Good morning. Anyone feeling lucky?
I’m taking bets* for which mystery AI startup Abidur Chowdhury, the industrial designer behind the new iPhone Air, reportedly left Apple for.
After six years at the pinnacle of corporate creativity—there are several fine books about Apple’s design work—you know the opportunity just had to be good.
My money’s on OpenAI-owned io, by the way. Though Jony Ive and Chowdhury barely overlapped in Cupertino, game recognize game, you know?
Today’s tech news below. —Andrew Nusca
*I’m not really. This newsletter and its author follow all applicable laws, folks.
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Google launches Gemini 3
Settle down, folks, there’s a new AI model in town.
Google announced its Gemini 3 on Tuesday, less than a year after the debut of its predecessor.
CEO Sundar Pichai called G3—if I may—the company’s “most intelligent model,” though as we move away from chest-thumping about industry benchmarks, there’s no universal definition of what that quite means.
What we do know: G3 is better at coding and reasoning than its predecessor. Better still, it will be embedded in Google’s lucrative search engine from launch—a first, but major, step for a company that has promised to spend $85 billion this year on AI-related capital expenditures and even more in 2026.
The launch of Gemini 3 comes with accoutrements, if you will.
There’s a Gemini Agent that promises multi-step task completion (e.g. organizing your inbox). There’s also a redesigned Gemini app that returns fuller answers (R.I.P. to the open web). And we mustn’t forget the new agent-centric software development platform for businesses dubbed Antigravity.
How long will Google retain the lead amid stiff competition from OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and others? Well, see you tomorrow. —AN
Meta acquisitions don't violate antitrust law, judge rules
Score one for the Eye of Sauron.
A U.S. judge this week ruled that Meta’s long-ago acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp did not violate antitrust law.
The Federal Trade Commission had argued that Meta illegally monopolized the social networking market. Each of Meta’s services enjoys millions of users; they collectively drive tens of billions of dollars of ad revenue each quarter.
But Meta said that its addressable market was much broader than the handful of remaining social media companies founded in the aughts. What’s more, Meta was seeing its grip on users’ attention weaken in the face of competition by TikTok and others.
“With apps surging and receding, chasing one craze and moving on from others, and adding new features with each passing year, the FTC has understandably struggled to fix the boundaries of Meta’s product market,” wrote U.S. District Judge James Boasberg.
“Whether or not Meta enjoyed monopoly power in the past, though, the agency must show that it continues to hold such power now. The court’s verdict today determines that the FTC has not done so.”
The FTC can appeal, but said only that it was reviewing its options. —AN
Cloudflare recovers after major outage
Another day, another Internet outage.
This time Cloudflare was to blame. (And no, it wasn’t a cyber attack, for once.)
In a candid post-mortem, CEO Matthew Prince wrote that the Tuesday outage—which knocked out everything from OpenAI’s ChatGPT to Uber to Spotify to, irony of ironies, Downdetector.com—was triggered “by a chance to one of our database systems’ permissions.”
A few small problems led to a big failure, Prince wrote, which “caused the majority of core traffic to stop flowing” through the Internet infrastructure company’s network, leading to quite a few Zoom meetings crashing out yesterday. (Giving you your time back!)
“Given Cloudflare's importance in the Internet ecosystem any outage of any of our systems is unacceptable,” he wrote, adding that the incident was Cloudflare’s worst outage since 2019.
“That there was a period of time where our network was not able to route traffic is deeply painful to every member of our team. We know we let you down today.” —AN
More tech
—Kraken is now worth $20 billion. The crypto firm fundraises $200 million mere months after raising $600 million.
—TP-Link accuses Netgear of a smear campaign about its China ties.
—Anthropic, Microsoft, Nvidia partner. Anthropic will buy $30 billion worth of Microsoft cloud capacity in exchange for a $5 billion investment from Redmond and $10 billion investment from Nvidia.
—Trump: U.S. needs a federal AI standard. The argument for streamlined regulation comes with the reality that the White House wants very little regulation at all.
—Zoox launches San Francisco robotaxi rides. It will be the first time the Amazon-owned firm goes head-to-head with Alphabet-owned rival Waymo.
—xAI is reportedly in talks to raise $15 billion at a $230 billion valuation, double what it was in March.
—U.S. will lend $1 billion to restart Three Mile Island. The Constellation-run nuclear plant signed a deal with Microsoft last year.