Tech

A year ago, DeepSeek was a curiosity — a scrappy Chinese lab that somehow built a model rivaling OpenAI’s o1 for a fraction of the cost. Markets panicked. Think pieces multiplied. Then the hype faded. DeepSeek didn’t. Today the Hangzhou-based lab released V4 in two variants — V4-Pro and V4-Flash — and the numbers are hard to ignore. This is the largest open-weights AI model ever released, and it’s trading blows with the best closed-source systems from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. ...

If you were writing a dystopian tech thriller, you’d struggle to invent a plot more on-the-nose than what Meta announced this week. The company is cutting 10% of its workforce — roughly 8,000 people — while simultaneously rolling out software that tracks employee mouse movements, clicks, and keystrokes to train AI models. The models that will, eventually, do their jobs. The Tracking Tool Nobody Asked For Reuters broke the story earlier this week. Meta is deploying an internal tool called the Model Capability Initiative (MCI) to U.S.-based employees. It captures mouse movements, clicks, keystrokes, and periodic screenshots. The goal: teach AI models the messy, real-world ways humans interact with computers. Dropdown menus, keyboard shortcuts, the digital muscle memory that machines still can’t replicate on their own. ...

Less than two months between GPT-5.4 and GPT-5.5. Even OpenAI president Greg Brockman admitted during Thursday’s press briefing that “there are probably enough model releases that it’s getting hard to distinguish one from another.” He’s right. But GPT-5.5 deserves your attention anyway — not because of what it promises, but because of what it reveals about where this industry is heading at full speed. The Pitch: Less Hand-Holding, More Doing OpenAI’s headline claim is deceptively simple: GPT-5.5 can do more with less guidance. Hand it a messy, multi-part problem and it figures out the plan on its own — choosing tools, checking its work, iterating toward a solution. ...

Four days. That’s the gap between Meta announcing 8,000 layoffs and Reuters revealing that the company is recording every keystroke, mouse movement, and screen action its employees make — to train AI that does their jobs. You can’t make this stuff up. The Timeline That Says Everything April 17: Reuters reports Meta plans to cut 10% of its 78,865-person workforce starting May 20, with more cuts planned for late 2026. ...

AI beating humans at games is old news. Deep Blue took Kasparov in ‘97. AlphaGo stunned the world in 2016. But every one of those victories happened in digital environments with perfect information and unlimited thinking time. Table tennis is a completely different beast. And this week, Sony AI’s robot Ace became the first autonomous machine to defeat elite human players under official competition rules — earning the cover of Nature in the process. ...

Nvidia has owned the AI chip conversation for three years straight. That era might be ending — not with a bang, but with a procurement spreadsheet. Over the past 48 hours, Google quietly revealed the most aggressive custom silicon strategy in the industry: a four-company chip design alliance spanning Broadcom, MediaTek, Marvell, and Intel. Each partner handles a different piece of the puzzle. Together, they represent something Nvidia should lose sleep over. ...

Your employer watching your screen isn’t new. But your employer recording every mouse movement, every keystroke, every dropdown menu selection — and feeding it all into an AI that might eventually replace you? That’s a different beast entirely. Meta just crossed that line, and its own employees are furious about it. What the Model Capability Initiative Actually Does On April 21st, Meta’s Superintelligence Labs team rolled out the Model Capability Initiative (MCI) to all US-based employees and contractors. The tool captures mouse movements, click locations, keystrokes, and periodic screenshots — all piped directly into Meta’s AI training pipeline. ...

A rocket company just dropped $60 billion on a code editor. And somehow, it makes perfect sense. SpaceX announced Tuesday that it has secured an option to acquire Anysphere — the parent company behind Cursor, the AI coding assistant that’s taken over developer workflows — for $60 billion. The alternative: pay $10 billion just for the partnership work. Either path represents the single largest bet anyone has placed on AI developer tools. ...

The pretense is officially over. For years, Wall Street executives delivered a comforting mantra: AI will enhance your work, not replace it. This week, as Q1 2026 earnings rolled in, that narrative crumbled in spectacular fashion. JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Wells Fargo collectively reported $47 billion in profits — up 18% year-over-year — while shedding approximately 15,000 employees. More money, fewer humans. The math is brutal and undeniable. ...

There’s a saying in venture capital: if you can’t pick the winner, fund the race. Amazon just applied that maxim with a $75 billion budget. Amazon announced it will invest up to $25 billion in Anthropic — the company behind Claude — as part of a sprawling deal committing Anthropic to spending over $100 billion on AWS over the next decade. This comes just two months after Amazon dropped $50 billion on OpenAI’s record-breaking funding round. ...