☁️ Cloud AI profits soar | 👁️ Altman’s Orb eyes U.S. malls | 🚗 Tesla board keeps Musk in the driver’s seat

Warm up

Hey there, pixel pilgrim—welcome to Thursday’s Link & Load.

• Wall Street cheers cloud AI while gadgets sulk.

• Sam Altman wants your eyeballs—literally.

• Kubernetes wrangler pockets a nine-digit check.

• Tesla’s board plays whack-a-rumor.

• A rocket goes boom in the weirdest way.

🚀 Today in Tech

Cloud Nine, Grounded Gadgets

Reuters: https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/big-techs-fortunes-diverge-ai-powers-cloud-tariffs-hit-consumer-electronics-2025-05-01/

TL;DR: Microsoft and Alphabet ride AI-supercharged cloud profits while tariff-bruised hardware drags Apple & Amazon into the doldrums.

Orb-It-All ID Check

Wired: https://www.wired.com/story/sam-altman-orb-eyeball-scan-launch-us

TL;DR: Altman’s Tools for Humanity brings its iris-scanning “World” orbs to U.S. malls, with a shrimp-sized Orb Mini and a Visa card so your eyeball can finally buy coffee.

Cash for Cast

TechCrunch: https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/30/cast-ai-raises-108m-to-get-the-max-out-of-ai-kubernetes-and-other-workloads/

TL;DR: Miami-based Cast AI hauls in $108 million to auto-tune Kubernetes costs for hungry LLM workloads, snagging backing from Goldman and ex-Google brass.

Board Says “Stay, Elon”

The Verge: https://www.theverge.com/news/659396/tesla-new-ceo-elon-musk-replacement-wsj-report-denial

TL;DR: Tesla directors swat down whispers of a Musk replacement—because swapping CEOs at Tesla is like changing the batteries in your Model S key-fob: nobody remembers how. (Dad joke deployed—mission complete.)

Firefly’s Freaky Fail

Ars Technica: https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/04/fireflys-rocket-suffers-one-of-the-strangest-launch-failures-weve-ever-seen/

TL;DR: A Firefly Alpha’s first stage apparently blew itself apart milliseconds after ignition, leaving engineers with more questions than fragments.

🎲 Link Grab-Bag

• Axios: https://www.axios.com/local/denver/2025/04/29/colorado-ai-bill> — Colorado’s ambitious AI law gets a last-minute rewrite.

• Engadget: https://www.engadget.com/ai/mark-zuckerberg-predicts-ai-will-write-most-of-metas-code-within-12-to-18-months-213851646.html> — Zuck bets AI bots will crank most of Meta’s code next year.

• IEEE Spectrum: https://spectrum.ieee.org/amp/china-nuclear-fusion-reactor-2671833945> — China fires up new fusion reactors, racing the U.S. for star-in-a-jar bragging rights.

• Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43815523> — Devs share side-projects in April’s “What are you working on?” thread.

• Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/ArtificialInteligence/comments/1kbyji6/oneminute_daily_ai_news_4302025/> — A 60-second AI news roundup for the attention-challenged.

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