The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

YouTube expands its AI likeness detection program to users over the age of 18, after rolling it out to select creators, politicians, journalists, and others (Mia Sato/The Verge) [60d]
Filings: YouTube and Snap reached agreements to settle a lawsuit headed to trial in June over claims addiction to social media has disrupted students' learning (Bloomberg) [60d]
Sources: the US FTC is investigating whether Arm is trying to illegally monopolize parts of the semiconductor market (Josh Sisco/Bloomberg) [60d]
Professional services firm EY has withdrawn a study on loyalty rewards programs after researchers at GPTZero found apparent AI hallucinations and fake footnotes (Stephen Foley/Financial Times) [60d]
How tech companies are using open source initiatives to achieve critical strategic goals and how such efforts are reshaping industries like AI, AVs, and more (Bill Gurley/Bill's Substack) [60d]
In a viral X post that parodies the old Mac vs. PC commercials, General Catalyst posted a "VC vs GC" video, with the VC apparently modeled after Marc Andreessen (Julie Bort/TechCrunch) [60d]
Semiconductor stocks fell globally on Friday after the Trump-Xi summit concluded without major chip deals; Nvidia closed down 4.42% and AMD closed down 5.69% (Mauro Orru/Wall Street Journal) [60d]
Sources: SpaceX aims to make its IPO prospectus public by next week, targeting a June 12 listing on Nasdaq, driven by a faster-than-expected SEC review (Reuters) [60d]
Sources: Nord Quantique, a quantum computing startup that is pursuing a hardware-level quantum error correction approach, raised $30M at a $1.4B valuation (Sean Silcoff/Globe and Mail) [60d]
Source: Kraken cut ~150 staff after AI tools improved efficiency and its IPO may be delayed until late 2026 or early 2027 due to a drop in digital-asset prices (Olga Kharif/Bloomberg) [60d]
OpenAI's disavowal of a liability shield in Illinois SB 3444 bill and endorsement of a stronger SB 315 suggest it is open to meaningful AI safety legislation (Transformer) [60d]
ArXiv, the repository of preprint academic research, says it will ban authors for a year if their papers have "incontrovertible evidence" of AI-generated work (Samantha Cole/404 Media) [60d]
OpenAI memo: Greg Brockman says he will lead product strategy as part of a reorg, folding ChatGPT, Codex, and developer-facing API into one core product team (Maxwell Zeff/Wired) [60d]
Replit says it has "worked things out with Apple", which has approved a Replit update after four months, following a reported dispute over vibe coding apps (Zac Hall/9to5Mac) [60d]
OpenAI debuts personal finance tools for US ChatGPT Pro users, partnering with Plaid to give access to 12K+ financial institutions to analyze spending and more (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch) [60d]
A profile of AI video generation startup Runway, which is training models directly on observational data, is now valued at $5.3B, and added $40M in ARR in Q2 (Rebecca Bellan/TechCrunch) [60d]
Gridcare, which uses AI to detect underused capacity in electric grids, raised a $64M Series A, following a $13.5M seed in 2025 (Bianca Giacobone/Latitude Media) [60d]
A look at Matthew McConaughey's novel legal strategy to fight unauthorized AI use of his image, which involves trademarking video and audio clips of him (Todd Spangler/Variety) [60d]
Ofcom says X has committed to implementing stronger protections for UK users, including reviewing illegal hate content within 24 hours, following a probe (Daniel Thomas/Financial Times) [60d]
Nvidia's future in China remains unclear after the Trump-Xi Summit; Trump says China "chose not to" buy Nvidia chips as "they want to try to develop their own" (Meaghan Tobin/New York Times) [60d]