AI
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced on May 2 that AI-generated performances and AI-written screenplays are ineligible for Academy Award consideration, effective for the 99th Awards. Human performers must be 'demonstrably' credited and consenting; scripts must be human-authored.
AI
OpenClaw (323k+ GitHub stars) turned the $599 Mac mini into the default local-AI workstation — and Apple cannot build them fast enough. Tim Cook Q2 2026: Mac revenue $8.4B, up 6% YoY. Supply constraints may last several months.
AI
Mistral AI released Medium 3.5 — a 128B-parameter dense model with 256k context under a Modified MIT license, scoring 77.6% on SWE-Bench Verified. Pricing of $1.50 per million input tokens and $7.50 per million output tokens is multiples above Chinese rivals on the same benchmarks.
AI
Google began Gemini rollout in cars on April 28–30. GM is upgrading roughly 4 million MY2022+ Cadillac, Chevrolet, Buick and GMC vehicles via OTA, and Polestar swapped Google Assistant for Gemini Live in U.S. cabins — the largest in-car AI deployment to date.
Prediction Markets
Gemini secured a CFTC Derivatives Clearing Organization license on April 29 — Gemini Olympus, LLC is now an approved DCO. Combined with its existing DCM authorization, the Winklevoss exchange now has a full-stack U.S. trading license to clear and settle derivatives and prediction markets.
Funding
Sweden's Legora closed a $50 million Series D extension, bringing the round to $600 million at a $5.6 billion post-money valuation. Nvidia's NVentures, Atlassian, Adams Street and Insight all participated, and ARR has crossed $100 million.
AI
Elon Musk told a California federal court it was "partly" true xAI used distillation on OpenAI models to train Grok. He framed the practice as a "general" industry approach — the rare public admission lands mid-trial in his lawsuit against OpenAI and Altman.
Funding
Anthropic is fielding preemptive offers to raise roughly $50 billion at a $850–$900B valuation. Investors have 48 hours to confirm allocation. A May board meeting is expected to formalize the round, lifting the AI lab past OpenAI on paper.
Funding
Runway CEO Cristóbal Valenzuela says AI video is the prequel — world models that simulate physics, causality and persistent state are next. Runway has raised ~$860M at a $5.3B valuation (Series E led by General Atlantic), going head-to-head with Google and OpenAI.
AI
Mayo Clinic's REDMOD AI — published in Gut, validated on ~2,000 multi-institution CT scans — detects pancreatic cancer up to three years before clinical diagnosis (median 16 months). It catches 73% of cases vs 39% for specialist radiologists, on scans already in the EHR.
AI
Microsoft disclosed over 20M paid Microsoft 365 Copilot seats — up from 15M in January — and said weekly engagement now matches Outlook. The number of customers buying more than 50,000 seats has quadrupled. Bayer, J&J, Mercedes and Roche each have 90K+; Accenture is rolling to 743K employees.
AI
Google Cloud crossed $20.03B in Q1 2026 revenue (+63% YoY) but Sundar Pichai openly conceded the segment is "compute constrained in the near-term." Backlog doubled to $462B; Gemini API throughput hit 16B tokens per minute — both signals that demand has structurally outrun supply.