Anthropic hires former OpenAI member and Tesla AI director Andrej Karpathy

Andrej Karpathy — a founding member of OpenAI, Tesla’s director of AI from 2017 to 2022, and the man responsible for the term “vibe coding” — is doing what many in tech are doing right now: heading to greener pastures at Anthropic.

Anthropic, which is slated to go public this year, recently raised money at a $950 billion valuation, making it more valuable than OpenAI and nearly as valuable as Tesla.

Personal update: I've joined Anthropic. I think the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative. I am very excited to join the team here and get back to R&D. I remain deeply passionate about education and plan to resume my work on it in time.
— Andrej Karpathy (@karpathy) May 19, 2026

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Rani Molla1h

Report: Tesla to build solar factory near Houston

Tesla is planning to build its solar panel manufacturing plant — an endeavor that could add up to $50 billion in value to its energy business — near Houston, Texas, Electrek reports. The plant would be located on the same site as its Megafactory, which builds Megapack battery systems.

The solar plant is part of Tesla and SpaceX’s goal of eventually putting solar-powered data centers in space.

On the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call, CEO Elon Musk said Tesla was “going to work towards getting 100 gigawatts a year of solar cell production, integrating across the entire supply chain from raw materials all the way to finished solar panels.”

At the time, the news had sent shares of First Solar down, but subsequent reports suggest Tesla is unlikely to compete directly with the country’s leading photovoltaic panel maker, instead using much of that production internally.

Exclusive: Tesla (TSLA) is building its giant solar panel factory in Houston

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Rani Molla

“governments around the world will not allow Apple junk fees to stand”

Rani Molla5h

Epic Games has returned “Fortnite” to the Apple App Store globally, after the video game maker signaled confidence in its ongoing lawsuit with the iPhone maker. In a press release Tuesday, the company wrote:

“Fortnite is returning to the App Store now because we are confident that once Apple is forced to show its costs, governments around the world will not allow Apple junk fees to stand.

We will continue to challenge Apple’s anticompetitive App Store practices of banning alternative app stores and competition in payments.”

Late last year, an appeals court partly reversed sanctions against Apple but upheld the contempt finding and an injunction forcing Apple to permit outside payment options. “Fortnite” returned to the US App Store a year ago.

The suit began in 2020 over Apple’s mandatory 30% commission on in-app purchases and its refusal to allow third-party payment processors or alternative app stores on its mobile devices.

Rani Molla22h

Meta to lay off 8,000 employees, move 7,000 to new initiatives related to AI

On Wednesday, Reuters reported Meta plans to lay off about 8,000 employees in three batches and move another 7,000 employees to “new initiatives related to AI workflows.” The company also plans to “eliminate managerial roles,” though Reuters did not specify how many.

Reuters had previously reported the number and date of the layoffs, but details of the restructuring come from a new internal document from the company’s head of human resources. The cuts come as Meta tries to balance its enormous capex budget of $125 billion to $145 billion this year, as it builds out its AI infrastructure.

As of the company’s last earnings report, its headcount was 77,986.

Exclusive: Meta lays out plans for May 20 layoffs, restructuring, internal document says

As of the company’s last earnings report, its headcount was 77,986.

Rani Molla5/18/26

Google employees are now competing with Anthropic and Meta for access to Google compute

Google built its reputation as a paradise for ambitious researchers: a place where smart people got massive resources and freedom to experiment.

But in the AI era, the physical infrastructure that powers those breakthroughs is maxed out, and even Google’s own employees are reportedly struggling to get enough computing power.

According to Bloomberg, the bottleneck comes down to hardware. Google’s custom-built AI chips — tensor processing units, or TPUs — are in such high demand that internal researchers say they’re effectively competing for rack space against massive, paying cloud customers like Anthropic and Meta. Frustrated by the bureaucracy of fighting for server time, top engineers are jumping ship to launch their own startups, arguing they can secure more reliable access to infrastructure on the open market than inside the company that actually builds it.

In other words: Google became so successful at selling AI infrastructure that its own researchers now have to justify experimental projects against revenue-generating workloads and a more than $460 billion backlog of paying tenants.

Google’s Own AI Researchers Jockey for Access to Its Computing

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