✖️ xAI promised employees $420 for tax returns and hasn’t paid
xAI asked employees to submit their personal tax returns as training data for Grok and offered $420 in return, according to Bloomberg.
The company wanted to improve Grok’s tax capabilities before the April 15 filing deadline as users increasingly turned to ChatGPT and Claude for accounting tasks.
Two months later, employees are still waiting for the payments.
Even training data can end up as an unpaid invoice.
✔️ @venture
xAI asked employees to submit their personal tax returns as training data for Grok and offered $420 in return, according to Bloomberg.
The company wanted to improve Grok’s tax capabilities before the April 15 filing deadline as users increasingly turned to ChatGPT and Claude for accounting tasks.
Two months later, employees are still waiting for the payments.
Even training data can end up as an unpaid invoice.
✔️ @venture
🤖 OpenAI had 11 founders. Only 3 are still there.
The OpenAI trial brought renewed attention to the company’s early days. Today, only Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and Wojciech Zaremba remain at the company.
🖱 Wojciech Zaremba remains at OpenAI. He spent years leading robotics research and recently shifted his focus to AI safety and long-term alignment.
🖱 Elon Musk left the board in 2018 after disagreements over the company’s direction. He later launched xAI and merged it into SpaceX.
🖱 Ilya Sutskever left in 2024 after co-leading OpenAI’s research team and co-founded Safe Superintelligence, a company focused entirely on building safe AGI.
🖱 Andrej Karpathy left in 2017 to lead Tesla’s Autopilot team, returned briefly to OpenAI, founded education startup Eureka Labs, and has now joined Anthropic.
🖱 Durk Kingma, one of the most respected researchers in deep learning, moved to Google DeepMind and later joined Anthropic.
🖱 John Schulman helped create reinforcement learning systems behind ChatGPT. He left in 2024 and is now chief scientist at Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines.
🖱 Pamela Vagata was the first founder to leave. She joined Stripe’s AI efforts and later launched venture fund Pebblebed.
🖱 Trevor Blackwell had a background in robotics, left in 2017, and later became a partner at Y Combinator.
🖱 Vicki Cheung worked on engineering and infrastructure before leaving to co-found Gantry, a platform for improving machine learning systems.
OpenAI’s founders now lead or advise many of the most important companies in AI.
The original team ended up shaping the entire industry.
✔️ @venture
The OpenAI trial brought renewed attention to the company’s early days. Today, only Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and Wojciech Zaremba remain at the company.
🖱 Wojciech Zaremba remains at OpenAI. He spent years leading robotics research and recently shifted his focus to AI safety and long-term alignment.
🖱 Elon Musk left the board in 2018 after disagreements over the company’s direction. He later launched xAI and merged it into SpaceX.
🖱 Ilya Sutskever left in 2024 after co-leading OpenAI’s research team and co-founded Safe Superintelligence, a company focused entirely on building safe AGI.
🖱 Andrej Karpathy left in 2017 to lead Tesla’s Autopilot team, returned briefly to OpenAI, founded education startup Eureka Labs, and has now joined Anthropic.
🖱 Durk Kingma, one of the most respected researchers in deep learning, moved to Google DeepMind and later joined Anthropic.
🖱 John Schulman helped create reinforcement learning systems behind ChatGPT. He left in 2024 and is now chief scientist at Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines.
🖱 Pamela Vagata was the first founder to leave. She joined Stripe’s AI efforts and later launched venture fund Pebblebed.
🖱 Trevor Blackwell had a background in robotics, left in 2017, and later became a partner at Y Combinator.
🖱 Vicki Cheung worked on engineering and infrastructure before leaving to co-found Gantry, a platform for improving machine learning systems.
OpenAI’s founders now lead or advise many of the most important companies in AI.
The original team ended up shaping the entire industry.
✔️ @venture
🤖 Altman Offers Startups $2M in Tokens for Equity
Sam Altman proposed giving each YCombinator startup $2 million in tokens for about 7% equity, roughly YCombinator's usual stake.
The tokens come from Codex, which Altman aims to promote by tying new startups to his ecosystem amid competition with Anthropic.
✔️ @venture
Sam Altman proposed giving each YCombinator startup $2 million in tokens for about 7% equity, roughly YCombinator's usual stake.
The tokens come from Codex, which Altman aims to promote by tying new startups to his ecosystem amid competition with Anthropic.
✔️ @venture
❤1
🤖 DeepMind Founder Holds Stake in Anthropic
The Financial Times revealed that Demis Hassabis, founder of DeepMind, secretly invested early in Anthropic as an angel investor.
Anthropic is an AI startup competing closely with DeepMind.
Despite this rivalry, Google recently agreed to invest $10 billion in Anthropic, possibly influenced by Hassabis.
✔️ @venture
The Financial Times revealed that Demis Hassabis, founder of DeepMind, secretly invested early in Anthropic as an angel investor.
Anthropic is an AI startup competing closely with DeepMind.
Despite this rivalry, Google recently agreed to invest $10 billion in Anthropic, possibly influenced by Hassabis.
✔️ @venture
📊 AI startups are inflating ARR numbers to look bigger
TechCrunch spoke with founders, investors, and finance operators who say many AI startups are stretching the meaning of ARR to boost growth narratives.
The main trick is replacing real ARR with “contracted ARR” or annualized projections. In some cases, startups reportedly counted revenue from customers who were not fully onboarded yet, long pilot programs, or contracts that may never convert into payments.
Several investors admitted the practice is common and often tolerated because everyone is chasing the same AI growth story. One VC said some companies report CARR that is 70% higher than actual ARR.
The pressure comes from AI valuations. Investors now expect companies to jump from $1 million to $100 million revenue at record speed.
In AI, revenue headlines are becoming part of the marketing stack.
✔️ news.nzoko.com
TechCrunch spoke with founders, investors, and finance operators who say many AI startups are stretching the meaning of ARR to boost growth narratives.
The main trick is replacing real ARR with “contracted ARR” or annualized projections. In some cases, startups reportedly counted revenue from customers who were not fully onboarded yet, long pilot programs, or contracts that may never convert into payments.
Several investors admitted the practice is common and often tolerated because everyone is chasing the same AI growth story. One VC said some companies report CARR that is 70% higher than actual ARR.
The pressure comes from AI valuations. Investors now expect companies to jump from $1 million to $100 million revenue at record speed.
In AI, revenue headlines are becoming part of the marketing stack.
✔️ news.nzoko.com
📈 Robinhood traders keep buying every AI dip
Retail traders spent 2026 piling into Nvidia, Tesla, Micron, Sandisk, and other AI infrastructure plays.
The strongest signal came during the DeepSeek panic in January, when Nvidia lost almost $600 billion in market value in one session.
Robinhood users responded with the highest buy-to-sell ratio for Nvidia seen in the last 3 years.
The same pattern showed up across other selloffs. Traders kept buying discounted AI names while taking profits in stocks that had already run hard.
Retail is still playing one trade.
Buy the panic. Hold the AI winners.
✔️ news.nzoko.com
Retail traders spent 2026 piling into Nvidia, Tesla, Micron, Sandisk, and other AI infrastructure plays.
The strongest signal came during the DeepSeek panic in January, when Nvidia lost almost $600 billion in market value in one session.
Robinhood users responded with the highest buy-to-sell ratio for Nvidia seen in the last 3 years.
The same pattern showed up across other selloffs. Traders kept buying discounted AI names while taking profits in stocks that had already run hard.
Retail is still playing one trade.
Buy the panic. Hold the AI winners.
✔️ news.nzoko.com
Most investors don’t understand how brutal losses really are.
Down 50%?
You need +100% just to break even.
Down 80%?
You need +400%.
This is why “cheap” stocks can be dangerous.
And why protecting capital matters just as much as finding winners.
✔️ news.nzoko.com
Down 50%?
You need +100% just to break even.
Down 80%?
You need +400%.
This is why “cheap” stocks can be dangerous.
And why protecting capital matters just as much as finding winners.
✔️ news.nzoko.com
🤖 Anthropic Could Surpass Alphabet by 2027
Investor Joseph Jack from OSS Capital projects Anthropic's ARR to jump from $1B in January 2025 to $30B by April 2026, with growth accelerating rather than slowing. Even a conservative slowdown scenario predicts $100B revenue by end of 2026 and $340B in 2027.
Anthropic builds AI models and enterprise software, rapidly expanding its client base. The number of customers spending over $1M annually doubled to 1,000 in under two months, fueling fast scaling and market capture.
Demand for Anthropic's Gemini tokens grew 10x last quarter, far outpacing Alphabet's 60% growth. This rapid adoption narrows the revenue gap, making it likely Anthropic will overtake Alphabet around mid-2028 at $575B revenue.
✔️ @venture
Investor Joseph Jack from OSS Capital projects Anthropic's ARR to jump from $1B in January 2025 to $30B by April 2026, with growth accelerating rather than slowing. Even a conservative slowdown scenario predicts $100B revenue by end of 2026 and $340B in 2027.
Anthropic builds AI models and enterprise software, rapidly expanding its client base. The number of customers spending over $1M annually doubled to 1,000 in under two months, fueling fast scaling and market capture.
Demand for Anthropic's Gemini tokens grew 10x last quarter, far outpacing Alphabet's 60% growth. This rapid adoption narrows the revenue gap, making it likely Anthropic will overtake Alphabet around mid-2028 at $575B revenue.
✔️ @venture
🚖 Uber questions AI spending amid rising costs
Uber's COO said heavy AI spending is hard to justify as token consumption grows without clear consumer benefits. The company used its annual AI budget in just 4 months.
Nvidia's VP noted their compute costs now exceed employee expenses, showing AI is becoming more expensive than human labor.
✔️ @venture
Uber's COO said heavy AI spending is hard to justify as token consumption grows without clear consumer benefits. The company used its annual AI budget in just 4 months.
Nvidia's VP noted their compute costs now exceed employee expenses, showing AI is becoming more expensive than human labor.
✔️ @venture
🤖 Anthropic nears $1T valuation after $65B raise
Anthropic closed a $65 billion Series H round, raising its valuation to $965 billion from $380 billion months ago.
It reported an annual recurring revenue of $47 billion, surpassing peers including OpenAI, valued at $852 billion.
✔️ @venture
Anthropic closed a $65 billion Series H round, raising its valuation to $965 billion from $380 billion months ago.
It reported an annual recurring revenue of $47 billion, surpassing peers including OpenAI, valued at $852 billion.
✔️ @venture
🚫 China is restricting overseas travel for top AI engineers
China has started limiting foreign travel for AI researchers and engineers working at private companies like Alibaba and DeepSeek, according to Bloomberg.
People involved in advanced AI work now reportedly need government approval before leaving the country. The restrictions target specialists considered strategically important for China’s AI race with the US.
The move shows how seriously Beijing now treats AI talent and research. Engineers are increasingly being viewed less like employees and more like critical infrastructure.
The global AI race is starting to look closer to semiconductor policy than normal tech hiring.
✔️ @venture
China has started limiting foreign travel for AI researchers and engineers working at private companies like Alibaba and DeepSeek, according to Bloomberg.
People involved in advanced AI work now reportedly need government approval before leaving the country. The restrictions target specialists considered strategically important for China’s AI race with the US.
The move shows how seriously Beijing now treats AI talent and research. Engineers are increasingly being viewed less like employees and more like critical infrastructure.
The global AI race is starting to look closer to semiconductor policy than normal tech hiring.
✔️ @venture
⚖️ AI is pushing more people to sue without lawyers
MIT and USC researchers analyzed 4.5M federal cases and 46M PACER records to study how generative AI is changing US courts.
For almost 20 years, only ~11% of federal cases were filed without attorneys. In 2025, that jumped to 16.8%.
The increase is strongest in paperwork-heavy cases. AI helps people draft complaints, handle legal formatting, and navigate filings without paying a lawyer.
Courts are already seeing the effect. These cases are not resolved faster, but they generate far more activity inside the system. In the first 180 days, court filings and procedural records in self-represented cases rose 158% versus the pre-AI period.
Researchers also found AI-written complaints rising fast: from ~1% in 2023 to 18% by early 2026.
✔️ @thestartupsvc
MIT and USC researchers analyzed 4.5M federal cases and 46M PACER records to study how generative AI is changing US courts.
For almost 20 years, only ~11% of federal cases were filed without attorneys. In 2025, that jumped to 16.8%.
The increase is strongest in paperwork-heavy cases. AI helps people draft complaints, handle legal formatting, and navigate filings without paying a lawyer.
Courts are already seeing the effect. These cases are not resolved faster, but they generate far more activity inside the system. In the first 180 days, court filings and procedural records in self-represented cases rose 158% versus the pre-AI period.
Researchers also found AI-written complaints rising fast: from ~1% in 2023 to 18% by early 2026.
✔️ @thestartupsvc
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“When people start telling you you’re crazy, you just might be on to the most important innovation in your life.”
~ Larry Ellison
✔️ @venture
~ Larry Ellison
✔️ @venture
🔋 Google engineer allegedly made $1.2M using insider information on Polymarket
The US Department of Justice charged Google engineer Michele Spagnolo with making $1.2 million from prediction market bets using non-public company information.
According to prosecutors, Spagnolo used advance knowledge of Google’s annual Year in Search rankings to place bets on Polymarket before the results were published. He reportedly wagered more than $2.7 million in total.
Google said the information came from internal marketing materials that were widely accessible to employees, but using it for betting was prohibited.
✔️ news.nzoko.com
The US Department of Justice charged Google engineer Michele Spagnolo with making $1.2 million from prediction market bets using non-public company information.
According to prosecutors, Spagnolo used advance knowledge of Google’s annual Year in Search rankings to place bets on Polymarket before the results were published. He reportedly wagered more than $2.7 million in total.
Google said the information came from internal marketing materials that were widely accessible to employees, but using it for betting was prohibited.
✔️ news.nzoko.com
🤖 Anthropic sued over subscription limits
A US user named Carl Khan filed a lawsuit accusing Anthropic of misleading customers by lowering subscription limits. He claims the advertised limits for premium plans Max 5x and Max 20x are far from reality.
For example, the Max 20x plan reportedly offers only about 6× the limits of the Pro subscription, not the promised 20×. Khan wants to make the lawsuit class-action, covering all users who bought these plans since April 2025.
📊@tech
A US user named Carl Khan filed a lawsuit accusing Anthropic of misleading customers by lowering subscription limits. He claims the advertised limits for premium plans Max 5x and Max 20x are far from reality.
For example, the Max 20x plan reportedly offers only about 6× the limits of the Pro subscription, not the promised 20×. Khan wants to make the lawsuit class-action, covering all users who bought these plans since April 2025.
📊@tech
📣 SpaceX to Merge with Cursor for $60B
SpaceX and Cursor signed a final merger agreement valuing Cursor at $60 billion. The deal will be done through a stock swap and aims to close in Q3.
Cursor is a coding tool with a loyal user base, unlike SpaceX's Grok, which failed to gain traction in vibe coding and had an unnoticed Grok Build release.
📊@tech
SpaceX and Cursor signed a final merger agreement valuing Cursor at $60 billion. The deal will be done through a stock swap and aims to close in Q3.
Cursor is a coding tool with a loyal user base, unlike SpaceX's Grok, which failed to gain traction in vibe coding and had an unnoticed Grok Build release.
📊@tech
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🔗 MiniMax launches AI-powered creative Hub
MiniMax introduced Hub, a local workstation where AI agents handle creative tasks like research, scripting, image creation, music, and final editing. It supports multiple projects and an infinite canvas for seamless workflow.
Hub runs directly on your computer, integrating local files and apps for instant import and export. Early users before July 1 get 3000 credits, and points from Hailuo AI transfer fully to MiniMax Hub.
📊@tech
MiniMax introduced Hub, a local workstation where AI agents handle creative tasks like research, scripting, image creation, music, and final editing. It supports multiple projects and an infinite canvas for seamless workflow.
Hub runs directly on your computer, integrating local files and apps for instant import and export. Early users before July 1 get 3000 credits, and points from Hailuo AI transfer fully to MiniMax Hub.
📊@tech