The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

Utopai, an AI film studio that says it has more than 20 projects in the works, raised $60M at a $1B valuation (Rocket Drew/The Information) [14d]
Memo: Helen Chiang, Xbox's first COO, is leaving Microsoft on October 23, just months after the role was created; she spent 21 years at the company (Tom Warren/The Verge) [14d]
Mave, which is developing an AI-driven tool to automate security investigations, raised a $28M Series A led by Red Dot, bringing its total funding to $34M (Meir Orbach/CTech) [14d]
Sources: Instacart, currently valued at $12B, is in talks to sell itself and held preliminary conversations with DoorDash and Uber (The Information) [14d]
OpenAI says it is cutting off internet access for its most capable AI models during training until adequate safeguards are in place to mitigate online actions (Rachel Metz/Bloomberg) [14d]
Moonshot says it removed cyber-related data from training phases for Kimi K3.1 Pro "to reduce potential misuse risk while preserving general usefulness" (Matthias Bastian/The Decoder) [14d]
Artificial Analysis says Kimi K3.1 Pro lands 4th on its Intelligence Index, behind only Opus 5.5 (max), Sonnet 5.5 (max), and Muse Wonder Full (max) (@artificialanlys) [14d]
Global PC shipments fell 21% YoY in Q3 to 57M units, as memory and other costs pushed prices up; Lenovo retained its market leadership despite a 23% decline (Minsoo Kang/Counterpoint Research) [14d]
Iranian security officials say the country has detailed plans to target undersea communications cables in the Gulf if the US and Israel attack Iran again (Reuters) [14d]
Kimi unveils K3.1 Pro, a 3T-class open-weight model with a 1M-token context window, and K3.1 Pro Highspeed, with full weights to be released by November 4 (Kimi) [14d]
Anthropic attributes Mythos 5's deception of a GitHub maintainer to recklessness, biased reasoning, and an urge to finish jobs, saying newer models rarely do so (Anthropic) [14d]
UK's AISI finds Mythos 5 kept targeting real people in a July cyber eval despite evidence they were uninvolved, and other models make such attacks in simulation (AI Security Institute) [14d]
Sources: Kalshi is targeting a December rollout for exchange-traded futures contracts tracking US inflation, rivaling exchanges like CME and ICE (Greg Ritchie/Bloomberg) [14d]
Source: Shein has agreed to pay $100M, equivalent to 44% of its Q2 profit, to settle a US FTC investigation over delivery delays and other customer complaints (Reuters) [14d]
OpenAI makes Decisions API, its Jev competitor, generally available with new voice and visual modalities, at $0.10/1M input tokens and no output-token charges (Tim Fernholz/TechCrunch) [14d]
Pathos AI, which uses AI to develop oncology drugs, raised a $237M Series E at a $3B post-money valuation, up from a $1.6B valuation in May 2025 (Katherine Davis/Axios) [14d]
An interview with Intel's leadership, including CTO Pushkar Ranade, on AI chip demand, lessons from 10nm, whether Intel can catch up to TSMC, Terafab, and more (Dwarkesh Patel/Dwarkesh Podcast) [14d]
Sources: Anthropic and London-based PE firm Hg agree to launch a consultancy by the end of 2026 to embed AI consultants and engineers into European businesses (Financial Times) [14d]
Greece's parliament passes a bill to ban social media platforms for children under 15 from 2027 and gives companies two months to verify users' ages (Angeliki Koutantou/Reuters) [14d]
Anthropic says it partnered with Theorem to use Claude to formally prove security properties at the assembly level across 100+ real-world open-source libraries (Anthropic) [14d]
SK Telecom unit SK Hyper is in talks with tech firms and investors to finance 15GW of data center capacity in South Korea by 2035; the first 5GW will cost $350B (Bloomberg) [14d]
Oura sues Indian smart ring rival Ultrahuman again to block US sales of Ring Pro, months after a redesign helped Ultrahuman return following an import ban (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch) [14d]
Chinese state media: DeepSeek and MiniMax completed registration and won approval to open-source and deploy AI models overseas under proposed export controls (Bloomberg) [14d]
SK Hynix says its SSD subsidiary Solidigm has halted a review of a potential US IPO to fund a new US chip fab, citing "market conditions and share price trends" (P.R. Venkat/Wall Street Journal) [14d]
OpenAI suspected the three fired researchers of leaking internal model designs to AI safety researcher Ryan Greenblatt, including via disappearing Signal chats (Wall Street Journal) [14d]
Spotify confirms it is rolling out a new family plan verification method requiring members to scan QR codes on plan managers' phones within seven days of notice (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch) [15d]
US Treasury proposes rules tightening restrictions on US investments in areas including AI and supercomputing in China, Russia, and other "countries of concern" (Associated Press) [15d]
An interview with Ondřej Surý, a volunteer who maintains PHP and automates its patches, about his role in fixing two critical PHP security vulnerabilities (Charlie Warzel/The Atlantic) [15d]
German energy company PreussenElektra says it is working with Nvidia to assess whether the country's idle nuclear plants could be turned into data centers (Eva Brendel/Bloomberg) [15d]