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Ben Cohen / Wall Street Journal: A profile of BlackBerry's QNX division, whose operating system controls safety features in 275M cars and accounts for half of BlackBerry's revenue — John Wall has spen

Rashi Shrivastava / Forbes: A profile of music AI startup Suno, valued at ~2.5B with 2M+ paying users and 300M annualized revenue as of February, as it battles record labels and artists — The music AI

Rachyl Jones / Semafor: A slew of top Boston Dynamics execs have left the Hyundai-owned company in recent months, as sources say it faces pressure to speed the delivery of humanoids — In recent months

This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on how AI is changing music and the music industry, follow Terrence O'Brien. The Stepback arri

Javi West Larrañaga / Reuters: Amadeus IT Group, which operates the world's largest travel booking system, plans to acquire French biometrics company Idemia Public Security, for €1.2B in cash — Spanis

NIST: An evaluation by NIST's CAISI says DeepSeek V4 Pro lags behind leading US AI models by about eight months and is the most capable Chinese AI model to date — In April 2026, the Center for AI Stan

Abhishek Vishnoi / Bloomberg: Analysis: Asian suppliers account for ~90% of Nvidia's production costs, up from 65% in 2025, as latest wave of collaborations shifts from chips to physical AI — The list

Michael Acton / Financial Times: Apple's handling of vibe coding apps draws complaints from startups like Replit and Anything, which say Apple is applying App Store rules erratically — iPhone maker wa

Laurie Chen / Reuters: China's Linkerbot, which holds 80%+ of global dexterous robotic hands market, raised a Series B+ at a 3B valuation and seeks a 6B valuation in its next round — Chinese robotics

Lauren Thomas / Wall Street Journal: GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen says he is making an unsolicited ~$56B offer to buy eBay and will take the offer to shareholders if the company is not receptive — Cohen to

Chavie Lieber / Wall Street Journal: How Amazon's expansion into fashion helped Jeff Bezos enter fashion's inner circle, as he and Lauren Sánchez Bezos become underwriters for this year's Met Gala — T

Terrence O'Brien / The Verge: How music streaming services are adapting to the rise of AI-generated music by labeling, deranking, and demonetizing tracks, using AI detection tools, and more — The use

It's not hyperbole to call DualShot Recorder an overnight sensation. It took only 12 hours from the time it was released to hit number one on the App Store's list of top paid apps. It was a surprise s

Financial Times: JLL: Japan's $23B data center market is set to grow ~50% by 2030, with 90% of sites concentrated in densely populated regions, prompting pushback from residents — Japan is getting rea

Automated lint: 45 errors, 11 warnings, 3 info

David Keohane / Financial Times: Nintendo's share price has fallen by ~45% since August 2025, as rising memory chip costs drive investor concerns over profit margins for the Switch 2 — Higher memory c

The Economic Times: Palo Alto Networks agrees to acquire Portkey, which develops AI gateway tech to manage and secure AI agents; sources say the deal values Portkey at 120M-140M — Cybersecurity giant

We used an automatic classifier which judged sycophancy by looking at whether Claude showed a willingness to push back, maintain positions when challenged, give praise proportional to the merit of ide

Wall Street Journal: Sources: Anthropic is finalizing a deal for a 1.5B JV with Blackstone, Goldman Sachs, Hellman & Friedman, and others to sell AI tools to PE-backed companies — Anthropic, Blackston

Georgia Wells / Wall Street Journal: Sources: OpenAI employees have raised alarms internally over failures to alert law enforcement when users describe plans for real-world violence to ChatGPT — OpenA

Enterprises are moving fast to embed artificial intelligence into everything from customer interactions to decision-making. The benefits are undeniable: speed, efficiency and scale. The danger isn’t n

Victor Swezey / Bloomberg: A Chinese court ruled that companies cannot terminate staff just to replace them with AI, following a similar ruling by another Chinese court in December 2025 — A Chinese co

Bloomberg: A look at casino-style games, considered gambling in some US states, where player “whales” spend tens of thousands via IAP on Apple, Google, and Meta platforms — “please remove this game fr

Wall Street Journal: A profile of OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar, who sources say helped keep OpenAI's Microsoft deal on track and has privately suggested waiting until 2027 for an IPO — The chief financial o

The AI Engineer World's Fair is a conference event featuring talks on emerging AI research and engineering topics including autoresearch systems, advanced memory architectures, world models, tokenizat

Olga Kharif / Bloomberg: Analysis: after Trump's World Liberty raised $550M from investors, tokens worth hundreds of millions in USD were privately sold in “white glove” transactions — The pitch was s

Chase DiBenedetto / Mashable: Ask.com shutters, as its owner IAC “continues to sharpen its focus”; a dot-com era icon, Ask Jeeves launched in 1997, a year before Google — “As IAC continues to sharpen

Allie Garfinkle / Fortune: Avoca, whose AI agents let physical services businesses handle inbound calls and dispatch, raised 125M+ across seed, Series A, and Series B at a 1B valuation — Tyson Chen an

A startup called Sonic Fire Tech has developed an infrasound-based fire suppression system that disrupts oxygen flow to flames by vibrating oxygen at rates fire cannot consume, without using water or

This article explores the origins and development of Intel's 8008 microprocessor, a pioneering chip that played a crucial role in the early microcomputer revolution of the 1970s. It likely examines th

Reuters: Investigation: Nobitex was founded by two brothers from Iran's elite Kharrazi family; the crypto exchange processed hundreds of millions beyond US sanctions — Two brothers from the elite Khar

Sanya Mansoor / The Guardian: Maryland becomes the first US state to ban surveillance pricing in grocery stores, as other states including CO, CA, MA, IL, and NJ consider similar bills — Critics say M

Meta Platforms Inc. has acquired Assured Robot Intelligence Inc., a provider of artificial intelligence software for robots. The social media giant announced the deal today without disclosing the fina

New York Times: Ripple Labs investor and exec Chris Larsen plans to spend 3.5M to help Alex Bores, a NY congressional candidate at the center of a proxy war over AI regulation — Chris Larsen, who hail

/elsewhere/sightings/ I have a new camera (a Canon R6 Mark II) so I'm taking a lot more photos of birds. I share my best wildlife photos on iNaturalist, and based on yesterday's successful prototype I

The Information: Sources: Anthropic is in early talks to buy AI inference chips from UK-based Fractile when they become available in 2027 — As Anthropic's sales explode, straining the servers it uses,

Lauren Thomas / Wall Street Journal: Sources: GameStop is preparing to make an offer for eBay after quietly building a stake; GameStop had a market cap of ~11B as of May 1, while eBay had ~45B — Retai

Bloomberg: Sources: Nigerian mobile payments service OPay is preparing for a US IPO at a $4B valuation with Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, and JPMorgan Chase advising — Opay Digital Services Ltd. is workin

Robert Booth / The Guardian: Study: OpenAI's o1 correctly diagnosed 67% of emergency room patients using electronic records and a few sentences from nurses, vs. to 50-55% for triage doctors — Research

Jonathan Greig / The Record: A bug in popular cPanel, WHM, and WP Squared software has reportedly been exploited since Feb.; CISA it gives a 9.8 CVSS score, tells agencies to patch by May 3 — Federal

A new US-wide cell phone network marketed to Christians is set to launch next week. It blocks porn, which experts in network security say marks the first time a US cell plan has used network-level blo

Sam Tobin / Reuters: A UK court orders Samsung to pay ZTE 392M for patents needed to enable phone network access; Samsung faces similar suits from ZTE in China, Germany, and Brazil — Samsung Electroni

JuliaHub Inc., an “agentic” industrial engineering startup that’s trying to automate complex manufacturing processes with artificial intelligence, said today it has raised 65 million in a Series B fun

On April 7, 2026, Anthropic did something unprecedented in the history of artificial intelligence: The company announced that it had built its most capable model ever and would not be releasing it to

AI is driving healthcare digital transformation at an unprecedented pace, forcing insurance and healthcare organizations to modernize operations and decision-making while balancing speed with strong g

If anyone thought artificial intelligence was running into a slow patch, let alone running into any fundamental technical or financial hurdles, this week quieted the doubters — at least for now. In a