Welcome to the TechBoo ride home for Tuesday, April 28, 2026. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, the Musk v. Altman trial kicks off in California with opening arguments set for today. Microsoft and OpenAI amend their partnership, removing the AGI clause. OpenAI missed internal user and revenue targets. Google launches Ask YouTube and March saw a surge in tech layoffs. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Pull out your popcorn because a U.S. judge has seated a nine-person jury in the Musk v. Altman trial at a federal courthouse in California. Sam Altman and Greg Brockman were in attendance yesterday, quoting CNBC. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez-Rogers is overseeing the proceedings between the world's richest person and the CEO of OpenAI. Opening arguments are scheduled to begin today. Gonzalez Rogers opted to divide the trial into two parts, a liability phase to decide if any wrongdoing occurred, and a remedies phase to determine the appropriate damages and next steps. The jury will weigh in during the liability phase only, and its verdict will be advisory, which means Gonzalez Rogers will make the final decision in both sections of the trial. The liability phase of the trial is expected to wrap up by May 21st, Gonzalez Rogers said Monday. Gonzalez Rogers started the proceedings by welcoming the prospective jurors to the courtroom. She cracked some jokes as she explained the case and laid out the trial's schedule. Lawyers grilled prospective jurors on their views on AI, Elon Musk, and Sam Altman. Some confessed to holding negative views of Musk due to his political ideology. The reality is people don't like him, Gonzalez Rogers said at one point. She expressed confidence, though, that the jurors selected will respect the judicial process and the facts of the case. Musk alleges in his lawsuit that he was assiduously manipulated and deceived by OpenAI, Altman and Brockman, and their promises to chart a safer, more open course than profit-driven tech giants. He has asked the judge to consider unwinding the company's recent restructuring, which cemented its structure as a non-profit with a controlling stake in its for-profit business. Musk and Altman have been in a public war of words for months leading up to the trial. That continued on Monday with Musk posting in a post on ex-scam Altman and Greg Stockman stole a charity, full stop, end quote. Of the 26 claims that Musk asserted in 2024, only two remain, unjust enrichment and breach of charitable trust. Musk's lawyers dismissed two of the claims, fraud and constructive fraud, ahead of the trial in an effort to streamline the case according to a filing, end quote. And quoting Wired, the goal today was to select nine jurors who could be fair and impartial in this case, an especially difficult challenge, considering the main characters are some of the most high-profile tech executives in the world. Several potential jurors said they had negative opinions about Musk when questioned by Judge Yvonne Gonzalez-Rogers and attorneys, but that didn't necessarily disqualify them. Only one juror was ultimately excused on the basis of their strong negative opinions regarding Musk. The nine jurors that were ultimately selected represent quite a diverse group, including a painter, a former Lockheed Martin employee, and a psychiatrist. Some of them said they had negative opinions about artificial intelligence technology more broadly. In the end, however, all of the people selected assured the court that their outside opinions about Musk and AI shouldn't interfere with their ability to determine the facts of the case, end quote. Microsoft and OpenAI have amended their deal to allow OpenAI to serve all of its products across any cloud provider. Microsoft will no longer pay a revenue share to OpenAI. They also removed a clause that would have given Microsoft IP rights until OpenAI achieved so AGI Microsoft retains the use of OpenAI models until 2032 Quoting TechCrunch With this new deal instead of Microsoft having exclusive access to all of OpenAI products and IP until the magical day when OpenAI produces AGI its partnership has a definitive timeline This contract gives Microsoft a non-exclusive license to OpenAI IP for models and products through 2032. The two companies are still calling Microsoft OpenAI's primary cloud partner, meaning that the bulk of OpenAI's cloud will likely be served by Azure for the six years this deal covers, even as OpenAI rushes to build its own data centers with other partners. In October, OpenAI agreed to buy an additional $250 billion worth of Microsoft's cloud. This line is a message to Microsoft shareholders that OpenAI will still be an enormous Azure customer. OpenAI products will ship first on Azure unless Microsoft cannot and chooses not to support the necessary capabilities, the companies say. But critically, OpenAI can now serve all its products to customers across any cloud provider. Again, first is not defined clearly in this announcement whether that means exclusive on Azure only for some time period or just that Microsoft will also be among the vendors carrying OpenAI's latest products. But the most important part of this term, it solves the possibility that Microsoft could sue OpenAI over the AI Labs deal with Amazon. To recap that messiness, in February, OpenAI announced that Amazon was investing up to $50 billion in the model maker, comprised of a $15 billion initial investment and another $35 billion in the coming months when certain conditions are met, the company said without specifying what those conditions were. In exchange, OpenAI agreed to co-develop a stateful runtime technology on AWS Bedrock, the AWS service that serves up various AI models and services. Stateful runtime is the tech that supports AI agents, allowing them to remember tasks and context for long periods of time, end quote. Meanwhile, this comes from the journal, quote, OpenAI recently missed its own targets for new users and revenue, stumbles that have raised concerns among some company leaders about whether it will be able to support its massive spending on data centers. Chief Financial Officer Sarah Fryer has told other company leaders that she is worried the company might not be able to pay for future computing contracts if revenue doesn't grow fast enough, according to people familiar with the matter. Board directors have also more closely examined the company's data center deals in recent months and questioned Chief Executive Sam Altman's efforts to secure even more computing power despite the business slowdown, the people said. The spending scrutiny is constraining Altman's once-boundless ambitions ahead of a potential initial public offering that could take place by the end of the year. Fryer and other executives are now seeking to control costs and instill more discipline in the business at times, putting them at odds with their CEO, people familiar with the issue said, end quote. Google is launching Ask YouTube, a conversational AI search experiment that generates pages with videos and text summaries for premium users in the US aged 18 plus, quoting The Verge. The company is now testing a new way to search on YouTube that feels more like a conversation, with results pulling in things like long-form videos, YouTube shorts, and text about what you're searching for. The experiment is now available if you're a YouTube Premium subscriber in the U.S. who is 18 or older. I turned it on for my account, and now in the search bar, I see an Ask YouTube button, and clicking the search bar shows prompts to ask, like funny baby elephant playing clips, summary of the rules of volleyball, and short history of the Apollo 11 moon landing. If I keep the search box blank but click the Ask YouTube button, YouTube takes me to a full page with suggested searches and a text button to ask a question. When you search with Ask YouTube, YouTube briefly shows a mostly blank page with a loading icon and after a few seconds fills it out with text and details I tested it with the short history of the Apollo 11 moon landing prompt At the top of the results was a bunch of text summarizing the mission including a bulleted list of milestones like the date of the lunar landing and Neil Armstrong first step on the moon Then the page included a video about the launch timestamped to a section about the launch day from a channel called The Life Guide, followed by galleries of videos under headers like From Launch to Splashdown, Historic Footage and Behind the Scenes, and a series of shorts about Moments on the Surface. I assume YouTube is pulling the text for those sections from the videos highlighted in the search results. At the end, the page has a few more suggested prompts including who were the Apollo 11 astronauts and, perhaps worryingly, Apollo 11 conspiracy theories and a text box I can use to ask a follow-up question or start a new search. I clicked the who were the Apollo 11 astronauts and got a new, slightly differently formatted set of results including a grid with background about astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins. searching for Apollo 11 conspiracy theories just showed a typical list of YouTube search results, however, end quote. Well, they aren't alone in doing stuff like that because Bloomberg CTO Sean Edwards says that company is overhauling the iconic Bloomberg terminal with a new chatbot-style interface called AskBee, currently open to around 125,000 users in beta, quoting Wired. For its famous intractability, the Bloomberg terminal has long-inspired devotion, bordering on obsession. Among traders, the ability to chart a path through the software's dizzying scrolls of numbers and text to isolate far-flung information is the mark of a seasoned professional. But as a greater mass of data is fed into the terminal, not only earnings and asset prices, but weather forecasts, shipping logs, factory locations, consumer spending patterns, private loans, and so on, valuable information is being lost. It has become more and more untenable, says Sean Edwards, chief technology officer at Bloomberg. You miss things or it takes too long. To try to remedy the problem, Bloomberg is testing a chatbot-style interface for the terminal AskB, pronounced AskB even though it's spelled A-S-K-B, built atop a basket of different language models. The broad idea is to help finance professionals to condense labor-intensive tasks and make it possible to test abstract investment theses against the data through natural language prompts, end quote. According to layoffs.fyi, companies announced layoffs affecting 45,800 tech employees in March alone, making March the worst month for reported tech job cuts in at least two years. Quoting the journal, companies are straining to portray the cuts as evidence they are confident in an AI future in which more workers will be replaced by machines. They have been careful not to suggest any problems on the horizon. We're not making this decision because we're in trouble, Block chief executive Jack Dorsey wrote in his announcement. There is some trouble brewing, though. Tech companies are, in effect, playing a game of chicken with each other on capital spending plans. They are shelling out as much as they can, more than their rivals they hope, on AI chips and data centers that could put them in the lead in a race they feel they can't afford to lose. That, in turn, is heightening competition over who can use AI to help do more with a lot less, freeing up money to spend on expensive chips. In some cases, though, cuts look more like efforts to correct for past overhiring or simply to come into line with industry norms. Oracle's annual revenue per employee is lower than most other major software companies and less than a third of Microsoft's, according to data from S&P Global Market Intelligence. Snap's last reported headcount was 65% above its pre-COVID level, even as the Snapchat parent consistently failed to turn an annual operating profit. Dressing up layoffs as visionary moves for the age of AI carries certain risks. Rampant layoffs hurt morale and create an exit incentive for other employees especially talented ones with alternatives For all of AI capabilities people will still be needed to figure out business models deal with customers and importantly make sure AI tools are being deployed and used safely Smart castaways might establish startups that end up competing with the big tech companies, a headache a large workforce helps protect against. The layoffs also lend credence to a growing public perception that AI isn't a panacea, but actually a job killer. That will feed a backlash that is already constraining AI as more communities are fighting against the construction of massive data centers. Even for tech giants that are raking in revenue and profits, those numbers look increasingly worrisome. Debt for some large tech players is already on the rise. Meta's debt to equity ratio was 39% last year, up from just 8% five years prior. Some of the big players, including Meta, are engaging in off-balance sheet financial wizardry to keep their AI computing growth humming, end quote. Finally today, an analysis of Internet Archive data found that by mid-2025, around 35% of new websites published since ChatGPT's launch in November of 2022 were AI-generated or at least AI-assisted, quoting 404 Media. Researchers working with data from the Internet Archive have discovered that a third of websites created since 2022 are AI-generated. The team of researchers, which includes people from Stanford, the Imperial College London, and the Internet Archive, published their findings online in a paper titled The Impact of AI-Generated Text on the Internet. The research also found that all this AI-generated text is making the web more cheery and less verbose. Inspired by the dead internet theory, the idea that much of the internet is now just bots talking back and forth, the team set out to find out how ChatGPT and its competitors had reshaped the internet since 2022. The proliferation of AI-generated and AI-assisted text on the internet is feared to contribute to a degradation in semantic and stylistic diversity, factual accuracy, and other negative developments the researchers write in the paper. We find that by mid-2025, roughly 35% of newly published websites were classified as AI-generated or AI-assisted, up from zero before ChatGPT's launch in late 2022. I find the sheer speed of the AI takeover of the web quite staggering. Jonas Dozal, an AI researcher at Stanford and co-author of the paper told 404 Media, after decades of humans shaping it, a significant portion of the internet has become defined by AI in just three years. We're witnessing, in my opinion, a major transformation of the digital landscape in a fraction of the time it took to build in the first place. The researchers also tested six common critiques of AI-generated text. Does it lead to a shrinking of viewpoints? Does it create more disinformation as hallucinations proliferate? Does online writing feel more sanitized and cheerful? Does it fail to cite its sources? Does it create strings of words with low semantic density? Has it forced writing into a monoculture where unique voices vanish and a generic uniform style takes hold? To the surprise of the researchers, only two of the six theories they tested about the effects of AI-generated text seemed true. AI was making the internet less semantically diverse and more positive overall, but it wasn't causing a proliferation in lies or cutting out its sources. The most surprising result was that our truth decay hypothesis wasn't confirmed, Dolezal said. It's worth noting that we were specifically looking for an increase in verifiably untrue statements, which we didn't find. But it could still be the case that AI is quietly increasing the volume of unverifiable claims, one that can't be checked against existing fact-checking tools and infrastructure. Or it may simply be that the internet wasn't a particularly truth-adhering place to begin with, end quote. nothing more for you today talk to you tomorrow
