OpenAI says “GPT-5.5 matches GPT-5.4 per-token latency in real-world serving, while performing at a much higher level of intelligence”  —  A new class of intelligence for real work  —  We're releasing GPT-5.5, our smartest and most intuitive to use model yet …

Microsoft announces its first voluntary retirement program, for staff whose years of employment and age add up to 70+; source: 7% of US employees are eligible  —  Microsoft will offer voluntary buyouts to some U.S. employee, a first for the 51-year-old software giant, as the tech industry grapples …

Memo: Meta plans to cut 10% of workers, or ~8,000 jobs, on May 20 and won't fill 6,000 open roles, in an effort to offset its AI spending and boost efficiency  —  Meta Platforms Inc. plans to cut 10% of workers, or roughly 8,000 employees, in an effort to boost efficiency and offset its heavy spending on artificial intelligence.

Xbox CEO Asha Sharma and Chief Content Officer Matt Booty detail their “return of Xbox” strategy, including daily active players as its “new north star”  —  Microsoft's new Xbox leader starts to talk strategy for the company's gaming business.

Microsoft says Copilot's agentic features in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint are now generally available and enabled by default for 365 Copilot and 365 Premium  —  Try Microsoft 365 Copilot  —  Available on desktop and mobile devices  —  Today, I am excited to share that agentic capabilities in Word …

Sources: Thoma Bravo prepares to hand over customer experience management company Medallia to creditors, leading to a ~$5.1B wipeout for Medallia's investors  —  Private equity firm Thoma Bravo is nearing an agreement to hand over software firm Medallia to its lenders, wrapping up months …

Anthropic says it has fixed three causes of recent Claude Code quality issues: reduced default reasoning, a caching bug, and a system prompt to reduce verbosity  —  We traced recent reports of Claude Code quality issues to three separate changes.  Here's what happened and what we're changing.

Internal memo: Amazon is replacing white-collar job titles at its Ring and Blink units with the designation “builder”, and “builder leaders” for managers  —  During Amazon's (AMZN.O) annual review season now under way, hundreds of employees will see their job titles stripped.

Apple fixes a bug that stored notifications for deleted messages on iPhone and iPad, following a report that police used it to extract deleted Signal messages  —  Apple released a software update on Wednesday for iPhones and iPads fixing a bug that allowed law enforcement to extract messages …

SpaceX's S-1 excerpts list “manufacturing our own GPUs” among the “substantial capital expenditures” it is undertaking, with the size of the expenditure TBD  —  SpaceX may be tackling one of the biggest challenges in the chip business: manufacturing the keys …

Intel reports Q1 revenue up 7% YoY to $13.58B, vs. $12.42B est., and forecasts Q2 revenue and adjusted EPS above estimates; INTC jumps 15%+ after hours  —  - Intel reported first-quarter earnings that beat Wall Street expectations … Intel reported first-quarter earnings Thursday …

Spotify celebrates its 20th anniversary with a first-ever list of its 20 most streamed artists, albums, songs, podcasts, and audiobooks  —  But who else made the cut? … It was 20 years ago today that Spotify began to play.  And to mark the streaming service's big anniversary …

Memo: White House says it has info indicating “foreign entities, principally based in China” are engaged in “industrial scale distillation” of American AI tech  —  Trump official Michael Kratsios says Chinese entities stealing from American labs

Vercel says some customer accounts were compromised prior to its early-April breach, potentially through social engineering, malware, or other methods  —  App and website hosting giant Vercel on Thursdays said hackers had accessed some of its customers' data before the company discovered …

Around 30K attend a Samsung union rally demanding 15% of operating profits for chip division staff amid the AI boom; the demand totals $27B or $400K+ per worker  —  Tens of thousands of people gathered outside Samsung Electronics Co.'s main chip hub to demand employees get a greater share of profits reaped from the AI boom.

X says it is deprecating X Communities, giving members until May 30 to migrate to XChat, and plans to increase group chat limits to 1,000 in the next two weeks  —  Today we're announcing two product changes for organizing communities on X: 1. XChat now supports joinable links for groupchats. Create a public link & share direct to Timeline. With support for 350 members per chat (and growing), Groupchat Links are the fastest way to bring [image]

How Cash App founder Bob Lee's 2023 killing fed into a narrative pushed by tech leaders like Elon Musk about SF's decline until an acquaintance was convicted  —  The 2023 murder of a tech executive seemed to fit neatly into narratives about street crime in liberal cities, until it didn't.

GitHub says it has begun collecting pseudonymous client-side telemetry from command-line interface (CLI) users and enabled it by default  —  Opt-out instructions included if you're not keen on GitHub watching you in the name of product improvement  —  Users of GitHub's command-line interface (CLI) who value privacy, beware.

Anthropic's valuation has hit $1T on Forge Global, a leading private marketplace exchange, surpassing OpenAI's valuation on the platform of $880B  —  - Anthropic's valuation now hovers at $1 trillion on Forge Global, a leading private marketplace exchange.  — That is a higher price than OpenAI …

Shenzhen-based Pudu Robotics, which makes commercial service robots, raised ~$150M, bringing its total funding to $300M+, and says its valuation exceeds $1.5B  —  Pudu Technology Inc. today said it has it raised nearly $150 million in a new funding round.  Following this round …

Instagram launched Instants, an app for sharing disappearing photos, in Italy this week, after rolling out an Instants feature in its main app in some regions  —  - Instagram launched a new app in Italy this week called “Instants.”  — A hodgepodge of apps like Snapchat, Locket, and BeReal, the app is meant to be “low-pressure.”

A poll of 4,000 workers in the US and the UK finds that the highest-earning and most experienced workers are adopting AI in their jobs far faster than others  —  FT-Focaldata poll offers early evidence on how the technology is reshaping work and reinforcing gender and pay gaps

Turkey's parliament passes a bill requiring social media and online game companies to restrict access for children under 15, following a school shooting  —  Turkish lawmakers passed a bill late Wednesday that includes restricting access to social media platforms for children under 15, state media reported.

Texas Instruments stock rose 19% on Thursday, its best day since 2000, after upbeat Q2 guidance driven by high demand for analog chips used in AI data centers  —  Texas Instruments had its best day on Wall Street since 2000 after the chipmaker reported better-than-expected quarterly results …

Music publishers including UMG, Warner Music, and Sony drop a copyright suit against Verizon following a SCOTUS decision limiting ISP liability in Cox's suit  —  Publishers representing the bulk of the music industry dropped a copyright lawsuit against Verizon Communications Inc. over music piracy …

Sources: Bain Capital seeks to sell a stake of 40%+ in Bridge Data Centres in a deal that would value the Singapore-based data infrastructure builder at $5B  —  U.S. investment firm Bain Capital is seeking to sell a stake of at least 40% in Bridge Data Centres (BDC) in a deal that would value …