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Techmeme
April 29, 2025, 10:20 AM

Top News

Punchbowl News:
Source: Amazon plans to soon show how much President Trump's tariffs are adding to the price of each product, right next to its total listed price  —  Amazon doesn't want to shoulder the blame for the cost of President Donald Trump's trade war.  So the e-commerce giant will soon show …
Kevin Breuninger / CNBC:
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt says Amazon reportedly adding tariff pricing to each product on its site “is a hostile and political act by Amazon”  —  WATCH NOW  —  The White House on Tuesday slammed Amazon for reportedly planning to display the cost …
Will Oremus / Washington Post:
The US House passes the Take It Down Act to criminalize posting nonconsensual intimate imagery, including deepfakes, and require online platforms to remove them  —  Trump is expected to sign into law a bill that would force online platforms to quickly take down nonconsensual intimate images.
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
Alibaba debuts its Qwen3 family of open-weight “hybrid” AI reasoning models, including Qwen3-235B-A22B, with 235B total parameters and 22B activated parameters  —  Chinese tech company Alibaba on Monday released Qwen3, a family of AI models the company claims matches …
Jay Peters / The Verge:
Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn says the company will “gradually stop using contractors to do work that AI can handle”, as part of an announcement to be “AI-first”  —  The company is going to be ‘AI-first,’ says its CEO. … Duolingo will “gradually stop using contractors …
Reece Rogers / Wired:
OpenAI starts rolling out product recommendations in ChatGPT, including Plus, Pro, Free, and logged-out users, with buy buttons that link to merchants' websites  —  OpenAI is launching a shopping experience inside of ChatGPT, complete with product picks and buy buttons.
Maxwell Zeff / TechCrunch:
Anna Nicolaou / Financial Times:
Spotify reports Q1 revenue up 15% YoY to €4.2B, paying subscribers up 12% YoY to 268M, above its guidance of 265M, and MAUs up 10% YoY to 678M; SPOT drops 8%+  —  Music-streaming group reaches 268mn paying subscribers in strongest first-quarter growth since 2020
Lawrence Abrams / BleepingComputer:
Sources: Scattered Spider conducted a ransomware attack on UK retailer M&S, which employs 64,000 in 1,400+ stores, causing widespread disruption from April 22  —  Ongoing outages at British retail giant Marks & Spencer are caused by a ransomware attack believed to be conducted …
Google Cloud Blog:
Google tracked 75 zero days exploited in the wild in 2024, down from 98 in 2023 but up from 63 in 2022; state-sponsored threat groups led in zero-day exploits  —  Google Threat Intelligence  —  Visibility and context on the threats that matter most.  —  Executive Summary
Joey Roulette / Reuters:
Amazon launches 27 satellites for its Project Kuiper broadband internet program, the first batch of 3,236 satellites that it plans to send into low-Earth orbit  —  The first 27 satellites for Amazon's Kuiper broadband internet constellation were launched into space from Florida on Monday …
Wall Street Journal:
Sources detail tensions between Sam Altman and Satya Nadella, whose partnership began after a summer 2018 meeting; Microsoft can block OpenAI's for-profit move  —  The OpenAI and Microsoft CEOs helped each other become power players in generative AI but are now preparing for independent futures
Zvi Mowshowitz / Don't Worry About the Vase:
A deep dive into GPT-4o's tendency to give sycophantic responses, an issue Sam Altman promised to fix and that may be caused by OpenAI optimizing for engagement  —  GPT-4o tells you what it thinks you want to hear.  —  The results of this were rather ugly.  You get extreme sycophancy.  Absurd praise.

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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
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