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A deep dive on Apple's iPhone manufacturing process, including 2,700 parts from 187 suppliers in 28 countries; just 30 suppliers have no presence in China (Financial Times)

Music creation startup Splice buys London-based orchestral sound studio Spitfire Audio, a source says for ~$50M; sources say Splice has $100M+ in annual revenue (Anna Nicolaou/Financial Times)

Google Chrome won the browser wars fair and square, and the web will be worse off if Google is forced to sell it, even to atone for ad market monopoly abuses (David Heinemeier Hansson/HEY)

While Big Tech is largely spared from tariffs, small companies making devices like baby monitors face price hikes, shortages, and degrading product quality (Nicole Nguyen/Wall Street Journal)

How AI tools like Autistic Translator and Goblin Tools are helping those with autism and other neurodiverse people understand social situations (Andrea Jimnez/Washington Post)

A look at Interpol's innovation lab in Singapore for studying cybercrime, digital piracy, and more, and developing new techniques for bringing down criminals (Owen Walker/Financial Times)

A look at the sprawling network of group chats that surged in 2020 as a place for SV leaders to talk candidly, with Marc Andreessen playing a central role (Ben Smith/Semafor)

Huawei's recovery shows the limits of US policies aimed at restricting China, and how those policies can backfire, spurring Chinese firms to innovate and grow (Samm Sacks/Bloomberg)

Geoffrey Hinton fears AI companies are under-investing in safety research, embracing military usage, and sharing model weights while pushing for less regulation (CBS Mornings on YouTube)

A profile of Darktrace CEO Jill Popelka, who joined the British cyber security firm in Jan. 2024 and was at the helm when it was bought by Thoma Bravo for 4.3B (Anjli Raval/Financial Times)

Analysis: Meesho accounts for about 37% of India's e-commerce orders, but only 8%-9% of the sector's total value due to the small average transaction size (Manish Singh/India Dispatch)

While Apple's iPhone manufacturing in India matches China in quality, making the extraordinarily complex 20th anniversary iPhones outside China remains doubtful (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)

Architect Partners: crypto firms have struck 88 M&A and SPAC deals worth $8.2B so far in 2025, nearly 3x the $2.75B transaction value across 188 deals in 2024 (Wall Street Journal)

Sources: Huawei has approached some clients about testing the technical feasibility of the Ascend 910D, its newest AI chip that it hopes will beat Nvidia's H100 (Wall Street Journal)

A look at the rise of "pure play" bitcoin companies like Twenty One, as the stock market pays far more for crypto exposure than the crypto market itself (Matt Levine/Bloomberg)

India faces a shortage of agentic AI professionals, with executives estimating fewer than 100,000 available against a projected need of 200,000 by 2026 (Prachi Verma/The Economic Times)

Experts say that India lags behind China in deep tech innovation due to its historical focus on services, lower R&D investment, and a brain drain of AI talent (Furquan Ameen/Rest of World)

Trump's tariffs could slow robot adoption in the US, as buyer demand weakens and supplies of key components like magnets and actuators are disrupted (Financial Times)

Tel Aviv-based Sentra, whose cloud data security software now includes controls aimed at keeping AI prompts free from restricted data, raised a $50M Series B (Ryan Naraine/SecurityWeek)

Salsa, which provides APIs and UI components that let vertical SaaS platforms offer payroll as a feature to their customers, raised a $20M Series A led by Altos (Ryan Lawler/Axios)

Alpaca, which offers APIs for financial firms to connect and trade in US stocks, raised a $52M Series C to expand into the Middle East, Europe, and Asia (Kate Park/TechCrunch)

NYC-based Healthee, whose AI assistant Zoe lets its clients' workers navigate health insurance and benefits options, raised a $50M Series B led by Key1 Capital (Erin Brodwin/Axios)

Filing: China's leading flash memory chipmaker YMTC raised ~$219M from Hebei Yangyuan Zhihui Beverage Co. at a ~$22.1B valuation in December 2023 (Coco Feng/South China Morning Post)

4chan is back online after being down for 10 days, following a hack that leaked the emails of its lead administrators called "janitors" (Owen Carry/Know Your Meme)

Test conversations with some Meta AI digital companions, including celebrity-voiced ones, show them engaging in sexual chats even when users identify as minors (Jeff Horwitz/Wall Street Journal)

Bitcoin miners' earnings power and stocks have diverged from the asset they help produce, as the hashrate languishes amid technical and macroeconomic headwinds (Sidhartha Shukla/Bloomberg)

Prompt engineering roles, one of the buzziest jobs in 2023, become obsolete as AI models better intuit user intent and companies train staff in writing prompts (Isabelle Bousquette/Wall Street Journal)

At a major Hong Kong electronics exhibition, some Chinese companies say they are exploring ways to lower or skirt tariffs while others plan to wait them out (Luz Ding/Bloomberg)

Stripe plans to test a stablecoin payments product aimed at companies outside the US, the UK, and the EU, using tech from Bridge, which Stripe acquired recently (Francisco Rodrigues/CoinDesk)

Watching OpenAI's o3 guess a photo's location feels surreal, dystopian, and entertaining, including running Python code to examine details like license plates (Simon Willison/Simon Willison's Weblog)

Sources: ~300 London-based DeepMind staff sought to unionize with the CWU in recent weeks, to challenge AI sales to defense groups and Google's ties to Israel (Financial Times)

a16z, which owns ~20% of Deel, a stake worth $2.5B+, is advising Deel in fighting Rippling, whose CEO Parker Conrad said a16z pushed him out of Zenefits in 2016 (The Information)

US v. Google: Chrome General Manager Parisa Tabriz testified that only Google can run Chrome, given the browser's "interdependencies" on other parts of Google (Leah Nylen/Bloomberg)

Q&A with Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas on Motorola partnership, Perplexity's upcoming browser Comet, TikTok bid, ChatGPT's scale, Google's DOJ trial, and more (Alex Heath/The Verge)

A look at efforts by Apple and others to become carbon neutral by investing in eucalyptus farms in Brazil's Cerrado region, amid skepticism from some ecologists (Gregory Barber/MIT Technology Review)

Docs and sources detail the opaque market for shares of Elon Musk's private companies; Valor recently offered investors $1B worth of shares in SpaceX and xAI (Wall Street Journal)

A profile of Saudi billionaire investor Prince Alwaleed, who, along with his investment firm Kingdom Holding, is the second-biggest shareholder in XAI Holdings (Devon Pendleton/Bloomberg)

IBM has booked $6B in sales around generative AI and Red Hat's revenue has about doubled since IBM bought it, fueling a ~2x jump in IBM's stock since April 2020 (Asa Fitch/Wall Street Journal)

NetEase has lost at least three senior executives in recent months, as CEO William Ding pulls back on investments and cuts jobs in a bid to boost profits (Bloomberg)

A Nigerian tribunal upholds a $220M fine imposed on Meta in July 2024 for discriminatory and exploitative practices against Nigerian consumers (Nnaemeka Onyekachi/Nairametrics)

Symbiotic, which is building a "universal staking" platform after starting as a restaking protocol on Ethereum, raised a $29M Series A led by Pantera Capital (Yogita Khatri/The Block)

A US DOJ official says Tyler Buchanan, a 23-year-old from Scotland, and an alleged Scattered Spider cybercrime group member, was extradited from Spain to the US (Margi Murphy/Bloomberg)

Etsy agrees to sell Reverb, an online musical instruments marketplace that it acquired for $275M in 2019, to investors Creator Partners and Servco (Stuart Dredge/Music Ally)

Autodesk adds Jeff Epstein and Christie Simons to its board and settles the proxy fight with Starboard Value, which has criticized Autodesk for underperformance (Svea Herbst-Bayliss/Reuters)

Many AI features, like Gmail's AI assistant, feel useless because they don't allow users to edit system prompts, constraining the AI models they're built with (Pete Koomen)

Sources: XAI Holdings, the newly combined entity housing xAI and X, is in talks to raise roughly $20B, or possibly more, valuing the company at more than $120B (Bloomberg)

Interpretability, or understanding how AI models work, can help mitigate many AI risks, such as misalignment and misuse, that stem from AI systems' opacity (Dario Amodei)

Reducto, which helps companies convert complex documents into inputs for LLMs, raised a $24.5M Series A led by Benchmark, following a $8.4M seed in October 2024 (Allie Garfinkle/Fortune)

Google says it will end support for 1st- and 2nd-gen Nest thermostats on October 25, and won't launch new models in Europe due to its "unique" heating systems (Chris Welch/The Verge)

Leaked letter: interim US Attorney for DC Ed Martin accused Wikipedia of allowing foreign manipulation and propaganda, threatening its tax-exempt status (Gabe Kaminsky/The Free Press)

Sources: Butterfly Effect, the Chinese startup behind Manus, has discussed setting up a new HQ outside China, and separating its domestic and global businesses (Juro Osawa/The Information)

Deel sues Rippling for alleged defamation, libel, and deceptive trade practices, says Rippling placed an insider within Deel, is not tax compliant, and more (Dan Primack/Axios)

Sources: Microsoft plans to increase the use of third-party firms for selling software to SMBs; in-house sellers will get more training and focus on AI products (Brody Ford/Bloomberg)

Meta and Booz Allen partner to deploy Space Llama, a fine-tuned version of Llama 3.2, for research aboard the International Space Station National Laboratory (Hayden Field/CNBC)

Docs: Scale AI had revenue of $870M in 2024, missing its $1B target, and plans a $150M share sale that values the startup at around $25B, up 80% from a year ago (The Information)

The US SEC Chairman says the agency has ample authority to oversee digital assets as Congress debates if SEC or the CFTC should be the primary crypto regulator (Lydia Beyoud/Bloomberg)

Deliveroo, which listed in London with a 7.6B valuation in 2021, says it received a buyout proposal from DoorDash that would value the company at 2.7B (Financial Times)

Sources: Chinese AI startup Manus raised $75M led by Benchmark at a $500M valuation, and plans to expand to markets including the US, Japan, and the Middle East (Bloomberg)

Sources: China has quietly exempted from tariffs at least eight classifications of US-made microchips, as it seeks to exempt "irreplaceable" goods (Washington Post)

Internal presentation by Microsoft's CFO Amy Hood: number of users for Copilot has been flat over the past year with ~20M weekly users, as ChatGPT grew to 400M (Newcomer)

Microsoft makes Recall available to all Copilot+ PCs, along with a new AI-powered Windows search and Click to Do, which works like Google's Circle to Search (Tom Warren/The Verge)

Swiss National Bank says cryptocurrencies failed to meet its currency reserve standards, as a referendum campaign seeks to require SNB to hold bitcoin reserves (John Revill/Reuters)

CB Insights: fintech startups globally raised a combined $10.3B in Q1, the highest since Q1 2023; 19 US fintech startups have raised over $50M in 2025 so far (Mary Ann Azevedo/TechCrunch)

Sources: the US pushed back against EU's AI code of practice; the code is voluntary, still being finalized, and aims to help companies comply with the AI Act (Bloomberg)

Temu and Shein raise prices ahead of de minimis tariff exemption expiring on May 2 and urged customers to make purchases prior to April 25 to avoid 120% tariffs (CNN)

Docs: X's data licensing and subscriptions revenue grew 32% YoY to $91M in February, ad revenue grew 4% YoY to $146M; Twitter had $4.5B in ad revenue in 2021 (Carmen Arroyo/Bloomberg)

Nous, which plans to launch an AI training system on Solana using people's idle computing power, raised a $50M Series A, a source says at a $1B token valuation (Leo Schwartz/Fortune)

Sources: Tencent Music is in advanced talks to buy Chinese podcasting startup Ximalaya in a $2.4B deal (Bloomberg)

Baidu CEO Robin Li says demand for text-based models like DeepSeek's is "shrinking" and claims its model had a higher propensity for "hallucinations" (Eleanor Olcott/Financial Times)

Toshiba Europe researchers say they used quantum key distribution cryptography to send messages over a 250km German commercial telecommunications network (Michael Peel/Financial Times)

Brazil's AI-based social security app, launched in 2018, has cut bureaucracy in some cases but wrongly rejected hundreds of vulnerable people over minor errors (Gabriel Daros/Rest of World)

Three European scientific funding agencies have put research programs with China on hold since 2021 due to concerns over the country's Data Security Law (Andrew Silver/Reuters)

JD.com's costly bid to challenge Meituan in food delivery, while the latter enters the e-commerce space, has led to a loss of ~$70B in combined market value (Charlotte Yang/Bloomberg)

OpenAI expands deep research usage for Plus, Pro, and Team users with an o4-mini-powered lightweight version, which also rolls out to Free users today (Kyle Wiggers/TechCrunch)

Baidu rolls out Ernie 4.5 Turbo and X1 Turbo, new versions of its flagship foundation and reasoning models, as it looks to take on Alibaba's Qwen and DeepSeek (Bloomberg)

Adobe says Firefly users can now generate images using OpenAI's GPT, Google's Imagen 3 and Veo 2, and Flux 1.1 Pro, in addition to its own Firefly image models (Stephen Nellis/Reuters)

Sources: Apple plans to move assembly of all US-sold iPhones, ~60M/year, to India by the end of 2026, as President Trump's trade war pushes a pivot from China (Financial Times)

YouTube is testing a new AI Overviews carousel in its search results for queries focused on products and location information, for some US Premium subscribers (Danny Goodwin/Search Engine Land)

Sources: the US is conducting a criminal antitrust probe into TP-Link's pricing strategies and whether the router maker represents a national security threat (Bloomberg)

Source: Alphabet's Q1 profit was boosted by $8B in unrealized gains from an investment in SpaceX; Alphabet has been a major SpaceX investor since at least 2015 (Davey Alba/Bloomberg)

Politics Headlines Today
[Mon-28-Apr-2025]

(FULL LIST) Davido, Mohbad, Tems, others shine at 17th Headies Awards - Punch

1,141 contraventions removed to restore drainage channels, says Lagos govt - The Nation

1.4m Children To Benefit From New Polio Vaccination In Adamawa - Daily Independent

111 Ex- Workers Of New Nigerian Newspapers Die Waiting For Their Entitlement - Daily Independent

15 months after, EFCC yet to release probe reports on Edu, Sadiya - Daily Trust

2025 Hajj: Jigawa begins vaccination for intending pilgrims - Punch

2025 Hajj: NAHCON chair hails cash BTA for pilgrims - The Nation

2025 Headies: Emotional Moment Wunmi Hands Mohbads Award To Son, Liam - New Telegraph

2025:Enugu airport set for full operations April 28 as airlines return - Blueprint

2026: Ekiti North stakeholders set to endorse Oyebanji, deputy - Blueprint

2027 and realignment of forces - The Nation

2027 poll: Abia groups urge Kalu to run for governor - Guardian

2027: Atikus coalition against Tinubu unfair, unjustified, says Nwosu - Guardian

2027: Ex-Buhari campaigner wants Jonathan to contest - The Sun

2027: Nasarawa gov urges N/Central agitators to show discipline - Daily Trust

2027: No candidate can defeat Tinubu alone Kenneth Okonkwo - The Sun

2027: No single candidate can beat Tinubu alone - Okonkwo - Punch

2027: Yobe governor rejects Atikus coalition - Guardian

A Pope's Funeral And New Leadership Paradigm - Daily Independent

A Pope's Funeral And New Leadership Paradigm - Leadership

ABC Transport owners daughter rejects wanted declaration tag by police - The Nation

ABIA 2027: Ukwa Ngwa Leader Debunks Call For Deputy Speaker's Guber Involvement, Supports Otti - Daily Independent

Abia 2027: Ukwa Ngwa leader disowns call for Deputy Speaker Kalus guber bid - The Sun

ABIA 2027: Ukwa Ngwa Leader Disowns Call for Deputy Speakers Guber Involvement - Daily Times

Abuse scandals, disunity and diplomacy the new popes challenges - Guardian

Activist urges Delta gov to industrialise state through agriculture, aquaculture - Punch

Adagba launches divine consensus for Alia 2027, awards scholarship to Jechira students - The Sun

Adamawa Launches Pensioners' Verification Exercise - Daily Independent

Adeola awards scholarships, bursaries to 3,881 students in Ogun - The Sun

Afe Babalola Wins African Man of the Year Awards in Food Security, Canvasses Nigerians Return to Full Agriculture - Thisday

Afreximbank grows top-line by 23% to $3.3b - The Nation

Africa waits as AU announces 2025 AFRIMA awards host city - The Sun

Air Vice Marshal Chiedu: Meet NAFs first serving officer to be promoted to rank of professor - The Nation

Akpabio: APC chieftain warns VeryDarkMan against slander - The Sun

Akpoti-Uduaghan fires back at Akpabio with sarcastic apology: 'Forgive my dignity - PM News

Alawuba: UBA to Operate in All African Nations, Expand Footprint to 100 Countries Globally - Thisday

ALX launches creative tech lite to empower Africas digital creators - Daily Times

AMAC win inaugural FCT FA womens Inter-Area Councils Football tourney - Blueprint

AMAC wins inaugural FCT FA Womens Inter-Area Councils football tourney - The Nation

Analyst, Dan Kunle, under fire over call for private takeover of oil sector - Peoples Daily

Anambra 2025: Stakeholders mobilise electorate for Soludo - Blueprint

APC expecting more opposition governors, says Uzodimma - Guardian

APRCN honours Sylvester Iyade with UN eminent ambassador award - Peoples Daily

Argentina soccer team pays tribute to their holiest fan, Pope Francis - Blueprint

Army donates vehicle to Man O War in Lagos - Punch

Arne Slot Has Four Warnings To Look At After Debut Premier League Title Win - Daily Independent

Arokodare, Onyedika listed for Ebony Boot award - The Nation

Assefa sets women's record as Sawe wins men's race - BBC

Assefa sets womens record as Sawe wins mens race - Blueprint

AVM Ubadike emerges NAF's first serving professor of aerospace engineering - PM News

Awoniyi unlucky as Man City edge Nottingham to FA Cup final - The Nation

Bankole Benard: Stringent UAE Visa Policy Targets Prevention of Suspect Nigerians from Entering the Emirates - Thisday

Bayelsa govt seeks investigation into shooting atpro-Tinubu rally - Guardian

Bayelsa govt seeks probe of shooting at groups rally - Daily Times

Bayelsa govt, pro-Tinubu group bicker over shooting at mega rally - The Sun

Bayelsa, pro-Wike group trade blame over rally shootings - Punch

Benue Govt: Armed Herdsmen Have Sacked 50 Communities Across Five LGs - Thisday

Benue Killings: LG Chairman issues quit notice to Fulani herdsmen - Daily Times

Benue's new CP assumes duty - Punch