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Techmeme
April 26, 2025, 1:30 PM
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Top News

Bloomberg:
Sources: XAI Holdings, the newly combined entity housing xAI and X, is in talks to raise roughly $20B, or possibly more, valuing the company at more than $120B  —  Elon Musk's XAI Holdings is in talks with investors to raise roughly $20 billion in funding for his newly combined artificial intelligence startup …
Wall Street Journal:
Docs and sources detail the opaque market for shares of Elon Musk's private companies; Valor recently offered investors $1B worth of shares in SpaceX and xAI  —  Lucrative stock deals have allowed SpaceX to avoid public scrutiny even as it has grown into one of the largest companies in the U.S.
More: TESLARATI, MarketWatch, SPACE.com, and Politico
Bluesky: @iainmartin and @jetjocko.  X: @davecbenoit.  LinkedIn: Christine Healey
Alex Heath / The Verge:
Q&A with Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas on Motorola partnership, Perplexity's upcoming browser Comet, TikTok bid, ChatGPT's scale, Google's DOJ trial, and more  —  Aravind Srinivas discusses his partnership with Motorola, fighting Google, and why AI assistants are coming for browsers.
Gabe Kaminsky / The Free Press:
Leaked letter: interim US Attorney for DC Ed Martin accused Wikipedia of allowing foreign manipulation and propaganda, threatening its tax-exempt status  —  In a letter obtained by The Free Press, Trump appointee Ed Martin accuses the Wikimedia Foundation of violating the law.
The Information:
a16z, which owns ~20% of Deel, a stake worth $2.5B+, is advising Deel in fighting Rippling, whose CEO Parker Conrad said a16z pushed him out of Zenefits in 2016  —  Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz has landed in the middle of a nasty Silicon Valley spy scandal between …
Dan Primack / Axios:
Deel sues Rippling for alleged defamation, libel, and deceptive trade practices, says Rippling placed an insider within Deel, is not tax compliant, and more
Chris Welch / The Verge:
Google says it will end support for 1st- and 2nd-gen Nest thermostats on October 25, and won't launch new models in Europe due to its “unique” heating systems  —  The company is also pulling Nest thermostats out of Europe entirely, citing “unique” heating challenges.
Dario Amodei:
Interpretability, or understanding how AI models work, can help mitigate many AI risks, such as misalignment and misuse, that stem from AI systems' opacity  —  In the decade that I have been working on AI, I've watched it grow from a tiny academic field to arguably the most important economic and geopolitical issue in the world.
Leah Nylen / Bloomberg:
US v. Google: Chrome General Manager Parisa Tabriz testified that only Google can run Chrome, given the browser's “interdependencies” on other parts of Google  —  Google is the only company that can offer the level of features and functionality that its popular Chrome web browser has today …
Juro Osawa / The Information:
Sources: Butterfly Effect, the Chinese startup behind Manus, has discussed setting up a new HQ outside China, and separating its domestic and global businesses  —  Leaders of the Chinese startup behind the hit artificial intelligence agent Manus have discussed setting up new headquarters outside China …
More: WinBuzzer
Bloomberg:
Sources: Chinese AI startup Manus raised $75M led by Benchmark at a $500M valuation, and plans to expand to markets including the US, Japan, and the Middle East

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About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 1:30 PM ET, April 26, 2025.

The most current version of the site as always is available at our home page. To view an earlier snapshot click here and then modify the date indicated.

From Mediagazer

Dominic-Madori Davis / TechCrunch:
A look at Hamlet, a startup that uses AI to process local government meeting videos and which plans to provide the tool to local journalists for free

Oliver Darcy / Status:
Sources: David Ellison's interference in WBD's failed summer talks to extend HBO Max's South Park licensing deal left David Zaslav distrustful of Ellison

Pamela McClintock / The Hollywood Reporter:
A look at Paramount's culture shift under David Ellison, where the focus is on male-driven action movies, and not on prestige films seen as critics' darlings

More News

Nnaemeka Onyekachi / Nairametrics:
A Nigerian tribunal upholds a $220M fine imposed on Meta in July 2024 for discriminatory and exploitative practices against Nigerian consumers
Pete Koomen:
Many AI features, like Gmail's AI assistant, feel useless because they don't allow users to edit system prompts, constraining the AI models they're built with

Earlier Picks

Hayden Field / CNBC:
Meta and Booz Allen partner to deploy Space Llama, a fine-tuned version of Llama 3.2, for research aboard the International Space Station National Laboratory
Financial Times:
Deliveroo, which listed in London with a £7.6B valuation in 2021, says it received a buyout proposal from DoorDash that would value the company at £2.7B
Tom Warren / The Verge:
Microsoft makes Recall available to all Copilot+ PCs, along with a new AI-powered Windows search and Click to Do, which works like Google's Circle to Search
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