Outlet
Techmeme
Latest headlines
- Google DeepMind launches AlphaGenome 2, trained on 100M+ cell profiles across 68 tissues to predict genetic mutation effects, for non-commercial research (Robert Hart/The Verge)
- Plurai, founded by former Nexar staffers to use synthetic data and digital twins of corporate IT environments to assess AI agents, raised a $13M seed (Tim Fernholz/TechCrunch)
- Rox, which develops AI agents to automate customer research and outreach, raised a $100M Series B co-led by General Catalyst and March at a $1.3B valuation (Morgan Chittum/Fortune)
- After the US midterms, Palantir CEO Alex Karp pivots toward Democrats, describing his philosophy as progressive and acknowledging ICE's enforcement missteps (Politico)
- An analysis of 42 interviews since 2022: after US chip restrictions, Jensen Huang's public rhetoric became more admiring of China and critical of export rules (J.D. Capelouto/Semafor)
- Sources: Anthropic's IPO draws multiple times the orders for the shares available; a source says Dario Amodei and Jamie Dimon have a livestream event on Friday (Bailey Lipschultz/Bloomberg)
- Salt Lake City-based energy storage startup Torus raised a $500M Series C led by Magnetar to build shipping container-sized AI data centers at 1MW to 20MW sizes (Mark Chediak/Bloomberg)
- London-based AI chip startup Fractile raised $720M from Thrive, Founders Fund, and others, sources say at a $7B post-money valuation, up from ~$1.1B in May (George Hammond/Financial Times)
- Wesleyan Media Project: political campaigns spent ~$187M on ~300 AI-generated or AI-enhanced ads in the midterms; 90% of tracked AI ads were for GOP candidates (Loreben Tuquero/Poynter)
- Anthropic's IPO roadshow video: Dario Amodei says cancer, Alzheimer's, heart disease, and mental illness will be "relics of the past" in "less than a decade" (@firesidealpha)
- Game developer House House confirms using AI during Big Walk's final development, sparking an intense debate among Independent Games Festival judges and jurors (Luke Plunkett/Aftermath)
- German defense tech giant Helsing launches Clarity, an intelligence platform using military-customized AI agents to rival Palantir's Maven and Anduril's Lattice (Ingrid Lunden/Resilience Media)
- Sources: ByteDance co-founder Zhang Yiming says the company plans to launch a Muse-like AI assistant in the coming weeks and reach the AI frontier by 2029-2030 (Bloomberg)
- As Anthropic prepares to IPO, Amazon and Google collectively own 25%+; Amazon's $18B investment could reach $250B+ in value and Google's $33B could hit $140B (Karen Weise/New York Times)
- Sources: SoftBank reserved 13GW+ of turbines, equivalent to six Hoover Dams, to power AI; SoftBank took a $3.7B earnings hit mostly from canceled reservations (Wall Street Journal)
- After China's anti-corruption crackdown on hospital visits and pharma reps, drugmakers are turning to AI assistants from Alibaba and others to reach physicians (Andrew Silver/Reuters)
- Filing: Alphabet agrees to additional privacy protections to salvage its $10M acquisition of bankrupt Spirit Airlines' data, resolving union objections (Alexander Gladstone/Wall Street Journal)
- The European Commission introduces the Digital Fairness Act, which aims to curb addictive design features and manipulative "dark patterns" or face large fines (Gian Volpicelli/Bloomberg)
- Rather than being a spy, Alice Huang is likely primarily a commercial fixer or "white glove" for businesses, leveraging a career in China's capital markets (Desmond Shum)
- Sources: the UK's proposed under-16 social media ban is expanding to target recommender systems and user content, including YouTube Kids, Lego Play, and Spotify (Jessica Elgot/The Guardian)
- Analysis: AI-driven e-commerce adoption surged during China's month-long Singles Day festival, with event sales rising 2.4% between October 7 and October 31 (Reuters)
- MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR teardown: a 5/10 score, a point above the M5 MacBook Pro, and Touch ID works with a new logic board; the backlit logo uses four LEDs (Elizabeth Chamberlain/iFixit News)
- England's university regulator says AI makes grading coursework "close to impossible" and recommends a return to "AI-free assessment" methods like written exams (Richard Adams/The Guardian)
- VR pioneer Jaron Lanier says Silicon Valley is sabotaging itself by poorly pitching AI and treating areas designated for data centers as sacrifice zones (Jaron Lanier/New York Times)
- Nintendo sold 5.2M copies of its The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake in just four days, giving the Switch 2 the blockbuster hit it had been waiting for (Vlad Savov/Bloomberg)
- The Nvidia spy scandal exposes networks operating in Singapore that help Chinese tech companies access advanced US AI chips and circumvent export controls (Owen Walker/Financial Times)
- Sources: Rapidus has yet to produce functioning SRAM, a key step that needed to be completed by summer 2026 to meet its March 2028 deadline for making 2nm chips (Takashi Mochizuki/Bloomberg)
- A profile of Alice Huang, an alleged Chinese spy who founded Megaspeed with her business partner Kang Wei, who sources say was often introduced as her husband (New York Times)
- Records: China's Northwestern Polytechnical University, which has close PLA ties, has access to Nvidia's H200 AI chips despite being on a US export blacklist (Eduardo Baptista/Reuters)
- Researchers find that Grok Build is leaking data of over 35,000 apps via shareable links, including proprietary information, some belonging to SpaceXSI (Dan Goodin/Ars Technica)
- Apple says its Apple Support Community forum will close permanently on November 20 and starting today the site is read-only and no longer accepts new posts (Marcus Mendes/9to5Mac)
- Sources: Jensen Huang's affair has significantly raised the chances of Congress enacting chip export limits in 2026 via the National Defense Authorization Act (Politico)
- Nvidia's stock fell 5.47% on Tuesday, following a 4%+ drop on Monday, after Jensen Huang admitted to an affair with Alice Huang, an alleged Chinese spy (April Roach/CNBC)
- Source: the CFTC warned Kalshi of possible imminent charges over failure to notify the regulator of certain products; Kalshi says it is addressing the issue (Declan Harty/Politico)
- A US judge sentences tech consultant Nima Momeni to 16 years to life in prison for the second-degree murder of Cash App founder Bob Lee in April 2023 (Heather Knight/New York Times)
- Anthropic opens its Australian retail IPO, giving individual investors access to Class A shares ahead of the company's planned Nasdaq listing (Jenny Lee/CNBC)
- How US-based game publishers are losing ground in the $121B mobile gaming market to Chinese rivals, which can make games quicker, cheaper, and more profitably (Bloomberg)
- An analysis of the tech job market in late 2026: product managers seem to be benefiting most in the AI era, demand for engineers is plateauing, and more (Lenny Rachitsky/Lenny's Newsletter)
- Sources: Anthropic's bankers are weighing plans to raise its IPO price following heavy demand, which could increase the valuation target to $1.5T or more (Financial Times)
- A deep dive into AMD's Zen 6 EPYC Venice: it uses TSMC's N2P, the 9686F often beats Nvidia's Vera, a dual 9996 is up to 93% faster than a dual Zen 5 9965, more (Jake Roach/Tom's Hardware)