☕️ OpenAI reshuffles leadership as top executives step back

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In today's Techpresso:

🔄 OpenAI reshuffles leadership as top executives step back

🚀 Musk requires SpaceX IPO banks to buy Grok subscriptions

📱 NASA astronauts took iPhones on Artemis II mission

🚪 Claude just shut the door on OpenClaw

⚠️ Meta pauses Mercor partnership after AI data breach

⚡ Half of planned US data center builds delayed or canceled

Plus: 🎁 13 other news you might like, 🧰 5 tools, and 📚 4 papers.

🔄 OpenAI reshuffles leadership as top executives step back LINK

OpenAI is going through a wave of leadership changes, with several top executives moving into new roles or stepping back for health reasons, according to a report from Bloomberg.

COO Brad Lightcap is shifting to lead "special projects" focused on complex deals and investments, while former Slack CEO Denise Dresser will take over some of his commercial duties.

CEO of AGI development Fidji Simo is taking medical leave for a neuroimmune condition, with co-founder Greg Brockman managing product, and marketing head Kate Rouch is stepping down for cancer recovery.

🚀 Musk requires SpaceX IPO banks to buy Grok subscriptions LINK

Elon Musk is requiring banks, law firms, and other advisers involved in SpaceX's upcoming initial public offering to buy subscriptions to Grok, the AI chatbot now part of SpaceX.

Some banks have agreed to spend tens of millions on Grok and have already started integrating the chatbot into their IT systems, according to anonymous sources cited by The New York Times.

The IPO filing came after SpaceX purchased xAI, which makes Grok, while the AI service faces investigations and lawsuits over generating nude images of real people and child sexual abuse material.

📱 NASA astronauts took iPhones on Artemis II mission LINK

NASA astronauts on the Artemis II mission carried iPhone 17 Pro Max devices to the moon, marking the first time the agency gave each crew member a personal smartphone for photos and videos.

The iPhones can't connect to the internet or use Bluetooth and are limited to capturing photos and videos, and NASA had to run a four-phase safety review covering hazards like shattering glass.

The crew also has four GoPro Hero 11 cameras and two Nikon D5 bodies onboard, and NASA discussed using Velcro to mount phones inside the Orion capsule in microgravity conditions.

🚪 Claude just shut the door on OpenClaw LINK

Anthropic announced that starting April 4, 2026, Claude Pro and Max subscribers will no longer be able to connect their subscriptions to third-party agentic tools like OpenClaw, citing strain on compute and engineering resources.

Users can still power third-party agents with Claude models, but they must now switch to pay-as-you-go "extra usage" billing or Anthropic's API, which charges per token instead of offering flat-rate access.

OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger, now at OpenAI, accused Anthropic of copying popular open-source features into Claude Code and then locking out competing tools, while Anthropic offered credits and discounts to ease the transition.

⚠️ Meta pauses Mercor partnership after AI data breach LINK

Meta has paused its partnership with Mercor, the AI training data company, after a massive data breach exposed as much as 4TB of sensitive information including candidate profiles and personally identifiable information.

Mercor has been approaching professionals across industries, including visual effects artists, offering payment in exchange for work materials from previous jobs like "4D physics scenes with camera data."

Much of the material Mercor is seeking likely belongs to former employers and is protected by intellectual property laws and confidentiality agreements, even though the company says it "does not buy intellectual property."

⚡ Half of planned US data center builds delayed or canceled LINK

About half of all planned U.S. data center builds this year are expected to be delayed or canceled, mainly because key electrical equipment like transformers, switchgear, and batteries is in short supply.

Lead times for high-power transformers in the U.S. have stretched from around two years before 2020 to as long as five years today, far exceeding the under-18-month deployment cycles AI data centers need.

China still accounts for over 40% of U.S. battery imports and nearly 30% of certain transformer and switchgear categories, so ongoing trade-war tensions could further disrupt builds despite massive spending plans.

Other news you might like

• Anthropic ramps up its political activities with a new PACLINK

• 'Copilot is for entertainment purposes only': Even Microsoft's official terms and conditions say you really shouldn't be using its AI at workLINK

• Anthropic discovers "functional emotions" in Claude that influence its behaviorLINK

• Take-Two lays off AI team members weeks after "embracing" generative AILINK

• Firm quietly boosts H.264 streaming license fees from $100,000 up to staggering $4.5 millionLINK

• The Facebook insider building content moderation for the AI eraLINK

• Chinese Robot Pioneer UBTech Offers $18 Million for AI ScientistLINK

• Apple leans into the component crisis stormLINK

• Netflix open-sources VOID, an AI framework that erases video objects and rewrites the physics they left behindLINK

• Backer Y Combinator drops Delve on compliance allegations; top brass allege smear campaignLINK

• Deepseek v4 will reportedly run entirely on Huawei chips in a major win for China's AI independence pushLINK

🧰 Trending tools

Google Vids 2.0: creates AI-generated videos using Lyria 3 and Veo 3.1 models, letting teams produce video content without requiring editing expertise or production budgets.LINK

Surf Social Websites: aggregates Mastodon, Threads, Bluesky, RSS, podcasts, and YouTube into one feed, eliminating the need to check multiple platforms separately.LINK

Mercury Edit 2: a diffusion-based LLM that generates code up to 10x faster than traditional autoregressive models while maintaining comparable output quality.LINK

APImage: an AI photo editor that removes backgrounds, generates product visuals, and creates studio-quality images from text prompts in seconds.LINK

ismcpdead.com: aggregates live data from GitHub, Hacker News, and Reddit to track Model Context Protocol adoption metrics and community sentiment.LINK

📚 Trending papers & reports

Self-distillation for code generation improves a 7B parameter model's accuracy from 50.6% to 60.4% on HumanEval by training it on its own correct outputs, matching models 10x larger.LINK

Reasoning models decide which tool to use in their first few tokens, before actually reasoning through the problem, suggesting they rely on pattern matching rather than deliberate analysis.LINK

Video object removal deletes people or objects from videos while realistically filling in backgrounds and maintaining interactions with remaining elements, trained on 100,000 video clips with synthetic annotations.LINK

KV cache compression cuts memory usage to 2 bits per value using polar coordinates instead of Cartesian, maintaining 99% accuracy on long context tasks while reducing storage by 8x compared to standard methods.LINK

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