The Brutalist Report

Sources: Recursive Superintelligence, a four-month-old start-up developing self-teaching AI and founded by ex-DeepMind and OpenAI engineers, has raised $500M+ (Financial Times) [1h]
White House says a meeting between Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and Dario Amodei had been "productive and constructive"; source: Scott Bessent joined the meeting (Axios) [1h]
A deep dive into Dwarkesh Patel's interview with Jensen Huang, including Huang's takes on Nvidia's moat and chip sales to China, and reactions to the interview (Zvi Mowshowitz/Don't Worry About the Vase) [1h]
Bill Peebles, the researcher behind Sora, is leaving OpenAI as the company consolidates around enterprise AI and its forthcoming "superapp" (Rebecca Bellan/TechCrunch) [2h]
Cerebras files to go public on Nasdaq and reports $510M in 2025 revenue, up 76% YoY, with a net income of $87.9M, up from a $485M net loss in 2024 (Jordan Novet/CNBC) [2h]
Kevin Weil, OpenAI's former CPO who became VP of OpenAI for Science, is leaving the company; Prism, a web app for scientists launched in Jan., will be shuttered (Maxwell Zeff/Wired) [2h]
Sources: Meta intends to conduct a first wave of sweeping layoffs planned for this year on May 20, laying off ~10% of its global workforce, or ~8,000 employees (Reuters) [3h]
Figma stock drops ~7% after Anthropic launched Claude Design, a dedicated app powered by its latest model Claude Opus 4.7 (Jon Keegan/Sherwood News) [3h]
In disclosures due to Broadcom CEO Hock Tan's presence on the Meta board, Meta says it paid Broadcom $2.3B in 2025; Tan is leaving the board (Martin Peers/The Information) [3h]
Sources: Cursor is in advanced talks to raise about $2B co-led by a16z at a valuation of more than $50B, not including the investment, with Nvidia participating (Bloomberg) [4h]
A profile of wealth manager Iconiq, which, sources say, has $100B AUM, with $26B specifically for VC investing; Iconiq invested $3B into AI startups in 2025 (Natasha Mascarenhas/Bloomberg) [4h]
World expands its Tinder partnership and partners with Zoom and others to verify human users, as it continues its pivot from crypto to identity verification (Maxwell Zeff/Wired) [5h]
Ad buyers say ad rates for ChatGPT are falling from $60 CPM to as low as $25 and the minimum spend to advertise is down to $50K from $250K at launch (Krystal Scanlon/Digiday) [6h]
Netflix plans to launch a vertical video feed, to help with content discovery, this month, and plans to use AI for content creation and recommendations (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch) [7h]
China's smartphone shipments declined 4% YoY in Q1 amid memory shortages; Huawei's shipments grew 2% YoY for a 20% market share, iPhone grew 20% for a 19% share (Ivan Lam/Counterpoint Research) [7h]
Sources: xAI plans to let Cursor train Composer 2.5 AI coding model using tens of thousands of xAI's GPUs, a new strategy for xAI in a competitive AI landscape (Grace Kay/Business Insider) [7h]
Anthropic launches Claude Design, a new experimental product that lets users create visuals like prototypes, slides, one-pagers, and more using Claude (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch) [7h]
Sources: DeepSeek is in talks to raise outside capital for the first time, seeking at least $300M at a valuation of at least $10B (The Information) [8h]
Sources: some shareholders are questioning whether Sam Altman should lead OpenAI through the turbulence of an IPO and have floated Bret Taylor as a successor (Wall Street Journal) [8h]
India drops a proposal to require Apple, Google, Samsung, and others to pre-install the country's biometric identification app Aadhaar on phones (Reuters) [9h]
Bluesky says a sophisticated DDoS attack is to blame for continued app outages but it has not seen any evidence of unauthorized access to private data (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch) [9h]
Loop, which uses AI to predict supply chain disruptions, raised a $95M Series C co-led by Valor Equity Partners and the Valor Atreides AI Fund (Sean O'Kane/TechCrunch) [9h]
An interview with Dario Amodei, who says the negative narrative around AI is dominant because the industry hasn't yet fully delivered the benefits it promises (John Thornhill/Financial Times) [9h]
Kraken parent company Payward agrees to acquire Bitnomial, a digital asset derivatives platform, for up to $550M in cash and stock (Will Canny/CoinDesk) [10h]
Cyber experts say the EU's age verification app has glaring privacy and security problems; after saying it was ready, EU officials say the app is a "demo" (Politico) [10h]
China fines leading food delivery apps, including Alibaba and Meituan, a combined ~$528M, the largest fine for the sector since the 2015 food safety law (Luz Ding/Bloomberg) [10h]
Charles Schwab unveils its long-awaited crypto investing product, Schwab Crypto, with a 0.75% fee on trades and plans to launch in the coming weeks (Tanaya Macheel/CNBC) [10h]
Docs: US tech companies successfully lobbied the EU to hide data centers' environmental toll; one of their demands was written almost verbatim into EU rules (The Guardian) [11h]
Counterpoint: India's smartphone shipments fell 3% YoY in Q1 2026, a six-year low, as price hikes weigh on sales; 80+ smartphone models saw price hikes of ~15% (Abhinav Parmar/Reuters) [11h]
SynMax: ~40% of US data centers due in 2026 are facing delays, with major sites for Microsoft, OpenAI, and others likely set back by more than three months (Financial Times) [11h]
Sources: Dario Amodei is set to meet with WH Chief of Staff Susie Wiles on Friday, a breakthrough in Anthropic's effort to resolve its fight with the Pentagon (Axios) [12h]
Uber agrees to pay ~€270M for an additional 4.5% stake in German food delivery rival Delivery Hero from Prosus, which would bring its total stake to ~7% (Financial Times) [13h]
Sources: Sequoia raised ~$7B for a new fund, the first fundraising round under its new leadership; the firm's last expansion fund was a $3.4B vehicle in 2022 (Bloomberg) [13h]
Physical Intelligence says its new model, π0.7, can direct robots on tasks they weren't trained on, an "early sign" of generalization, surprising researchers (Connie Loizos/TechCrunch) [15h]
OnlyFans is in advanced talks to sell Architect Capital a below 20% stake at a $3B+ valuation, down from a previously reported ~60% stake at a ~$5.5B valuation (Financial Times) [17h]
Sources: China mobilizes multiple agencies to probe Meta's $2B Manus deal; some officials worry aggressive measures may send chilling signals to the tech sector (Financial Times) [17h]
Hangzhou-based Manycore shares rose 187% early in its Hong Kong debut after raising $156M in its IPO; it is pivoting to selling AI training data to robot makers (Bloomberg) [18h]
Mozilla launches Thunderbolt, an open-source AI client for users and businesses who want to run their own self-hosted AI infrastructure, available on GitHub (Kyle Orland/Ars Technica) [19h]
Q&A: Ronan Farrow on his Sam Altman profile in The New Yorker, how Altman changed in 18 months of reporting, OpenAI's board drama and enterprise shift, and more (Nilay Patel/The Verge) [20h]
Sources: Cerebras plans to make its IPO public as soon as Friday, aiming to raise $3B+ at a $35B+ valuation, a 60% premium to its $22B February valuation (The Information) [20h]
Sources: OpenAI agrees to pay Cerebras $20B+ to use its server chips, double the amount previously associated with the deal, and may receive equity in Cerebras (The Information) [21h]
Roblox agrees to pay $12.5M and implement age verification for all users as part of a settlement with Nevada over claims it failed to protect young users (Jessica Hill/Associated Press) [21h]
Sources: SpaceX told employees that it has moved up the scheduled date for when shares awarded to employees become eligible for sale from May to April (Bloomberg) [21h]
Alibaba unveils Qwen3.6-35B-A3B, an open-weight MoE model with 35B total and 3B active parameters, saying it rivals larger dense models in agentic coding tasks (Qwen) [22h]
IAB and PwC: digital ad revenue hit $294.6B in 2025, up 13.9% YoY; social media advertising hit $117.7B, up 32.6%, and digital video hit $78B, up 25.4% (George Winslow/TV Tech) [23h]
The US and the Philippines agree to launch a high-tech industrial hub on the island of Luzon to counter China's supply chains; the US will run it as an SEZ (Wall Street Journal) [23h]

Cloudflare Blog

Bleeping Computer

TechRadar

The Shortcut

Serve The Home

Intel Launches Core Series 3 “Wildcat Lake” Mobile Processors for Low-Cost Laptops [6h]