Global AI Picks — Top Tech Media Coverage

AI Drafting My Stories? Over My Dead Body

Smith once said that writing a column is easy: “All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” In 2026, though, no blood is required.

TC

Tokenmaxxing, OpenAI’s shopping spree, and the AI Anxiety Gap

Listen on Apple Podcasts Listen on Spotify The gap between AI insiders and everyone else is widening, and the spending, suspicion, and even new vocabulary are starting to show it.

ARS

Meta's AI spending spree is helping make its Quest headsets more expensive

The rising costs of RAM and other computing components are pushing up the price of Meta’s Quest VR headsets, which the company says will increase by $50–$100 (about 12–20 percent) starting on April 19.

WD

Gazing Into Sam Altman’s Orb Now Proves You’re Human on Tinder

humanity-verifying World project announced at an event in San Francisco on Friday that Tinder users around the globe can now put a digital badge on their profiles signaling to potential suitors that they’re a real human, provided they’ve already stared into one of World’s glossy white Orbs and allow

ARS

Satellite and drone images reveal big delays in US data center construction

Silicon Valley has been pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into building ever-larger AI data centers that require as much electricity as hundreds of thousands of US homes—but that massive buildout faces significant construction and power challenges along with growing local resistance.

TC

‘Tokenmaxxing’ is making developers less productive than they think

There’s an old saw in management: What you measure matters. And, typically, you get more of whatever you’re measuring. Software engineers have debated productivity metrics for decades, starting with lines of code.

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Sources: Cursor in talks to raise $2B+ at $50B valuation as enterprise growth surges

AI coding startup Cursor is nearing new funding in which the four-year-old company would raise at least $2 billion in fresh capital, according to four sources familiar with the matter.

WD

OpenAI Executive Kevin Weil Is Leaving the Company

Kevin Weil, OpenAI’s former chief product officer who was recently tapped to build a new AI workspace for scientists, Prism, is leaving the company, WIRED has confirmed.

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Kevin Weil and Bill Peebles exit OpenAI as company continues to shed ‘side quests’

OpenAI is losing two of the architects of its most ambitious moonshots. Kevin Weil, who led the company’s science research initiative, and Bill Peebles, the researcher behind AI video tool Sora, both announced their departures on Friday.

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Sam Altman’s project World looks to scale its human verification empire. First stop: Tinder.

At a trendy venue near the San Francisco pier, Sam Altman’s verification project World celebrated its next evolution and rapid expansion of its ambitions. And it’s starting with Tinder. Tools for Humanity (TFH), the company behind the World project, announced Friday plans to integrate its verificat

TC

Roblox’s AI assistant gets new agentic tools to plan, build, and test games

Roblox is introducing new agentic features to help developers plan, build, and test games on its platform, the company told TechCrunch exclusively.

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AI traffic to US retailers rose 393% in Q1, and it’s boosting their revenue too

As of March, AI traffic to U.S. retailers’ websites rose by 269% over the previous 12 months, continuing the momentum during the holiday shopping season when AI traffic was up by 693%, according to new data released on Thursday by Adobe. And in the first three months of 2026, AI traffic had risen 39

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InsightFinder raises $15M to help companies figure out where AI agents go wrong

The role of observability tools has evolved once again. While the market for solutions to ensure tech systems’ reliability has grown over the years, the center of gravity has steadily shifted from “track everything” to “control complexity and costs.” Meanwhile, the rapid influx and adoption of AI ag

ARS

Gemini can now create personalized AI images by digging around in Google Photos

Google began rolling out “personal intelligence” in Gemini early this year, giving AI subscribers the option of a more customized experience when using the company’s chatbot. Today, it’s using personal intelligence to tie its image-generation model to Google Photos.

WD

Google's AI Mode Update Tries to Kill Tab Hopping in Chrome

to worry about the dozens of tabs open on your desktop again. In fact, you’ll never even have to leave AI Mode, Google’s chatbot-style search tool, at all.

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Google now lets you explore the web side-by-side with AI Mode

Google announced on Thursday that it’s rolling out a new way to explore the web with AI Mode, its conversational search experience.

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Microsoft and Stellantis want to use AI to help car owners

Stellantis, the global car company that owns brands from Alfa Romeo to Vauxhall (including Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep, and Ram), has begun a five-year partnership with Microsoft.

WD

The UK Launches Its $675 Million Sovereign AI Fund

has launched a venture fund for investing in domestic AI startups, part of a bid to minimize the country’s dependence on foreign-made technology.The fund, Sovereign AI, will invest roughly $675 million in homegrown startups in fields ranging from model development to agentic AI to drug discovery.

WD

Musk v. Altman Is a Battle for OpenAI’s Soul

against Sam Altman will head to trial this month in an Oakland, California, federal courtroom, where nine jurors will settle a years-long dispute between the cofounders of OpenAI over the group’s founding mission.

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Anthropic CPO leaves Figma’s board after reports he will offer a competing product

Mike Krieger, Anthropic’s chief product officer, resigned from the board of interface design company Figma on April 14. His departure was disclosed to the U.S.