The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

In an expanded class action lawsuit, a group of Claude subscribers says Anthropic deceptively advertised the limits of its Max subscription tier (Hayden Field/The Verge) [2d]
Q&A with Mark Zuckerberg on Muse, the data center backlash, Meta's recent youth-safety settlement, privacy concerns about Meta's smart glasses, and more (Alex Heath/Sources) [2d]
Ireland's media watchdog investigates X over concerns about age assurance measures and parental controls, the first formal probe under the Online Safety Code (Brian O'Donovan/RTÉ) [2d]
Block says it has submitted an application to US regulators to establish a federally regulated, uninsured national trust bank called Builders Bank & Trust (Elias Schisgall/Wall Street Journal) [2d]
Chime agrees to acquire longtime banking partner Stride Bank for $590M; Stride will become Chime Bank, a wholly owned subsidiary; CHYM jumps 8.5%+ after hours (Paige Smith/Bloomberg) [2d]
Source: Anthropic is severing ties with the Information Technology Industry Council after the tech industry trade group opposed three export control measures (Maria Curi/Axios) [2d]
Antioch, which creates high-fidelity simulations to reduce the need for hardware validation in physical AI training, raised a $32M Series A led by Greylock (John Koetsier/Forbes) [2d]
Meta's personal AI agent Muse is powered by Muse Spark 1.3 and is free for up to 100M tokens per week, with $20 and $100 monthly tiers (Riley Griffin/Bloomberg) [2d]
Meta says users can connect their apps to Muse to send emails, turn recipe Reels into grocery lists, make purchases via Link by Stripe support, and more (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch) [2d]
Meta launches Muse, a personal AI agent that runs on a dedicated VM in Meta's cloud, initially available in the US, with support coming soon for its AI glasses (Ina Fried/Axios) [2d]
OpenAI says, while unlikely, it "cannot rule out that de-identified data derived" from Buckmaster's and Alpöge's use of its products helped improve its models (OpenAI) [2d]
OpenAI launches ChatGPT Images 2.5, which it says cuts image generation latency by up to 50% vs. Images 2.0, and adds a Sketch feature for drawing in ChatGPT (Ina Fried/Axios) [2d]
OpenAI's Sébastien Bubeck says he never asked for removal of Levent Alpöge from authorship of the work Alpöge and Tristan Buckmaster did on Navier-Stokes (Sebastien Bubeck/@sebastienbubeck) [2d]
Sources: Ramp is in early talks to raise about $1B at a ~$60B valuation, up from $44B in June; Ramp has raised $3B to date (Bloomberg) [2d]
AI coding startup Cognition raised $2B at a $48B valuation, up from $26B in May, and says its run-rate revenue grew from $492M in May to ~$900M (Samantha Oltman/Bloomberg) [2d]
The White House has quietly removed Build The Wall, a Tetris clone on its arcade.gov website, after Tetris said it takes "copyright infringement very seriously" (Zack Zwiezen/Kotaku) [2d]
OpenAI denies that its researchers or models saw Buckmaster or Alpöge's prompts, says it spent millions in compute after hearing Anthropic had a breakthrough (Wired) [2d]
OpenAI says an internal model "significantly more capable than GPT-6 Astra" solved the Navier-Stokes problem using 10K concurrent agents working for 88 hours (Madison Mills/Axios) [2d]
UK seeks to force Apple and Google to block children from taking, viewing, or sharing nude images on their devices, and praises Apple's age-based restrictions (Jacob Reid/Bloomberg) [2d]
Mathematician Tristan Buckmaster alleges OpenAI learned of his work with Anthropic's Levent Alpöge on Navier-Stokes and used an internal model to solve it (Joseph Howlett/Scientific American) [2d]
NextEra Energy, which partnered with Google to revive an Iowa nuclear power plant, gets a $1.9B loan from the Department of Energy to finance the refurbishment (Tim De Chant/TechCrunch) [2d]
Circle agrees to acquire Singapore-based cross-border B2B payments company Tazapay for $400M, in one of its largest publicly disclosed acquisitions to date (Francisco Rodrigues/CoinDesk) [2d]
Google DeepMind releases AlphaGenome Atlas, a 1PB dataset of predicted molecular effects for all ~9B possible single-letter DNA changes in the human genome (Google) [2d]
Celero, which is developing a chip to enable long-distance connections between AI data centers, raised $275M at a $3B+ valuation (Dina Bass/Bloomberg) [2d]
Runway co-CEO Anastasis Germanidis says the startup's annual recurring revenue hit $200M in September; source: it expects ARR to cross $350M by the end of 2026 (Rachel Metz/Bloomberg) [2d]
Poseidon Aerospace, which plans the first test flight of its pilotless cargo plane by year-end, raised a $60M Series A led by TQ Ventures, after an $11M seed (Sean O'Kane/TechCrunch) [2d]
Google Cloud and Accenture form the Accenture Gemini Enterprise Business Group to train up to 1,000 Accenture forward deployed engineers for Gemini Enterprise (Isabelle Bousquette/Wall Street Journal) [2d]
Researchers say Meta ran 300+ ads with CSAM this year; some featured morphed images of real children, and many linked to "nudification" apps from China (Matt Burgess/Wired) [2d]
Qualcomm signs a deal with Amazon to provide "multiple generations of customized silicon" to help build AWS' AI infrastructure; QCOM jumps 6%+ (Ari Levy/CNBC) [2d]
Robinhood adds Crypto.com's yes-or-no contracts to its platform and takes minority stakes in the exchange and its prediction market business OG (Wall Street Journal) [2d]
A look at Apple's path to a foldable device, the biggest change in iPhone history; sources: memory shortages led Apple to blow past an early $1,999 price goal (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg) [2d]
Fields medalist Jacob Tsimerman, set to join OpenAI later this month, launches the Mathematical AI Safety Institute to apply higher math to AI safety problems (Siobhan Roberts/New York Times) [2d]
Australia proposes a "My Feed, My Way" initiative requiring social platforms to send users a notification asking them to opt in or out of algorithmic content (Clare Armstrong/ABC) [2d]