The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

• Musk v. Altman: Elon Musk says he was a "fool" for backing OpenAI, accusing Altman and Brockman of manipulating him into donating tens of millions of dollars (Angel Au-Yeung/Wall Street Journal) [15d]
• Sources: Anthropic has begun weighing a new funding round at a $900B+ valuation, after previously resisting investor proposals at an $800B+ valuation (Bloomberg) [15d]
• Meta says Q1 family daily active people fell 20M QoQ to 3.56B, vs. 3.62B est., due to internet disruptions in Iran and WhatsApp access restrictions in Russia (Jonathan Vanian/CNBC) [15d]
• Alphabet reports Q1 revenue up 22% YoY to $109.9B, vs. $107.2B est., Google Cloud revenue up 63% to $20B, vs. $18.05B est., net income up 81% to $62.58B (Alphabet) [15d]
• Google says paid subscriptions reached 350M in Q1, up 25M QoQ, driven by YouTube and Google One, while Gemini Enterprise paid MAUs grew 40% QoQ (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch) [15d]
• eBay reports Q1 revenue up 19% YoY to $3.09B, vs. $3.04B est., net income up 2% to $512M, GMV up 18% to $22.2B, and forecasts Q2 revenue above estimates (Kelly Cloonan/Wall Street Journal) [15d]
• AWS revenue rose 28% YoY in Q1 to $37.6B, vs. $36.64B est., its fastest growth in 15 quarters, as capital expenditures rose to $44.2B, up from $25B in Q1 2025 (Quartz) [15d]
• Qualcomm reports Q2 revenue down 3% YoY to $10.6B and says a top hyperscaler is on track to begin using its chips later this year; QCOM jumps 7%+ after hours (Ian King/Bloomberg) [15d]
• Microsoft reports Q3 Xbox hardware revenue fell 33% YoY and Xbox content and services revenue, which includes Game Pass, dropped 5% YoY (Emma Roth/The Verge) [15d]
• Google has told employees in a memo that it "proudly" works with the US military and will continue to do so, amid opposition from some staff over DOD contracts (Financial Times) [15d]
• Meta reports Reality Labs Q1 revenue of $402M, vs. $488.8M est., and a $4.03B operating loss, vs. $4.82B est.; Reality Labs has $80B+ in losses since late 2020 (Jonathan Vanian/CNBC) [15d]
• Microsoft's Q3 Intelligent Cloud revenue was $34.68B vs. $34.27B est., with Azure and other cloud services surging 40% YoY; Microsoft 365 Copilot has 20M+ seats (Jordan Novet/CNBC) [15d]
• Meta raises its 2026 capital expenditures to between $125B and $145B, far exceeding analysts' estimates, after previously forecasting $115B to $135B (Riley Griffin/Bloomberg) [15d]
• Amazon reports Q1 ad revenue up 24% YoY to $17.24B, vs. $16.87B est., and subscription services revenue up 15% to $13.43B (Annie Palmer/CNBC) [15d]
• Alphabet reports YouTube's Q1 ad revenue rose 10.7% YoY to $9.88B, vs. $9.99B est., and Google's ad revenue reached $77.25B, up from $66.89B in Q1 2025 (Todd Spangler/Variety) [15d]
• Microsoft reports Q3 revenue up 18% YoY to $82.9B, net income up 23% to $31.8B, and says its AI business surpassed an annual revenue run rate of $37B, up 123% (Microsoft) [15d]
• Amazon reports Q1 revenue of $181.5B, up 17% YoY, net income of $30.3B, up 77%, and operating income of $23.9B, up 30% YoY (Amazon) [15d]
• Alphabet reports Q1 revenue up 22% YoY to $109.9B, vs. $107.2B est., Google Cloud revenue up 63% to $20B, vs. $18.05B est., net income up 81% to $62.58B (Jennifer Elias/CNBC) [15d]
• Meta reports Q1 revenue up 33% YoY to $56.31B, net income up 61% to $26.77B, and family DAP up 4% to 3.56B on average for March; META drops 6%+ after hours (Meta) [15d]
• Letters: House Homeland Security Committee and House China Select Committee are probing Airbnb and Cursor maker Anysphere over their use of Chinese AI models (Rachyl Jones/Semafor) [15d]
• Google says the Gemini app can now generate files; supported formats include PDF, Microsoft Word and Excel, Google Docs and Sheets, plain text, and Markdown (Abner Li/9to5Google) [15d]
• Meta quietly rolled out USDC stablecoin payouts on Solana and Polygon for select creators in Colombia and the Philippines (Fortune) [15d]
• Sources: PayPal is separating Venmo into its own standalone unit and is looking to recruit a digital banking executive to run the new Venmo segment (Hugh Son/CNBC) [15d]
• SpaceX's draft IPO filing: from 2023 to 2025, Starlink's individual subscribers rose from 2.3M to 8.9M, revenue grew from $3.9B to $11.4B, and ARPU fell 18% (The Information) [15d]
• Pursuit, which uses AI to scan public data to help companies find and win government contracts, raised a $22M seed led by OpenGov co-founder Mike Rosengarten (Dominic-Madori Davis/TechCrunch) [15d]
• OpenLight, which designs custom application-specific photonic chips, raised $50M in a Series A extension, after raising $34M in August 2025 (Charlotte Trueman/DatacenterDynamics) [15d]
• Sources: Apple plans a new Siri camera mode in iOS 27 by moving Visual Intelligence, currently tied to the Camera Control button, into the camera app (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg) [15d]
• Motorola unveils its 2026 foldables lineup, including its first book-style model, which costs $1,900; prices for clamshell models have gone up by up to $200 (Chris Welch/Bloomberg) [15d]
• Scout AI, which is building an AI model to operate and command military assets like autonomous ATVs, raised a $100M Series A co-led by Align and Draper (Tim Fernholz/TechCrunch) [15d]
• Seven families of victims in the Tumbler Ridge shooting in Canada sue OpenAI, accusing it of failing to warn authorities about the suspect's ChatGPT activity (Clare Duffy/CNN) [15d]
• Aidoc, which provides AI medical imaging software to flag incidental findings on CT scans and X-rays, raised a $150M Series E, taking its total funding to $520M (Brock E.W. Turner/Axios) [15d]
• Uber partners with Expedia to launch a hotel booking integration in its app in the US, and plans to add Expedia's Vrbo brand later in 2026 (Natalie Lung/Bloomberg) [15d]
• SpaceX IPO filing: Elon Musk can only be removed as CEO via a vote by holders of Class B super-voting shares, which he will control post-IPO, a rare provision (Reuters) [15d]
• Crypto payments company MoonPay acquires Israeli crypto security startup Sodot, sources say in a $100M all-stock deal, to launch a unit focused on institutions (Emily Nicolle/Bloomberg) [15d]
• Brookfield-backed Compass drops plans to develop 800+ acres in Virginia's 2,100-acre Digital Gateway data center corridor, sources say due to local opposition (Dawn Lim/Bloomberg) [15d]
• Divine, a Vine reboot financed by Jack Dorsey-backed nonprofit and Other Stuff and built by an early Twitter staffer, launches with ~500K restored Vine videos (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch) [15d]
• Google celebrates 20 years of Translate with a new AI pronunciation practice tool for Android users in the US and India; Translate gets 1B+ queries per month (Macy Meyer/CNET) [15d]
• Rogo, which uses AI to help lighten junior bankers' workloads, raised a $160M Series D led by Kleiner Perkins at a $2B valuation, up from $750M in January (Todd Gillespie/Bloomberg) [15d]
• Sources: OpenAI has, in practice, abandoned its Stargate JV in favor of large bilateral deals; execs say its guiding principle remains to "build more compute" (Financial Times) [15d]
• Hightouch, which uses AI to help marketers create and manage campaigns, raised $150M led by Goldman Sachs and Bain at a $2.75B valuation, up from $1.2B in 2025 (Patrick Coffee/Wall Street Journal) [15d]
• Mayo Clinic researchers detail an AI system called Redmod that identified pancreatic cancer on routine CT scans an average of 475 days before clinical diagnosis (Jason Gale/Bloomberg) [15d]
• A working paper uses an LLM to analyze political discourse on X, finding that anger is the dominant emotion expressed by US users, especially those over 65 (Tim Harford/Financial Times) [15d]
• How Chinese regulators killed Manus by blocking Meta's $2B takeover in a 54-character decree, creating an uncertain era for the country's expanding AI industry (Bloomberg) [15d]
• Cognizant agrees to acquire Astreya, which helps manage data center infrastructure, AI lab environments, and enterprise networks, for ~$600M, set to close in Q2 (Reuters) [15d]
• Indonesia sentences eFishery founder Gibran Huzaifah to nine years in prison, concluding a $300M scandal that destroyed one of Southeast Asia's top startups (Bloomberg) [15d]
• Cash-rich AI startups fuel a boom in Manhattan's commercial real-estate market; many offices have more vacant desks than workers, as startups prepare to scale (Isabelle Bousquette/Wall Street Journal) [15d]
• Knight Frank: Anthropic, OpenAI, and other AI companies have leased 1M+ square feet of London office space since the start of 2025, or ~7% of all lettings (Natasha Voase/Bloomberg) [15d]
• Samsung's Lee family dynasty reached a combined ~$45.5B net worth in March, up from ~$20.1B in 2025, amid the AI boom; they are now Asia's third-richest family (Bloomberg) [15d]
• YouTube CEO Neal Mohan says YouTube TV is getting "fully customizable" multiview, letting users pin up to four live streams, after a limited rollout in 2023 (Jay Peters/The Verge) [15d]
• Source: China's leverage against Meta in the Manus deal could include 10%+ of its global revenue from Chinese ads and Goertek in Meta AI glasses' supply chain (Financial Times) [15d]
• Bengaluru-based stock trading platform Sahi raised a $33M Series B led by Accel at a $200M valuation to expand into margin trade funding, commodities, and more (The Economic Times) [15d]
• The European Commission issues preliminary DSA findings against Meta, saying Instagram and Facebook fail to prevent under-13 users from accessing the services (Gian Volpicelli/Bloomberg) [15d]
• Poll: 31% of US adults expect driverless cars to be common within five years, up from 19% in 2018, and 19% say they would own or lease one, the same as in 2018 (Mary Page James/Gallup) [15d]
• An interview with AWS CEO Matt Garman on why AWS will be a better OpenAI partner than Microsoft, chip bubble fears, Jeff Bezos' Project Prometheus, and more (Alex Heath/Sources) [15d]
• Filing: TSMC sold its remaining 1.11M Arm shares at $207.65 per share for a total of ~$231M this week; TSMC invested ~$100M in Arm's 2023 IPO at $51 per share (Wen-Yee Lee/Reuters) [15d]
• Sources: China suspends issuing new Level 4 autonomous vehicle licenses, after over 100 of Baidu's Apollo Go robotaxis disrupted traffic in Wuhan last month (Bloomberg) [15d]
• Sources: Apple tells suppliers it will maintain its current production share in India rather than expand, after local sites struggled without China-based teams (Nikkei Asia) [15d]
• Pentagon's Digital and AI Chief Cameron Stanley confirms the DoD is expanding its Google Gemini use, saying "overreliance on one vendor is never a good thing" (Seema Mody/CNBC) [15d]
• New York-based Actively, which offers AI sales agents for account management, raised a $45M Series B co-led by TCV and First Harmonic at a $250M valuation (Sofia Chierchio/Forbes) [15d]
• Sources: the White House is developing rules for government agencies to get around Anthropic's supply chain risk designation and onboard new models like Mythos (Axios) [15d]
• Microsoft is rolling out Copilot 365 to all of Accenture's roughly 743,000 employees, in the biggest enterprise deal for Copilot, following a 2023 pilot (Aditya Soni/Reuters) [15d]
• EU countries and lawmakers reach an impasse on a deal watering down the EU's AI Act due to some parties seeking exemptions for already regulated industries (Foo Yun Chee/Reuters) [15d]
• A US judge denied Sam Bankman-Fried's request for a new trial based on what SBF called new evidence; SBF tried to withdraw his request, but the judge refused (Bob Van Voris/Bloomberg) [16d]
• Parallel Web Systems, founded by former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal and which offers web search tools for AI agents, raised a $100M Series B at a $2B valuation (Belle Lin/Wall Street Journal) [16d]
• OpenAI's Codex instruction set contains a line, repeated several times, that forbids Codex from randomly mentioning goblins, gremlins, and other creatures (Will Knight/Wired) [16d]