The Brutalist Report - techmeme
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- How IShowSpeed became YouTube's top livestreamer with 62M+ subscribers, as his 24/7 "IRL streams" that last days mingle childlike wonder with teenage mischief (Jon Caramanica/New York Times) [5d]
- Saudi Aramco acquires a 49% stake in AI startup Humain, contributing ~$2.6B in cash in 2026 plus AI, compute, and digital assets; Saudi Arabia's PIF retains 51% (Dean Takahashi/GamesBeat) [5d]
- OpenAI plans a post-midterms policy and PR blitz, pushing mandatory "speed limits" for powerful AI and rebranding its data centers as "AI compute campuses" (Axios) [5d]
- How "get-paid-to" apps like Freecash, briefly a top five App Store app in September, pay users small sums to play games and help publishers find big spenders (John Herrman/New York Magazine) [5d]
- ServiceNow confirms it acquired Israeli startup Sweep to speed up customers' migrations to its CRM, for an undisclosed price estimated at hundreds of millions (Allon Sinai/CTech) [5d]
- Analysis: candidates backing a data center moratorium could win up to 15 of 36 US governors' races on Tuesday, including in Texas, Ohio, Michigan, and New York (Shane Burke/The Information) [5d]
- A look at VC-backed glossy magazine Colossus, whose glowing profiles of Zuckerberg and other tech titans win industry praise, as Kara Swisher says it is PR (Andrew Fedorov/The San Francisco Standard) [5d]
- Binance says net outflows were $3.64B, or 2.1% of assets, in the 9.5 hours after it began restoring withdrawals; DefiLlama puts 24-hour net outflows at $4.05B (Zack Abrams/The Block) [5d]
- Google's data center energy head says space data centers cost up to 100x more than Earth-based ones, and US power supply is sufficient but permits are slow (Amir Efrati/The Information) [5d]
- A profile of White House OSTP Director Michael Kratsios, an ex-Peter Thiel aide who is among a handful of players steering the Trump administration's AI policy (Harry Lambert/Colossus) [5d]
- Solve: the cost of insuring against debt defaults at hyperscalers Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta, and Oracle has hit its highest level since 2021 (Gunjan Banerji/Wall Street Journal) [5d]
- Lumaril, which develops AI software for optimizing industrial production by connecting to existing control systems, raised a $66M Series A at a $400M valuation (Sarah Klearman/Wall Street Journal) [5d]
- Binance says it plans to resume withdrawals in phases starting Sunday, after covering 95% of the ~$6.3B in tokens stolen in the hack, including BTC and ETH (Reuters) [5d]
- Shanghai-based NeuroXess, which is developing BCI technology for movement support, speech decoding, and control of external devices, raised a ~$105M Series B (TechNode) [5d]
- Enterprise voice AI tools provider Deepgram acquires Daily, which has raised $62M+ and develops open-source voice AI framework Pipecat, for an undisclosed sum (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch) [5d]
- DeepSeek open sources Super-Agent as a research prototype, a proactive coding agent it says can monitor group chats for coding issues and suggest solutions (Debby Wu/Bloomberg) [5d]
- A look at a crude campaign of cyberattacks by Russia-linked hacktivist groups that have caused physical damage in NATO-aligned countries over the past two years (Ryan Gallagher/Bloomberg) [5d]
- Insurance software maker Guidewire agrees to acquire Hyperexponential, which makes AI-powered insurance underwriting and pricing software, for $1.7B in cash (Anzar Mehraj/Reuters) [5d]
- The FBI attributes the $6B+ Binance hack to North Korea's TraderTraitor hacking group, which the agency also previously blamed for the Bybit hack (Kevin Whitelaw/Bloomberg) [5d]
- Tests: chatbots rely on three obscure AI-built voter sites for US midterm answers; Copilot cited the error-prone Ballot Brief in 75% of tests and ChatGPT in 22% (Washington Post) [6d]
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