The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

Samsung reports preliminary Q1 operating profit of ~$38B, up more than 8x YoY and above ~$27B est., a record, and revenue up 68% YoY to ~$88B (Hyunjoo Jin/Reuters) [23d]
Amazon and USPS reach a new delivery deal; sources: Amazon will reduce the packages it ships through USPS by 20%, instead of the two-thirds cut proposed earlier (Esther Fung/Wall Street Journal) [23d]
OpenAI sends a letter to the California and Delaware AGs, urging them to investigate "anti-competitive behavior" by Elon Musk, ahead of a trial in April (CNBC) [23d]
Filing: Broadcom agrees to produce future versions of Google's TPUs and expands its Anthropic deal to give the startup access to ~3.5 GW of computing capacity (Jordan Novet/CNBC) [23d]
Anthropic signs an agreement with Google and Broadcom for multiple GWs of TPU capacity, and says run-rate revenue has crossed $30B, up from ~$9B at 2025's end (Anthropic) [23d]
The rapid adoption of AI coding tools has let workers generate massive volumes of code, leaving companies scrambling to review and secure the AI-generated code (New York Times) [23d]
Sources: OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google are sharing information via the Frontier Model Forum to detect adversarial distillation attempts that violate their ToS (Bloomberg) [23d]
Australian AI infrastructure startup Firmus raised $505M led by Coatue at a $5.5B valuation, bringing its funding raised in the last six months to $1.35B (Ian King/Bloomberg) [23d]
A look at Eko, whose Arkansas "capture factory" creates digital product catalogs intended to serve as training data for retail-focused AI models (Sarah Nassauer/Wall Street Journal) [23d]
How social media became a freak show: X punishes external links and most top accounts, such as Catturd, are very low-quality but get more engagement than NYT (Nate Silver/Silver Bulletin) [23d]
A federal appeals court rules New Jersey cannot block Kalshi users in the state from sports-related event contracts, finding CFTC has exclusive jurisdiction (Nate Raymond/Reuters) [23d]
Sources: Meta is preparing to release the first AI models developed under Alexandr Wang, with plans to offer versions of those models via an open source license (Ina Fried/Axios) [23d]
Netflix launches Netflix Playground, a games app for kids aged eight and under, in the US, UK, Canada, Australia, the Philippines, and New Zealand (Andrew Webster/The Verge) [23d]
Source: Binance Chief Compliance Officer Noah Perlman is looking to leave sometime in 2026 or 2027; other senior compliance staff left over the past few months (Olga Kharif/Bloomberg) [23d]
OpenAI buying TBPN makes little sense, par for the course for a company that, like Twitter, stumbled into a big market and may never build a functional business (Ben Thompson/Stratechery) [23d]
How advanced chip packaging became one of Intel's fast-growing businesses; sources: Intel is in talks with Google and Amazon for its advanced packaging services (Lauren Goode/Wired) [23d]
Xoople, which is developing a satellite constellation to collect earth data for training AI models, raised a $130M Series B, bringing its total funding to $225M (Tim Fernholz/TechCrunch) [23d]
Russian cryptocurrency payment network A7 expands to Africa, as Moscow builds an alternative payments system amid western sanctions after its Ukraine invasion (Financial Times) [23d]
Interviews with Sam Altman and 100+ people on if he can be trusted amid allegations of persistent lying and more: some defend him, others call him a sociopath (New Yorker) [23d]
Jack Dorsey says Apple removed his Bluetooth P2P messaging app Bitchat, used during protests in Iran and Uganda, from China's App Store following CAC's demands (Stephen Katte/Cointelegraph) [23d]
OpenAI unveils policy proposals for a world with superintelligence: higher capital gains taxes, a public AI investment fund, strengthened safety nets, and more (Amrith Ramkumar/Wall Street Journal) [23d]
Japan, driven by labor shortages, is increasingly adopting robotics and physical AI, with a hybrid model where startups innovate and corporations provide scale (Kate Park/TechCrunch) [23d]
Sources: companies like Palo Alto Networks and Sophos see increased demand for their ransom negotiators, as businesses seek help in talks with cybercriminals (Kieran Smith/Financial Times) [23d]
Netflix - yes Netflix - jumps on the AI bandwagon with video editor (Thomas Claburn/The Register) [24d]
Indian IT giant Wipro agrees to buy Mindsprint, the IT services arm of Singapore-based Olam, for $375M, and strikes an eight-year, $1B contract with Olam (Reuters) [24d]
Documents: OpenAI and Anthropic have projected profitability to investors with and without training costs, and report inference costs exceeding half of revenue (Wall Street Journal) [24d]
Microsoft is updating devices from Windows 11 24H2 to version 25H2 with no way to fully opt out, and says an "intelligent" ML-based system handles the rollout (Kunal Khullar/Tom's Hardware) [24d]
Sources: Sam Altman has excluded OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar from some key financial meetings; Friar began reporting to Fidji Simo instead of the CEO in August 2025 (The Information) [24d]
China, which dominates the global drone industry, has sharply tightened its drone use rules, as some users say they are hindering routine and lawful flights (Joy Dong/New York Times) [24d]