Techmeme
May 1, 2025, 11:40 AM

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:
In an hour-long Q&A with reporters, Elon Musk talked DOGE, including acknowledging its shortcomings, leaving the US government, working with Trump, and more  —  Elon Musk acknowledges his budget-cutting exercise known as DOGE hasn't been as successful as he hoped.
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.
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 …
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.
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.
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.
Jess Weatherbed / The Verge:
Pinterest rolls out global AI labels to mark images made or edited with generative AI, adding an “AI modified” stamp, via metadata analysis and 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
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
JetBrains launches Mellum, its 4B-parameter code-generating “open” AI model trained on 4T+ tokens and released in October 2024, on Hugging Face under Apache 2.0  —  JetBrains, the company behind a range of popular app development tools, has released its first “open” AI model for coding.
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 …
Microsoft:
Microsoft Q3: revenue up 13% YoY to $70.1B, vs. $68.42B est., Microsoft 365 Commercial products and cloud services up 11%, and Q4 revenue forecast above est.  —  Microsoft Cloud and AI Strength Drives Third Quarter Results  —  REDMOND, Wash. — April 30, 2025 — Microsoft Corp. today announced …
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 behavior  —  From the department of head scratches comes this counterintuitive news: Microsoft says it has no plans to change a remote login protocol …
Sandra Erwin / SpaceNews:
True Anomaly, which designs hardware and software for military and intelligence space reconnaissance, raised a $260M Series C led by Accel  —  - Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window) Email  —  Join our newsletter to get the latest military space news every Tuesday by veteran defense journalist Sandra Erwin.
More: Payload
Financial Times:
Kadrey v. Meta, centered on the use of LibGen to train Llama AI models, kicks off, marking the first big legal test in the ongoing battle over AI and copyright  —  Tech giant faces lawsuit from US authors over use of material from shadow library LibGen  —  Meta will fight a group of US authors …

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Lucas Ropek / Gizmodo:
Bloomberg Tax: