Emma Roth

TSMC, the world's largest semiconductor manufacturer, is struggling to meet demand from American customers despite expanding US factory capacity. CEO C.C. Wei acknowledged after a shareholder meeting that customer demand for AI chips far exceeds production capacity. The AI boom has already created widespread shortages of RAM and NAND Flash memory expected to persist for years.

Amazon has added an AI-generated image feature to its search bar that creates visual representations of products based on text descriptions. The feature currently works for clothing and home goods, allowing users to tap on generated images to find similar items. Amazon frames it as a solution for users who can describe what they want but cannot recall specific product names or terminology.

Amazon has rolled out podcast generation capabilities for Alexa Plus, its upgraded AI assistant, allowing users to request AI-generated episodes on virtually any topic. Users can preview what the AI hosts will discuss, adjust episode length, and steer the conversation before generation begins. Amazon demonstrated the feature with examples including discussions of Roman history, new music, and World Cup predictions, as well as audio lessons on topics like the Apollo missions.

Microsoft is expanding Edge's Copilot AI chatbot to access information across all open browser tabs, allowing users to ask questions about tab content, compare products, and summarize articles. The feature includes user controls to opt in or out of specific experiences. Microsoft is simultaneously retiring Copilot Mode, which offered similar tab-based context plus agentic capabilities like booking reservations, consolidating these functions into the new unified Copilot interface.

Canvas, the Instructure-owned learning management platform used by schools, went offline after the hacking group ShinyHunters claimed responsibility for a data breach affecting student names, email addresses, ID numbers, and messages. ShinyHunters left a message on the platform stating they had breached Instructure again and threatened to release school data unless contacted for ransom resolution. The platform has since been restored, though the full scope of the breach and number of affected institutions remain unclear from available reporting.

Google has shut down Project Mariner, its experimental web automation feature that could perform multiple tasks across websites, as of May 4, 2026. The company announced the closure via the project's landing page, stating that the technology has been integrated into other Google products, particularly Gemini Agent. Project Mariner, which launched in December 2024 and was later updated to handle up to 10 concurrent tasks, represented Google's push into autonomous web agents but did not continue as a standalone offering.

Google DeepMind, Microsoft, and xAI have agreed to allow the US government to review new AI models before public release, expanding a program run by the Commerce Department's Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI). The center, which began evaluating models from OpenAI and Anthropic in 2024, has completed 40 reviews to date. Both OpenAI and Anthropic have renegotiated their partnerships with CAISI to align with current administration priorities. The move represents a formalization of pre-deployment government oversight for frontier AI systems.

The Pentagon has authorized classified AI use across seven vendors: OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Nvidia, xAI, and Reflection. Notably absent from the approved list is Anthropic, which the Defense Department previously relied on for classified work but has now designated a supply-chain risk. The move expands on existing agreements with OpenAI and xAI for lawful use of their AI systems in defense contexts.

X is rolling out a Grok-powered timeline curation feature to Premium subscribers on iOS, with Android access coming soon. The feature lets users pin specific topics to their home tab, which Grok then uses to personalize the posts they see in each feed. X product head Nikita Bier framed the capability as combining Grok's post-level understanding with the platform's existing personalization algorithm to create individually tailored timelines.