Techmeme

Meta reports Q1 revenue up 27% YoY to $36.46B, net income up 117% YoY to $12.37B, and family daily active people up 7% YoY to 3.24B for March 2024 (Meta Investor Relations) + RELATED
  Meta reports Q1 revenue up 27% YoY to $36.46B, net income up 117% YoY to $12.37B, and family daily active people up 7% YoY to 3.24B for March 2024 (Meta Investor Relations)
  Meta's stock drops 15%+ after hours on weak Q2 revenue guidance and higher FY 2024 capital expenditures due to increased AI infrastructure investments (Ashley Capoot/CNBC)
  Mark Zuckerberg says Meta AI assistant has been "tried" by "tens of millions of people" and it will take Meta several years to make money from generative AI (Alex Heath/The Verge)
  On Meta's Q1 earnings call, Mark Zuckerberg said Threads now has more than 150M MAUs, up from 130M in February 2024 (Karissa Bell/Engadget)
  Meta's Reality Labs Q1: revenue up 30% YoY to $440M, vs. $512.5M est., a $3.85B operating loss, vs. $4.31B est.; Reality Labs lost $45B+ since the end of 2020 (Alex Koller/CNBC)
President Biden signs the ByteDance-TikTok divest-or-ban bill into law, after the Senate passed it by 79-18; the House passed the legislation 360-58 on April 20 (Lauren Feiner/The Verge) + RELATED
  President Biden signs the ByteDance-TikTok divest-or-ban bill into law, after the Senate passed it by 79-18; the House passed the legislation 360-58 on April 20 (Lauren Feiner/The Verge)
  Sources: ByteDance execs have previously considered TikTok's global operations to be worth ~50% of the company's overall value, which would put it above $100B (Wall Street Journal)
  How a tiny group of US lawmakers and aides wrote the TikTok divestment bill, hiding their efforts to avoid TikTok's lobbying, alongside the DOJ and White House (New York Times)
  Biden signing the TikTok divestment bill starts a 270-day countdown for a sale or a US prohibition; sources say ByteDance sees a divestiture as a last resort (Alex Barinka/Bloomberg)
  Whether TikTok is banned or not, this is the end as we know it for the money-losing app, which may lose focus due to advertiser, creator, and staff uncertainty (M.G. Siegler/Spyglass)
  Biden's re-election campaign plans to continue using TikTok for at least the next year, with "enhanced security measures", to help "meet voters where they are" (Monica Alba/NBC News)
  Meta, Google, Snap, and Amazon all benefit from the US' TikTok ban; Mark Zuckerberg criticized TikTok's Chinese roots in 2019, part of Meta's broader campaign (Will Oremus/Washington Post)
Cisco details a hacking campaign that penetrated multiple governments' networks using two zero-day flaws in its VPN and firewall Adaptive Security Appliances (Andy Greenberg/Wired)
Hands-on with the Rabbit R1: a fun and funky AI device that feels pretty nice and does a solid job with basic AI questions, but the Rabbithole app is unfinished (David Pierce/The Verge)
US prosecutors charge two founders of the Samourai Wallet crypto mixing service, saying it facilitated more than $100M in money laundering transactions (Bob Van Voris/Bloomberg)
IBM agrees to buy HashiCorp, which helps companies manage cloud infrastructure, in a deal valuing HashiCorp at $6.4B and expected to close by the end of 2024 (Ben Glickman/Wall Street Journal) + RELATED
  IBM agrees to buy HashiCorp, which helps companies manage cloud infrastructure, in a deal valuing HashiCorp at $6.4B and expected to close by the end of 2024 (Ben Glickman/Wall Street Journal)
  IBM reports Q1 revenue up 1% YoY to $14.46B, vs. $14.55B est., software revenue up 5.5% YoY to $5.9B, and net income of $1.6B, up from $927M YoY; IBM drops 5%+ (Jordan Novet/CNBC)
Apple researchers share OpenELM, a family of LLMs with 270M to 3B parameters, designed to run on-device, and pre-trained and fine-tuned on public datasets (Shubham Sharma/VentureBeat)
Snowflake announces Arctic, an LLM optimized for enterprise tasks such as SQL generation, coding, and instruction following, with an Apache 2.0 license (Shubham Sharma/VentureBeat)
AI coding assistant startup Augment emerges from stealth with a $227M Series B at a $977M post-money valuation, following a $25M Series A led by Sutter Hill (Kyle Wiggers/TechCrunch)
Cloud data management startup Rubrik priced its NYSE IPO at $32 a share, above its expected $28-$31 range, raising $752M and valuing the company at $5.6B (CNBC)
TSMC unveils a new chip manufacturing technology called A16 and says it plans to start producing its ultra-advanced 1.6nm chips by 2026 (Cheng Ting-Fang/Nikkei Asia)
Worldcoin subsidiary World Assets plans to sell WLD tokens to meet the demand for orb-verified World IDs and support Worldcoin network growth; WLD drops 7%+ (Brian McGleenon/The Block)
Reddit announces that its Dynamic Product Ads, which use "shopping signals" to automatically show relevant ads to users, are entering public beta globally (Scharon Harding/Ars Technica)
WhatsApp rolls out passkey support on iOS, removing the need for users to deal with SMS one-time passcodes, six months after introducing the feature on Android (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch)
Nvidia acquires AI infrastructure orchestration and management service Run:ai, a source says for ~$700M; Run:ai, founded in 2018, had raised $118M to date (Meir Orbach/CTech)
Nooks, whose AI tools can analyze sales calls and summarize customer interactions, raised a $22M Series A led by Lachy Groom, bringing its total funding to $27M (Ken Yeung/VentureBeat)
Qualcomm details its Snapdragon X Plus and X Elite chips; benchmarks from a demo suggest the chips match Apple's M3, Intel's Core Ultra 9, and AMD's Ryzen 9 (Joanna Nelius/The Verge) + RELATED
  Qualcomm details its Snapdragon X Plus and X Elite chips; benchmarks from a demo suggest the chips match Apple's M3, Intel's Core Ultra 9, and AMD's Ryzen 9 (Joanna Nelius/The Verge)
  Sources: Qualcomm is cheating on Snapdragon X Plus and Elite benchmarks given to OEMs and the press; the numbers are not achievable with the claimed settings (Charlie Demerjian/SemiAccurate)
TikTok is suspending the rewards program in TikTok Lite while it tries to resolve EU concerns about the potentially addictive nature of the program for children (Foo Yun Chee/Reuters)
Memo: Thrasio CEO Greg Greeley plans to resign and five other senior executives will "step down when Thrasio emerges from Chapter 11 in the coming weeks" (Annie Palmer/CNBC)
Filing: Swiggy, which has a ~45.8% share of the Indian food delivery market, secures shareholder approval for a potential $1.25B IPO, slated for later this year (Manish Singh/TechCrunch)
A look at Saudi Arabia's spending blitz to become an AI superpower, which has put the kingdom in the middle of an escalating global competition over AI (New York Times)
SK Hynix reports Q1 revenue of ~$9B, more than doubling YoY, and ~$2B in operating income, above estimates of ~$1.3B and the biggest quarterly profit since 2022 (Yoolim Lee/Bloomberg)
K Krithivasan, the CEO of Indian IT giant TCS, says there'll be "minimal" need for call centers in as soon as a year, as AI chatbots take over much of the work (Financial Times)
The US FTC bans noncompete clauses that restrict job switching, the first time in 50+ years that the FTC has issued a regulation mandating an economywide change (Wall Street Journal)
Stripe says some of its products will be available to companies that are using other payments providers, and unveils new embedded finance features and AI tools (Ingrid Lunden/TechCrunch)
Source: Cognition, which offers an AI coding assistant, raised $175M led by Founders Fund at a $2B valuation, a month after a Series A at a $350M valuation (Kate Clark/The Information)
The US DOJ argues Binance founder Changpeng Zhao should spend three years in prison and pay $50M for helping Binance violate sanctions and money laundering laws (Nikhilesh De/CoinDesk)
Microsoft begins rolling out Windows 11 Start menu ads that show app "recommendations" from "a small set of curated developers"; users can disable the ads (Tom Warren/The Verge)
US companies racing to build data centers to serve AI demand is causing a shortage of parts, property, and power; cooling system lead times are now 5x longer (Wall Street Journal)