Category: Consumer Assistance

Brendan Bordelon / Politico: Lina Khan, Steve Bannon, and others worry the FTC could abandon its Meta antitrust case after Zuckerberg’s concessions to Trump; the trial is set for April 14  —  With a historic antitrust suit looming against Meta, could the company get a reprieve from its new ally in the White House?

Mark Gurman / Bloomberg: Sources: Apple is keeping TikTok and other ByteDance apps on its US App Store for at least another 75 days, following assurances from AG Pam Bondi  —  Apple Inc., following assurances from the Trump administration, is keeping TikTok and other apps from ByteDance Ltd. on its US App Store for at…

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge: Z-Wave, popular among smart home enthusiasts, becomes an open-source protocol with a new long-range technology as it seeks Matter support to avoid obsolescence  —  Now an open-source protocol and with a new long-range technology, the path forward for Z-Wave looks clearer, with a little help from Matter.

Mark Gurman / Bloomberg: How Apple may adjust to the US tariffs; sources: the iPhone 17 Pro’s camera panel will span the width of the phone and will be the same color as the device  —  After years of avoiding iPhone price hikes in the US, Apple could finally be forced to to make increases.

New York Times: A look at the US market for humanoids in homes and businesses; PitchBook says investors have poured $7.2B into 50+ startups since 2015, including $1.6B in 2024  —  By getting its humanoids into people’s homes, 1X hopes to gather enormous amounts of data that can show these robots how to handle …

Emilia David / VentureBeat: Anthropic’s Alignment Science team: “legibility” or “faithfulness” of reasoning models’ Chain-of-Thought can’t be trusted and models may actively hide reasoning  —  We now live in the era of reasoning AI models where the large language model (LLM) …

Wall Street Journal: Analysis: newly announced US tariffs for goods from China could raise the bill of materials for the iPhone 16 Pro with 256GB of storage from ~$550 to ~$850  —  This is what the company pays for components inside its bestselling phone, and how Trump’s China tariffs could raise the bill.

Ben Blanchard / Reuters: Foxconn reports Q1 revenue up 24.2% YoY to $49.5B, driven by AI demand, but says the impact of evolving global political conditions will need “close monitoring”  —  Taiwan’s Foxconn, the world’s largest contract electronics maker, posted its highest first-quarter revenue ever …

Xinmei Shen / South China Morning Post: DeepSeek and Tsinghua University researchers detail an approach combining reasoning methods to let LLMs deliver better and faster results to general queries  —  In collaboration with Tsinghua University, DeepSeek developed a technique combining reasoning methods to guide AI models towards human preferences

Krystal Hu / Reuters: SandboxAQ, which uses quantum computing to develop AI, raised a $150M Series E extension from Google, Nvidia, and others, taking its total funding to $950M+  —  SandboxAQ, a startup drawing on quantum computing techniques to develop quantitative artificial intelligence models for enterprises …