Techmeme
May 1, 2025, 9:30 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:
Meta:
Meta reports Q1 revenue up 16% YoY to $42.3B, vs. $41.4B est., net income up 35% to $16.6B, family daily active people up 6% to 3.43B on average for March 2025  —  Meta Platforms, Inc. (Nasdaq: META) today reported financial results for the quarter ended March 31, 2025.
Jonathan Vanian / CNBC:
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
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.
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 …
Jordan Novet / CNBC:
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.
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.
Maxwell Zeff / TechCrunch:
A study from Cohere, Stanford, and others 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 specific phrases in a new language, sound less formal, and more  —  Google on Tuesday is releasing three new AI experiments aimed at helping people learn to speak a new language in a more personalized way.
Abner Li / 9to5Google:
Google is rolling out AI image editing in the Gemini app, letting users edit uploaded images and those generated by the app 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:
World's WLD launches in most of the US, including on Coinbase, starting this week, as Tools for Humanity 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.
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
JetBrains makes Mellum, its 4B-parameter code-generating AI model released in 2024, openly available on Hugging Face under an Apache 2.0 license  —  JetBrains, the company behind a range of popular app development tools, has released its first “open” AI model for coding.
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 Xbox Series S is up $80 to $380  —  New first-party Xbox games are moving from $69.99 to $79.99 later this year, but there are no Xbox Game Pass increases.
Lucas Ropek / Gizmodo:
Marc Andreessen says VC may be one of the last fields safe from AI after it replaces most workers, as it requires “intangible” skills like psychological insight  —  In the future, AI will apparently be able to do everybody's job—except Marc's.  —  Egg-headed venture capitalist …
Financial Times:
Kadrey v. Meta, centered on the use of LibGen to train Llama AI models, begins Thursday and marks the first big 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 …
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 …

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Dan Goodin / Ars Technica:
Bloomberg Tax: