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]