This Week in Tech (Week Ending May 23, 2025)
TL;DR - 📢Google I/O; 📱Jony Ive joins OpenAI; 🤝 M&A from Cohere, Perplexity; 🙂↔️ propaganda I’m not falling for
Hey folks!
TGIF - Tech news below. Have a good Memorial Day wkend! 🇺🇸
TL;DR -
📢Google held its annual I/O conference - included in its update is AI Mode, its chatbot-style search tab, which will soon roll out to all users in the United States..
📱Jony Ive, a chief architect of the iPhone, and his design firm are taking over creative and design control at OpenAI. OpenAI is paying $5 billion in stock for io, Ive’s startup, to create a new generation of AI devices.
🤝 M&A from Cohere / Ottogrid (market research tooling); Perplexity / Sidekick (a distraction free browser) and more.
🙂↔️ Heard of the “propaganda I’m not falling for” trend? Guess what Gen Z users hate the most… answer at the bottom! ⬇️
🌎 Macro (Economic) and Trends
👴🏻Former President Biden was diagnosed late last week with an "aggressive form" of prostate cancer.
⭐️The Trump administration sent a letter to Harvard informing the university that it would no longer have the ability to enroll international students. Current international students, the university said, would be forced to transfer. The move, which could affect about a quarter of the school’s student body, escalated the administration’s pressure on the college to adhere to the president’s agenda.
💳The "gold card" website allowing people to buy U.S. permanent residency for $5 million will launch within a week.
😢🇮🇱Two young Israeli Embassy staff members were shot and killed at close range in downtown Washington on Wednesday. The victims were a couple and were about to be engaged. The suspect, who is in custody, had shouted “free Palestine”.
🇲🇽A Mexican navy training ship crashed into the Brooklyn Bridge over the weekend, killing two crew members. The bridge sustained no structural damage.
🌪️ At least 27 people have been killed by tornadoes that swept across part of the U.S. Midwest and South.
ABUSA - Anywhere but USA: The latest in investment trends. Last week, global stocks made a new all-time high—so long as the U.S. is excluded. The big question for investors is whether U.S. underperformance is just the unwinding of last year’s overdone bets on U.S. exceptionalism, or whether the U.S. is beginning a long and painful decline relative to the rest of the world.
📺Trending - streaming quality over quantity: Streaming services are shifting to promoting the quality of their programming instead of the sheer quantity of it.
🏝️🫥Yikes - is there a vacation tax? A new study shows that even when a manager encourages you to unplug outside of work hours, you'll probably get dinged for doing it. I mean, don’t let it ruin your Memorial Day weekend though 😅
A Linkedin Executive’s OpEd on how the bottom rung of the career leader is breaking: “Unless employers want to find themselves without enough people to fill leadership posts down the road, they need to continue to hire young workers. But they need to redesign entry-level jobs that give workers higher-level tasks that add value beyond what can be produced by A.I.”
🤑😬The rich are feeling anxious: “The Birkin bags are going into hiding”. Quiet luxury this is not. The rich have just gone silent in an era of rising economic tension and class rage.
🔬 Micro (Tech Companies)
⭐️Google held its annual I/O conference and despite the focus on AI, investors seemed unimpressed - Alphabet’s stock was down 1.2% during the keynote. Additional features include: Flow — a new app with a collection of generative AI tools for making video clips; bringing its Gemini AI assistant to Chrome; and more. Google will also start rolling out AI Mode, its chatbot-style search tab, to all users in the United States
Meta has an “epidemic of scams” as criminals floor Instagram and Facebook with fake bargains.
Reddit banned the r/Efilism subreddit, an online community devoted to a nihilistic anti-life philosophy, after the bombing of a Palm Springs fertility clinic was linked to someone with those nihilistic beliefs. Other anti-natalist subreddits remain on the platform.
Tesla Motors and SpaceX saw their brand reputations crater in the past year. Why it matters: Elon Musk's polarizing political activism appears to have come at the expense of his largest companies.
The Athletic has posted a profit for the past three quarters, proving its parent, the New York Times, is good for its word when it comes to Wall Street projections. A big part of The Athletic's path to profitability has been integrating it further into the New York Times subscription bundle and growing its paid advertising.
Waymo has completed 10 million paid rides, including rides on the Waymo One app and the Uber app.
Comcast’s Epic Universe opened in Orlando, FL this week, and it includes rides from How to Train Your Dragon, Harry Potter and Super Nintendo World. Comcast Universal invested in the highest-end technology to create immersive experiences to try and beat Disney at its own game. The goal in the theme-park arms race is vacation-destination supremacy.
Layoffs: Walmart plans to cut around 1,500 corporate jobs in a U.S. restructuring aimed at trimming its expenses and speeding up decision-making
🤖 AI News
The U.S. government is scrutinizing Apple’s plan to work with Chinese tech giant Alibaba to release AI features in China. U.S. officials are worried the deal will help Alibaba improve its AI capabilities, broaden the reach of Chinese chatbots that censor information and deepen Apple’s exposure to Chinese regulations related to censorship and data.
🤷🏻♀️OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told employees that the company’s next major product won’t be a wearable. Instead, it will be a compact, screenless device, fully aware of its user’s surroundings. Small enough to sit on a desk or fit in a pocket, Altman described it as both a “third core device” alongside a MacBook Pro and iPhone, and an “AI companion” integrated into daily life. I don’t get it…
OpenAI released an artificial intelligence coding “agent” that can automate software engineering tasks such as fixing bugs and answering questions about a codebase.
Microsoft said that xAI’s Grok artificial intelligence models were now available to buy through its cloud server unit Azure as it continues to try to diversify its AI business from OpenAI.
Perplexity facts: the number of questions people have asked the search engine increased 5x to 460 million from a year ago; Perplexity had just under 260,000 paying consumer subscribers at year-end; Perplexity generated $34 million in revenue, including sales from business customers.
Mistral showed off Devstral, which it claims is now the most powerful open-source coding model available “by a large margin.
The half measure vs the oneshot - what life looks like in an AI-native world: Casey Winters writes there are 3 tiers of work in an AI native world:
The old way: write a SQL query to get data
The half measure: use ChatGPT to write SQL queries for you to get data
The one shot: have Cursor write Python scripts for you to get data
If an entrepreneur, you should as much as possible be building one shot product experiences. When the technology can’t quite get there, perhaps find product/market fit with a half measure product that allows you to sequence to the one shot easily. Do not build half measures that do not sequence to one shot solutions you can own.
🤝 Select M&A, Fundraises, IPO, Partnerships
M&A
⭐️Jony Ive, a chief architect of the iPhone, and his design firm are taking over creative and design control at OpenAI. OpenAI is paying $5 billion in stock for io, Ive’s startup, to create a new generation of AI devices.
Cohere acquired market research tooling startup Ottogrid. Ottogrid’s existing product will be shut down, while Cohere integrates its technology into North, the company’s ChatGPT-style tool for summarizing documents.
Charter Communications is acquiring Cox Communications for $34.5bn, showing how broadband is consolidating in the decline of cable TV.
Chobani acquired smoothie and frozen meal startup Daily Harvest.
Perplexity acquired Sidekick, which develops a distraction-free browser.
Regeneron, a biotech company, agreed to buy the assets of 23andMe, the DNA testing company that filed for bankruptcy in March, for $256 million. That’s just 4% of the San Francisco-based startup’s peak valuation as a public company in 2021.
Alation, a data intelligence platform, acquired workflow automation platform Numbers Station for an undisclosed sum. Alation hopes Numbers Station's tech will help its customers be able to better utilize AI agents without security risks or hallucinations.
‼️Remember Touchland? the viral hand sanitizer? It was just snapped up by Church and Dwight, a personal care brand company, for $700mill.
Fundraising
Nvidia is in advanced talks to invest in PsiQuantum, a quantum computing startup.
Stord, a logistics startup, raised $80 million in equity funding at a $1.5 billion valuation and raised $120 million in debt financing, likely setting up the company to acquire more U.S. warehousing operations.
Anthropic received a $2.5 billion, five-year revolving credit line.
Coreweave, the debt-laden data center builder, sold $2 billion in high-yield bonds, $500 million more than expected, a sign investors will continue to fund the costly buildout of artificial intelligence computing power.
Partnerships
Google is working with Warby Parker to develop AI-powered smart glasses.
IPO
Hinge Health, a digital physical therapy company, priced its I.P.O. at $32 a share, the top end of the expected range.
⚱️ Gold Panning - For those who reached the bottom
Yikes! there was a potential measles exposure at Shakira’s concert in NJ.
Austin lost it: Nearly five years after Austin, Texas, became a darling of the tech industry, the city is now bleeding tech talent that is flowing back to the coasts. Big Tech employment declined 1.6% in Austin, and startup employment fell 4.9%. Tech employment also fell in Dallas, Houston and Denver. Meanwhile, tech employment grew in New York and San Francisco.
🇷🇺🇧🇷Omg fascinating! One of my favorite shows of all-time is The Americans, about Russian sleeper agents in the US during the Cold War, and apparently, it’s a real thing! But instead of the US, Russia uses Brazil to train their “illegals”.
🧮⌚️Trending - alternative devices: Concerned parents in affluent suburbs are fueling the rise of “alternative device fairs,” where companies pitch stripped-down phones that block social media, censor profanity, and alert parents to risky content.
💗🤨 But is she ready for Scientology? Are Tom Cruise and Ana de Armas a thing? (still super excited for MI8)
📺 Disney’s new comedy Adults, which premieres next week, is being positioned as a next-gen Friends.
👚The new status symbol for Gen Z is Parke, a fast-growing online brand known for its $125 mock-neck sweatshirts. Parke is owned by a 28-year-old TikTok influencer named Chelsea Kramer. (Her middle name is Parke.) Kramer started selling sweatshirts less than two years ago. Last year, she says, her business brought in $16 million.
The latest tiktok trend: “propaganda I’m not falling for” lists where Gen Z users are listing their dislikes. The top 10 most mentioned items: (from last to first) — I had to google most of these 👵🏻
1️⃣0️⃣ matcha 🍵 — haters
9️⃣ climbing the corporate ladder 🪜🙅🏻♀️
8️⃣ preventative botox 💉
7️⃣ Benson Boone 🤸♀️
6️⃣ trad wife 🤰
5️⃣ Colleen Hoover - lol best selling author of Verity and It Ends with Us.
4️⃣ whole milk 🥛
3️⃣ labubus 🪆- had zero idea what this was - they’re little Nordic elves
2️⃣ clean girl aesthetic - apparently ppl are over minimalism (thank goodness) and want “boom boom”, excess aesthetic
1️⃣ ChatGPT! - kinda surprised by this
Going into the long weekend like… (apparently this is how bumblebees actually nap!) Happy Memorial Day weekend! 🇺🇸
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