/Financial Times) [12d]
Kraken parent company Payward agrees to acquire Bitnomial, a digital asset derivatives platform, for up to $550M in cash and stock (Will Canny/CoinDesk) [12d]
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 a "demo" (Politico) [12d]
China fines leading food delivery apps, including Alibaba and Meituan, a combined ~$528M, the largest fine for the sector since the 2015 food safety law (Luz Ding/Bloomberg) [12d]
Charles Schwab unveils its long-awaited crypto investing product, Schwab Crypto, with a 0.75% fee on trades and plans to launch in the coming weeks (Tanaya Macheel/CNBC) [12d]
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 (The Guardian) [12d]