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For a while, it looked like President Donald Trump was going to have Big Tech’s back.

Now, the tech industry is collateral damage in his global trade war.

On Thursday, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen floated the idea of placing “a levy on the advertising revenues of digital services” if tariff negotiations with the US go south. This would be the opposite outcome that tech CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg were hoping for when they threw their support behind the new administration. 

To someone like Zuckerberg, Trump was supposed to be the strong-armed leader to bring the overbearing EU to heel. Instead, the rhetoric between the US and EU is ratcheting up just weeks before the EU is already set to fine Meta (and Apple) for violating its Digital Markets Act. 

While certainly more of a self-inflicted wound, Elon Musk’s popularity in the US has “inverted as his support for President Trump has increased,” Nate Silver wrote this week. Tesla’s stock price, meanwhile. has lost over a third of its value this year, and, thanks to tariffs, the company has removed the option to buy new, US-made vehicles in China. 

As I predicted last week, TikTok is particularly s …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Netflix is starting to test search that’s powered by OpenAI, according to Bloomberg.

The new search engine will let users “look for shows using far more specific terms, including the subscriber’s mood, for example, the company said,” per the report. This OpenAI-powered search will also allow users to make queries that “go well beyond genres or actors’ names.”

The feature, which is opt in, is already available for some users to try in Australia and New Zealand on iOS.

Netflix spokesperson MoMo Zhou confirmed to The Verge that Bloomberg’s story is accurate. Zhou says that the test will expand to the US “in the coming weeks and months” and that there aren’t currently plans for the feature outside of iOS.

“It’s early days for the feature and we’re really in a learn and listen phase for this beta,” Zhou says.

OpenAI didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.

In an interview on the Decoder podcast last year, The Verge’s editor-in-chief, Nilay Patel, asked Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters about how the company was thinking about AI. Here was part of his response:

We have a long history of using machine learning and artificial intelligence in our recommender systems. We’ve been doing that for 20-some years. Again, we think that our job is to be proactive about understanding where there’s technical innovation. How do we use that both to serve creators, allow them to tell their stories in more compelling ways, and also then to serve our members better user experiences?

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There are few areas where AI has seen more robust deployment than the field of software development. From "vibe" coding to GitHub Copilot to startups building quick-and-dirty applications with support from LLMs, AI is already deeply integrated.

However, those claiming we're mere months away from AI agents replacing most programmers should adjust their expectations because models aren't good enough at the debugging part, and debugging occupies most of a developer's time. That's the suggestion of Microsoft Research, which built a new tool called debug-gym to test and improve how AI models can debug software.

Debug-gym (available on GitHub and detailed in a blog post) is an environment that allows AI models to try and debug any existing code repository with access to debugging tools that aren't historically part of the process for these models. Microsoft found that without this approach, models are quite notably bad at debugging tasks. With the approach, they're better but still a far cry from what an experienced human developer can do.

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