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Techmeme
April 18, 2026, 5:20 AM
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Maxwell Zeff / Wired:
Kevin Weil, OpenAI's former CPO who became VP of OpenAI for Science, is leaving the company; Prism, a web app for scientists launched in Jan., will be shuttered  —  The former Instagram VP is departing the ChatGPT-maker, which is folding the AI science application he led into Codex.
Rebecca Bellan / TechCrunch:
Bill Peebles, the researcher behind Sora, is leaving OpenAI, along with Srinivas Narayanan, OpenAI's CTO of enterprise applications  —  OpenAI is losing two of the architects of its most ambitious moonshots.  Kevin Weil, who led the company's science research initiative, and Bill Peebles …
Axios:
White House says a meeting between Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and Dario Amodei had been “productive and constructive”; source: Scott Bessent joined the meeting  —  Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent joined a meeting on Friday between White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles …
Financial Times:
Sources suggest Anthropic is holding off from a wider Mythos release until it can reliably serve it to customers; Anthropic has suffered outages in recent weeks  —  Dario Amodei met with Susie Wiles despite lawsuits over whether AI lab is a national security threat
Nicole Nguyen / Wall Street Journal:
Some Mac Mini and Mac Studio models are unavailable or facing up to 12-week wait times in the US, with analysts citing strong demand from AI agent power users  —  The scarcity of Apple's littlest Mac comes at a time of high interest from AI power users and a potential product refresh
Aisha Malik / TechCrunch:
Anthropic launches Claude Design, a new experimental product that lets users create visuals like prototypes, slides, one-pagers, and more using Claude  —  Anthropic announced on Friday that it's launching Claude Design, a new experimental product that lets users create visuals like prototypes, slides, one-pagers, and more using Claude.
More: Anthropic, The Register, TechCrunch, WinBuzzer, The Verge, CNET, Yahoo Finance, Ghacks, Digit, Neowin, Let's Data Science, Blockonomi, TestingCatalog, iThinkDifferent, Adweek, Times of India, VentureBeat, The Indian Express, Engadget, Fast Company, Gizmodo, How-To Geek, Inc.com, MakeUseOf, PCWorld, MacRumors, iPhone in Canada, OfficeChai, Agence France-Presse, TechJuice, The Information, The Next Web, The New Stack, Quartz, Yahoo Tech, Implicator.ai, Crypto Briefing, EdTech Innovation Hub, The Decoder, Rolling Out, Gadget Review, Business Wire, The Tech Buzz, Digital Trends, The Verge, Innovation Village, 9to5Mac, Investing.com, The Deep View, Inc, and SiliconANGLE
X: @wallstengine, @claudeai, @wesbos, @rsms, @amorriscode, @joshpuckett, @voidwalker_com, @kimmonismus, @amirmxt, @stocksavvyshay, @kyleturman, @bouazizalex, @flomerboy, @raph_dornano, @ultralinx, @9to5mac, @chooserich, @brewmarkets, @polymarket, @morningbrew, @theamolavasare, @benbajarin, @aakashgupta, @dannpetty, @zachtratar, @helloitsaustin, @matthewberman, @polymarketmoney, @bearlyai, @skeptrune, @fastcompany, @callmejohnnie, @petergyang, @cointelegraph, @angjiang, @alexalbert__, @businessbarista, @lexxbarn, @ehuanglu, @petergyang, @cnulty, @birdabo, @vaibhavsisinty, @robertjbye, @cgtwts, @charlespattson, @adocomplete, @yuchenj_uw, @testingcatalog, @ai_for_success, @nateparrott, @scaling01, @claudeai, and @techcrunch
LinkedIn: Mary Aguililla, Drew Bent, Pradeep Sanyal, Gianluca Brugnoli, Amol Avasare, Tom Wentworth, and Claude.  Bluesky: @isolyth.dev.  Threads: @claudeai
Forums: Hacker News, r/figmaStock, and r/ClaudeAI
Reuters:
Sources: Meta intends to conduct a first wave of sweeping layoffs planned for this year on May 20, laying off ~10% of its global workforce, or ~8,000 employees  —  Meta (META.O) intends to conduct a first wave of sweeping layoffs planned for this year on May 20, with more coming later …
Siladitya Ray / Forbes:
What some leaders think of using universal income to mitigate AI-fueled layoffs: Musk calls it the “best way”, OpenAI's policy doc mentions a Public Wealth Fund  —  Topline  —  Elon Musk on Friday touted what he described as “Universal HIGH INCOME” as a solution to deal …
Zvi Mowshowitz / Don't Worry About the Vase:
A deep dive into Dwarkesh Patel's interview with Jensen Huang, including Huang's takes on Nvidia's moat and chip sales to China, and reactions to the interview  —  Some podcasts are self-recommending on the 'yep, I'm going to be breaking this one down' level.  This was one of those.  So here we go.
Jordan Novet / CNBC:
Cerebras files to go public on Nasdaq and reports $510M in 2025 revenue, up 76% YoY, with a net income of $87.9M, up from a $485M net loss in 2024  —  Cerebras, a producer of chips that run artificial intelligence models, on Friday filed to go public on Nasdaq under the ticker symbol “CBRS.”
Mary Ann Azevedo / Crunchbase News:
Autonomous vehicle startups raised a record $21.4B across 34 deals through April 15, up from $5.9B raised across 99 investments globally in all of 2025  —  Funding to autonomous vehicle startups has seen a massive resurgence in 2026, more than tripling so far this year compared to all of 2025 globally, Crunchbase data shows.
Reuters:
Chinese lidar maker Hesai, a primary supplier for Nvidia's ADAS, announces EXT lidar, calling it the industry's first to integrate spatial and color detection  —  Hesai (2525.HK), China's leading maker of lidar, has developed a version of the technology used in autonomous driving that is capable …
Bloomberg:
Sources: Cursor is in advanced talks to raise about $2B co-led by a16z at a pre-money valuation of more than $50B, with Nvidia participating  —  Cursor, a leading artificial intelligence startup for coding, is in advanced talks with investors to raise about $2 billion in a funding round …

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About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 5:20 AM ET, April 18, 2026.

The most current version of the site as always is available at our home page. To view an earlier snapshot click here and then modify the date indicated.

From Mediagazer

Associated Press:
A federal judge orders Trump to sit for a deposition in his defamation lawsuit against the BBC by December 11, or face sanctions up to dismissal of the lawsuit

Dominick Mastrangelo / The Hill:
Politico corrects a story to say Chief of Staff Susie Wiles had no direct role in setting up Katie Zacharia's Sean Hannity interview, after a White House threat

Deadline:
John Malone, who was a major WBD stakeholder, said the Trump administration told Netflix its bid for WBD would be blocked, so Netflix dropped out of bidding

More News

Maxwell Zeff / Wired:
World expands its Tinder partnership and partners with Zoom and others to verify human users, as it continues its pivot from crypto to identity verification
Ivan Mehta / TechCrunch:
Netflix plans to launch a vertical video feed, to help with content discovery, this month, and plans to use AI for content creation and recommendations
Ivan Lam / Counterpoint Research:
China's smartphone shipments declined 4% YoY in Q1 amid memory shortages; Huawei's shipments grew 2% YoY for a 20% market share, iPhone grew 20% for a 19% share
Grace Kay / Business Insider:
Sources: xAI plans to let Cursor train Composer 2.5 AI coding model using tens of thousands of xAI's GPUs, a new strategy for xAI in a competitive AI landscape

Earlier Picks

Wall Street Journal:
Sources: some shareholders are questioning whether Sam Altman should lead OpenAI through the turbulence of an IPO and have floated Bret Taylor as a successor
Will Canny / CoinDesk:
Kraken parent company Payward agrees to acquire Bitnomial, a digital asset derivatives platform, for up to $550M in cash and stock, which values Payward at $20B
Politico:
Cyber experts say the EU's age verification app has glaring privacy and security problems; after saying it was ready, EU officials say the app is “still a demo”
The Guardian:
Docs: US tech companies successfully lobbied the EU to hide data centers' environmental toll; one of their demands was written almost verbatim into EU rules
David Gewirtz / ZDNET:
OpenAI updates its Codex desktop app with features like computer control, an in-app browser, image generation, automation memory, plugin support, and more
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