This Week in Tech (Week Ending Jun 6, 2025)
TL;DR - ✂️🍿Breakup of the year; 🇺🇦🦾 Ukraine's drone attack; ⭐️Mary Meeker's AI report
Hey folks!
TGIF - Tech news below.
TL;DR -
✂️🍿Breakup of the year just happened - Trump 💔 Musk
🇺🇦🦾 Ukraine launched an audacious drone operation, which destroyed nuclear-capable bombers deep inside Russian territory.
⭐️She’s back: Mary Meeker, the most famous internet analyst of the dot-com boom era, says artificial intelligence is growing faster than anything that came before it in a 340 page report on AI.
Reddit is suing Anthropic for allegedly using Reddit's data to train its AI models without proper licensing.
🌎 Macro (Economic) and Trends
🌋Trump and Musk are no more: After Musk attacked President Trump’s tax bill, Trump said he was disappointed and suggested Musk was suffering from “Trump derangement syndrome.” Musk, who spent hundreds of millions of dollars to help get Trump re-elected, shot back in real time on social media that the president was ungrateful and wouldn’t be sitting in the Oval Office without his support. 😳🍿Musk proceeded to tweet about Trump or the bill more than 40 times on Thursday alone. Tesla’s stock plunged 14% on Thurs.
Trump has banned citizens from 12 countries (including Haiti, Afghanistan and Iran) from traveling to the U.S. and introduced more-limited travel restrictions on seven others.
🇵🇸🇮🇱A man "used a makeshift flamethrower and threw an incendiary device" at a group of demonstrators in Boulder, Colorado earlier this week. The demonstrators were calling for the release of Israeli hostages held by Hamas. 12 people were injured.
🇳🇱The Dutch government collapsed on Tuesday, most likely ushering in a snap election.
🇺🇦🦾 Ukraine launched an audacious drone operation, which destroyed nuclear-capable bombers deep inside Russian territory. Ukraine's ingenious use of low-cost drones has vast implications not only for the future of this war — but for the future of all war. Recall: The U.S. and European allies have hesitated to supply Ukraine with additional air defenses to counter Russia's weekly bombardments, citing their own dwindling stockpiles. Russia rejected Ukraine's offer for a 30-day ceasefire. Trump railed against Putin for his obstinacy, but has so far declined to impose any new sanctions against Moscow.
🔥Wildfire smoke from Canada and plumes of desert dust from the Sahara smothered large portions of the U.S. this week. The conditions caused hazy skies and hazardous air quality from New York City to Miami.
🥘Trending - Home cooking: Americans are cooking at home more often and targeting budget-friendly foods due to recession fears. Fast food chains like McDonald's have already flagged softness in spending from low- and middle-income consumers. Restaurants know it and are catering accordingly - check out 🍔 Super Duper’s “recession” burger lol meet the moment right?
🏡Housing - it’s a buyer’s market…if you can afford it: There are nearly 500,000 more home sellers than buyers in the U.S. housing market. That's the widest gap on record — and a big reversal from just a few years ago. Redfin believes prices will dip 1% by the end of the year
🔬 Micro (Tech Companies)
💬X plans to start rolling out its new direct message feature, XChat, to all users this week after it appeared to be in beta testing last week. Before it launched, X said it was pausing work on encrypted DMs, possibly because XChat would soon replace the older system.
Google has agreed to spend $500 million over 10 years and create new compliance committees to settle shareholder litigation accusing it of antitrust violations.
🇨🇳Apple’s plan to launch its artificial intelligence features in China in partnership with Alibaba Group is facing delays as the country’s top internet regulator hasn’t approved the companies’ applications.
👵🏻🚙Tell your mom: Uber is now releasing accounts meant for older adults. These accounts sport a simpler UI, bigger text, and features like ride-tracking for family members, easily accessible list of saved destinations, and some other nifty features
Meta Platforms is buying the power output from Constellation Energy’s Clinton, Illinois nuclear power plant under a 20-year deal, the latest sign of how tech firms are dealing with fast-rising need for electricity to power their AI data centers.
👻👓Snap CEO Evan Spiegel said the company is on “the cusp of a real transformation” in computing and predicted that AR glasses will surpass the Apple Watch in popularity by the end of the decade.
TikTok has launched TikTok for Artists, a music insights platform that the company says will help artists help connect with fans, improve promotional efforts, and understand what to upload.
🕵️♀️Reddit is rolling out a new update meant to increase users' privacy on the platform. It's adding a "Content and Activity" setting that allows people to decide what kind of content from the subreddits they participate in will show up on their profile.
✂️Layoffs: Disney informed employees that it plans to lay off several hundred staff members globally as part of an effort to become more efficient. Layoffs at Warner Bros. Discovery and Paramount are also expected soon.
⭐️She’s back: Mary Meeker, the most famous internet analyst of the dot-com boom era, says artificial intelligence is growing faster than anything that came before it in a 340 page report on AI. Meeker used to publish an annual “internet trends” through 2019 and has since sporadically published reports with various themes. Meeker covers a ton of ground - talking about the industry as a whole, training compute costs, capex investments from BigTech, AGI and much more. It’s hard to summarize takeaways so just take a gander. Items I found helpful include: an AI milestone timeline; Enterprise AI adoption examples (p67-74); AI Monetization methods - chips, compute services, data layer (p156-p175); predictions for the next AI use case frontiers (p245); LLM User share (p293 and below).
🤖 AI News
Nvidia is developing a new chip for China that for the first time will allow customers to connect multiple chips together to create higher-performance computing clusters.
⭐️Reddit is suing Anthropic for allegedly using Reddit's data to train its AI models without proper licensing.
Builder.AI is bankrupt after it turns out its “AI” was powered by 700 Indian engineers.
🤝 Select M&A, Fundraises, IPO, Partnerships
M&A
The FTC has fully taken over the congressional antitrust probe into the Omnicom/IPG merger.
Leidos, which develops defense technology, acquired Kudu Dynamics, which uses AI for cybersecurity, for $300 million in cash.
Snowflake bought Crunchy Data, a Postgres database partner, for an estimated $250 million.
Collibra acquired data access company Raito to help its customers automate data access requests in the age of AI.
IBM acquired Seek AI, a startup that lets users ask questions about enterprise data using natural language.
AMD, the semiconductor giant, announced that it acquired Brium, an AI optimization startup currently in stealth.
Fundraising
Elon Musk’s xAI is allowing employees to sell $300 million worth of shares to investors, in a deal that values the company at $113 billion.
Cohere, a prominent A.I. start-up, is said to be seeking $500 million in new funding to keep up with bigger rivals like OpenAI and Anthropic.
Anduril, the late stage defense tech startup, raised a $2.5 billion round that values the company at $30.5 billion.
Grammarly, which uses AI for proofreading, raised $1 billion from General Catalyst. Grammarly said its annual revenue exceeds $700 million.
Empathy, which uses AI to provide emotional support when loved ones die, raised $72 million in a Series C.
Prepared, which uses AI to assist 911 operators, raised $80 million in a Series C
Speedata has raised $44 million to boost its analytics processing unit (APU) tech that’s designed to accelerate big data analytics and AI workloads
Partnerships
Samsung is reportedly about to close an investment in Perplexity. The deal would also see Perplexity's app and assistant pre-installed on its phones and its search features built into the default browser
AMC Networks announced a partnership with AI startup Runway to integrate generative AI into its marketing and production processes, becoming one of the first major cable networks to formally embrace the technology for content creation.
IPO
Chime is going public. The company announced that it's pricing its shares between $24 and $26, which will give it a valuation of up to $11.2 billion.
Voyager Technologies, a defense and space company, is aiming to raise up to $319 million in an initial public offering that could value the company as high as $1.6 billion.
⚱️ Gold Panning - For those who reached the bottom
🧬So apparently there’s another Hadid sister to join Gigi and Bella. Gotta love 23andMe discoveries.
💿Late last week, news broke that Taylor Swift bought back the masters for her first six albums six years after they were sold to Scooter Braun without her knowledge.
🩴Latest fashion statement: fisherman sandals
Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, starring Oscar Isaac, Jacob Elordi, and Christoph Waltz, out this November. Teaser trailer:
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