Techmeme
April 27, 2025, 12:10 PM

Top News

Jeff Horwitz / Wall Street Journal:
Test conversations with some Meta AI digital companions, including celebrity-voiced ones, show them engaging in sexual chats even when users identify as minors  —  Chatbots on Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp are empowered to engage in ‘romantic role-play’ that can turn explicit.
Furquan Ameen / Rest of World:
Experts say that India is behind China in deep tech innovation due to its historical focus on services, lower R&D investment, and a brain drain of AI talent  —  India's government urges the private sector to take the lead in tech innovation, while industry experts say it's complicated.
Financial Times:
Sources: ~300 London-based DeepMind staff have sought to unionize with the CWU in recent weeks, to challenge AI sales to defense groups and Google's Israel ties  —  Move by employees at Google's AI arm follows discontent after weapons and surveillance pledge is dropped
Leah Nylen / Bloomberg:
US v. Google: Chrome's GM testified that other companies cannot develop Chrome effectively, 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 …
Coco Feng / South China Morning Post:
Filing: China's leading flash memory chipmaker YMTC raised ~$219M from Hebei Yangyuan Zhihui Beverage Co. at a ~$22.1B valuation in December 2023  —  The deal was signed in December 2023 but was only announced on Friday as it ‘involved commercial secrets’, Yangyuan said

Sponsor Posts

Subquadratic:
Subquadratic: the LLM built for 12M-token reasoning  —  SubQ can reason across entire codebases and document sets in one pass with no RAG workarounds.  Read how SubQ 1.1 Small holds near-perfect retrieval out to 12M tokens.
Cloudflare:
Cloudflare Connect 2026: The Agentic Conference  —  Stop preparing for agents.  Start running them.  100+ sessions, workshops, and speakers from OpenAI, Arm, and Cloudflare across AI, security, and performance.
Zoho:
Automate your scheduling workflows with Zoho Calendar  —  Your calendar can do more than schedule meetings Creating a calendar event takes only a few seconds.  But scheduling is rarely just about creating the event.
IDrive:
Protecting your Cloud Applications Data  —  Backing up Office 365, Google Workspace, Dropbox & Salesforce data is critical to preventing data loss or corruption, complying with laws and avoiding critical downtime in case of a disaster.

Featured Podcasts

Big Technology Podcast:
A Sober Conversation About AI Existential Risk — With Nate Soares
The Big Technology Podcast takes you behind the scenes in the tech world featuring interviews with plugged-in insiders and outside agitators.
Subscribe to Big Technology Podcast.
Channels with Peter Kafka:
AI Wants to Shop for You. What Could Go Wrong?
Media and tech aren't just intersecting - they're fully intertwined. To understand how those worlds work, Peter Kafka talks to industry leaders, upstarts and observers.
Subscribe to Channels with Peter Kafka.
Invest Like the Best:
Michael Moritz - Lessons From 40 Years of Investing and Writing
The leading destination to learn about business and investing. We do this by showcasing exceptional talent and ideas.
Subscribe to Invest Like the Best.
Sources:
Baseten's CEO on why every company will want to own its AI
Candid conversations with the leaders shaping what's next in AI and the broader tech industry. Hosted by Alex Heath, who has covered Silicon Valley for more than a decade.
Subscribe to Sources.
Training Data:
Box's Aaron Levie: On Reinventing Yourself in the AI Age and Enterprise Diffusion
Sequoia Capital partners host conversations with leading AI builders and researchers to develop a deeper understanding of the evolving technologies and their implications.
Subscribe to Training Data.
Uncapped with Jack Altman:
Andrew Feldman from Cerebras
Conversations with people I admire about things I'm genuinely interested in.
Subscribe to Uncapped with Jack Altman.
 

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 12:10 PM ET, April 27, 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.

More News

Earlier Picks

Wall Street Journal:
Gabe Kaminsky / The Free Press: