☕️ Ask.com shuts down after 25 years

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In today's Techpresso:

🔎 Ask.com shuts down after 25 years

🩺 AI beats doctors on diagnoses in Harvard study

💼 Anthropic nears $1.5B Wall Street venture

📦 Amazon declares war on UPS and FedEx

📱 Musk texts Brockman seeking OpenAI settlement

🎮 GameStop bids $56 billion for eBay

Plus: 🎁 11 other news you might like, 🧰 6 tools, and 📚 5 papers.

🔎 Ask.com shuts down after 25 years LINK

Ask.com has officially closed its doors after 25 years online, with parent company IAC confirming on May 1, 2026 that it shut down its entire search business, ending one of the web's earliest recognizable search brands.

Born in the late 1990s alongside Google Search, the platform started with a question-and-answer format and a butler mascot named Jeeves before rebranding to Ask.com, but it steadily lost ground to Google's ranking systems.

In a farewell message, IAC said "a very great search must come to an end" and thanked its engineers, designers, and the millions of users, noting that Ask's natural-language approach foreshadowed today's conversational search and AI tools.

🩺 AI beats doctors on diagnoses in Harvard study LINK

OpenAI's o1 model matched or beat board-certified emergency room physicians on diagnosis, triage and next-step care decisions in a new Science study, based on six experiments using real data from a Massachusetts medical centre.

The model stood out during early-stage triage, where it handled uncertainty better than doctors by making stronger use of unstructured notes and partial information, though both humans and AI improved as more data came in.

Researchers, including Harvard's Arjun Manrai and commentators from Flinders University, warned that AI cannot read visual, body language or auditory cues, and called for prospective clinical trials covering safety, equity and cost-effectiveness before wider use.

💼 Anthropic nears $1.5B Wall Street venture LINK

Anthropic is close to sealing a roughly $1.5bn joint venture with Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, Goldman Sachs, and General Atlantic that will push Claude into the portfolio companies owned by those Wall Street firms.

Anthropic, Blackstone, and Hellman & Friedman are each anchoring the deal at about $300m, Goldman Sachs joins as a founding investor at roughly $150m, and General Atlantic and others cover the rest.

The venture follows OpenAI's DeployCo, which drew $4bn from five PE firms last month with a 17.5 per cent annualised return guarantee, while Anthropic's smaller structure has no publicly reported guaranteed returns.

📦 Amazon declares war on UPS and FedEx LINK

Amazon is opening its freight network to businesses in retail, healthcare, manufacturing and other industries through a new service called Amazon Supply Chain Services, letting them move, store and deliver goods by ocean, road, rail and air.

The offering taps Amazon's fleet of more than 100 cargo planes, over 80,000 trailers and 24,000 intermodal containers, plus warehouses, and includes distribution, fulfillment, parcel shipping, two-to-five-day delivery, warehousing and inventory forecasting.

The push targets the business-to-business shipping market, a high-margin segment for logistics firms, and mirrors the playbook of Amazon Web Services, which started in 2006 as internal infrastructure before becoming the biggest cloud provider.

📱 Musk texts Brockman seeking OpenAI settlement LINK

OpenAI's lawyers have asked a federal judge to let Greg Brockman testify about an April 25 text in which Elon Musk floated a settlement, then warned Brockman and Sam Altman would become "the most hated men in America."

The defense says the text shows motive and bias rather than settlement value, citing Federal Rule of Evidence 408 and arguing Musk is using the Oakland lawsuit to attack a competitor after launching xAI.

Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, not the nine-person advisory jury, will decide liability and remedies, which could include removing Altman and Brockman from leadership, disgorgement to the charity, and unwinding OpenAI's for-profit conversion.

🎮 GameStop bids $56 billion for eBay LINK

GameStop has made an unsolicited, non-binding offer to buy eBay for $125 per share in a cash-and-stock deal worth about $55.5 billion, a 20% premium over eBay's Friday closing price of $104.07.

GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen, who told the Wall Street Journal he wants to turn eBay into a bigger rival to Amazon, has built a 5% stake and secured up to $20 billion in debt financing from TD Bank.

The bid raises feasibility questions since GameStop's market value was $12 billion versus eBay's $46 billion, but Cohen plans to cut $2 billion in yearly costs and pitch GameStop's 1,600 stores as fulfillment infrastructure.

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• Guilty until proven innocent: shoppers falsely identified by facial recognition system struggle to clear their namesLINK

• Building AI data centers is becoming a stress test for banksLINK

• X user tricks Grok and Bankrbot into sending $200K using Morse codeLINK

🧰 Trending tools

Mindra: lets you deploy coordinated AI agent teams that automate complex business workflows, with human oversight built in for accountability.LINK

Codex Pets: a platform for building and scaling AI-powered products using pre-integrated models, removing infrastructure setup from your workflow.LINK

Aaavatar: automatically removes backgrounds, balances colors, and exports consistent profile photos in bulk, saving HR and design teams manual editing time.LINK

Claude Code & Codex Usage Trading Cards by Rudel: tracks token usage, session patterns, and quality metrics across your team, then classifies your AI coding style against nine archetypes derived from 20k real sessions.LINK

Visitor profiles and timeline by Croct: tracks individual visitor behavior and history, giving product and growth teams actionable context for personalization and segmentation decisions.LINK

Sleek Analytics for iOS: drop-in website analytics that tracks real-time visitor behavior with minimal setup, skipping cookies and complex configuration entirely.LINK

📚 Trending papers & reports

AI coding agents consume up to 1000x more tokens than standard code tasks, with costs varying 30x across runs, and frontier models cannot accurately predict their own token usage beforehand.LINK

AI hallucination is mathematically proven to be impossible to fully eliminate from large language models, because no AI can learn every computable function, making errors an unavoidable built-in flaw.LINK

Automated discovery of randomized self-reductions now outperforms genetic algorithms and symbolic methods, with a new tool called Bitween using linear regression and AI agents to find mathematical security properties across 80 benchmark functions.LINK

AI Trojan backdoors were mapped, detected, and partially mitigated through a multi-year government research program that analyzed model weights and trigger inversion to protect AI systems from hidden malicious hijacking.LINK

H100 and A100 GPUs were compared over 11.7 million GPU hours, revealing H100s have 3.2x worse memory error rates than A100s, though better core hardware reliability, with 5% overprovisioning needed to handle failures.LINK

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