☕️ OpenAI acquires tech talk show TBPN

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In today's Techpresso:

🎙️ OpenAI acquires tech talk show TBPN

🚀 NASA sends astronauts toward the Moon for first time in 50 years

🤖 Google rethinks the AI model race with Gemma 4

👀 AI helped two brothers build a $1.8B company

⛽ Amazon adds 3.5% fuel surcharge for sellers amid rising costs

🛰️ SpaceX accuses Amazon of deploying satellites at wrong altitude

Plus: 🎁 14 other news you might like, 🧰 5 tools, and 📚 3 papers.

🎙️ OpenAI acquires tech talk show TBPN LINK

OpenAI has bought TBPN, a popular daily tech talk show on YouTube and X, marking the AI company's first acquisition of a media property.

TBPN, hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, will keep its own brand and editorial independence but report to OpenAI's chief political operative, Chris Lehane.

The deal raises conflict-of-interest questions since OpenAI, a company approaching an IPO, now owns a show that regularly covers OpenAI itself and its competitors.

🚀 NASA sends astronauts toward the Moon for first time in 50 years LINK

NASA launched four astronauts toward the Moon on Wednesday aboard the Space Launch System and Orion capsule, marking the first crewed flight beyond low Earth orbit in more than 50 years.

Pilot Victor Glover will manually fly Orion within about 30 feet of the spent upper stage in a rendezvous demonstration, testing all six degrees of freedom to build confidence for future lunar dockings.

NASA calls Artemis II a test flight with off-ramps, meaning controllers will check life-support performance after launch vibration and bring the crew home early if systems do not meet expectations.

🤖 Google rethinks the AI model race with Gemma 4 LINK

Google launched Gemma 4, its next generation of open models, positioning the smaller and more efficient family as a strong alternative as inference costs rise across the industry.

Gemma 4 comes in four sizes, from 2B-parameter models that run offline on phones and laptops to a 31B Dense model ranked #3 on the Arena AI text leaderboard.

The open-source models now feature an Apache 2.0 license, and Google says the Gemma family has been downloaded over 400 million times since its first launch in February 2024.

👀 AI helped two brothers build a $1.8B company LINK

Matthew Gallagher used more than a dozen A.I. tools and just $20,000 to build Medvi, a telehealth GLP-1 drug provider that hit $401 million in sales its first year with only one employee, his brother.

Gallagher relied on ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, Midjourney and Runway to write code, generate ads and handle customer service, while CareValidate and OpenLoop managed doctors, pharmacies and shipping.

Medvi is now on track for $1.8 billion in sales this year and has expanded into men's health and meal delivery, with a 16.2 percent net profit margin, triple that of competitor Hims.

⛽ Amazon adds 3.5% fuel surcharge for sellers amid rising costs LINK

Amazon is adding a 3.5% fuel surcharge for sellers who use its distribution network, a move driven by rising gas prices tied to the war in Iran and its impact on global oil markets.

The surcharge takes effect on April 17 and applies to merchants using Fulfillment by Amazon, the service that handles packing and shipping for the vast majority of third-party sales on the platform.

Amazon last instituted this type of surcharge in 2022 when crude oil topped $100 a barrel after Russia invaded Ukraine, and Iran's blocking of Strait of Hormuz shipping lanes has similarly rocked markets.

🛰️ SpaceX accuses Amazon of deploying satellites at wrong altitude LINK

SpaceX has filed a complaint with the FCC claiming that Amazon launched its Leo satellites at altitudes 50–90 km higher than authorized, which it says violates orbital debris rules and raises collision risks.

Amazon denied wrongdoing and pointed out that SpaceX itself helped launch Amazon satellites into a similar altitude last year, only raising objections after moving Starlink satellites into nearby orbits.

Amazon told the FCC back in 2021 that its satellites would be launched "at or near 400 km" before rising to operational altitudes between 590 km and 630 km.

Other news you might like

• US targets Chinese chipmaking with proposed export restrictions on ASML and othersLINK

• Google pivots AI video toward practical usesLINK

• Artemis II astronauts encounter Outlook glitch, request Houston for assistance in spaceLINK

• Cursor refreshes its vibe coding platform with focus on AI agentsLINK

• ElevenLabs releases a new AI-powered music-generation appLINK

• Anthropic acquires startup Coefficient Bio for about $400 million: ReportLINK

• Elon Musk's X Is Making Big Changes to Combat Crypto ScamsLINK

• Smartphone price hikes are ‘inevitable’ report says, entry-level phones are a riskLINK

• Reddit is moving on from r/allLINK

• Highlights from my conversation about agentic engineering on Lenny's PodcastLINK

• This chip keeps working at 700°C, surviving lava-like heatLINK

• 'I think EmDash was created to sell more Cloudflare services': WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg gives his verdict on Cloudflare's EmDashLINK

🧰 Trending tools

Apfel: a local AI assistant that runs Apple's MLX models on Mac hardware, providing privacy-focused chat and automation without cloud dependencies.LINK

Only-EU: a curated directory of European-built software alternatives to 120+ popular US applications including Google, Apple, and Dropbox services.LINK

Blogosphere: aggregates and displays recent posts from personal blogs across multiple categories to highlight independent web content.LINK

Side Reminder: a macOS utility that displays Apple Reminders in a sidebar triggered by mouse movement, eliminating app switching with voice input and timer features.LINK

Qwen3.6-Plus: a multimodal AI assistant that handles text chat, image/video analysis, document processing, and web search in one integrated platform for versatile workflows.LINK

📚 Trending papers & reports

Zero-error AI systems argues that large language models handling critical tasks like medical diagnosis or legal advice must achieve perfect accuracy on defined problems, proposing formal verification methods to guarantee correctness rather than accepting probabilistic failures.LINK

Language models can detect when their training data was poisoned with specific concepts, achieving 99% accuracy at identifying injected backdoors by analyzing their own internal activations without external help.LINK

AI safety alignment shows that fixing one harmful behavior in language models often causes new problems elsewhere, with researchers documenting this whack-a-mole effect across multiple alignment techniques.LINK

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