#A260423p7

From Techmeme: Canada's Cohere and Germany's Aleph Alpha agree to a merger deal valuing the combined group at ~$20B to work on sovereign AI; both governments support the deal (Financial Times)

From Techmeme: EY survey of 18,000 people across 23 countries: ~49% of consumers have used AI over the past six months to support their savings and investment decisions (Emma Dunkley/Financial Times)

From Techmeme: Tracxn: global edtech funding fell from $16.7B in 2021 to $2.6B in 2025, while the number of startups launched dropped from 10,491 in 2021 to just 645 in 2025 (Ananya Bhattacharya/Rest of World)

From Techmeme: Sources: India is piloting 10 schemes to test whether its CBDC, the e-rupee, can deliver welfare payments more efficiently, as it looks to boost e-rupee usage (Reuters)

From Techmeme: DeepSeek V4 Pro costs $1.74/1M input tokens and $3.48/1M output tokens, while V4 Flash costs $0.14/1M and $0.28/1M; both models are the cheapest in their class (Simon Willison/Simon Willison's Weblog)

From Techmeme: Staffing experts say India's IT sector is seeing a rise in replacement hiring as companies adapt to Gen Z staff leaving jobs faster than previous generations (Tanya Pandey/The Economic Times)

From Techmeme: Sources: Cursor hit $2.7B in annualized sales in March, up ~14x from a year ago, and reported a ~$900M loss in its last fiscal year on $770M in total revenue (The Information)

From Techmeme: China's top market regulator says it is launching a six-month crackdown on the country's online ad sector, targeting malpractices including the misuse of AI (Ben Jiang/South China Morning Post)

From Techmeme: The AI boom has pushed the market cap of Shenzhen-listed Zhongji Innolight, a leading optical communications device maker, close to $146B, a record high (Bloomberg)

From Techmeme: DeepSeek V4 Pro has 1.6T total parameters, its largest model by that metric, and V4 Flash has 284B parameters; both models have a context window of 1M tokens (Vincent Chow/South China Morning Post)

From Techmeme: Huawei says its Ascend supernode based on the Ascend 950 AI chips will fully support DeepSeek V4, as DeepSeek launches a preview of its V4 model (Reuters)

From Techmeme: DeepSeek releases its new flagship models V4 Pro and V4 Flash in preview, saying V4 Pro trails the performance of state-of-the-art models by about 3 to 6 months (Bloomberg)

From Techmeme: S-1 excerpts: SpaceX warns multiple investigations into sexually abusive AI imagery created with xAI's Grok may hurt the company's global market access (Reuters)

From Techmeme: Q&A with Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian on building infrastructure for AI agents, balancing internal needs and the demands of customers like Anthropic, and more (Ben Thompson/Stratechery)

From Techmeme: Trump threatens to "put a big tariff on the UK" if it does not drop its digital services tax, which he views as unfairly targeting US tech companies (Connor Stringer/Telegraph)

From Techmeme: SAP reports Q1 revenue up 6% YoY to €9.56B, vs. €9.53B est., non-IFRS operating profit up 17% to €2.87B, cloud revenue up 19% to €5.96B; SAP up 10%+ after hours (Reuters)

From Techmeme: Singapore is slowly emerging as a neutral ground for AI companies, offering an alternative place to build without worrying about US or Chinese regulations (Reuters)

From Techmeme: Sources: AI coding firm Cognition is in early talks to raise hundreds of millions of dollars at a $25B valuation, up from $10.2B announced in September 2025 (Bloomberg)

From Techmeme: Sources: the US DOJ arrested a soldier involved in the capture of Nicolás Maduro for allegedly making $400K+ on Polymarket by betting on his removal from office (ABC News)

From memeorandum: Justice Department Places FDA-Approved Marijuana Products and Products Containing Marijuana Subject to a Qualifying State-issued License in Schedule III ... (US Department of Justice)