The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

Sources: Anthropic is weighing the possibility of designing its own chips, but it has yet to commit to a design or put together a dedicated team for the project (Reuters) [22d]
How Black Forest Labs, a 70-person startup based in Germany, became a top competitor in AI image generation; sources: it recently declined to partner with xAI (Maxwell Zeff/Wired) [22d]
xAI has filed a lawsuit challenging Colorado's landmark AI anti-discrimination law, set to take effect in the summer, saying it violates free speech protections (Financial Times) [23d]
A gap in understanding AI is growing, as casual users cite flaws in old free models while power users point to new models' staggering gains in technical domains (Andrej Karpathy/@karpathy) [23d]
An OpenAI note to investors after Anthropic announced Mythos says OpenAI's early push to increase computing resources gives it a key advantage over Anthropic (Shirin Ghaffary/Bloomberg) [23d]
Internal memo: Meta is pulling top engineers into its new Applied AI Engineering division, as part of a push to improve its models and "compete in the AI race" (Jyoti Mann/The Information) [23d]
An Ohio man is the first convicted under the Take It Down Act after pleading guilty to creating and sharing real and AI-generated explicit images of 10+ victims (Ashley Belanger/Ars Technica) [23d]
EFF says it is leaving X, as "X is no longer where the fight is happening" and an X post now gets less than 3% of the views a tweet got seven years ago (Kenyatta Thomas/Electronic Frontier ...) [23d]
OpenAI launches a $100/month ChatGPT Pro subscription, which offers 5x more Codex usage than Plus; the $200/month Pro plan offers 20x higher limits than Plus (Zac Hall/9to5Mac) [23d]
Google says the Gemini app can now generate interactive 3D models and simulations; users must select the Pro model in the prompt bar (Emma Roth/The Verge) [23d]
Sources: the White House is pushing back on GOP-led AI bills in Nebraska and Tennessee, putting new pressure on GOP state lawmakers who support AI guardrails (Axios) [23d]
Anthropic makes Claude Cowork, previously available as a "research preview", generally available to all paid plans, and adds six features for enterprise use (Zac Hall/9to5Mac) [23d]
Florida's AG launches a probe into OpenAI and ChatGPT, saying its data could fall "into the hands of America's enemies" and citing a mass shooter's ChatGPT use (Juby Babu/Reuters) [23d]
X brings back Voice Notes to X Chat, supporting one-on-one and group conversations via a new voice input icon, as it tests a standalone X Chat spinoff on iOS (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch) [23d]
Visa unveils Intelligent Commerce Connect, a platform that facilitates payments for AI agents across multiple card networks, including those of Visa competitors (Kelly Tyko/Axios) [23d]
Chapter, which uses AI to help seniors enroll in Medicare, raised a $100M Series E, doubling its valuation to $3B and bringing its total funding to $285M (Stephanie Palazzolo/The Information) [23d]
RISC-V chip designer SiFive raised a $400M Series G led by Atreides at a $3.65B valuation; CEO Patrick Little says it is the final funding round before an IPO (Stephen Nellis/Reuters) [23d]
Elorian, which builds visual AI models with better reasoning capabilities for industries like robotics, emerges from stealth with $55M at a $300M valuation (Bloomberg) [23d]
Google and Intel expand their partnership to deploy Intel's Xeon 6 chips and co-develop custom Infrastructure Processing Units to improve computing efficiency (Zaheer Kachwala/Reuters) [23d]
Annual letter: Andy Jassy says AWS's AI revenue has reached a $15B annual run rate as of Q1, and Amazon plans to spend ~$200B in capital expenditures in 2026 (Todd Bishop/GeekWire) [23d]
Documents: OpenAI expects ads to generate ~$2.4B in 2026 revenue and to quadruple in 2027 to nearly $11B; in 2030, OpenAI expects ads to generate ~$102B (Sri Muppidi/The Information) [23d]
In his annual letter, Andy Jassy says Amazon's space-internet service Leo will "launch in mid-2026", after delays; Amazon has FCC approval for 3,236 satellites (Thomas Ricker/The Verge) [23d]
Meta begins removing dozens of Facebook and Instagram ads that trial lawyers placed to reach eligible plaintiffs, after social media addiction trial losses (Dan Primack/Axios) [23d]
Researchers: a zero-day vulnerability in Adobe Reader has been actively exploited since at least December 2025, and some docs contain Russian-language lures (Sergiu Gatlan/BleepingComputer) [23d]
Samsung plans to invest $4B to construct a chip packaging facility in Vietnam's Thai Nguyen province to support AI demand; sources say the first phase costs $2B (Bloomberg) [23d]