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Archives for April 2026

Jay Peters
Jay Peters
The Steam Controller and iOS don’t work very well together just yet.

Even though Valve says the Steam Controller is built for “anything running Steam,” out of curiosity, I paired my Steam Controller review unit to my iPhone 16 Pro this afternoon. Most native iOS games I tried didn’t recognize the controller. When they did, there were problems, like not being able to move my Fortnite character at all.

I’ve pinged Valve and Apple to see if this situation might change. As expected, the controller worked with games streamed over the Steam Link app, though!

Update: Noted that the controller is designed for devices running Steam.

A photo of a Steam Controller paired to an iPhone 16 Pro playing Vampire Crawlers.
Fun way to play Vampire Crawlers!
Photo by Jay Peters / The Verge
Richard Lawler
Richard Lawler
Pete Hegseth goes out of his way to call Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei an “ideological lunatic.”

Asked by Senator Jacky Rosen (D-Nevada) in a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing about the DoD’s dispute with Anthropic and whether he could guarantee a human would be in the loop on any targeting decisions made with AI, Hegseth focused on Amodei and his company’s refusal to “accept our terms of service.”

Richard Lawler
Richard Lawler
Here’s how Gabe Newell and Hideo Kojima ended up in the Musk v. Altman evidence.

Among the evidence released publicly, there’s this email exchange (Exhibit No.844) between Valve founder Gabe Newell and Elon Musk about, of all things, trying to get a SpaceX tour and OpenAI introduction for Hideo Kojima.

Musk also wrote that he’d lost confidence in OpenAI competing with Google/Deepmind, and decided to attempt that through Tesla instead,” while pumping up Neuralink’s progress. Newell has since launched his own BCI company, Starfish.

Screenshot of Musk email response to Newell: “Sure, it would be great to meet Hideo Kojima and he’s welcome to see the rocket factory. No problem to send him my email. Best person to talk 0 at Neuralink is Max Hodak (max@neuralink com), who is the de facto head of day to day operations. Shivon Zilis is also worth talking to (predictably at shivon@neuralink). We’ve made some pretty insane technical progress. This is highly confidential, but we’re now able to implant ~6000 electrodes in a monkey brain with decent signal/noise. Moreover, the electronics are compact enough to be flush with the skull and the only thing visible is the USB-C opening and slight surround. Very trippy. Just like Neuromancer. Regarding OpenAL my involvement is very limited at this point. I still provide some financial support and get verbal and email updates every few wecks from Sam Altman, but don’t spend time there. I lost confidence that OpenAl could muster the resources to serve as an effective counterweight to Google/Deepmind and decided to attempt that through Tesla instead. We have cash flow on the order of billions of dollars per year to build hardware that hopefully has atleast a dark horse chance to keep Google honest. Probably worth talking about at some point.”
Screenshot of Gabe Newell email to Musk: For a long time | thought neuromodulation (e: TMS) was weird, mainly because | had an unsophisticated understanding of a bunch of aspects of the brain. I’ve more or ess done a 180, and think there is a significant near-term consumer marke. Is this something | should bring up with the Neuralnk team? If so, anyone in particular | should chat with there? Hope you are well
1/2
The craziest part of Musk v. Altman happened while the jury was out of the room

Jared Birchall, Musk’s money manager, answered a question he wasn’t supposed to.

Elizabeth Lopatto
Stevie Bonifield
Stevie Bonifield
“Roblox Reality will not be free.”

During Roblox’s quarterly earnings call on Thursday, CEO David Baszucki commented on the photorealistic upsampling tech he’d shared a demo of earlier this week:

“...I do want to highlight, we’re right on the edge, really, in the whole AI space of running real-time photoreal video models in 2K at 60 hertz. ...This will not be free. This will use cloud compute. We will have some kind of way of subscribing or paying for this.”

Emma Roth
Emma Roth
Rising memory prices will have an “increasing impact” on Apple’s business.

Apple CEO Tim Cook said during an earnings call that the company expects “significantly higher memory costs” in the upcoming quarter. He added that Apple will “look at a range of options” to address the global shortage.

Roblox’s daily users continue to drop as age checks slow growthRoblox’s daily users continue to drop as age checks slow growth
Emma Roth
Emma Roth
Tim Cook and John Ternus comment on Apple’s CEO change during earnings call.

Cook:

This moment for the transition is the right one for a number of reasons. First, our business has been performing extremely well. The first half of this year was very strong, growing double digits year over year. Second, our roadmap is incredible, and most importantly, we have the right leader ready to step into the role. As I have said, there is no one on this planet I trust more to lead Apple into the future than John Ternus.

Ternus:

As Tim mentioned, we have an incredible roadmap ahead, and while you’re not going to get me to talk about the details of that roadmap, suffice it to say this is the most exciting time in my 25 year career at Apple to be building products and services.

Congress keeps kicking surveillance reform down the roadCongress keeps kicking surveillance reform down the road
Apple’s iPhone revenue jumps to $57 billion despite chip shortagesApple’s iPhone revenue jumps to $57 billion despite chip shortages
Elizabeth Lopatto
Elizabeth Lopatto
Jury is being dismissed early so YGR can deal with an objection to Birchall’s testimony.

After Birchall said he had no first-hand knowledge of the xAI bid for OpenAI’s assets, OpenAI’s lawyer asked that his testimony from the direct examination be struck. We are going to hear about that now, outside the presence of the jury.

Jay Peters
Jay Peters
Reddit is working on making the platform “faster across the board.”

Making Reddit faster “remains a meaningful opportunity and can lead to an outsized impact,” says CEO Steve Huffman in the company’s Q1 2026 letter to shareholders released with its earnings.

Reddit also wants to reach 100 million daily US users, and “we’re actively executing a strategy to get us there,” Huffman says. In Q1, the platform saw 53.5 million daily active unique users.

Q1 2026 Letter to shareholders

[Reddit]

Rivian downsizes new EV factory after Trump’s DOE slashes loan agreementRivian downsizes new EV factory after Trump’s DOE slashes loan agreement
Rivian’s revenue is up as R2 production kicks into gearRivian’s revenue is up as R2 production kicks into gear
Elizabeth Lopatto
Elizabeth Lopatto
We are now hearing about the pause in quarterly donations.

We saw Chris Clark’s email about pausing donations yesterday during Musk’s testimony. Today, we see an email from Birchall: “This was ready to go out when I was told that Elon informed Greg and Ilya that the funding would be on pause until they came to terms on the right path moving forward.”
This was while there were discussions of how to put the for-profit Musk wanted together.

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