• Google says it is testing new ad formats in search results and AI Mode, including Conversational Discovery ads, Highlighted Answers, and AI-powered Shopping ads (Anu Adegbola/Search Engine Land)
• Airbnb says it is adding luggage storage, airport pickups, car rentals, grocery delivery, and thousands of boutique and independent hotels to its platform (Jacob Passy/Wall Street Journal)
• Sources: OpenAI is preparing to file confidentially for an IPO as early as Friday; the company plans to be ready to go public as early as September (Wall Street Journal)
• Ubisoft reports a record operating loss of $1.40B for the year to March and says sales in 2026-27 will fall by about 8% to 9%; UBI falls 6%+ (Reuters)
• Internal memo: Xbox hires game industry analyst Matthew Ball as chief strategy officer, and names Scott Van Vliet, who led Azure AI infrastructure, as Xbox CTO (Tom Warren/The Verge)
• Internal memo: Mark Zuckerberg told employees that he does not expect more company-wide layoffs this year (Katie Paul/Reuters)
• An interview with Match Group CEO Spencer Rascoff about plans for Tinder, including a redesign, AI features, live events, and group dating to win over Gen Z (Samantha Kelly/Bloomberg)
• OpenAI's Chris Lehane says he is pursuing "reverse federalism", lobbying blue states to pass AI safety laws and create a de facto US standard, as DC dithers (Brendan Bordelon/Politico)
• Stability AI releases a new family of audio models called Stable Audio 3.0 that is trained on licensed data; the top model can generate six-minute songs (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)
• NanoClaw creator NanoCo raised a $12M seed led by Valley Capital and says it is booking enterprise customers; co-founders say they rejected a $20M buyout offer (Julie Bort/TechCrunch)
• Variational, which has built a protocol for decentralized derivatives trading aimed at gathering liquidity from traditional markets, raised a $50M Series A (Jack Kubinec/Fortune)
• Samsung Electronics and its South Korean labor union reach a preliminary pay deal; the union says it has suspended a general strike and put the deal to a vote (Reuters)
• Mercury, which provides banking services to startups, raised a $200M Series D led by TCV at a $5.2B valuation, up from $3.5B in March 2025 (Hugh Son/CNBC)
• Socket, which helps companies safeguard open-source code against hackers, raised $60M led by Thrive Capital at a $1B valuation (Dina Bass/Bloomberg)
• Apple says the App Store prevented over $2.2B in potentially fraudulent transactions in 2025, rejected over 2M problematic app submissions, and more (Ryan Christoffel/9to5Mac)
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• Tempo Promo Code: 60% Off Ready-to-Heat Meals in 2026
• HBO Max Promo Code: 50% Off | May
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