TLDR 2026-04-23

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Big Tech & Startups

Google unveils two new TPUs designed for the “agentic era” (9 minute read)

Google's new TPUs provide Google and its customers with a faster and more efficient AI platform. The TPU 8t was designed to reduce training time for frontier models from months to weeks. The TPU 8i is designed to be more efficient when running multiple specialized agents. It can also run in large pods of 1,152 chips. The TPUs will power Google's Gemini-based models, but they are also designed with third-party developers in mind, with both TPUs supporting popular frameworks that developers are already using.

Tesla to Spend $3 Billion on ‘Research Fab,' Use Intel Tech (3 minute read)

Tesla plans to spend roughly $3 billion on building a research chip factory in Texas. The research facility will be built on Tesla's existing Giga Texas campus. It will be capable of outputting just a few thousand wafers per month, but it is more of a testing ground for new technologies and processes than a mass manufacturing facility. Tesla plans to leverage Intel's most advanced production process, 14A, which should be mature and ready by the time Tesla's plan scales up.

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Science & Futuristic Technology

Xpeng is actually building this electric flying car — I visited the factory (5 minute read)

Xpeng, a Chinese automaker, is pouring serious resources into making manned electric aircraft a commercial reality. It has a prototype aircraft that can take off, hover, and land, all controlled by a single joystick. The prototype is part of a system with two parts: a six-wheeled, three-axle ground vehicle that serves as transport and charging station, and a detachable two-seat eVTOL aircraft that sits in the back and deploys autonomously. The entire package is priced around $300,000 USD. Xpeng is targeting customer deliveries toward the end of 2026.

AI-powered robot beats elite table tennis players (5 minute read)

Ace is a robotic system developed by Sony AI that can beat elite players at table tennis. It has an eight-jointed arm on a movable base and multiple cameras that can view the entire court from different angles. The cameras track the position and spin of the ball, allowing Ace to make split-second changes to its trajectory. Ace displays a mastery of spin and can handle difficult shots. It still loses against professionals, but its abilities are still a milestone in robotics - table tennis is one of the toughest tests of how far the technology has advanced.

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Programming, Design & Data Science

Webinar: Make your product dashboards un-ignorable (Sponsor)

Giving users too many options? Limiting them to static reporting? In both cases, your dashboards get ignored. Want dashboards that actually get used? This Reveal webinar is for you. Learn how to decide what users can edit, design analytics experiences for different user personas, and enable interactions without custom dev. Save your seat

The AI-native interview (6 minute read)

Coding agents have upended software engineering. The role is now shifting from building machines to designing and honing them. Engineers now focus less on precise lines of code and more on whether software produces the right outcomes over time. This shift changes what should be evaluated in interviews. This post looks at how Sierra redesigned its engineering interview process from the ground up to reflect this new reality.

One Developer, Two Dozen Agents, Zero Alignment (15 minute read)

Coding agents give developers a lot of their time back, allowing them to have enough time and energy to make their products the way they want to. Agents allow developers to make much better software through more rigorous critical thinking and better alignment in the planning stage. They allow teams to scale in a way that leads to higher-quality software. In a world of fast, cheap software, quality becomes the new differentiator.

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Miscellaneous

Mars or the Moon or AI? Elon Musk's Changing Goals for SpaceX (8 minute read)

SpaceX's mission for years was to get humans to Mars. However, over the last six months, the company's priorities have shifted. SpaceX recently struck a deal with AI startup Cursor that could result in the acquisition of the company for $60 billion. Elon Musk has proposed moonshots, including AI data centers in Earth orbit, moon-based factories, and an AI chip manufacturing plant. The changing goals have resulted in criticism from some investors.

Cursor and SpaceX: In search of a complete loop (13 minute read)

Being the top lab in coding means owning both the compute to train new models and capabilities and the product to recursively inform that process. Cursor and SpaceX combining together can complete that loop. That's why they entered into an agreement to co-develop coding and knowledge agent models together. This is the first deal where two sub-frontier labs plausibly combine into a frontier contender.

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Quick Links

The $100K Mistake Hiding in Your Equity Comp (Sponsor)

Equity comp decision ahead? Employees at places like Anthropic, Databricks, and Ramp trust Titan with over $1B to get RSUs, options, and taxes right. Don't leave $100K on the table. Book your free equity review.

Microsoft's LinkedIn names longtime exec Dan Shapero its new CEO (3 minute read)

Ryan Roslansky, who had run LinkedIn since 2020, will retain his position as executive vice president at Microsoft.

OpenAI unveils Workspace Agents, a successor to custom GPTs for enterprises that can plug directly into Slack, Salesforce and more (14 minute read)

Workspace Agents allows ChatGPT Business, Enterprise, Edu, and Teachers users to design and select from pre-existing agent templates that can perform tasks across third-party apps and data sources.

The LLM Inference Trilemma: Throughput, Latency, Cost (12 minute read)

The three-way orthogonal tension between throughput, latency, and cost is the central engineering challenge in dedicated large language model hosting.

TLDR is hiring a curator for TLDR AI (3-5 hrs/week, Fully Remote)

We're hiring an engineer/researcher at a major AI lab or startup to help write for 1M+ subscribers. Curators have been invited to Google I/O and OpenAI DevDay, scouted for Tier 1 VCs, and get early access to unreleased TLDR products. Learn more.

Microsoft looked at buying Cursor before SpaceX deal (4 minute read)

Microsoft had considered buying Cursor, but it didn't make an offer.

Imagine every pixel on your screen, streamed live directly from a model (3 minute read)

Flipbook creates interactive illustrations without HTML, a layout engine, or code.

We found a stable Firefox identifier linking all your private Tor identities (11 minute read)

There is a vulnerability in all Firefox-based browsers that allows websites to derive a unique, deterministic, and stable process-lifetime identifier, even in contexts where users expect stronger isolation.

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Thanks for reading,
Dan Ni & Stephen Flanders

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Google TPU v8 ⚡, Tesla's research fab 🏭, AI-native interviews 💼