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April 20, 2025, 7:10 PM
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A comparison of OpenAI's o3, o4-mini, and GPT-4.1; Aaron Levie says o3 nailed a multi-step financial modeling task; Scale AI CEO says o3 is “a big breakthrough” — Our take on what's powerful, what's practical, and what's still TBD … If you've been following AI news this week …
More: One Useful Thing, Anecdotal Value, Don't Worry About the Vase, and The Algorithmic Bridge
Bluesky: @smcgrath.phd. Mastodon: @aulia@mementomori.social. Threads: @benedictevans. X: @emollick, @deedydas, @natolambert, @smokeawayyy, @deanwball, @bentossell, @tweetatpablo, @mattshumer_, @kaseyklimes, @daveshapi, @ivanfioravanti, @emollick, @littmath, @grantslatton, @timsoret, @kwharrison13, @gregmushen, @emollick, @tenreirodaniel, @gregkamradt, @amasad, @kantrowitz, @datachaz, @aidan_mclau, @danshipper, @nabeelqu, @danshipper, @krishnanrohit, @daniel_mac8, @kirkegaardemil, @spencerkschiff, @eigenrobot, @krishnanrohit, @seconds_0, @aaditsh, @miles_brundage, @krishnanrohit, @levie, @tunguz, @packym, and @littmath. LinkedIn: Ethan Mollick. Forums: Hacker News
| Wall Street Journal: |
A half-marathon in Beijing featured a road race with human runners and 21 Chinese humanoid robots, highlighting both the progress and limitations of such robots — A half-marathon in Beijing featured a road race between human runners and 21 robot models—and showed how far robots still are from mimicking people.
More: Wired, Business Insider, UPI, South China Morning Post, The Gateway Pundit, PCMag, talkSPORT, Interesting Engineering, Semafor, Bloomberg, Breitbart, Engadget, Reuters, Associated Press, TechCrunch, iPhone in Canada Blog, Xinhua, TechEBlog, Digital Trends, The Sun, The Crypto Times, Daily Sabah, Al Jazeera, DAWN.COM, Sky News, Tech in Asia, KRDO, Robotics & Automation News, The Japan Times, and The Independent
Bluesky: @wired.com, @zeyiyang, and @zoeschiffer
| Ben Weiss / Fortune: |
Coinbase faces pump-and-dump accusations after its subsidiary Base launched a “content coin” on Zora; Coinbase clarifies that Base will never sell the tokens — Jesse Pollak is the creator of Base, a new blockchain from Coinbase. — Winni Wintermeyer for Fortune
More: Cointelegraph, The Block, Blockchain News, CoinDesk, crypto.news, Bitcoin Insider, Inside Bitcoins, Protos, Disrupt Africa, Cryptopolitan, CryptoSlate, DL News, and Crypto Briefing
X: @base and @jacqmelinek
| Financial Times: |
A look at the race to turn brainwaves into fluent speech, as researchers at universities in California and companies use brain implants and AI to make advances — Californian researchers and groups such as Precision Neuroscience use implants and AI to make advances in ‘voice prosthesis’| Christopher Grimes / Financial Times: |
The success of A Minecraft Movie, set to hit $700M in ticket sales globally this weekend, signals Hollywood's breakthrough in adapting video games into films — While superhero franchises flag, ‘A Minecraft Movie’ shows the industry has finally cracked the formula for translating popular games into films
More: TechCrunch, Variety, Associated Press, Fox News, RTÉ, and The Sun
| Mark Bergen / Bloomberg: |
How YouTube is adapting to the AI era; a VP expects that in five years, every video uploaded to YouTube could be dubbed automatically into every spoken language — The video giant, turning 20, tries to keep the content spigot flowing while appeasing its army of broadcasters and copyright holders.
More: Mirror, Yahoo News, and Barrett Media
Bluesky: @airbagmoments. Mastodon: @glinden@sigmoid.social. Threads: @mattnavarra. LinkedIn: Mark Bergen
| Ruth Reader / Politico: |
After lobbying US Congress to shelve the Senate-passed KOSA bill in 2024, Meta has now made headway in lobbying for an app store age-verification bill — The Facebook founder is lobbying Congress to leave his firm alone — and making headway. — To protect kids online … | Krishnapriya V.S. / The India Forum: |
India's Open Network for Digital Commerce has struggled to break the near-duopoly of Zomato and Swiggy in online food delivery after cutting back on discounts — A near-duopoly of Zomato and Swiggy controls almost 95% of India's digital platform-based food delivery market … | Katie Fehrenbacher / Axios: |
Crux, a financing software provider for clean energy companies, raised a $50M Series B led by Lowercarbon Capital, taking its total funding to more than $77M — Crux, a clean economy financing software provider, raised a $50 million Series B round to expand its capital platforms, CEO Alfred Johnson tells Axios.
More: Crux, FinSMEs, and Technical.ly
| Sri Muppidi / The Information: |
Sales data: AI evaluation startups have modest revenue; Weights & Biases hit $50M ARR by Dec. 2024, but only 2% of that was from its AI evaluation product Weave — Startups whose products evaluate artificial intelligence to make sure it isn't making things up or delivering unsafe results … | Jowi Morales / Tom's Hardware: |
Huawei unveils the Ascend 920 AI chip, expected to hit mass production in H2 2025, after Trump included Nvidia H20 in the ban on AI chip exports to China — The Ascend 920 supposedly offers a performance comparable to the Nvidia H20. … Just one day after this, Huawei announced the Ascend 920 … | Allie Garfinkle / Fortune: |
Assort Health, which is developing voice AI agents for healthcare to manage patient phone calls, raised a $22M Series A co-led by First Round and Chemistry — Assort Health cofounders Jeff Liu and Jon Wang. — Assort Health — Jon Wang and Jeff Liu met dozens of prospective cofounders—until they met each other.
More: Business Wire, VC News Daily, Pulse 2.0, FinSMEs, and HIT Consultant
Sponsor Posts
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UiPath:
UiPath Unveils 10 Innovations that Will Shape the Agentic Future — Orchestration engine, API workflows and agentic testing among key features of new UiPath Platform™ for agentic automation, launched at UiPath DevCon 2025
UiPath Unveils 10 Innovations that Will Shape the Agentic Future — Orchestration engine, API workflows and agentic testing among key features of new UiPath Platform™ for agentic automation, launched at UiPath DevCon 2025
Zoho:
6 Tips to Unlock Revenue with Transactional Emails — This is a guest post by Tabular.You might think of transactional emails as boring necessities, but the truth is, they're far more powerful than you realize.
6 Tips to Unlock Revenue with Transactional Emails — This is a guest post by Tabular.You might think of transactional emails as boring necessities, but the truth is, they're far more powerful than you realize.
IDrive:
Protecting your Cloud Applications Data — Backing up Office 365, Google Workspace, Dropbox & Box data is critical to preventing data loss or corruption, complying with laws and avoiding critical downtime in case of a disaster.
Protecting your Cloud Applications Data — Backing up Office 365, Google Workspace, Dropbox & Box data is critical to preventing data loss or corruption, complying with laws and avoiding critical downtime in case of a disaster.Featured Podcasts
Lenny's Podcast:
Why Uber's CPO delivers food on weekends | Sachin Kansal
Interviews with world-class product leaders and growth experts to uncover actionable advice to help you build, launch, and grow your own product.
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Techmeme Ride Home:
Big Meta/Anduril Deal Is A Big Deal
The day's tech news, every day at 5pm ET. Fifteen minutes and you're up to date.
Subscribe to Techmeme Ride Home.
The Social Radars:
Ron Conway, Founder, SV Angel Part 4 (Bonus)
Come be a fly on the wall as Y Combinator's Jessica Livingston and Carolynn Levy talk to some of the most successful founders in Silicon Valley about how they did it.
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Hard Fork:
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The future is already here. Each week, journalists Kevin Roose and Casey Newton explore and make sense of the latest in the rapidly changing world of tech.
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The Logan Bartlett Show:
Rick Smith (CEO, Axon): The Wild Ride From Near-Bankruptcy to $50B+
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'Sewing Machine Repair Shop', With Patrick McGee
The director's commentary track for Daring Fireball. Long digressions on Apple, technology, design, movies, and more.
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