TechCoreVoice

Sources: Ripple has proposed a takeover of Circle for $4B to $5B, a bid that was rejected as too low; Ripple remains interested in Circle (Bloomberg Tax)

Visa partners with Stripe's Bridge to help fintechs launch their own stablecoin-linked card programs in multiple countries at once, starting in Latin America (Emily Mason/Bloomberg)

Visa announces Visa Intelligent Commerce, opening its payment network to developers building AI agents to find and buy products for users (Sabrina Ortiz/ZDNET)

Q&A with Mark Zuckerberg on Llama 4, benchmarks, AI friends, DeepSeek, China, export controls, open source, monetizing AGI, aligning with Trump, and more (Dwarkesh Patel/Dwarkesh Podcast)

PayPal is expanding PayPal Ads to sell programmatic ads on the open web, using shopping data from its services to help advertisers target ads (Lauren Johnson/Adweek)

WhatsApp plans to add cloud-based AI features like message summarization and composition, utilizing a system called Private Processing to maintain data privacy (Lily Hay Newman/Wired)

A deep dive on GPT-4o's tendency to give sycophantic responses, an issue Sam Altman promised to fix and that may be caused by OpenAI optimizing for engagement (Zvi Mowshowitz/Don't Worry About the Vase)

P-1 AI, which is developing an AI-powered engineering agent and hopes AI can eventually design complex machines, emerges from stealth with $23M in seed funding (Sharon Goldman/Fortune)

Q&A with Alvaro Bedoya and Rebecca Slaughter who Trump fired, likely illegally, as FTC commissioners, on Meta, fighting for privacy, and bribes in the US (Nilay Patel/The Verge)

Geoffrey Hinton fears AI firms 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)

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: 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)

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)

Meta lays off an unspecified number of employees in Reality Labs, affecting Oculus Studios teams and, sources say, staff involved in Meta's hardware efforts (Alex Heath/The Verge)

Motorola's new Razr phones will include Perplexity's AI search engine, as part of a distribution partnership that lets Perplexity gain users rather than revenue (Hayden Field/CNBC)

Discord CEO Jason Citron is stepping down and will be succeeded by Humam Sakhnini, effective April 28; Citron will stay on the board and serve as a CEO advisor (Dean Takahashi/VentureBeat)

Nvidia updates its G-Assist AI chatbot, offering plugin and API support to let developers connect to external services and tools, such as Spotify and Gemini (Tom Warren/The Verge)

SK Telecom, South Korea's largest telecom, says hackers accessed USIM-related customer info, potentially useful in SIM swap attacks and targeted surveillance (Bill Toulas/BleepingComputer)

DOJ v. Google: an OpenAI exec says Google declined to let OpenAI access its search index; a DOJ remedy proposal would make Google share its index with rivals (Bloomberg)

Supabase, an open-source alternative to Google's Firebase that's used by 2M+ developers, raises $200M Series D at $2B valuation (Allie Garfinkle/Fortune)