The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

• FTC: Americans reported losing $2.1B to social media scams in 2025, including $794M to scams that started on Facebook, more than on any other platform (Scott Younker/Tom's Guide) [17d]
• Taylor Swift's TAS Rights Management has filed applications to trademark the singer's voice and image, aiming to protect against threats posed by AI (Josh Gerben/Gerben IP) [17d]
• Archaeologists and researchers at Pompeii used AI for the first time to digitally reconstruct the face of a man killed in the AD 79 eruption of Mount Vesuvius (Giada Zampano/Associated Press) [17d]
• Apple will let developers offer monthly subscriptions with a 12-month commitment starting in May, except in the US and Singapore (Eric Slivka/MacRumors) [17d]
• Xiaomi open sources MiMo-V2.5 and MiMo-V2.5-Pro under the MIT License, saying both models are among the most efficient available for agentic "claw" tasks (Carl Franzen/VentureBeat) [17d]
• Renders based on photos of Samsung's upcoming smart glasses, expected to launch later this year, show a design nearly identical to Ray-Ban Meta glasses (Alexander Maxham/Android Headlines) [17d]
• Study: only ~3% of Polymarket accounts drove most price discovery in 2023-2025, suggesting market accuracy comes from an informed minority, not crowd wisdom (Sam Reynolds/CoinDesk) [17d]
• Elon Musk boosts an X post by Ronan Farrow promoting his New Yorker article on Sam Altman's alleged deceptions, as Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI heads to trial (Wired) [17d]
• Jury selection begins in Musk v. Altman trial at a federal courthouse in California, with Sam Altman and Greg Brockman in attendance (Ashley Capoot/CNBC) [17d]
• Have I Been Pwned: ShinyHunters' breach of ADT exposed the personal data of 5.5M people; ADT previously disclosed data breaches in August 2024 and October 2024 (Sergiu Gatlan/BleepingComputer) [17d]
• GitHub says all Copilot plans will move to usage-based billing on June 1, replacing premium requests with monthly GitHub AI Credits (Mario Rodriguez/The GitHub Blog) [17d]
• The EU unveils new proposals under the DMA aimed at opening up Android to rivals' AI services; Google says the measures are "unwarranted intervention" (Samuel Stolton/Bloomberg) [17d]
• More than 600 Google employees, including many from DeepMind, sign a letter to Sundar Pichai demanding he bar the DOD from using Google's AI for classified work (Gerrit De Vynck/Washington Post) [17d]
• Kashable, which lets companies offer "socially responsible" credit and financial wellness programs for employees as a voluntary benefit, raised a $60M Series C (Mary Ann Azevedo/Crunchbase News) [17d]
• PocketOS founder Jer Crane says a Cursor agent running Claude Opus 4.6 accidentally deleted a production database when it was working in a staging environment (Jer/@lifeof_jer) [17d]
• Canva says it "moved quickly to investigate and fix" an issue with its Magic Layers feature that replaced the word "Palestine" in designs, after a viral X post (Jess Weatherbed/The Verge) [17d]
• Ineffable Intelligence, founded by ex-Google DeepMind Principal Scientist David Silver, raised a $1.1B seed at a $5.1B valuation to build AI "superlearners" (Will Knight/Wired) [17d]
• Microsoft and OpenAI remove a clause in their deal that would grant Microsoft IP rights up until OpenAI achieved "AGI", replacing it with a fixed-term agreement (Aaron Holmes/The Information) [17d]
• Quantum Art, a quantum computing startup focused on enhancing computational throughput using its unique "multicore" architecture, extends its Series A to $140M (Mike Wheatley/SiliconANGLE) [17d]
• Microsoft and OpenAI amend their deal to let OpenAI serve all its products across any cloud provider; Microsoft will no longer pay a revenue share to OpenAI (OpenAI) [17d]
• Spotify partners with Peloton to offer Premium users access to playlists and a catalog of 1,400+ ad-free fitness classes, its first foray into fitness content (Bloomberg) [17d]
• Lithuania-based Vinted says it completed an ~€880M secondary share sale led by EQT, Teachers' Venture Growth, Schroders at an €8B valuation, up from €5B in 2024 (Ivan Levingston/Financial Times) [17d]
• San Francisco public records: in 2024, Salesforce and Airbnb were among the top tech spenders in the city's 10B program, which lets them hire police officers (Paresh Dave/Wired) [17d]
• Amazon reaches a multiyear licensing deal with Oprah Winfrey to produce twice-a-week video podcasts starting in July, repurpose The Oprah Winfrey Show, and more (Nicole Sperling/New York Times) [17d]
• Meta says it signed a deal with Overview Energy for 1GW of space solar energy; the startup seeks to collect sunlight in satellites, with a demonstration in 2028 (Riley Griffin/Bloomberg) [17d]
• Analysis: as of late 2025, 79 of 500 tracked software companies including HubSpot, Adobe, and Salesforce adopted usage-based AI fees, more than doubling on 2024 (The Information) [17d]
• A look at what's next for Netflix and Comcast's Peacock after the WBD-Paramount deal; Nielsen says Netflix had six of the top 10 original streaming shows in Q1 (Lucas Shaw/Bloomberg) [17d]
• Sources: some UK officials fear Keir Starmer's plan for closer EU ties risks the US-UK alliance, and worry the UK may be forced to adopt the EU's AI regulation (Financial Times) [17d]
• Truecaller faces mounting pressure as growth slows in India, its largest market, while telcos, Apple, and Google roll out caller ID and spam-blocking features (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch) [17d]
• Chinese regulators block Meta's $2B acquisition of Manus, after reviewing whether the deal violated Beijing's investment rules; Manus moved to Singapore in 2025 (Arjun Neil Alim/Financial Times) [17d]
• A profile of Anthony Fujiwara, who industrialized "clipping" for social media video marketing and has contributed to the rise of crypto casinos like Stake (Boaz Sobrado/Forbes) [17d]
• A look at Elon Musk's efforts to launch the banking and payments service X Money, delayed by US regulatory concerns, as some industry watchers remain skeptical (Bloomberg) [17d]
• A deep dive into how ASML became a chokepoint for making cutting-edge chips by betting on EUV, close collaboration with TSMC and the US government, and more (Neil Hacker/Works in Progress) [17d]
• Analysis of 100 actively traded software company loans since January 20 finds sector-wide price pressure as investors seek defensive moats against AI disruption (Sam Goldfarb/Wall Street Journal) [17d]
• How Sergey Brin's political push against a proposed wealth tax in California has helped mobilize a network of fellow tech leaders to sway state issues (Bloomberg) [17d]
• Sources detail Microsoft's "Windows K2", an ongoing initiative to address major Windows 11 user complaints about AI features, OS bloat, performance, and more (Zac Bowden/Windows Central) [17d]
• Kuo: OpenAI is working with MediaTek and Qualcomm to develop smartphone chips, with Luxshare handling the system co-design; mass production is expected in 2028 (@mingchikuo) [17d]
• Sources and executives: the war in the Middle East disrupted crucial PCB raw material supplies; Goldman Sachs says PCB prices surged as much as 40% MoM in April (Reuters) [17d]
• Chinese state media: China formalizes gig worker rules for online platforms, calling for standardized contracts, fair pay, and stronger labor protections (Bloomberg) [17d]
• Stuttgart-based Sereact, which develops software for industrial robots to handle tasks they haven't been trained on, raised a $110M Series B led by Headline (Yazhou Sun/Bloomberg) [17d]
• Filing: Beijing-based GPU maker Moore Threads reports Q1 revenue up 155% YoY to ~$107.89M, and a $4.3M net profit, up from a ~$16.46M net loss in Q1 2025 (Iris Deng/South China Morning Post) [17d]
• Sources: Jay Chen, who led Tokyo Electron's China operations, left the company after the chip toolmaker discovered his family invested in Chinese competitors (Financial Times) [17d]
• Taiwan's Intellectual Property and Commercial Court sentences ex-Tokyo Electron engineer Chen Li-ming to 10 years in prison for stealing TSMC's proprietary data (Debby Wu/Bloomberg) [17d]
• OpenAI publishes a five-principle framework for AGI development, pledging to resist concentrating AI power and to collaborate with companies and governments (Marcus Schuler/Implicator.ai) [17d]
• An interview with Bill Nguyen, a tech entrepreneur who is completely outsourcing parts of his life to an AI assistant in his bid to create a virtual body double (Reed Albergotti/Semafor) [17d]
• Amateur solved a 60-year-old Erdős problem with a single GPT-5.4 Pro prompt; Terence Tao says it's a nice achievement, but its long-term significance is unclear (Joseph Howlett/Scientific American) [18d]
• Cyera agrees to acquire Ryft, an Israeli startup building automated data access and governance tools for enterprise AI deployment, sources say for $100M-$130M (Meir Orbach/CTech) [18d]