Tech Brew Ride Home

The EU escalated its DSA probe against Meta over child safety failures on Instagram and Facebook. OpenAI has effectively abandoned its Stargate JV, China suspended new robotaxi licenses after a Baidu outage, and the Musk v. Altman trial kicked off with opening arguments.


The European Commission issues preliminary DSA findings against Meta, saying Instagram and Facebook fail to prevent under-13 users from accessing the services (Bloomberg)


YouTube rolls out Full Multiview Customization to YouTube TV, letting users pin up to four live streams in a window, after debuting a limited version in 2023 (The Verge)


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" (FT)


Sources: China suspends issuing Level 4 autonomous vehicle licenses, after 100+ of Baidu's Apollo Go robotaxis stalled and disrupted traffic in Wuhan in March (Bloomberg)


OpenAI's Codex instruction set contains a line, repeated several times, that forbids Codex from randomly mentioning goblins, gremlins, and other creatures (Wired)


Musk v. Altman: Musk testifies he's suing OpenAI because "it is not okay to steal a charity" and its pivot sets a concerning precedent for philanthropic efforts (Bloomberg)

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The Musk v. Altman trial seated a jury in California, with opening arguments set for today. Microsoft and OpenAI amended their partnership, removing the AGI clause. OpenAI missed internal user and revenue targets, Google launches Ask YouTube, and March saw 45,800 tech layoffs.


A US judge seated a nine-person jury in the Musk v. Altman trial at a federal courthouse in California; Sam Altman and Greg Brockman were in attendance (CNBC)


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)


Sources: OpenAI missed an internal goal of reaching 1B weekly active ChatGPT users by 2025's end, and missed multiple monthly revenue targets earlier in 2026 (WSJ)


Google launches Ask YouTube, a conversational AI search "experiment" that generates pages with videos and text summaries, for Premium users in the US aged 18+ (The Verge)


Bloomberg CTO Shawn Edwards says the company is overhauling Terminal with a new chatbot-style interface called ASKB, currently open to ~125K users in beta (Wired)


Layoffs.fyi: companies announced layoffs affecting 45,800 tech employees in March, making it the worst month for reported tech job cuts in at least two years (WSJ)


An analysis of Internet Archive data: by mid-2025, ~35% of new websites published since ChatGPT's launch in November 2022 were AI-generated or AI-assisted (404 Media)

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China blocked Meta's $2B Manus acquisition and ordered both sides to unwind the deal, closing the "Singapore washing" loophole for Chinese AI startups. OpenAI is developing smartphone chips with Qualcomm and MediaTek, Google controls ~25% of global AI compute, and SaaS pricing shifts to usage-based.


China blocks Meta's $2B Manus acquisition, after reviewing whether it violated investment rules, and tells both to cancel it; Manus moved to Singapore in 2025 (FT)


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 (Ming-Chi Kuo)


Epoch AI: Google controls ~25% of global AI compute, with ~3.8M TPUs and 1.3M GPUs; Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian says demand and revenue justify the spend (FT)


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)


Anthropic details Project Deal, a marketplace experiment where Claude models bought, sold, and negotiated personal belongings on behalf of Anthropic employees (Anthropic)

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DeepSeek dropped V4 Pro and V4 Flash, undercutting US labs on price by roughly 5x. OpenAI fired back with GPT-5.5, reclaiming benchmark crowns from Claude. Meta confirms 8,000 layoffs on May 20, and Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic.


DeepSeek releases its new flagship models V4 Pro and V4 Flash in preview, saying V4 Pro trails the performance of state-of-the-art models by about 3 to 6 months (Bloomberg)


Simon Willison's comparison chart of DeepSeek V4 pricing vs. US frontier models (Simon Willison)


OpenAI says "GPT-5.5 matches GPT-5.4 per-token latency in real-world serving", performs "at a much higher level of intelligence", and is more capable for Codex (OpenAI)


Meta plans to cut 10% of its employees, or ~8,000 jobs, on May 20 and won't fill 6,000 open roles, trying to boost efficiency and offset its heavy AI spending (Bloomberg)


Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic: $10B now at a $350B valuation, with another $30B if Anthropic hits performance targets (Bloomberg)

Weekend Longreads Suggestions


A look at the AI nonprofit METR, maker of maybe the most important AI benchmark, whose time-horizon metrics are used by researchers and Wall Street to track AI development (NYT)


The Infinite Machine Olto e-bike review: a more elegant solution for trips too long to walk but too short to drive (The Verge)

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Microsoft considered buying Cursor but didn't pull the trigger before SpaceX's deal. Microsoft launches its first-ever voluntary retirement program, Anthropic's secondary market valuation hits $1T on Forge Global, and SpaceX's S-1 reveals plans to manufacture its own GPUs.


Sources: Microsoft considered buying Cursor in recent weeks but didn't make an offer; Microsoft has been working to boost GitHub Copilot's popularity (CNBC)


Microsoft announces the first voluntary retirement program in its 50-year history, for US staffers whose combined years of service added to their age totals 70+ (The Verge)


Kalshi suspends and fines congressional candidates Mark Moran of Virginia, Matt Klein of Minnesota, and Ezekiel Enriquez of Texas for political insider trading (CNBC)


Anthropic's valuation has hit $1T on Forge Global, a leading private marketplace exchange, surpassing OpenAI's valuation on the platform of $880B (Business Insider)


A poll of 4,000 workers in the US and the UK finds that the highest-earning and most experienced workers are adopting AI in their jobs far faster than others (FT)


SpaceX's S-1 excerpts list "manufacturing our own GPUs" among the "substantial capital expenditures" it is undertaking, with the size of the expenditure TBD (Reuters)


Spotify celebrates its 20th anniversary with a first-ever list of its 20 most streamed artists, albums, songs, podcasts, and audiobooks (Billboard)

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