JadidJust-in AI Developments, Incidents & Deadlines
May 2026
SMTWTFS12345678910111213141516171819202122232425262728293031

AI news, Saturday, May 2, 2026

7 stories

TLDR

  • Musk v. Altman Week 1 ends with a bombshell: Musk admits xAI trained Grok on OpenAI models (Apr 30 – May 2) — Bloomberg reports the plaintiffs hit "rough spots"; Altman and Brockman take the stand next week
  • DeepSeek V4 Pro introductory pricing ends May 5 (Apr 24) — Current rate of $0.44/$0.87 per million tokensA small unit of data, such as part of a word, that AI models read and generate. Many AI services price by tokens in and out.NVIDIA ↗ rises 4× to $1.74/$3.48; the lowest price window closes in 3 days
  • TAKE IT DOWN Act platform compliance deadline: May 19, 2026 — Platforms must have deepfake/NCII notice-and-takedown processes live in 17 days or face FTC enforcement
  • Huawei Ascend 950 demand surges after DeepSeek V4 validates Chinese-chip AI training (Apr 29) — ByteDance, Tencent, and Alibaba rushed new orders; Huawei forecasts ~$12B AI chip revenue in 2026
  • Q1 2026: 79K tech workers laid off, 48% blamed on AI — Highest AI-attribution share ever recorded; Washington Post warns some companies may be "AI-washing" restructuring

Action Items

Things your engineering team should look at or do this week.

  • Evaluate DeepSeek V4 Pro before May 5 — The launch introductory rate of $0.435 in / $0.87 out per million tokens expires May 5 and rises 4× to $1.74/$3.48 (a separate 75%-off promo runs through May 31, but the floor closes this week). V4 Pro is 1.6T parameter MoEMixture of expertsA model made of many sub-networks, called experts, where a learned router sends each input to only a few of them.Shazeer et al. 2017 ↗, MIT-licensed, 1M-token context — worth a quick benchmark against your Claude/GPT spend before the window closes. (DeepSeek API Docs | The Next Web)

  • Audit user-content platforms for TAKE IT DOWN Act compliance (deadline: May 19) — The federal law requires covered platforms (public websites + mobile apps) to have a notice-and-takedown workflow for nonconsensual intimate images and AI-generated deepfakes by May 19, 2026 — 17 days away. Removal SLA upon notification: 48 hours. FTC-enforced; criminal penalties for individuals (up to 3 years). If you run any platform with user-generated content, check whether you're in scope. (Skadden | Orrick)

  • Follow Musk v. Altman Week 2 closely — Altman testifies next week — If the court unwinds OpenAI's for-profit restructuring (Musk's two remaining claims: unjust enrichment + breach of charitable trust), it reshapes the frontier AI ecosystem. Liability phase concludes May 21. Bloomberg's Week 1 wrap is the most balanced read. (Bloomberg | Washington Post)

Models & Tools

  • DeepSeek V4 Pro + Flash (Apr 24) Open Source Pricing — DeepSeek's new flagship: 1.6T total / 49B active MoE parameters, 1M-token context, MIT license, weights on Hugging Face. V4 Flash is the lightweight companion at $0.14/$0.28 per million tokens. See APIs & Pricing for time-sensitive discount details. (DeepSeek API Docs | Dataconomy)

  • Claude Opus 4.7 (Apr 16) Agents — Anthropic's latest flagship posts a +12-point gain on CursorBench over Opus 4.6, adds high-resolution image input (up to 2576px), keeps the 1M token context windowHow much text a model can see and use at once while writing a reply.Anthropic ↗, and introduces task budgets so long-running agents can't silently burn quota. Currently leads SWE-benchA benchmark that tests whether a model can resolve real GitHub issues by editing code in popular Python repositories.Jimenez et al. 2023 ↗ Pro at 64.3% as of May 1. (Pragmatic Engineer)

APIs & Pricing

  • DeepSeek V4 Pro: price 4× on May 5, then 75% off through May 31 (Apr 24) Trending — Two-phase discount: (1) From launch to May 5, introductory rate is $0.435/$0.87 input/output per million tokens — the absolute floor. (2) May 5–31, "full" price ($1.74/$3.48) with a 75% launch promo applied, landing back at ~$0.435/$0.87. After May 31, full price applies. DeepSeek also slashed cache-hit charges across its entire API portfolio by 90%, effective immediately. The broader open-weightA model whose trained weights are published for anyone to download and run.NTIA ↗ market ($0.20–$0.80/M output for Llama 4, Qwen 3, DeepSeek V4) is compressing API margins industry-wide. (DeepSeek API Docs | The Next Web | Dataconomy)

Industry & Business

  • Musk v. Altman Week 1: xAI admitted to training Grok on OpenAI outputs (Apr 28 – May 2) Trending — Under cross-examination, Musk confirmed xAI used model distillationTraining a smaller model to copy a larger model's outputs, so it is cheaper to run.Hinton et al. 2015 ↗ on OpenAI models to train Grok, calling it "standard practice." Bloomberg's Week 1 wrap characterizes the plaintiffs as having hit "rough spots," with the jury apparently skeptical of some of Musk's framing. Altman and Brockman are set to testify in Week 2. Two claims remain: unjust enrichment and breach of charitable trust. Musk is seeking removal of both men and an unwinding of OpenAI's for-profit conversion. (Bloomberg | TechCrunch | MIT Tech Review)

  • Huawei Ascend 950 chip demand surge — China's AI stack accelerates (Apr 29) Infra Trending — Following DeepSeek V4's validation that frontier AI can be trained on Huawei hardware, ByteDance, Tencent, and Alibaba have rushed new Ascend 950 orders to Huawei. Huawei plans ~750K Ascend 950PR units shipped in 2026; revenue from AI chips is projected at ~$12B (+60% YoY). The Ascend 950PR delivers 1 PFLOPS FP8 and 2× H100 interconnect bandwidth (2 TB/s). This is the clearest signal yet that China is decoupling its AI training stack from NVIDIA at scale. (Invezz | Tom's Hardware)

  • Q1 2026 tech layoffs: 79K workers, 48% attributed to AI (ongoing) Hiring — The first quarter of 2026 saw 78,557 tech industry layoffs, with employers explicitly attributing 37,638 of those (~48%) to AI and workflow automation — the highest AI-attribution share on record. Flagged companies include Amazon (~16K), Meta (~8K), and Block (~4K, ~40% of headcount). The Washington Post warns some firms may be "AI-washing" ordinary restructuring as AI-driven efficiency. Paradoxically, Meta and IBM are simultaneously hiring for specialized AI roles while cutting general headcount. (Tom's Hardware | Washington Post)

Policy & Safety

  • TAKE IT DOWN Act: platform compliance deadline May 19, 2026 (ongoing) Trending — The federal law (signed May 19, 2025) criminalizes publishing nonconsensual intimate images and AI-generated deepfakes without consent, and requires "covered platforms" (public websites and mobile apps) to implement a notice-and-takedown process by May 19, 2026 — 17 days away. The 48-hour removal window runs from the moment a valid notice is received. The FTC enforces the platform obligations; individual publishers face up to 3 years in prison and fines. If you run any consumer platform with user-submitted content, assess scope now. (Skadden | Orrick | Congress.gov)

Type to search · ↑↓ to move · enter to open