good morning from Fort Mason, which Microsoft has taken over for Build

for context: US real GDP increased 1.6% in the first quarter of 2026, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis

is FOMO really gone, though?

"Some of Mr. McDowell’s clients working in the A.I. industry were, at times, offering millions of dollars over the asking price in all cash, agreeing to quickly close and waiving contingencies, such as the right to inspect the house before buying." www.nytimes.com/2026/05/29/r...

Microsoft is continuing to tone down Copilot in its productivity apps like Word and Excel. www.pcworld.com/article/3150...

"ByteDance currently sources CPUs from Intel and AMD, and they have raised prices significantly, with quarter-over-quarter increases ranging from 10% to as much as 35% in recent months, two of the sources said" www.reuters.com/world/china/...

"People who had more frequent contact with other team members were more likely to report conflict, growing mistrust and reduced performance. The results suggest that in highly confined settings, not only isolation but also constant proximity can be a source of stress" idw-online.de/en/news871326

idk i'm not sick of nostalgia yet www.vogue.com/article/how-...

Chromecast launched in 2013. Apple has waited 13 years to allow for Chromecast to work natively in iOS www.bloomberg.com/news/newslet...

look how they massacred my boy

changes are coming to Roku City www.roku.com/blog/new-hom...

people seem to like the Snowflake news (earnings, $6B AWS commitment, Natoma acquisition) www.cnbc.com/2026/05/27/s...

"small splurges" feels like a contradiction in terms. maybe we need a new word. or maybe there is a German word

if you need an insane story www.sfchronicle.com/projects/202...

A real honor to have this piece written about my work with the Monk Skin Tone Scale. My hope is that momentum keeps building and we can eventually live in a world where we can expect technology to work for everyone regardless of the color of their skin. current.fas.harvard.edu/stories/live...

omg Google updated the Google Sheets favicon

good @brodyford.bsky.social on Salesforce Agentforce marketing vs. reality www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

new: negotiations between Microsoft and its GitHub subsidiary have delayed GitHub's adoption of Microsoft's Azure cloud. now GitHub is facing capacity issues and outages as AI speeds up coding. GitHub employees, who can use its Copilot AI tool, are cutting corners www.cnbc.com/2026/05/22/m...

"The OpenAI C.E.O. has long been known for his boyishness, but the past few years have coarsened his features and frosted his spiky hair with gray tips. He looked like a lesser vocalist for ’N Sync on a reunion tour." www.newyorker.com/news/letter-...

Sundar Pichai says Google's Gemini app now has over 900 million users. OpenAI has been saying for a while that ChatGPT has over 900 million but has yet to give the word that the user count has reached 1 billion

spent a while reading this one last night and still thinking about a few aspects. turns out Wright Thompson is still among the best in the game

great write-up from Julie Bort on Eric Vishria's first Cerebras meeting techcrunch.com/2026/05/14/c...

now that Cerebras trades on Nasdaq, it's also worth more than: ServiceNow Cloudflare Datadog it's within a billion dollars of overtaking Adobe www.cnbc.com/2026/05/14/c...

at its $56.4 billion IPO valuation, Cerebras is worth more than: Snowflake Workday Twilio Veeva MongoDB Zscaler Atlassian DocuSign Atlassian Rubrik Figma etc. www.cnbc.com/2026/05/13/c...

it's called a Googlebook. except it's going to be made by Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP or Lenovo blog.google/products-and...

In this entire trial - nobody that I have seen or heard so far has produced a document where OpenAI cofounders "vowed" or contractually promised Musk they would keep the company as a nonprofit only or only ever establish a capped for-profit affiliate. It's so weird.

how is it almost Memorial Day

In Musk v. Altman today - Bret Taylor is set to wrap testimony, and Sam Altman to take the stand... @ashleycapoot.cnbc.com CNBC's AI reporter is in the court house. @jordannovet.cnbc.com & I are also monitoring the livestream. (We listen so you don't have to.) www.cnbc.com/2026/05/12/o...

unleashing the emergency courtroom sustenance

“Would it matter to you if I told you I’m Pope Leo?” www.nytimes.com/2026/05/05/u...

going to miss Evan Blass, who gave up his EvLeaks account on the bird app this week. one of his last leaks was the new e-ink tablet that Remarkable just announced, the Paper Pure, which Engadget says is an 8/10 www.engadget.com/2164815/rema...

this needs to be a book

"I was surprised to see that it made a simple arithmetic error early on, keeping more of my portfolio in cash than I had requested. As Lo pointed out ... small numbers can have big implications for investors. Give your AI allocations an extra check before deploying money" www.wsj.com/finance/inve...

RIP Ask Jeeves. The natural-language search engine founded in 1996 was rebranded as Ask in 2006, and officially shut down May 1. When websites close, the historical record can disappear with them. The #WaybackMachine preserves 30 years of web history: web.archive.org #90s #90sNostalgia #WebHistory

this interview with GameStop's Ryan Cohen on the proposed eBay deal is up there in awkwardness www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bmj2...

A detail I didn’t know: “The Herald entered the Epstein series for a Pulitzer Prize that year, but it was not a finalist. Alan Dershowitz … who helped broker Epstein’s original deal, wrote a letter to the Pulitzer committee that year, urging them not to honor Brown’s work.” share.inquirer.com/THMiUZ

TWLO went off the top

We got a Pulitzer! Along with thanking my editors here - Steve Stecklow, Mike Williams and Paulo Prada -- I need to thank Jason Dean, my former WSJ bureau chief who oversaw and occasionally fought for my Meta work. Congratulations to @theinformation.com for hiring him!

Copilot just popped up in the bottom right corner of Word when i opened a document. you know what else was in the bottom right corner of Word? Clippy

this does not identify songs that contain AI-generated music www.bbc.com/news/article...

"As OpenAI scales further, the blended Azure margin will move with it," says @om.co om.co/2026/05/01/w... the trend is already showing up in the broader Microsoft Cloud gross margin

did Satya just say evalmaxx

TBPN's John Coogan just published quite a fake image of Sundar Pichai, Satya Nadella, Andy Jassy and Mark Zuckerberg on the other app x.com/johncoogan/s...

nah. we need a new name

Meta and Salesforce are funding a petition for a proposed ballot initiative that would enact a sales and use tax to generate $980 million to support BART and other Bay Area transit agencies

"When companies buy back shares, they boost their earnings-per-share figure without actually raising net income—the bottom line. The difference between those two measures of profit is now at its smallest in more than two years, a gap of just under 1 percentage point" www.wsj.com/business/ear...

Really phenomenal reporting, this. Terrific angle on a global story - the proliferation of lawless gold-mining: www.nytimes.com/2026/04/26/w...

maybe many things will cost more apnews.com/article/iran...