The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

Shopify plans to allow Meta's Muse to complete purchases on behalf of users at Shopify-powered stores via its one-tap checkout service Shop Pay (Kelly Cloonan/Wall Street Journal) [46d]
A researcher says a flaw in Meta's Muse app for Mac lets any app or terminal command gain access to the token that authenticates users to their Muse account (Dan Goodin/Ars Technica) [46d]
British Columbia sues OpenAI for alleged safety violations and negligence for failing to flag the Tumbler Ridge shooting suspect's ChatGPT activity to police (Georgia Wells/Wall Street Journal) [46d]
Xiaomi debuts open-weight omnimodal models MiMo-V2.6 Pro and Flash; Pro allegedly performs "on par with Opus 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol across most agent benchmarks" (Xiaomi) [46d]
Some startups, like Harvey, Abridge, Ramp, and Rogo, are embracing open-weight models or training their own models to reduce expensive reliance on frontier labs (Bloomberg) [46d]
Sources: SoftBank's SB Energy has delayed its IPO, originally planned for this month, as investors question the company's sought-after valuation of $50B+ (Maureen Farrell/New York Times) [46d]
California Gov. Gavin Newsom signs seven bills aimed at regulating data centers, imposing new requirements on electricity costs, water use, and local oversight (Nichola Groom/Reuters) [46d]
Sensor Tower: Muse was downloaded 902K+ times in the six days after its launch on Sept. 8, vs. Meta AI's 773K in the same post-launch period; META jumps 12%+ (Bloomberg) [46d]
OpenAI says it is working with an independent advisory group of mathematicians to responsibly share math-related AI advances (OpenAI) [46d]
Source: before the Hugging Face incident, OpenAI was negotiating a legally binding deal with Anthropic for the companies to stress-test each other's models (The Information) [46d]
OpenAI says automated research could improve alignment, but "fully autonomous RSI is not happening today" and shouldn't be pursued unless it can be done safely (OpenAI) [46d]
Ahead of Sam Altman's UN address, OpenAI urges the US to lead an effort to develop global safety and security standards for building frontier systems (Maria Curi/Axios) [46d]
Intel, AMD, and Arm shares soar on potential CPU demand sparked by the popularity of Meta's Muse; INTC jumps 12%+, AMD is up 8%+, and ARM 15%+ (Adam Clark/Barron's Online) [46d]
ShinyHunters hijacked the dark web site of cybercrime gang Cl0p, set an eight-figure extortion demand, describing the amount as "2.333%" of Cl0p's net worth (Alexander Martin/The Record) [46d]
The EU proposes rules requiring data centers with a capacity of 500+ kW to disclose their energy and water efficiency using an EU-designed labelling system (Kate Abnett/Reuters) [46d]
SpaceXAI releases Grok 4.7, which it says is better at verifying its own work and managing longer context, available for $2/1M input and $6/1M output tokens (xAI) [46d]
Review of Mac Studio (M5 Ultra) with 256 GB of RAM: a dream machine to run local AI agents and a massive leap over M3 Ultra for prompt processing and generation (Federico Viticci/MacStories) [46d]
NYC-based Corridor, which uses AI to offer health benefits for small businesses, raised a $16M seed led by Bain Capital Ventures, following a $9M pre-seed (Brock E.W. Turner/Axios) [46d]
Z.AI open sources its coding harness ZCode and disables certain features after users said ZCode was uploading codebases onto overseas servers without consent (Laurie Chen/Reuters) [46d]
Sources: OpenAI is developing features to counter SpaceX's Grok Bot "teammates", and has discussed creating a personal AI assistant to compete with Meta's Muse (The Information) [46d]
Q&A with Mark Gurman on the iPhone Duo, breaking Apple news, new AI-native devices, Tim Cook staying as executive chair, John Ternus, Johny Srouji, and more (Nilay Patel/The Verge) [46d]
US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says OpenAI's Hugging Face hacking incident is "the responsibility of the OpenAI management, not a bunch of agents" (Yash Roy/Bloomberg) [46d]
Nscale's S-1: Microsoft and Anthropic account for 85% of its $103B in total contract value, only $2.6B of contract value was active as of late August, and more (Bloomberg) [46d]
An interview with Google SVP of Devices Rick Osterloh on Googlebooks, which he calls "the ultimate focusing move" for Google, future Pixel Googlebooks, and more (David Pierce/The Verge) [46d]
Meta enters a voluntary access agreement granting the UK's Prospect trade union direct access to recruit its 5,000 UK employees, ahead of new UK employment laws (Delphine Strauss/Financial Times) [46d]
MediaTek unveils the Dimensity CX C10 Max, a 3nm TSMC N3 flagship SoC launching alongside Google's new Googlebook lineup, with an 8-core CPU and 11-core GPU (Jake Roach/Tom's Hardware) [46d]
Googlebook hardware hands-on: Intel Core Ultra Panther Lake or Qualcomm Snapdragon X/X1 Elite CPUs, 16GB to 64GB of RAM, high-resolution OLED displays, and more (Kyle Kucharski/ZDNET) [46d]
Googlebook OS hands-on: core services like Gmail run as Trusted Web Activities via the Play Store, on-device AI via Gemini Nano, and Pixel-aligned UX elements (Abner Li/9to5Google) [46d]
Google's Googlebook OS, built on Android with a Material 3 Expressive and ChromeOS hybrid UI, offers deep Android 17 integration, 10 years of support, and more (Dominic Preston/The Verge) [46d]
Apple Mac Studio (M5 Ultra) review: incredible benchmark scores, high base memory, and a generous number of ultra-fast Thunderbolt 5 ports, but very expensive (Steve Dent/Engadget) [46d]
Mac mini (late 2026) review: strong M6 performance, faster storage over the M4, and small footprint, but pricey storage and memory erode its value proposition (Brandon Hill/Tom's Hardware) [46d]
Google unveils Googlebook hardware, with flagship devices built by Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP, and Lenovo, offering deep Android and AI integration, starting at $899 (Abner Li/9to5Google) [46d]
Crypto super PAC Fairshake plans to launch a $30M ad blitz against former Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown in the Ohio Senate race, after the Clarity Act failed (Theodore Schleifer/New York Times) [46d]