This Week in Tech (Week Ending Apr 25, 2025)
TL;DR - 🤝📱Phone manufacturer partnerships w AI; 🚙 Cars and robotaxis; 🇯🇵♥️ Japanophilia
Hey folks!
Happy Friday! I was out last week hanging with family ☺️ Hope you had a good 420 🌿 and Easter 🐣. Check out the tech news below -
TL;DR -
🤝📱Alot of partnerships with phone manufacturers: Google trying to guarantee its Gemini AI chatbot placement on Android phones; OpenAI, Microsoft and Meta Platforms have approached Samsung about deals to put their AI chatbots onto Samsung phones; AI startup Perplexity announced a partnership with Motorola to install Perplexity’s app on the electronics company’s phones
🚙Cars and robotaxis: Tesla’s robotaxi service has begun testing in Austin and San Francisco; Lyft will start offering taxi rides on its ride-hailing app in St. Louis; Uber plans to deploy thousands of autonomous Volkswagen minivans in cities across the U.S; The FTC filed a lawsuit against Uber today that accuses the ride-hailing company of signing users up for its Uber One subscription program and then making it "unreasonably difficult" for them to cancel.
🇯🇵♥️ What’s the latest in Japanophilia?
🌎 Macro (Economic) and Trends
⛪️ Pope Francis passed on Monday. RIP. But also: “Is there anything more Catholic than waiting until Monday to die so you don’t upstage Jesus Christ?”
📈 After a volatile start, the stock finished a strong week with the Nasdaq up more than 1% as investors prepare for a slew of economic data and corporate earnings next week.
Trump is signaling that he will blame the Fed for any economic weakness that results from his trade war if the central bank doesn’t cut interest rates soon. But his stance softened after the CEOs of three of the nation's biggest retailers — Walmart, Target and Home Depot — privately warned Trump that his policy could disrupt supply chains, raise prices and empty shelves.
🎙️ President Trump said he's giving an interview to The Atlantic's editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg — the journalist who was inadvertently added to a Signal chain with sensitive military planning
📉The daily average of Trump’s approval rating has steadily declined.
🤡Elon Musk is stepping away from his government role because of unwanted attention from DOGE and from pressure to resume focusing on Tesla. Tesla’s earnings showed that operating income dropped 66% and overall revenue was down 9% for the quarter compared to last year, driven by 20% lower automotive revenue and increased spending on artificial intelligence.
✨🙅🏻♀️Trending down - influencers’….influence: There’s major backlash against the influencer industry, which is built on selling aspirational lifestyles, due to the spike in economic uncertainty. Coming up: We may see more ‘mundane’ content "People are going to want an outlet that isn't luxury."
🏡📉Trending down - home sales: The housing market is still in a major funk - Sales of existing homes fell by 5.9% in March, which is typically the beginning of the busiest home-buying season.
👀 Trending - surveillance:
😳 Palantir is getting $30mill from the U.S. immigration department to create what it’s calling “ImmigrationOS” to help decide who to target for deportation
Massive Blue is helping cops deploy AI-powered social media bots to talk to people they suspect are anything from violent sex criminals all the way to vaguely defined “protesters.”
🎥 But I want to watch them talk: Trending - video podcasts. Audio dollars are growing but still tiny compared to video; the podcast video genre poses much bigger revenue opportunities. In the news: Netflix is interested in adding video podcasts to its platform; YouTube touted its growth in podcasting with more than 1 billion monthly active viewers of podcasts; Spotify has invested more in helping podcasters create and monetize videos,
🔬 Micro (Tech Companies)
🤖Google is paying “enormous” sums of money to guarantee its Gemini AI chatbot placement on Android phones, such as those sold by Samsung, in a repeat of its playbook for Google search which the court has ruled illegal.
🇮🇳Apple plans to assemble all the iPhones sold in the U.S. from India as soon as next year
📣 Alphabet’s revenue grew 12% year-over-year in the first quarter of 2025, equal to its growth in the previous quarter, as growth in Google’s Search and Cloud businesses slowed slightly from the fourth quarter.
📣 Comcast reported a 13% drop in net income and marginally lower revenue for the first quarter, as its cable TV and broadband businesses both suffered customer losses. NBCU’s Peacock streaming service lifted revenue 16% to $1.2 billion on 20% higher subscribers compared to a year earlier.
📉📣Earnings trend: Earnings announcements revealed how corporate America is feeling about the economy. Major companies like PepsiCo, Procter & Gamble, and others lowered their full year guidance.
⭐️ Last week, a federal judge ruled that Google's dominance of the online advertising and ad-tech markets violates U.S. antitrust laws. Google said it plans to appeal the guilty part of the ruling. Big picture: This is the second major recent antitrust loss for Google after a different court ruled last year that the giant has abused its dominance of the search market online.
Tesla’s planned robotaxi service has begun testing with employees in Austin and San Francisco
Ride share apps: Lyft will start offering taxi rides on its ride-hailing app in St. Louis, Mo. next month. Uber plans to deploy thousands of autonomous Volkswagen minivans in cities across the U.S
The Federal Trade Commission filed a lawsuit against Uber today that accuses the ride-hailing company of signing users up for its Uber One subscription program and then making it "unreasonably difficult" for them to cancel.
The European Union fined Apple and Meta Platforms hundreds of millions of dollars and ordered the companies to comply with the bloc’s tech rules.
Layoffs: Intel plans to cut more than 20% of its workforce, as the U.S. chip giant struggles to turn around its business,
🤖 AI News
Google’s Gemini AI has 35 million daily active users and 350 million monthly active users
ChatGPT has drawn away some search queries from Google but in primarily “homework and math” queries which don’t generate much in ad revenue. Google has not yet “seen cannibalization of commercial queries or [queries with] commercial intent.”
🇦🇪The United Arab Emirates unveiled plans to become the first nation to integrate AI directly into its lawmaking process
🤖So you’re saying we’ve got some time: Demis Hassabis, a Nobel laureate and Google DeepMind CEO, was interviewed on 60 Minutes, where he provided insights into AGI timeline, progress, and AI’s potential in medicine. Hassabis said AGI will arrive in 5-10 years.
The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences officially allowed the use of AI in film production, saying its use will “neither help nor harm the chances” of a nomination.
Anthropic expects AI-powered virtual employees to begin roaming corporate networks in the next year.
🤝 Select M&A, Fundraises, IPO, Partnerships
M&A
✅ Capital One’s proposed $35 billion acquisition of Discover was approved late last week by US bank regulators.
Tech M&A Outlook - dim: The outlook for tech M&A was optimistic entering the year - there were 205 U.S. startup acquisitions in Q1, and many of them were notable (ex: CoreWeave acquiring Weights & Biases for $1.7bn; ServiceNow acquiring Moveworks for $2.9bn; Google acquiring Wiz for $32bn). But then everything started to change in April when Trump announced sweeping tariffs. Tech companies saw their stock plummet and Q1’s progress started to look like a blip. The uncertainty has given many companies pause as the markets react and wait with bated breath.
Fundraising
Elon Musk’s Neuralink is raising $500 million at a valuation of $8.5 billion.
Partnerships
📱Phone manufacturer partnerships:
OpenAI, Microsoft and Meta Platforms have approached Samsung about deals to put their AI chatbots onto Samsung phones.
AI startup Perplexity announced a partnership with Motorola to install Perplexity’s app on the electronics company’s phones
📰The Washington Post signed a content licensing deal with OpenAI.
Volkswagen said that it will start supplying robotaxi rides for Uber in multiple U.S. cities starting in Los Angeles next year.
⚱️ Gold Panning - For those who reached the bottom
With the jobless rate for 20- to 24-year-olds rising to 7.5%, many Gen Zers are turning to grad school.
💰🗣️Trending - finfluencers: financial influencers. Over 40% of Americans get financial advice from social media. Money creators now earn 25-50% more per brand deal than other kinds of influencers.
🤣 I love this guy: Nate Bargatze. “I’m looking forward to the day you can’t see my nipples through my shirt. That’s all we’re working toward.”
💰Meet the queen of #richtok: Becca Bloom amassed over 2mill tiktok followers in just a few weeks showing her life as a 0.01%er. Her most watched video is of her plating her breakfast with dim sum, caviar, andn designer plateware (ever heard of Christofle? me either)
🎥Nice negotiation Coogler: Horror movie “Sinners” starring Michael B Jordan and directed by Ryan Coogler performed well in its opening weekend with really solid reviews (Rotten Tomatoes 98%, IMDB 8.2). Rights to the movie revert to Coogler, after 25 years, a condition that had scared off other studios from making the film.
🇯🇵♥️Calling all japanophiles: Here’s the forecast for the next big things from Japan
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