Techmeme
May 21, 2025, 8:50 AM

Top News

Igor Bonifacic / Engadget:
Google rolls out AI Mode to all Google Search users in the US, and announces Deep Search, agentic capabilities, chart generation, and more coming to Labs users  —  Google has begun rolling out AI Mode to every Search user in the US.  The company announced the expansion during its I/O 2025 conference.
Casey Newton / Platformer:
Google's I/O keynote was both scary and chill, a fever dream of sizzle reels seeking to reassure that AI is for everyday utility, a coworker, and a superpower  —  At its annual developer conference, the company seeks to reassure everyone that AI is for everyday utility — but the great disruption to the web continues
Maxwell Zeff / TechCrunch:
Chance Miller / 9to5Mac:
Epic Games says Fortnite for iPadOS and iOS is back on the US App Store, and on the Epic Games Store and AltStore in the EU; Apple kicked it off in August 2020  —  After a nearly five-year hiatus, Fortnite is back on the App Store for iPhone and iPad users in the United States.
Michael L Hicks / Android Central:
Google's Android XR Gemini-powered prototype glasses hands-on: light, comfortable to wear, the single display in the right lens works well, and Maps is seamless  —  Google's Android XR glasses prototype worked surprisingly well in my quick press demo.  —  I got hands-on time with Google's prototype AR glasses at Google I/O 2025.
Victoria Song / The Verge:
Mark Gurman / Bloomberg:
Samantha Subin / CNBC:
Amanda Kooser / CNET:
Eleanor Olcott / Financial Times:
Jensen Huang calls US AI chip export controls a “failure” that sped up China's efforts, cutting Nvidia's market share in China from 95% to 50% in four years  —  World's top AI semiconductor maker says export controls have accelerated Chinese rivals' advances
Reuters:
Distributed Denial of Secrets: the TeleMessage hacker stole messages from 60+ US government users covering about one day ending May 4, including travel plans  —  A hacker who breached the communications service used by former Trump national security adviser Mike Waltz earlier …
CNBC:
Google announces new video and image generation models Veo 3 and Imagen 4, new AI filmmaking tool Flow, and expanded access to music generation model Lyria 2  —  Google on Tuesday announced Veo 3, an AI video generator that can also create and incorporate audio.
Taryn Plumb / VentureBeat:
Emilia David / VentureBeat:
MIT Technology Review:
Analysis: AI energy consumption is exploding, with data centers doubling electricity use between 2017 and 2023, accounting for 4.4% of all US energy consumption  —  The emissions from individual AI text, image, and video queries seem small—until you add up what the industry isn't tracking and consider where it's heading next.
Kevin Collier / NBC News:
Matthew Lane, a 19-year-old from Massachusetts, pleads guilty to hacking two US companies and extorting them for ransoms; a source says one firm is PowerSchool  —  The Massachusetts man agreed to plead guilty to obtaining information from a protected computer and aggravated identity theft.
CoinDesk:
The US SEC sues Unicoin and its executives, alleging they broke securities laws by raising $100M+ for tokens falsely claimed to be backed by real estate  —  The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission sued crypto company Unicoin and three executives on Tuesday night on fraud charges …
Sergiu Gatlan / BleepingComputer:
Maine AG filing: Coinbase says its recent data breach impacted 69,461 individuals; stolen data included government IDs, account info, and personal identifiers  —  Coinbase, a cryptocurrency exchange with over 100 million customers, revealed that a recent data breach in which cybercriminals stole customer …
Laura Onita / Financial Times:
UK retailer M&S says it expects a £300M profit hit from an April cyberattack and disruption to continue until July 2025; M&S' market cap has falled by ~£750M  —  UK retailer discloses that breach came via supplier and warns online operations will be disrupted until July
Keach Hagey / Wired:
Book excerpt: a profile of AI-obsessed autodidact Eliezer Yudkowsky, who introduced the DeepMind founders to Peter Thiel and inspired DeepMind's Shane Legg  —  The AI doomer and the AI boomer both created each other's monsters. … Like Sam Altman, Peter Thiel had long been obsessed …
Forums: r/artificial
Tobias Mann / The Register:
AMD unveils Zen 5-based Threadripper 9000 CPUs with up to 96 cores, and an RDNA 4-based Radeon AI Pro R9700 workstation GPU, both slated to launch in July 2025  —  COMPUTEX AMD aims to extend its lead over Intel in the high-end desktop (HEDT) and workstation arenas with its 9000-series …
Paige Smith / Bloomberg:
Kalshi withdrew announcements about a collaboration with xAI just hours after CEO Tarek Mansour said the deal would “further take prediction markets mainstream”  —  Kalshi had announced on Tuesday morning that xAI would provide tailored information to offer guidance for bets made by the site's users.
More: Bloomberg
CNBC:
Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana says Waymo has reached 10M paid trips, doubling in the past five months, and that the company is not yet profitable  —  Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana told CNBC on Tuesday that the Alphabet-owned ride-hailing company has reached 10 million trips, doubling in the past five months.
Omar El Chmouri / Bloomberg:
Abu Dhabi's TII releases Falcon Arabic, an AI model that it claims can match the performance of models up to 10 times its size, and smaller model Falcon H1  —  A research arm of the Abu Dhabi government has released a powerful new Arabic-language artificial intelligence model in a bid …
More: Reuters

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More News

Colin Lecher / The Markup:

Earlier Picks

Charles Szumski / Euractiv:
Jonathan Vanian / CNBC:
Jay Peters / The Verge:
Ben Thompson / Stratechery:
Mark Gurman / Bloomberg: