Tech Brew Ride Home

Apple does a big acquisition. OpenAI is racing to IPO. Elon
might just merge all his companies into one. Google’s Project Genie is the
latest thing that will make you say, gee, AI can do that?! And, of course, the Weekend Longreads Suggestions.


Apple buys Israeli start-up Q.AI for close to $2bn in race to build AI devices (FT)


OpenAI Plans Fourth-Quarter IPO in Race to Beat Anthropic to Market (WSJ)


SpaceX in merger talks with other Musk companies ahead of IPO (Reuters)


Elon Musk’s SpaceX Said to Consider Merger With Tesla or xAI (Bloomberg)


Google’s AI helped me make bad Nintendo knockoffs (The Verge)


Moltbot Gets Another New Name, OpenClaw, And Triggers Security Fears And Scams (Forbes)

Weekend Longread:


To avoid accusations of AI cheating, college students are turning to AI (NBCNews)

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Meta earnings good. The street like the AI spending. Microsoft earnings bad. Why is growth in their cloud business not as robust all of the sudden? Elon is following through on taking Tesla all in on robots and AI. The AI inspired layoffs are NOT just for the tech industry. And are you actually technical enough to run that Clawdbot?


Zuckerberg teases agentic commerce tools and major AI rollout in 2026 (TechCrunch)


Microsoft stock drops 7% on slowing cloud growth, light margin guidance (CNBC)


Tesla scraps models in pivot to AI as annual revenue falls for first time (FT)


Dow to Cut 4,500 Employees in AI Overhaul (WSJ)


Waymo robotaxi hits a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica (TechCrunch)


Tiny startup Arcee AI built a 400B-parameter open source LLM from scratch to best Meta’s Llama (TechCrunch)


Clawdbot sheds skin to become Moltbot, can't slough off security issues (The Register)

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The Amazon layoffs showed up on schedule. Is Tether behind the rise in the price of gold? A new type of privacy screen tech from Samsung. Elon wants to IPO on his birthday. Anthropic raises more ahead of its IPO. And AI is finding weird stuff in Space.


Amazon says it is laying off 16,000 employees (TechCrunch)


Tether Is Shaking Up the Gold Market With Massive Metal Hoard (Bloomberg)


Samsung confirms Galaxy S26's insane 'pixel level' privacy feature (SamMobile)


SpaceX weighs June IPO timed to planetary alignment and Elon Musk’s birthday (FT)


Anthropic doubles VC fundraising to $20bn on surging investor demand (FT)


Anthropic Hikes 2026 Revenue Forecast 20% but Delays When It Will Go Cash Flow Positive (The Information)


Astronomers used AI to find 1,400 ‘anomalous objects’ from Hubble archives (The Verge)

RideHomeFund News: CrowdStrike buys identity security startup SGNL for $740 million in latest deal push

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I think we have to gird ourselves for a slew of Chinese AI releases in the coming weeks. Are AI inspired layoffs poised to sweep the tech industry? Meta goes with subscriptions. Uber wants to train AI for others. And Dario Amodei has a pretty stark warning about AI.


China’s Moonshot Unveils AI Model Ahead of DeepSeek Release (Bloomberg)


Pinterest laying off 15% of workforce in push toward AI roles and teams (CNBC)


TikTok says a power outage caused a 'cascading systems failure' that messed up its algorithm (BusinessInsider)


Meta to test premium subscriptions on Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp (TechCrunch)


Uber launches an ‘AV Labs’ division to gather driving data for robotaxi partners (TechCrunch)


Thread On The Amodei Essay @aakashgupta

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Did you even notice that new TikTok privacy policy over the weekend? AirTags finally have a second generation. Microsoft confirms it will give out your BitLocker recovery keys if you’re silly enough to store them with them. And let me introduce you to Clawdbot. Since you can’t see the spelling, you won’t understand how this is different until I explain.


TikTok Is Now Collecting Even More Data About Its Users. Here Are the 3 Biggest Changes (Wired)


Apple launches AirTag 2 with improved range, louder speaker, more (9to5Mac)


EU opens formal probe into Musk’s xAI over Grok deepfakes (FT)


Latest ChatGPT model uses Elon Musk’s Grokipedia as source, tests reveal (The Guardian)


Microsoft Gave FBI Keys To Unlock Encrypted Data, Exposing Major Privacy Flaw (Forbes)


Clawdbot Showed Me What the Future of Personal AI Assistants Looks Like (MacStories)

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