The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

Micron and Sandisk led a tech selloff on Tuesday, falling more than 13%; Western Digital fell 8%, Marvell 9%, Seagate 5%, Qualcomm 8%, and Applied Materials 8% (Britney Nguyen/MarketWatch) [18d]
YouTube settles a lawsuit ahead of a second California trial over social media harms to minors; Meta, TikTok, and Snap remain defendants (Hillel Aron/Courthouse News Service) [18d]
Sources: the Trump administration is pressing Meta to submit its AI models for voluntary review; Meta is the only major US AI developer without an agreement (New York Times) [19d]
Cerebras reports Q1 revenue up 94% YoY to $193.4M, net loss down 41% to $14M, and forecasts core gross margin to shrink in Q2; CBRS drops 8%+ after hours (Jordan Novet/CNBC) [19d]
Mistral debuts OCR 4, a model featuring structured document extraction with bounding boxes, block classification, and inline confidence scores, in 170 languages (Mistral AI Blog) [19d]
Sources: Hadrian, which is building AI-powered factories to produce space and defense parts, is in talks to raise ~$1B at a ~$7.5B post-money valuation (Bloomberg) [19d]
Sources: Miami-based cybersecurity company Varonis is exploring options including a potential sale after receiving takeover interest; VRNS jumps 6%+ (Bloomberg) [19d]
The FCC says an auction of wireless mid-band spectrum raised $3.5B+, which will largely be used to fund the replacement of Chinese telecom equipment in the US (David Shepardson/Reuters) [19d]
Walmart acquires Vibe.co, which lets businesses create and buy ads on CTVs, sources say for $1.4B cash; top executives get $180M to stay for four years (Sarah Nassauer/Wall Street Journal) [19d]
Alibaba sues the DOD, seeking removal from a blacklist of companies supporting China's military, says the decision is a violation of constitutional due process (Bloomberg) [19d]
On the first day of their trial, two members of Scattered Spider plead guilty in the UK to charges stemming from a 2024 cyberattack on Transport for London (Brian Krebs/Krebs on Security) [19d]
Anthropic launches Claude Tag, an agentic AI coworker for Slack that can learn context, give suggestions, and more, in beta for Claude Team and Enterprise tiers (David Gewirtz/ZDNET) [19d]
Sources: Meta is building a standalone prediction markets app called Arena, which would probably rely on video game-like points instead of money wagers (New York Times) [19d]
Sources: SpaceX, which is seeking to raise between $20B and $25B in its debut US bond sale, has drawn about $89B of demand (Bloomberg) [19d]
Stark, which has a deal to supply "kamikaze" drones to the German military, raised €500M from Founders Fund, Sequoia, others; it faced criticism over Thiel ties (Financial Times) [19d]
LastPass notifies customers that their personal information and customer support case records were stolen during a hack at Canadian market research company Klue (Zack Whittaker/TechCrunch) [19d]
Beehiiv adds Cloudflare AI Crawl Control to writers' dashboards, allowing them to decide whether AI crawlers can scrape their work (Duncan Riley/SiliconANGLE) [19d]
Market intelligence company Klue confirms it has suffered a breach, for which cybercrime group Icarus takes credit; Jamf, HackerOne, and others are affected (Zack Whittaker/TechCrunch) [19d]
Walmart acquires Paris-based Vibe.co, which lets businesses create and run targeted ads on streaming services; Vibe.co's co-founders will join Walmart Connect (Brian Steinberg/Variety) [19d]
SCOTUS ends a suit alleging Cisco aided China's Falun Gong persecution, further limiting a law used to hold corporations liable for overseas human rights abuses (Jan Wolfe/Reuters) [19d]
The Ethereum Foundation cuts ~20% of its workforce, or 54 staff, as part of a broad restructuring amid leadership turnover and growing Ethereum fragmentation (Margaux Nijkerk/CoinDesk) [19d]
Sources: Abu Dhabi's MGX has raised close to $50B from regional sovereign wealth funds, global pension funds, and others to accelerate spending on AI deals (Dinesh Nair/Bloomberg) [19d]
Menlo raised $3B for funds dedicated to backing AI startups, its largest haul to date; sources say Menlo's Anthropic stake is currently worth nearly $14B (Natasha Mascarenhas/Bloomberg) [19d]
Meta's Starfire glasses with Kylie Jenner include a tiny gemstone on the lens, a metal nose pad to prevent absorbing makeup, and an AI version of Kylie's voice (Julian Chokkattu/Wired) [19d]
Meta says Meta Glasses are its first AI glasses to launch with Meta AI powered by Muse Spark from day one, and come in 26 styles across a range of colors (Meta Newsroom) [19d]
Meta Fury, Meta Adventurer, and Meta Glasses by Kylie all sport EssilorLuxottica branding; Meta executives say dropping Ray-Ban helps keep the price down (Victoria Song/The Verge) [19d]
Meta unveils Meta Adventurer and Fury glasses, each priced at $299, its first under its own brand, and a $399 Starfire model in partnership with Kylie Jenner (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg) [19d]
New York-based crypto analytics startup Allium raised a $40M Series B led by Amplify Partners, with participation from Kleiner Perkins and others (Ben Weiss/Fortune) [19d]
The Netherlands joins the US-led Pax Silica initiative alongside South Korea and Japan to coordinate AI supply chains; Taiwan endorses it as a non-signatory (Toby Sterling/Reuters) [19d]
ByteDance unveils Seedance 2.5 in Beijing, saying the AI video model can generate 30-second clips from up to 50 reference materials, up from 12 for Seedance 2.0 (Juro Osawa/The Information) [19d]
Google plans a 12-week incubator, picking 10 to 20 AI startups from its "Xoogler" alumni and providing up to $350K in cloud credits and $100K in direct funding (Guinevere Grant/Bloomberg) [19d]
How Sam Altman's 80+ personal investments, many from his time at YC, benefit from ties to OpenAI; 10+ companies have discussed business deals with OpenAI (Wall Street Journal) [19d]
Top500: China's Arm-based LineShine surpasses the US' El Capitan by 20% to be the world's fastest supercomputer, the first time China takes the crown since 2017 (Don Clark/New York Times) [19d]
The EU is set to impose a €3 duty on non-EU items under €150 from July 1, as the bloc seeks to slow the flood of low-priced merchandise from retailers like Temu (Brendan Murray/Bloomberg) [19d]
South Korea's tech-heavy Kospi index falls 10%, dragged down by SK Hynix and Samsung; STMicro and ASML fall ~7%, and US tech stocks fall in pre-market trading (Chloe Taylor/CNBC) [19d]
An interview with Nvidia VP of Healthcare Kimberly Powell on how AI can ease doctors' workloads, help address trained medical staff shortages, and more (Cristina Criddle/Financial Times) [19d]
Sources: Tencent is negotiating exits from several game studio investments in Japan, including Tokyo-traded Marvelous, as it reassesses its global portfolio (Bloomberg) [19d]
How the data center boom is exposing weaknesses in US power grids and what fixes the electricity infrastructure may need to become fit for the future (Chris Gillett/Works in Progress Magazine) [19d]
Syntun: online sales during China's 618 shopping festival grew 4% YoY, a sharp drop from 15.2% growth last year, amid a persistent consumer spending slowdown (Evelyn Cheng/CNBC) [19d]
Eli Lilly plans to use its $7.3B cash reserve to fund an "App Store" for biotech scientists after launching a data center with 1,016 Blackwell chips in 2025 (Patrick Temple-West/Financial Times) [19d]
OpenAI debuts at Cannes Lions, pitching its new ChatGPT ad business and Codex to marketers, as it tries to build a multibillion-dollar business ahead of an IPO (Financial Times) [19d]
A US NLRB judge ruled that Amazon violated federal law by not recognizing the Teamsters union at a SF warehouse and must collectively bargain with the workers (Josh Eidelson/Bloomberg) [19d]
Real estate professionals are increasingly using AI-powered virtual staging tools like Stuccco and BoxBrownie to create misleading house and apartment listings (Gaby Del Valle/The Verge) [19d]