Techmeme
May 1, 2025, 12:25 PM

Top News

Josh Sisco / Bloomberg:
A US judge rules that Apple violated a 2021 court order to open the App Store to third-party payment options, and refers the case for a criminal investigation  —  Gonzalez Rogers also referred the case to federal prosecutors to investigate whether Apple committed criminal contempt of court for flouting her 2021 ruling.
Zac Hall / 9to5Mac:
Tim Sweeney says Epic plans to submit Fortnite to the US iOS App Store next week and “puts forth a peace proposal” to end all litigation over App Store policies  —  Epic Games founder and CEO Tim Sweeney has announced that the company will submit Fortnite to the iOS App Store in the U.S. next week.
Kif Leswing / CNBC:
Ben Thompson / Stratechery:
Q&A with Mark Zuckerberg on LlamaCon, Llama API, Meta's AI opportunity, social networking 2.0, Ray-Bans, Apple, the Meta AI app, tariffs, Reality Labs, and more  —  An interview with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg about Llama and the AI opportunity, the evolution of social medial, and what it means to connect.
Meta:
Tom Warren / The Verge:
Microsoft raises the prices of its Xbox Series S and X consoles, Xbox controllers, and some new Xbox games globally; the consoles are priced $80 to $100 more  —  New first-party Xbox games are moving from $69.99 to $79.99 later this year, but there are no Xbox Game Pass increases.
Wall Street Journal:
Sources: about a month ago, Tesla's board opened a search for a CEO to succeed Elon Musk; the succession planning status is unknown, but Tesla denied the report  —  With profits and stock price sinking, board members told Musk he needed to spend more time at company
Alex Isenstadt / Axios:
Chris Welch / The Verge:
Meta updated Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses' privacy policy on April 29 to enable the Hey Meta voice command by default, store voice recordings for a year, and more  —  The company has removed the option to disable your voice recordings from being stored, among other changes.
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
Microsoft releases three Phi-4 reasoning models on Hugging Face, expanding its Phi “small model” family, which it launched in May 2024 for AI app developers  —  Microsoft launched several new “open” AI models on Wednesday, the most capable of which is competitive with OpenAI's o3-mini on at least one benchmark.
Jess Weatherbed / The Verge:
Maxwell Zeff / TechCrunch:
A study from Cohere, Stanford, MIT, and Ai2 accuses LMArena of helping Meta, OpenAI, Google, and Amazon game its popular crowdsourced AI benchmark Chatbot Arena  —  A new paper from AI lab Cohere, Stanford, MIT, and Ai2 accuses LM Arena, the organization behind the popular crowdsourced AI …
Ethan Gach / Kotaku:
Polygon staffers, including co-founder and EIC Chris Plante, say the video games website has laid them off, after Vox Media sold Polygon to publisher Valnet  —  One of the biggest gaming sites around was just blown up  —  The video game website Polygon has been sold to Valnet and much of its staff …
Aisha Malik / TechCrunch:
Google launches Little Language Lessons, three experimental AI tools to help users learn phrases in a new language, expressions and slang, and vocabulary tips  —  Google on Tuesday is releasing three new AI experiments aimed at helping people learn to speak a new language in a more personalized way.
Jess Weatherbed / The Verge:
Pinterest rolls out an “AI modified” label globally to indicate AI-generated or AI-edited images, identified via metadata analysis and its own AI classifiers  —  AI labels are coming to a platform that sorely needed them. … Pinterest is making it easier for users to identify and avoid AI-generated slop on its platform.
More: Pinterest
Abner Li / 9to5Google:
Google rolls out native AI image editing in the Gemini app, letting users edit uploaded images and those the app generates using natural language text prompts  —  After developer testing last month, Google is beginning to roll out native AI image editing to the Gemini app.
Alex Heath / The Verge:
Tools for Humanity launches Worldcoin in most of the US, including via crypto exchanges like Coinbase, and debuts a portable “orb mini” device for iris scanning  —  After scanning millions of eyes around the world, Tools for Humanity is bringing Worldcoin to the United States.
The Verge:
US v. Google: Sundar Pichai said Google expects to strike a Gemini deal with Apple by mid-2025 and Tim Cook told him Apple plans to add more AI models in 2025  —  Google CEO Sundar Pichai suggested that the company plans to roll out its Gemini integration by the end of this year.
Sam Tobin / Reuters:
London's Court of Appeal rules Apple must pay Optis $502M as a lump sum for using Optis' 4G patents from 2013 to 2027, overturning a 2023 High Court decision  —  Apple (AAPL.O) must pay a U.S. patent holder $502 million for the use of 4G patents in devices including iPhones and iPads …
John Pavlus / Quanta Magazine:
An oral history from 19 current and former natural language processing researchers of the past five years, including how LLMs and ChatGPT disrupted their fields  —  There was one about using BERT to unredact the Mueller report, which is a terrible idea.  It seemed like there was just a never-ending supply …
Catherine McGrath / Fortune:
Dub, which lets users trade the same stock as celebrities and politicians like Nancy Pelosi, raised a $30M Series A co-led by Notable Capital and Neo  —  23-year-old Steven Wang founded Dub in 2021.  —  Courtesy of Dub  —  Dub, an investing platform founded in 2021, is trying to turn politicians …
Shimite Obialo / Forbes:
Plenful, which makes AI-powered healthcare workflow automation tools, raised a $50M Series B co-led by Arena Holdings and billionaire Mitchell Rales  —  I'm an advisor and attorney experienced in structuring PE & VC deals  —  Healthcare may be slow to modernize, but AI-powered startups …
Dan Goodin / Ars Technica:
A researcher says Windows RDP lets users log in using passwords that have been revoked or changed; Microsoft says it has no plans to change the login protocol  —  From the department of head scratches comes this counterintuitive news: Microsoft says it has no plans to change a remote login protocol …

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Earlier Picks

Lucas Ropek / Gizmodo:
Microsoft: