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ELON MUSK MEGATRIAL KICKS OFF SECOND WEEK WITH SCRUTINY OF OPENAI EXEC'S FINANCES

OpenAI president Greg Brockman took the stand on Monday. Two days before the trial, Elon Musk had messaged Brockman to gauge his interest in settling the case. Brockman suggested that both sides drop their claims, but Musk responded by saying that Brockman and Sam Altman would be the most hated men in America by the end of the week. Musk's lawyers are attempting to paint Brockman as motivated by money at the expense of OpenAI's nonprofit mission.

AMAZON BUILT A MASSIVE SUPPLY CHAIN FOR ITSELF. NOW IT'S FOR HIRE

Amazon has launched Amazon Supply Chain Services, a centralized place for companies to hire Amazon for services such as fulfillment, ocean and air shipping, and truck transportation. The offering puts Amazon in competition with transportation and warehousing giants such as DSV and DHL. The global market for third-party logistics is estimated to be more than $1.3 trillion. The move is a bet that Amazon can do for logistics what Amazon Web Services did for cloud computing.

SPACEX BREAKS GROUND ON SOLAR FAB TO POWER ORBITAL DATA CENTERS

SpaceX is constructing one of the world's most advanced solar cell factories in Bastrop, Texas. The company is vertically integrating the entire fabrication process to produce highly specialized aerospace-grade solar cells. Vertical integration allows SpaceX to insulate itself from global supply chain vulnerabilities while also giving it total control over the physical limits of solar cell efficiency and mass. SpaceX needs a continuous, high-volume supply of bespoke solar arrays to successfully pull off its plans of deploying an orbital cloud network capable of handling AI workloads.

THE ROOMBA GUY'S SECOND ACT: A ROBOT YOU'LL WANT TO SNUGGLE

Familiar Machines & Magic, a startup headed by Colin Angle, the former CEO of the company that invented the Roomba, has unveiled a robot designed by former Disney Imagineers to be cute and appealing. The Familiar is an emotionally intelligent robot trained to respond appropriately to tone of voice, body language, and overall vibe. The company will market the robot to people who want to monitor their loved ones, and it is also keen to sell Familiars to people who would like to support their own well-being. The robot is still in an early prototype phase, so there is no information on pricing or availability.

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FORMATTING AN ENTIRE 25 MILLION LINE CODEBASE OVERNIGHT: THE RUBYFMT STORY

Stripe runs the world's largest Ruby codebase. The pain of not having an auto-formatter was visible in how its engineers worked. In 2022, the company set two engineers from its infrastructure team to work full-time on rubyfmt, a tool that is currently being used to format 100% of Stripe's 42 million lines of Ruby. This post tells the story of how rubyfmt came to be.

REDIS ARRAY TYPE: SHORT STORY OF A LONG DEVELOPMENT

The PR for a new Array data type for Redis took four months to create using AI assistance. AI tools allowed the developer working on the code to venture into a level of complexity they would have otherwise skipped. They helped make tasks easier and less tedious while also providing a virtual workforce that could reveal bugs in complicated algorithms.

GAMESTOP OFFERS TO BUY EBAY FOR $56 BILLION

GameStop has made an unsolicited offer to buy eBay for $56 billion, a roughly 20% premium to the company's stock closing price on Friday. GameStop is a much smaller company than eBay and is currently valued at around $12 billion. The company has around $9 billion in cash and a commitment letter from TD Bank to provide up to $20 billion in debt financing to help make the deal possible, but it is unknown how the company will come up with the rest of the money.

AI FOR BIO HAS A FUZZY API PROBLEM

Biology is a uniquely hard application domain for machine learning. Drug discovery doesn't have the kind of clean feedback loops and clean interfaces that make modern ML so powerful elsewhere. Software has clean APIs, and when things break, you can usually trace the failure to a bug and fix the code. Biology's outputs are a lot fuzzier as there are many caveats at every step of the process.

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MENTAL MODEL FOR AGENTIC WORK

This post presents a mental model that applies everywhere in agentic systems that works because the architecture underneath the tools is always the same.

ARE VCS DUMB FOR INVESTING IN CRAZY $1B+ SEED ROUNDS?

Most of these investments won't work out, but the returns from just one of them being successful will justify the losing bets.

IOS 27 WILL LET YOU CREATE CUSTOM WALLET PASSES

A new 'Create a Pass' option will let users generate digital passes from scans of things like movie tickets, concert passes, and gym membership cards.

BECOME A CURATOR FOR TLDR AI (3-5 HRS/WEEK)

TLDR is looking for an engineer/researcher at a major AI lab or startup to help write for 1M+ subscribers. Our curators have been invited to Google I/O and OpenAI DevDay, scouted for Tier 1 VCs, and get early access to unreleased TLDR products. Learn more [21].

DATA CENTERS AT SEA: OREGON'S PANTHALASSA NETS $140M LED BY PETER THIEL FOR WAVE-POWERED AI

Panthalassa has a technology platform that turns waves into reliable, clean power to power onsite AI computing.

Y COMBINATOR'S STAKE IN OPENAI

Y Combinator owns about 0.6% of OpenAI, a stake worth over $5 billion.

HUMANOID ROBOT ACTUATORS: THE COMPLETE ENGINEERING GUIDE

Every step that humanoid robots take results in a shock through the leg actuators - this means roughly one million impacts for every month of operation.

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Y COMBINATOR'S STAKE IN OPENAI

OpenAI was seeded by an offshoot of Y Combinator called YC Research in 2016, when Altman was running YC. Y Combinator owns about 0.6% of OpenAI. At OpenAI's current valuation, that stake is worth over $5 billion.

ANTHROPIC AND OPENAI LAUNCH ENTERPRISE AI VENTURES

Anthropic and OpenAI both announced separate enterprise AI ventures backed by major financial firms, with Anthropic's valued at $1.5B and OpenAI's targeting a $10B valuation.

ANTHROPIC IS WORKING ON ORBIT, ITS UPCOMING PROACTIVE ASSISTANT

Orbit is a briefing and insights system in Claude and Claude Code that can produce personalized briefings with actionable insights drawn from connected work tools. Anthropic's Code with Claude developer conference will be held in San Francisco on May 6, London on May 19, and Tokyo on June 10. It is uncertain whether Orbit will be formally unveiled on stage or quietly rolled out.

GPT-5.5 PRICE INCREASE: WHAT IT ACTUALLY COSTS

GPT-5.5 launched with a 2x price increase over GPT-5.4. The price increase is mitigated by the model generating fewer completion tokens for longer prompts. The actual cost increase is between 49% to 92%.

INSIDE OPENAI'S LOW-LATENCY VOICE INFRASTRUCTURE

AUTOMATING AI RESEARCH

AI is rapidly approaching end-to-end automation of its own R&D, with major gains in coding, experiment execution, and long-horizon task autonomy. Benchmarks show models now handle complex engineering and scientific workflows, manage other agents, and increasingly outperform humans on key subproblems. If trends hold, there's a ~60% chance of self-improving AI systems by 2028, leading to recursive progress, massive productivity gains, and a capital-heavy, human-light “machine economy.”

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REDUCE FRICTION AND LATENCY FOR LONG-RUNNING JOBS WITH WEBHOOKS IN GEMINI API

The Gemini API now supports event-driven Webhooks. The push-based notification system eliminates the need for inefficient polling. The feature is available now for all developers using the Gemini API.

TUNA-2

Tuna-2 outperforms both Tuna-R and Tuna across a diverse suite of multimodal benchmarks by using pixel embeddings. Meta plans to only release a foundation checkpoint rather than the full production-trained model weights. The release will have a small number of layers removed from both the LLM backbone and the diffusion head, but the remaining layers and all other components are fully preserved. Examples of images generated by the model are available in the repository.

INSIDE VERCEL'S SECURITY TOOL DEEPSEC

Deepsec is an agent-driven security tool that scans large codebases locally or in parallel cloud sandboxes to uncover complex vulnerabilities.

CONSUMER AI'S ARPU PROBLEM

ChatGPT's viral "smile" retention curve obscured a monetization gap because it tracked gross rather than net retention, with even the most engaged consumers capped at $20/month while Anthropic's $44B B2B revenue grows on per-user spend expansion. Consumer AI fails to capture value the way coding agents and legal AI do because users don't view answers or fun images as worth paying for and resist coughing up subscription dollars for savings they already pocket.

MODEL-HARNESS-FIT

Bustamante dissects Codex CLI, Claude Code, and GitHub Copilot CLI to show that frontier labs post-train models against specific harnesses, baking tool names, schemas, citation tags, memory rituals, and system prompt structures into the weights. Terminal-Bench 2.0 data backs the thesis: Claude Opus 4.6 scored 79.8% with ForgeCode versus 75.3% with Capy, and Cursor jumped from "Top 30 to Top 5" by changing only the harness, while OpenAI models default to patch-based file edits and Anthropic models to string replacement, with mismatches costing reasoning tokens.

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HOW LLMS DISTORT OUR WRITTEN LANGUAGE

AI's subtle distortion of written language has the potential to affect cultural institutions.

POWERING THE INFERENCE ERA: INSIDE THE DIGITALOCEAN AI-NATIVE CLOUD

DigitalOcean AI-Native Cloud is a purpose-built platform for the inference and agentic era that integrates five layers from silicon to agents into a single open stack.

BECOME A CURATOR FOR TLDR AI (3-5 HRS/WEEK)

TLDR is looking for an engineer/researcher at a major AI lab or startup to help write for 1M+ subscribers. Our curators have been invited to Google I/O and OpenAI DevDay, scouted for Tier 1 VCs, and get early access to unreleased TLDR products. Learn more [21].

WHITE HOUSE CONSIDERS VETTING AI MODELS BEFORE THEY ARE RELEASED

The Trump administration is discussing a potential executive order to create an AI working group that would bring together tech executives and government officials to examine potential oversight procedures.

END-TO-END TOKENIZER TRAINING FOR AUTOREGRESSIVE IMAGES

An end-to-end pipeline jointly optimized image tokenization and generation, enabling direct feedback from generation quality.

CARPLAY ULTRA COMING TO THESE CARS, ACCORDING TO APPLE

Apple's Apple CarPlay Ultra has so far launched only with Aston Martin, while its broader rollout remains unclear despite earlier promises. Although several brands—including Hyundai, Kia, Porsche, and Ford—are still listed as partners (with Hyundai possibly launching support in an upcoming model), others like Mercedes-Benz, Audi, Volvo, Polestar, and Renault have backed out, and some partners have expressed lukewarm interest, leaving the platform's future adoption uncertain.

DID APPLE INSPIRE THE NEW XBOX LOGO?

Microsoft's Xbox has unveiled a new glossy, translucent logo that leans heavily into early-2000s nostalgia, closely resembling Liquid Glass—a design approach it previously mocked when introduced by Apple. While some see it as a throwback to classic Xbox aesthetics, the timing suggests broader influence, reinforcing a wider industry shift led by companies like Microsoft and Apple away from flat minimalism toward skeuomorphic, textured, and more expressive visual styles.

SPOTIFY INTRODUCES VERIFIED ARTIST BADGES TO HELP DISTINGUISH HUMANS FROM AI

Spotify is introducing "Verified by Spotify" badges with green checkmarks to help users distinguish authentic human artists from AI-generated content on the platform. To qualify for verification, artists must demonstrate listener engagement, have an identifiable presence both on and off the platform, and contribute meaningfully to music culture. The rollout will be ongoing, with over 99% of actively searched artists initially verified, and the platform is also testing additional features to combat the rise of AI-generated music and impersonators.

YOUR EGO IS HURTING YOUR CAREER

Designers fall into an "ego trap" by believing they should be creative heroes in their organizations, when in reality, most jobs involve trading value for money with limited autonomy. Many businesses function without designers, and good design is often less important to companies than keeping costs low. Designers need to accept their role as specialists rather than expecting the authority that comes with more general organizational responsibility.

FIGJAM IS NOW YOUR CODING AGENT'S WHITEBOARD TOO

Figma's MCP server connects design decisions to coding environments, ensuring built products match their original designs. This integration bridges the gap between design and development workflows. The tool enhances product building by providing designers with context directly within coding tools.

DON'T SIMPLY BOLT ON AI. RETHINK FROM THE GROUND UP

The rise of tools like ChatGPT marks a fundamental shift from command-based computing to intent-based interaction, but most products still use AI as a superficial add-on rather than fully integrating it into their core design. True “AI-native” products would let AI handle internal complexity and abstract concepts (like those in AWS), reducing the learning burden on users—though this requires rethinking product architecture, maintaining user trust, and embedding AI into both the interaction and conceptual layers, not just the interface.