Tech Brew Ride Home

Apple beat Q2 estimates and forecast strong Q3 growth as the MacBook Neo and Mac Mini sell out. The Senate unanimously banned prediction market trading for senators, Intel closed its best month ever at +114%, and Musk admitted xAI "partly" distilled OpenAI models.


Apple forecasts Q3 revenue above estimates, with sales expected to rise between 14% and 17%, and says memory expenses will climb "significantly higher" in Q3 (Bloomberg)


Amazon debuts "Join the chat", an AI-powered feature that lets users ask questions about products and get conversational audio responses generated in real time (TechCrunch)


The US Senate unanimously passed a rule barring senators from trading on prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket, amid rising concern over insider trading (CNBC)


Musk v. Altman: when asked whether xAI has distilled OpenAI models, Elon Musk says the claim is "partly" true (Wired)


Intel's stock jumped 114% in April, hitting a record on April 24 and lifting its market cap past $470B, closing out the chipmaker's best month on record (CNBC)

Longreads


Talkie-LM: what happens when you train a language model exclusively on text from before 1930? Can it predict the future or independently rediscover General Relativity? (Talkie-LM)

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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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