Welcome back to Week in Review! We’ve got lots of news for you this week: There were CEO shake-ups at Instacart and 11x; the web series is back — kind of; Threads is getting video ads; and much more. Let’s get to it!

Big move: Instacart CEO Fidji Simo will become OpenAI’s CEO for Applications, the company said this week. Simo is already on the OpenAI board. She’ll be tasked with helping OpenAI in scaling “traditional” company functions, CEO Sam Altman said, but he didn’t provide any details on what that means.

Speaking of OpenAI: The company decided that its nonprofit division will retain control over its for-profit organization after initially announcing that it planned to convert to a for-profit organization. OpenAI says that it made the decision “after hearing from civic leaders and engaging in constructive dialogue with the offices of the Attorney General of Delaware and the Attorney General of California.”

And speaking of CEO moves: 11x CEO Hasan Sukkar announced that he’s stepping down and moving into a “non-executive chairman” position. In March, TechCrunch reported that 11x had been showing off on its website customer logos of companies that were not active customers, and one of those companies was threatening to sue over the matter.

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News

Trademark friction: Tesla wants to trademark the terms “Cybercab” and “Robotaxi” but was denied by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office because the terms are too generic. Tesla has three months to file a response, or the office will abandon the application. 

No thanks: Speaking onstage at Stripe’s annual Sessions conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg laid out his plans to automate the entire ad industry with a black-box, end-to-end AI ad tool. As Maxwell Zeff reports, “It’s an open question as to what AI ad testing will do to Meta’s platforms from a user experience point of view, considering they’re already brimming with generative AI slop.”

And speaking of ads: Meta announced at the NewFronts conference that it’s testing video ads in Threads. The update follows Meta’s recent announcement that Threads now reaches over 350 million monthly active users.

Yes, please! I’m not too savvy in the kitchen, so Posha’s new robot that cooks your meals for you sounds like a dream come true. You scroll through a list of recipes, select the one you want, add the proper amounts of the requested ingredients, and the machine makes the meal from there.

We’re back, baby: Before the rise of vertical video, scripted web series on YouTube were successful enough to spin out into cult-favorite TV shows like “Broad City,” “Insecure,” and “Letterkenny.” Now the web series is back, but it lives on a new platform: TikTok. 

Goodbye to a real one: Bill Gates said Thursday that the Gates Foundation will have just 20 years to exhaust its coffers and wind down operations. He has pledged to donate 99% of his fortune, which today is worth an estimated $107 billion, to the foundation.

Analysis

What’s next for OpenAI: OpenAI’s new restructuring plan could satisfy regulators and investors who have invested heavily in the company hoping for future profits. But it might also disrupt OpenAI’s future ambitions, especially regarding a potential IPO.

It’s already been a tumultuous year for the U.S. semiconductor industry.

The semiconductor industry plays a sizable role in the “AI race” that the U.S. seems determined to win, which is why this context is worth paying attention to: from Intel’s appointment of Lip-Bu Tan — who wasted no time getting to work trying to revitalize the legacy company — to CEO, to Joe Biden proposing sweeping new AI chip export rules on his way out of office that may or may not actually stick.

Here’s a look at what’s happened since the beginning of the year. 

May

A last-minute reversal

May 7: Just a week before the “Framework for Artificial Intelligence Diffusion” was set to go into place, the Trump administration plans on taking a different path. According to multiple media outlets, including Axios and Bloomberg, the administration won’t enforce the restrictions when they were supposed to start on May 15 and is instead working on its own framework. 

April

Anthropic doubles down on its support of chip export restrictions

April 30: Anthropic doubled down on its support for restricting U.S.-made chip exports, including some tweaks to the Framework for Artificial Intelligence Diffusion, like imposing further restrictions on Tier 2 countries and dedicating resources to enforcement. An Nvidia spokesperson shot back, saying, “American firms should focus on innovation and rise to the challenge, rather than tell tall tales that large, heavy, and sensitive electronics are somehow smuggled in ‘baby bumps’ or ‘alongside live lobsters.’” 

Planned layoffs at Intel

April 22: Ahead of its Q1 earnings call, Intel said it was planning to lay off more than 21,000 employees. The layoffs were meant to streamline management, something CEO Lip-Bu Tan has long said Intel needed to do, and help rebuild the company’s engineering focus. 

The Trump administration further restricts chip exports

April 15: Nvidia’s H20 AI chip got hit with an export licensing requirement, the company disclosed in an SEC filing. The company added it expects $5.5 billion in charges related to this new requirement in the first quarter of its 2026 fiscal year. The H20 is the most advanced AI chip Nvidia can still export to China in some form or fashion. TSMC and Intel reported similar expenses the same week. 

Nvidia appears to talk its way out of further chip exports

April 9: Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang was spotted attending dinner at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, according to reports. At the time, NPR reported Huang may have been able to spare Nvidia’s H20 AI chips from export restrictions upon agreeing to invest in AI data centers in the U.S. 

An alleged agreement between Intel and TSMC

April 3: Intel and TSMC allegedly reached a tentative agreement to launch a joint chipmaking venture. This joint venture would operate Intel’s chipmaking facilities, and TSMC would have a 20% stake in the new venture. Both companies declined to comment or confirm. If this deal doesn’t come to fruition, this is likely a decent preview of potential deals in this industry to come. 

Intel spins off non-core assets, announces new initiative

April 1: CEO Lip-Bu Tan got to work right away. Just weeks after he joined Intel, the company announced that it was going to spin off non-core assets so it could focus. He also said the company would launch new products including custom semiconductors for customers. 

March

Intel names a new CEO 

March 12:  Intel announced that industry veteran, and former board member, Lip-Bu Tan would return to the company as CEO on March 18. At the time of his appointment, Tan said he Intel would be an “engineering-focused company” under his leadership. 

February

Intel’s Ohio chip plant gets delayed again

February 28: Intel was supposed to start operating its first chip fabrication plant in Ohio this year. Instead, the company slowed down construction on the plant for the second time in February. Now, the $28 billion semiconductor project won’t wrap up construction until 2030 and may not even open until 2031.

Senators call for more chip export restrictions

February 3: U.S. senators, including Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass) and Josh Hawley (R-Mo), wrote a letter to Commerce Secretary Nominee-Designate Howard Lutnick urging the Trump administration to further restrict AI chip exports. The letter specifically referred to Nvidia’s H20 AI chips, which were used in the training of DeepSeek’s R1 “reasoning” model. 

January 

DeepSeek releases its open “reasoning” model

January 27: Chinese AI startup DeepSeek caused quite the stir in Silicon Valley when it released the open version of its R1 “reasoning” model. While this isn’t semiconductor news specifically, the sheer alarm in the AI and semiconductor industries DeepSeek’s release caused continues to have ripple effects on the chip industry. 

Joe Biden’s executive order on chip exports

January 13: With just a week left in office, former President Joe Biden proposed sweeping new export restrictions on U.S.-made AI chips. This order created a three-tier structure that determined how many U.S. chips can be exported to each country. Under this proposal, Tier 1 countries faced no restrictions; Tier 2 countries had a chip purchase limit for the first time; and Tier 3 countries got additional restrictions. 

Anthropic’s Dario Amodei weighs in on chip export restrictions

January 6: Anthropic co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei co-wrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal endorsing existing AI chip export controls and pointing to them as a reason why China’s AI market was behind the U.S.’. He also called on incoming president Donald Trump to impose further restrictions and to close loopholes that have allowed AI companies in China to still get their hands on these chips.

From cybersecurity and aerospace to generative 3D, startup leaders are scaling ambitious companies from European soil and taking on global markets. In this conversation at the StrictlyVC event in Athens, we talked to three founders about what it takes to go from idea to impact while navigating the continent’s unique challenges — and why building in Europe is no longer a constraint, but a competitive edge.