Tech Brew Ride Home

Big Tech earnings landed — Alphabet soared on cloud growth while Meta dropped 10% after hiking capex to $145B. SoftBank plans an AI/robotics IPO called Roze, Anthropic weighs a $900B+ round, and Musk called himself a "fool" for backing OpenAI.


Microsoft says Q3 Intelligent Cloud revenue was $34.68B, vs. $34.27B est., with Azure and other cloud services up 40% YoY; Microsoft 365 Copilot has 20M+ seats (CNBC)


Meta raises full-year capex outlook to $125B–$145B, up from $115B–$135B; shares drop ~10%, biggest intraday decline since October (Bloomberg)


Alphabet stands out on Big Tech earnings day as Google Cloud revenue jumps 63% and backlog nearly doubles to $462B; capex guidance raised to $180B–$190B (MarketWatch)


Big Four combined Q1 capex hit a record $130B, on pace for $725B in 2026, up 77% from $410B last year (FT)


Sources: SoftBank plans to create an AI and robotics company called Roze in the US to build data centers and list it as early as 2026, seeking a $100B valuation (FT)


Sources: Anthropic has begun weighing a new funding round at a $900B+ valuation, after previously resisting investor proposals at an $800B+ valuation (Bloomberg)


Sony confirms that some digital PS4 and PS5 games require a one-time online license check "to confirm the game's license" (GameSpot)


OpenAI explains Codex's "goblin problem": reinforcement training rewarded quirky creature metaphors via a discontinued "Nerdy" personality, and the behavior spread (The Verge)


Musk v. Altman: Elon Musk says he was a "fool" for backing OpenAI, accusing Altman and Brockman of manipulating him into donating tens of millions of dollars (WSJ)

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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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