The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

• Two US officials and a Western official say the order to limit Ukraine's access to SpaceX's Starshield came from inside the White House (Reuters) [22d]
• Netflix Chief Content Officer Bela Bajaria is leaving the company and will be replaced by former Disney and Fox executive Peter Rice, who starts October 26 (Rebecca Rubin/Variety) [22d]
• Bluesky expands Attie, its AI tool for building custom feeds, with a "social vibe coding" feature to create sites, games, quizzes, and more on the AT Protocol (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch) [22d]
• Sources: some Anthropic investors discussed a ~$1.5T valuation for its IPO, down from ~$2T they had expected, after disclosures showed slowing Q3 revenue growth (Reuters) [22d]
• Experts say Meta's new terms of use will allow scraping of websites, including news sites, "associated with" business accounts on its platforms, with no opt out (Nieman Lab) [22d]
• Thoma Bravo-owned cybersecurity company Proofpoint plans to buy data security firm Varonis Systems in an all-cash deal valued at about $6.3B (Jaspreet Singh/Reuters) [22d]
• A US official says Trump didn't order any limitations on Ukraine's access to SpaceX's Starshield; Elon Musk said any limits are ultimately decided by POTUS (Kate Sullivan/Bloomberg) [22d]
• A researcher says modern neural networks are far more interpretable than believed, with most neurons understandable in models up to trillions of parameters (Nick Cammarata/Goodfire) [22d]
• Perplexity open sources SPACE, its AI agent sandbox, and says partners including CoreWeave, Akamai, and Crusoe agreed to offer SPACE to customers (Reed Albergotti/Semafor) [22d]
• Sources: top DOJ officials halt career prosecutors' Biden-era investigation of Meta over facilitating illegal drug sales and are weighing more lenient options (Ben Penn/Bloomberg Law) [22d]
• Google says it has 400+ publications in its News AI pilot, which tests features like overviews; participants include Financial Times, CNN, and The Texas Tribune (Andrew Deck/Nieman Lab) [22d]
• Two workers have been killed and another seriously injured at Intel's Kiryat Gat fab in Israel in an explosion resulting from a gas cylinder malfunctioning (CTech) [22d]
• Volvo says it will use Nvidia's Hyperion platform to launch a Level 2++ hands-free, point-to-point automated driving system by 2030 (Andrew J. Hawkins/The Verge) [22d]
• Memo: Accenture has told many employees, some of whom had been spending as much as $1,000 monthly, that it will now only spend $29 a month per person on Claude (Joseph Cox/404 Media) [22d]
• Anthropic says it is giving employee-like access to METR as part of its pledge to partner with evaluators for assessment of its models and safety practices (Anthropic) [22d]
• Sunbound, which makes software for handling billing, insurance claims, and payments for senior living operators, raised a $24M Series A led by TTV Capital (Ryan Lawler/Axios) [22d]
• Alexandr Wang says ex-Apple exec Daniel Gross, now at Meta, helped bring Meta and Apple together: "we're excited for mommy and daddy to be playing nice again" (Ina Fried/Axios) [22d]
• Meta says it worked with Apple to make Muse Spark Open run locally on M5 Ultra Mac Studios, letting users pair two to four Studios to code or do agentic work (CNBC) [22d]
• Meta releases Muse Spark Open, saying it is the most capable US open-weight model, with 816B total and 42B active parameters and a 1M-token context window (Meta AI Research) [22d]
• Sources: Binance.US seeks to raise up to $100M, targeting a ~$1B valuation in the private round, as it aims to expand its US business; WLF is not participating (Bloomberg) [22d]
• E Ink unveils Kaleido 4, its next-gen color e-paper tech, replacing the Kaleido 3 displays currently used by brands including Amazon, Kobo, and PocketBook (Andrew Liszewski/The Verge) [22d]
• Nvidia launches Nemotron 3.5 Super VL, a 120B-parameter open model for enterprise agents, and says it outperforms frontier models on specialized benchmarks (Carl Franzen/VentureBeat) [22d]
• Sony launches three new Android-powered Walkman music players, including the gold-plated NW-WM1ZM3 for $5,900, as it targets the audiophile market (Chris Welch/Bloomberg) [22d]
• Documents: Nvidia and Apple each committed $25M, the top contribution amount, to Trump's WH ballroom; Microsoft and Palantir committed $10M, Meta and Amazon $5M (Washington Post) [22d]
• Portland-based Mueon, which says its AI server racks could fit up to 10x more computing capacity, raised $65M led by Maverick Silicon, with Intel participating (Phoebe Liu/The Information) [22d]
• North.cloud, which helps companies watch their cloud, AI and data spend, raised a $60M Series B led by PeakSpan Capital, taking its total funding to $67M (Chris Metinko/Axios) [22d]
• An interview with John Ternus, who says the memory shortage is "a crisis" and "all options should be on the table", and that Tim Cook "has great relationships" (Andrew R. Chow/Time) [22d]
• Q&A with Dwarkesh Patel on his podcast, lessons from history, AGI, the mood in San Francisco, the Hugging Face hack, Chinese AI, pacing the frontier, and more (New York Times) [22d]
• BofA says it hired 1,000 contractors in Q2 to support 3,000 internal staff in patching proprietary and vendor software flaws exposed by AI models like Mythos (Hugh Son/CNBC) [22d]
• Nvidia's RTX Spark Superchip in the Surface Laptop Ultra outperforms Apple's M5 Max MacBook Pro by ~25% in agentic AI completion benchmarks using Qwen models (Jeffrey Kampman/Tom's Hardware) [22d]
• Ledger unveils Atom, an $899 data-only Android-based smartphone companion device launching in summer 2027, as it pauses some sales following hardware tampering (Dominic Preston/The Verge) [22d]
• Amazon launches two AI wearables, the $75 Bee Frontier wristband and $100 Bee Eclipse magnetic phone-attachment recorder, with a $12/month Bee Pro subscription (Bloomberg) [22d]
• Sources: OpenAI executives have warned staff over potential espionage like honey pots and insider threats and told them to adopt operational security measures (Wall Street Journal) [22d]