The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

• Sources: the US DOJ arrested a soldier involved in the capture of Nicolás Maduro for allegedly making $400K+ on Polymarket by betting on his removal from office (ABC News) [21d]
• Texas Instruments stock rose 19% on Thursday, its best day since 2000, after upbeat Q2 guidance driven by high demand for analog chips used in AI data centers (Katie Tarasov/CNBC) [21d]
• Shenzhen-based Pudu Robotics, which makes commercial service robots, raised ~$150M, bringing its total funding to $300M+, and says its valuation exceeds $1.5B (The Robot Report) [21d]
• Intel reports Q1 revenue up 7% YoY to $13.58B, vs. $12.42B est., and forecasts Q2 revenue and adjusted EPS above estimates; INTC jumps 15%+ after hours (Katie Tarasov/CNBC) [21d]
• Music publishers including UMG, Warner Music, and Sony drop a copyright suit against Verizon following a SCOTUS decision limiting ISP liability in Cox's suit (Kyle Jahner/Bloomberg Law) [21d]
• Xbox CEO Asha Sharma and Chief Content Officer Matt Booty detail their "return of Xbox" strategy, including daily active players as its "new north star" (Tom Warren/The Verge) [21d]
• Instagram launched Instants, an app for sharing disappearing photos, in Italy this week, after rolling out an Instants feature in its main app in some regions (Sydney Bradley/Business Insider) [21d]
• OpenAI says "GPT-5.5 matches GPT-5.4 per-token latency in real-world serving, while performing at a much higher level of intelligence" (OpenAI) [21d]
• Anthropic says it has fixed three causes of recent Claude Code quality issues: reduced default reasoning, a caching bug, and a system prompt to reduce verbosity (Anthropic) [21d]
• GPT-5.5 is priced at $5/1M input tokens and $30/1M output tokens, double GPT-5.4's pricing; GPT-5.5 Pro costs $30/1M input tokens and $180/1M output tokens (Carl Franzen/VentureBeat) [21d]
• GPT-5.5 is rolling out to Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise users in ChatGPT and Codex, and GPT-5.5 Pro to Pro, Business, and Enterprise users in ChatGPT (The Verge) [21d]
• OpenAI says GPT-5.5's improvements are strongest in agentic coding, computer use, and early scientific research, which require reasoning across longer contexts (Madison Mills/Axios) [21d]
• OpenAI unveils GPT 5.5, intended to be better at completing work without much direction, saying the model "kind of figures it out, deals with ambiguity" (Rachel Metz/Bloomberg) [21d]
• At a town hall, Asha Sharma said Microsoft is returning to using Xbox for its gaming division, instead of Microsoft Gaming, as "Xbox needs to be our identity" (Tom Warren/The Verge) [21d]
• Memo: Meta plans to cut 10% of workers, or ~8,000 jobs, on May 20 and won't fill 6,000 open roles, in an effort to offset its AI spending and boost efficiency (Kurt Wagner/Bloomberg) [21d]
• Microsoft announces its first voluntary retirement program, for staff whose years of employment and age add up to 70+; source: 7% of US employees are eligible (Jordan Novet/CNBC) [21d]
• A look at Microsoft's recent wave of executive departures, as it struggles to retain talent and changes its annual rewards and performance programs in response (Tom Warren/The Verge) [21d]
• Internal memo: Amazon is replacing white-collar job titles at its Ring and Blink units with the designation "builder", and "builder leaders" for managers (Greg Bensinger/Reuters) [21d]
• Manila-based Salmon, a consumer finance app targeting underbanked Filipinos, raised $60M in equity and $40M in debt; it raised $310M to date, $160M in equity (Kate Park/TechCrunch) [21d]
• Microsoft announces the first voluntary retirement program in its 50-year history, for US staffers whose combined years of service added to their age totals 70+ (Tom Warren/The Verge) [21d]
• Sources: Thoma Bravo prepares to hand over customer experience management company Medallia to creditors, leading to a ~$5.1B wipeout for Medallia's investors (Reuters) [21d]
• Joint statement: Apple, Amazon, and others push back on stricter emissions reporting rules proposed by climate body Greenhouse Gas Protocol to cut greenwashing (Olivia Raimonde/Bloomberg) [21d]
• Vercel says some customer accounts were compromised prior to its early-April breach, potentially through social engineering, malware, or other methods (Zack Whittaker/TechCrunch) [21d]
• WhatsApp partners with PayU to roll out prepaid mobile recharges in India; it remains a marginal payments player in India despite launching payments in 2020 (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch) [21d]
• Memo: White House says it has info indicating "foreign entities, principally based in China" are engaged in "industrial scale distillation" of American AI tech (Financial Times) [21d]
• Anthropic's valuation has hit $1T on Forge Global, a leading private marketplace exchange, surpassing OpenAI's valuation on the platform of $880B (Ben Bergman/Business Insider) [21d]
• Orkes, which helps companies scale their AI and agentic systems, raised $60M, including a $40M Series B led by AVP, bringing its total funding to ~$90M (Chris Metinko/Axios) [21d]
• How Cash App founder Bob Lee's 2023 killing fed into a narrative pushed by tech leaders like Elon Musk about SF's decline until an acquaintance was convicted (Shawn Wen/Bloomberg) [21d]
• Spotify celebrates its 20th anniversary with a first-ever list of its 20 most streamed artists, albums, songs, podcasts, and audiobooks (Gil Kaufman/Billboard) [21d]
• Lyft agrees to buy London black cab app Gett, its third acquisition in the past year, as the company expands its presence beyond the US (Natalie Lung/Bloomberg) [21d]
• Petual, which automates internal audit work and generates auditor-ready workpapers, raised $20M across a pre-seed led by First Round and a seed led by a16z (Ryan Lawler/Axios) [21d]
• Beehiiv rolls out new creator tools, including metered paywalls, letting creators host webinars for up to 10,000 people, AI analytics, and more (Lauren Forristal/TechCrunch) [21d]
• Sam Bankman-Fried withdraws his request for a new trial, saying he doubts he would receive a fair hearing; his broader appeal remains pending (Olivier Acuna/CoinDesk) [21d]
• Cloudsmith, which is building a cloud-native system to manage software artifacts, raised a $72M Series C, following a $23M Series B in 2025 (Natalie Breymeyer/Axios) [21d]
• Anthropic and law firm Freshfields sign a deal to develop specialized legal AI tools for document drafting, contract review, due diligence, and more (Kaye Wiggins/Financial Times) [21d]
• Turkey's parliament passes a bill requiring social media and online game companies to restrict access for children under 15, following a school shooting (Andrew Wilks/Associated Press) [21d]
• Omni, which is building a "semantic translation layer" for enterprise data, raised a $120M Series C led by Iconiq at a $1.5B valuation, up from $650M in 2025 (Lily Mae Lazarus/Fortune) [21d]
• France-based Univity, which seeks to build 3,400 VLEO satellites to reduce Europe's reliance on Starlink, raised €27M, bringing its total funding to €68M (Gianluca Lo Nostro/Reuters) [21d]
• S-1 excerpts: SpaceX says its total addressable market could be as much as $28.5T, with $26.5T from the AI sector, most of it from AI for businesses (Reuters) [21d]
• Filing: Netflix plans a $25B share buyback, adding to a Dec. 2024 program that still has $6.8B for purchases; NFLX is down 13% since its Q1 earnings on April 16 (Amy Thomson/Bloomberg) [21d]
• Sources: DeepSeek is fundraising to keep its researchers, some of whom have left for rivals whose valuations have soared; it is targeting a $20B valuation (Zijing Wu/Financial Times) [21d]
• Sources: Bain Capital seeks to sell a stake of 40%+ in Bridge Data Centres in a deal that would value the Singapore-based data infrastructure builder at $5B (Reuters) [21d]
• Tencent releases Hy3-preview, its first AI model developed under former OpenAI researcher Yao Shunyu; the model features 295B parameters, down from HY2's 400B (Vincent Chow/South China Morning Post) [21d]
• TSMC SVP Kevin Zhang says the company plans to open an advanced chip packaging plant in Arizona by 2029 and that construction has begun (Reuters) [21d]
• Sensor Tower: India's mobile app IAP revenue crossed $300M in Q1, up 33% YoY, with non-gaming apps generating $200M+, much of it captured by global platforms (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch) [21d]
• SpaceX's S-1 excerpts list "manufacturing our own GPUs" among the "substantial capital expenditures" it is undertaking, with the size of the expenditure TBD (Reuters) [21d]
• Around 30K attend a Samsung union rally demanding 15% of operating profits for chip division staff amid the AI boom; the demand totals $27B or $400K+ per worker (Yoolim Lee/Bloomberg) [21d]
• X says it is deprecating X Communities, giving members until May 30 to migrate to XChat, and plans to increase group chat limits to 1,000 in the next two weeks (Nikita Bier/@nikitabier) [21d]
• STMicro reports Q1 revenue of $3.10B, above $3.04B est., $171M operating income, above $165.8 est., and forecasts $3.45B revenue for Q2, above $3.21B est. (Nathan Vifflin/Reuters) [21d]
• Microsoft says Copilot's agentic features in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint are now generally available and enabled by default for 365 Copilot and 365 Premium (Sumit Chauhan/Microsoft 365 Blog) [21d]
• A poll of 4,000 workers in the US and the UK finds that the highest-earning and most experienced workers are adopting AI in their jobs far faster than others (Financial Times) [21d]
• Report: China's 360 Digital Security Group has uncovered ~1,000 previously unknown vulnerabilities, including in Microsoft's Office, using an AI-powered agent (Ryan Gallagher/Bloomberg) [21d]
• US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick says Nvidia has yet to sell H200 chips to Chinese companies and that the Chinese government has not approved such purchases (Alexandra Alper/Reuters) [22d]
• Sources: Microsoft told carbon-removal project developers it is shelving contracts under negotiation; Microsoft has been a major backer of carbon capture tech (Alastair Marsh/Bloomberg) [22d]
• GitHub says it has begun collecting pseudonymous client-side telemetry from command-line interface (CLI) users and enabled it by default (Brandon Vigliarolo/The Register) [22d]
• Elon Musk says Tesla plans to use Intel's 14A process technology to make chips at its Terafab project, which would make Tesla the first major customer for 14A (Reuters) [22d]
• TSMC says it will hold off on using ASML's most advanced high-NA EUV machines, costing upwards of €350M apiece, for chip production through 2029 to save money (Bloomberg) [22d]
• TSMC unveils its process technology roadmap through 2029, aiming to launch a new node yearly for client applications and every two years for AI and HPC (Anton Shilov/Tom's Hardware) [22d]
• US child safety group NCMEC received 1.5M reports of suspected CSAM with ties to AI in 2025, a significant surge compared to 67,000 in 2024 and 4,700 in 2023 (Bloomberg) [22d]
• Courier Health, which develops an AI-powered biopharma platform for managing the end-to-end patient experience, raised a $50M Series B led by Oak HC/FT (Heather Landi/Fierce Healthcare) [22d]
• OpenAI releases ChatGPT for Clinicians, a tool for medical tasks like documentation and research, free for verified physicians, pharmacists, and more in the US (OpenAI) [22d]
• Sources: SoftBank seeks a $10B two-year margin loan secured by its OpenAI shares, with an option for a year extension, as SoftBank aims to become an AI linchpin (Bloomberg) [22d]
• Sources: Microsoft considered buying Cursor in recent weeks but didn't make an offer; Microsoft has been working to boost GitHub Copilot's popularity (CNBC) [22d]
• Microsoft plans to invest AU$25B by 2029 to expand Azure AI supercomputing and cloud infrastructure in Australia, its largest commitment to the country (Ainslie Chandler/Bloomberg) [22d]
• An undergraduate used AI assistants to rewrite leaked source code for Claude Code in a different language, highlighting the uncertainty over copyright and AI (Meaghan Tobin/New York Times) [22d]