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HOW TRUMP'S TIKTOK NEGOTIATIONS WERE UPENDED BY CHINA AND TARIFFS

The Trump administration believed it had a plan to save TikTok last Wednesday, but the Chinese government would not let the deal proceed due to new tariffs on Chinese imports. President Trump extended the deadline for a TikTok deal into mid-June in response. ByteDance was reportedly comfortable with the new suggested plan, but even before the tariff announcement, there was no guarantee that China would approve of any deal. The talks about TikTok are likely to become even more complicated as the trade war between the two countries escalates.

INSIDE THE EV STARTUP SECRETLY BACKED BY JEFF BEZOS

Slate Auto, which could start production as soon as next year, is an EV startup that has been quietly operating since its founding in 2022. It has hired hundreds of employees, many of whom came from Ford, General Motors, Stellantis, and Harley-Davidson. The company is aiming to build an affordable two-seat electric pickup truck for around $25,000. It raised at least $111 million in a Series A round in 2023 that Jeff Bezos participated in. It is unknown how much Bezos put into the company.

ALTMAN-BACKED PRAXIS SCOUTS KYIV, ATHENS FOR TECH UTOPIA

Praxis is a self-described 'sovereign network' funded by Silicon Valley investors looking for at least 10,000 acres somewhere in the world to build its first city. Its co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Dryden Brown will visit several candidate sites in a world tour kicking off in May. The locations include Nuuk in Greenland, Buenos Aires, Rome, Athens, Auckland, Marrakesh, Tokyo, Kyiv, and the Dominican Republic capital of Santo Domingo. Once a location is announced and the host country's support has been secured, Praxis will dispatch a small delegation of supporters to move into 250 to 1,000 modular houses.

demo.

INTRODUCING THE EVALS API

OpenAI has released the Evals API for developers. The API enables developers to programmatically define tests, automate evaluation runs, and quickly iterate on prompts. It allows developers to integrate Evals anywhere in a workflow. Evals are still available in the dashboard.

APACHE ECHARTS

Apache ECharts is an open source JavaScript visualization library. It features flexible chart types, a powerful rendering engine, elegant visual design, and a healthy community. The library can automatically generate chart descriptions and decal patterns for accessibility. It provides easy ways to add intuitive, interactive, and highly customizable charts to commercial products.

ASK HN: DO YOU STILL USE SEARCH ENGINES? (HACKER NEWS THREAD)

More and more people are using large language models instead of search engines, but many developers are finding that the technology is not well suited to finding factual information. Search engines are still better at finding specific links and real information. Large language models can be helpful for many things, like helping someone unfamiliar with a topic better refine their searches by getting the terminology correct and exploring research topics. Search engines are still required for many things as large language models get lots of very important things wrong.

HOW APPLE STOCKPILED IPHONES TO AVOID TARIFFS AND KEEP PRICES LOW FOR A WHILE

Apple shipped five flights worth of Apple products in three days to the US in the last week of March to stock its warehouses. This is usually a time of the year when the company starts winding down its current-year products and starts manufacturing its September releases. The reserves that arrived at a lower duty will temporarily insulate the company from the higher prices it will need to pay under the revised tax rates. Apple is expected to take a $33 billion hit due to the Trump Administration's newly instated tariff plan.

MIRA MURATI'S AI STARTUP GAINS PROMINENT EX-OPENAI ADVISERS

Thinking Machines Lab has gained former OpenAI chief research officer Bob McGrew and Alec Radford, a former OpenAI researcher behind many of the company's more transformative innovations.

‘AN OVERWHELMINGLY NEGATIVE AND DEMORALIZING FORCE': WHAT IT'S LIKE WORKING FOR A COMPANY THAT'S FORCING AI ON ITS DEVELOPERS

Several people working in the video game industry or related fields tell stories about their daily interactions and struggles with artificial intelligence in the workplace and what it means for the jobs they've been trained and hired to do.

UNIT-TESTING AI AGENTS IN THE BROWSER

Gemini is the cheapest, most accurate, and among the fastest models on the market; GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet are pretty good, but not worth the 20-30x price premium over Gemini; and newer models like Claude 3.7 Sonnet and GPT-4.5 seem more creative and not ideal for doing exactly what you want to do.

POSTGRESQL FULL-TEXT SEARCH: FAST WHEN DONE RIGHT (DEBUNKING THE SLOW MYTH)

A look at how to correctly set up and use standard PostgreSQL Full-Text Search (FTS) for optimal performance that demonstrates the true speed of built-in FTS.

AI 2027: RESPONSES

This post collates several responses to a previous essay predicting the future of AI.

KEVIN KELLY POINTS A NEW WAY FORWARD INTO THE AGE OF AI

Kevin Kelly, a tech guru, wants to create a world where AI is decentralized and used to augment humans.

Applications in the Enterprise [4]" here.

STATE OF AI INDEX 2025

A great, high level, and comprehensive summary in 10 charts of the current state of AI across models, investment, and costs.

WAYMO'S PRIVACY CONCERNS

Waymo's draft privacy policy reveals it may use in-cabin camera footage to train AI models and personalize ads, prompting fresh concerns over data use in autonomous vehicles.

AI STARTUPS IN HEALTHCARE

Google for Startups has launched its 2025 AI for Health cohort, supporting 25 startups across EMEA with mentorship, product support, and AI best practices.

BENCHMARKING OPEN SOURCE MODELS FOR OCR

OCR is the task of recognizing text in images. It is challenging in the long tail and immensely valuable when done right. Many closed models such as the Gemini series are exceptional at this task. The new suite of Llama 4 models pushes the state of the art for open models forward substantially.

DEEPCODER

Together AI has trained a coding model that is competitive with closed source reasoning models. It has released data, code, training recipes, and showcased the model's strong long context ability.

A NEW BATCH NORMALIZATION

This paper proposes a new batch normalization method for SPD manifolds that uses a learnable Generalized Bures-Wasserstein metric.

HI DREAM IMAGE GENERATION MODEL

A strong 17B parameter image generation model that uses 4 different text encoders for generation. It has strong overall performance and is permissively licensed.

A FRAMEWORK FOR DYNAMIC MULTI-PRODUCT PRICING

This paper introduces a new framework for dynamic multi-product pricing that uses a censored multinomial logit model where buyers only consider products below their valuations.

MOTIFBENCH FOR PROTEIN DESIGN

MotifBench is a benchmark designed for computational protein design that focuses on the motif-scaffolding problem by identifying protein structures that stabilize target motifs.

HOW STUDENTS USE CLAUDE IN EDUCATION

Anthropic analyzed one million student conversations to understand AI usage in education. STEM students dominate usage, primarily leveraging Claude for content creation, technical problem-solving, and higher-order learning tasks.

ARABIC AI BENCHMARKS

Inception and MBZUAI have launched a unified Arabic AI evaluation platform featuring updated AraGen benchmarks and a new instruction-following leaderboard built on the Arabic IFEval benchmark.

17K REASONING TRACES FROM R1 (HUGGING FACE HUB)

A great set of reasoning traces from R1 that can be used as training data to distill a smaller reasoner or kick start the RL process.

HOW GOOGLE BUILT THE PIXEL'S ADD ME FEATURE

The "Add Me" feature on Pixel devices leverages advanced image segmentation and AI for personalized video experiences.

MICROSOFT'S COPILOT CAN NOW BROWSE THE WEB AND PERFORM ACTIONS FOR YOU

Microsoft's Copilot AI chatbot now performs tasks on popular websites, remembers user preferences, and analyzes real-time video.

ELEVENLABS RELEASES OFFICIAL MCP SERVER FOR AI-DRIVEN AUDIO PROCESSING

ElevenLabs has launched an official Model Context Protocol server for Text-to-Speech and audio processing that is compatible with clients like Claude Desktop and OpenAI Agents.

RIPPLE TO ACQUIRE PRIME BROKER HIDDEN ROAD FOR $1.25B

Ripple is buying prime brokerage firm Hidden Road for $1.25 billion, aiming to scale up its institutional crypto services and boost its stablecoin strategy. The deal will integrate Ripple's RLUSD stablecoin and the XRP Ledger into Hidden Road's infrastructure, positioning Ripple to better bridge traditional finance and digital assets.

DOJ AXES CRYPTO UNIT AS TRUMP'S REGULATORY PULLBACK CONTINUES

The DOJ has disbanded its National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team and shifted its focus from enforcing regulatory violations to targeting criminal activities like fraud and terrorist financing. The US Deputy Attorney General emphasized that the department is not a regulator. This is a clear deviation from the previous “regulation by prosecution” approach, which was halted by President Trump's executive order on digital assets.

COINBASE LAUNCHES SUPERPAY

Coinbase has launched SuperPay, a demo app built on its Developer Platform to simplify onchain payments. The app allows for easy USDC purchases, crypto transfers, and invoice management. It is now live on the Base Sepolia testnet. There are tools available for developers to build their own version.

OKX TO LIST PROMPT

OKX will list PROMPT (Wayfinder), an AI agent-based multi-chain trading protocol, for spot trading with deposits open from April 9. PROMPT/USDT trading will launch on April 10.

DEMYSTIFYING "TVL DEALS"

TVL deals are a way for crypto projects to temporarily boost their total value locked by offering a small portion of tokens in exchange for liquidity - a tactic aimed at building trust and early momentum. Deal parameters like asset type, lock-up duration, and transparent documentation are critical for incentive alignment and ensuring liquidity remains sticky. These deals have come under criticism for artificially inflating metrics and obscuring details from retail users.

TYPE III STABLECOINS

Type III stablecoins replace human oversight with immutable smart contracts. Unlike traditional models, which either depend on a centralized team (Type I) or decentralized committees (Type II) to allocate capital, Type III protocols, like Cap, use shared security and market-driven dynamics to match operator strategies weighted by restaker votes. This model lowers switching latency when market conditions change and ensures yield generation and risk management are aligned with user interests.

A FIRST PRINCIPLES BREAKDOWN OF THE CRYPTO PAYMENTS STACK

Stablecoins are transforming the payments industry by offering a faster, cheaper, and more efficient alternative to traditional financial systems. This deep dive breaks down the crypto payments stack from first principles and explores how stablecoins move through layers of wallets, on/off-ramps, BaaS providers, liquidity services, and more to reach the end user.

THE COLOR OF MONEY

This article compares the business models of major stablecoins - USDT, USDC, and USDS - through the lens of reserve structure and return on equity. It highlights how full reserve models (like USDC) prioritize liquidity but face profitability challenges, while fractional reserve models (like Tether and Sky) take on more risk for higher returns, suggesting a future where stablecoins serve different roles based on their economic design.

ETH'S STORY

Ethereum's narrative has shifted from once being touted as the future global supercomputer to now being pitched as a settlement layer, raising questions about its current $192B valuation.

THE OLD DAO MODEL IS IN SHAMBLES

There are growing concerns around DAO governance as platforms, like Lobby Finance, make it easier and cheaper to buy voting power, raising serious security and integrity risks.

THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM IS USER RETENTION

Even standout platforms like Hyperliquid retain only 20% of top users after six months.

AAVE'S INSTITUTIONAL DOMINANCE

Aave is flexing serious strength in the DeFi space, raking in $1.73M revenue in 48 hours, holding 67% lending market share, and gearing up for $1M weekly token buybacks.

Read the case study for all the juicy technical details + results

IOS 19 DESIGN LEAK: ROUNDED ICONS, NEW TAB BARS, AND A "GLASS-LIKE" INTERFACE

Among the key updates in iOS 19 are a sleeker, more transparent “glass-like” interface, rounder app icons, and a newly styled pill-shaped tab bar. Users can also expect redesigned elements such as rounded corners, thinner toggles, and a refreshed Settings app and keyboard to enhance ease of use. A subtle light effect will add extra shine to the interface, giving it a more modern feel.

EPIC GAMES ACQUIRES LOCI TO INTRODUCE AUTOMATED 3D TAGGING

Epic Games has acquired Loci, an AI platform that automates 3D asset tagging and detects potential IP violations. The technology will streamline content management and protect creators, especially in tools like Unreal Editor for Fortnite and Fab. This integration addresses past copyright issues and enhances asset discoverability across Epic's ecosystem.

TOWARDS A NEW MEDIA ECOSYSTEM WITH WORLD SIMULATORS

Runway has secured over $300M in Series D funding to expand its AI film studio and advance world simulator technology. With Gen-4, it can now enable consistent, AI-generated media content. The investment supports continued research, original productions, and hiring, pushing forward a new media ecosystem built on advanced AI models simulating realistic worlds.

UNDERSTANDING HOW TO PRIORITIZE MAKES YOU A MORE EFFECTIVE DESIGNER

Designers often struggle with prioritization, fearing wrong decisions or deferring to others. However, when everything's urgent, nothing gets done. Focusing on key users, tailoring communication to decision-makers, and offering thoughtful recommendations—even with options—helps drive action. Prioritization isn't optional - it's essential for impactful design in today's constrained, business-driven environment.