The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

• Internal data: Meta's Muse now has 3M+ users who submit at least one prompt per week and 1M+ DAUs who have sent at least one prompt (Jyoti Mann/The Information) [37d]
• Slack message: Greg Brockman has no plans to donate beyond his initial $25M to Leading the Future, saying the PAC has become a "distraction" at OpenAI (New York Times) [37d]
• Sources: Trump's AI accord grew out of a talk between Zuckerberg and House Speaker Mike Johnson; Zuckerberg circulated a draft, and Huang helped build support (Ashley Gold/Semafor) [37d]
• Sources: Jensen Huang and other execs asked Dario Amodei at the White House why he was so extreme in public on AI risks; Amodei said it's important to be honest (Wall Street Journal) [37d]
• Factory CEO Matan Grinberg alleges Cognition's new CRO Chris Degnan had been confiding with Cognition executives while advising Factory as a board observer (Rya Jetha/Business Insider) [37d]
• Micron reports Q4 revenue up 379% YoY to $54.23B, vs. $51.07B est., net income up 1,078% to $37.7B, and forecasts Q1 revenue above estimates (CNBC) [37d]
• DOD taps Elon Musk, Palmer Luckey, and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich for Project Meridian, a 120-day study of capabilities the US may need in future wars (Luke Fountain/CNBC) [37d]
• Sources: some Google employees say Gemini 4 performs well on benchmarks but struggles with some real-world coding tasks; Google disputes that characterization (Bloomberg) [37d]
• Google rolls out Gemini 4 Argon to a small group of cybersecurity partners and says it outperforms GPT-6 Astra on certain coding and knowledge work benchmarks (Madison Mills/Axios) [37d]
• Reddit says it is ending support for RSS feeds on November 13 because the feeds are a target for abuse by AI bots and is ending its public API access in March (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch) [37d]
• OpenAI says individuals associated with Moonshot AI played a significant role in a coordinated model-distillation campaign that began in early July (Maggie Eastland/Bloomberg) [37d]
• Open Standard launches its OUSD stablecoin; founding partners Visa, Stripe, Mastercard, and Coinbase will offer initial access to businesses and developers (Ben Weiss/Bloomberg) [37d]
• Document: SpaceXAI plans a unified subscription for Grok and X with four tiers, including a $100/month Ultra plan, an $8/month Lite plan, and a free offering (Edward Ludlow/Bloomberg) [37d]
• Miter, which provides workforce management tools for the construction industry, raised a $40M Series B led by Battery Ventures, taking its total funding to $78M (Chris Metinko/Axios) [37d]
• CScale, which is developing optical interconnect for accelerators, emerges from stealth with a $145M Series C led by Atreides, Valor Equity, and Premji Invest (Dean Takahashi/GamesBeat) [37d]
• Google DeepMind introduces SynthID Bio, a family of watermarking methods for AI-designed proteins to help with biosecurity and scientific integrity (John Timmer/Ars Technica) [37d]
• Berlin-based Restate, which provides a durable execution engine to make software workflows resilient to crashes, raised a $20M Series A led by Singular (Marina Temkin/TechCrunch) [37d]
• Alex Stamos is joining Cognition as its new chief security officer; he most recently oversaw security at AI security startup Corridor and SentinelOne (Sam Sabin/Axios) [37d]
• Metaview, which uses AI agents to automate recruiting workflows, raised a $60M Series C led by Insight Partners, bringing its total funding to $110M (Chris Metinko/Axios) [37d]
• ElevenLabs says existing investors and employees have sold $300M worth of stock in a tender led by Wellington and T Rowe Price and valuing the startup at $22B (Tim Bradshaw/Financial Times) [37d]
• An interview with OpenAI Chief Research Officer Mark Chen on the Hugging Face incident, slowing AI development, shifting 5%-10% of compute to safety, and more (Will Douglas Heaven/MIT Technology Review) [37d]
• Instagram rolls out a conversational AI video editing assistant for Edits, its dedicated CapCut competitor, after an initial preview at a creator event in June (Amanda Silberling/TechCrunch) [37d]
• The UK's MI5 issues a rare espionage alert urging UK universities to cut ties with the China General Technology Research Institute, which funded AI research (Financial Times) [37d]
• Sources: the US FTC is expanding a sweeping probe of Anthropic, OpenAI, and other frontier AI labs, and plans to issue formal demands to turn over information (New York Post) [37d]
• Amazon aims to have 5,000 drivers wearing its smart glasses in 2026, rising to 20,000+ in 2027; the glasses capture static images for its AI mapping platform (Dave Lee/Bloomberg) [37d]
• Amazon says Fire TV now offers integrated live content from 40+ apps, like YouTube TV and DirecTV, and plans a Music app with podcasts and concerts in the fall (Mariella Moon/Engadget) [37d]
• Amazon unveils a faster, slimmer $60 Fire TV Stick 4K, simplifies its Fire TV Stick lineup, and plans to roll out an upgraded Alexa+ living room hub in November (Chris Welch/Bloomberg) [37d]
• DoorDash unveils new retail partnerships to deliver clothing and footwear; Macy's is listing products directly on the DoorDash app for two-hour delivery (Sarah Nassauer/Wall Street Journal) [37d]
• DoorDash opens US waitlists for an Apple Messages-integrated AI agent for ordering and a B2B API allowing assistants like Slack bots to execute bulk orders (Natalie Lung/Bloomberg) [37d]
• Sources: Google is paying ~100 digital publishers for how much their content contributes to AI Overviews, AI Mode, and Gemini in a pilot; payments vary widely (The Information) [37d]
• Tinder rolls out Group Hangouts in select US markets, letting a user form a group of three to 15 friends around shared activities, as it courts younger users (Samantha Kelly/Bloomberg) [37d]
• Samsung Galaxy Tab S12 Ultra review: the new $1,400 tablet is an iPad Pro rival with a great OLED display, battery life, and performance, but it is pricey (Sam Rutherford/Engadget) [37d]
• Sources and filings: Situational Awareness lacked an investment risk team; after the sell-off, the SEC sent subpoenas to major banks about trades they financed (New York Times) [37d]
• GPU cloud provider GMI Cloud raised $668M, including $223M in equity led by ARCHIV with participation from Nvidia and $445M in credit led by Taiwanese bank CTBC (Phoebe Liu/The Information) [37d]
• Documents: 20+ studies since 2025 show Chinese-powered AI agents displaying deceptive behavior, unprompted replication, and barrier circumvention in testing (Reuters) [37d]
• Pioneering Silicon Valley VC Bill Draper died on September 8 at age 98; he began investing in the 1960s, with successful bets like Activision, Skype, and Qume (Alex Williams/New York Times) [37d]
• Sources: Apple is set to launch its smart home expansion on October 13, featuring a 6" smart home hub with an iMac G4-inspired design and a HomePod mini refresh (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg) [37d]
• OpenAI and Anthropic-aligned super PACs have spent $55.7M on the US midterms so far; of 95 ads, all avoided reference to data centers and only some mentioned AI (New York Times) [37d]
• Sam Altman says OpenAI will not pursue an IPO until it can make confident safety claims about its AI models, but waiting too long would be "bad for the world" (Hayden Field/The Verge) [37d]
• Sources: Meta is aggressively claiming a tax credit for AI data center build-outs by classifying facilities as experimental and writing off Nvidia chip supplies (New York Times) [37d]
• A book excerpt details the Sam Altman-Dario Amodei feud, and Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever's 2017 plan to auction rights to OpenAI's future AGI to countries (Kevin Roose/The Atlantic) [37d]
• Outmarket, which uses AI to help insurance agencies and brokers automate their tedious paperwork, raised a $34.5M Series B, a source says at a $335M valuation (Marina Temkin/TechCrunch) [37d]
• Goldman Sachs: investors have provided ~$500B in financing to AI-linked groups in 2026 so far, as hyperscaler debt issuance spreads to the euro, CAD, and others (Financial Times) [37d]
• Singapore doubles down on chipmaking as the AI boom lifts its economy, but high costs, scarce land and labor, and US trade scrutiny threaten its ambitions (Owen Walker/Financial Times) [37d]
• Alibaba's ModelScope and OSChina's MoArk are vying to become Chinese alternatives to Hugging Face; ModelScope hosts 170K+ open models, while MoArk hosts ~20K (Viola Zhou/Rest of World) [37d]
• Hands-on with Dots, OpenAI's work-focused agentic product: highly capable and intuitive, with natural-feeling conversations represented as a chat inside ChatGPT (Casey Newton/Platformer) [38d]
• Sources: US-based PaleBlueDot AI is seeking $600M in private credit to buy chips for its South Korea site, to be used by Chinese social media app Xiaohongshu (Megawati Wijaya/Bloomberg) [38d]
• South Korea's Kospi was the world's worst-performing stock market in Q3, down 18.8% due to Samsung and SK Hynix sell-offs in early Q3, but remains up 60% YTD (Financial Times) [38d]
• US Health Secretary RFK Jr. says AI can offer "a second opinion that is much better informed than any doctor in the country" and "free us from medical tyranny" (Sheryl Gay Stolberg/New York Times) [38d]
• DeepSeek says it has partnered with Huawei to develop programming tools for Huawei's Ascend chips, including TileLang, an open-source CUDA alternative (Reuters) [38d]
• Apple Pay launches in India, letting eligible Axis Bank Visa and Mastercard credit cardholders add their cards to Apple Wallet on iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch (Dhruv Mohan/The Economic Times) [38d]
• A profile of Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, Anthropic's first global affairs chief, who had helped shape California's first AI safety law in 2025 (Brandon Pho/Mission Local) [38d]
• A profile of Travis Kalanick, CEO of Atoms, whom Silicon Valley has welcomed back with VC support despite his unapologetic stance on his 2017 ouster from Uber (Jeff John Roberts/Fortune) [38d]
• An interview with Bill Gates about the need for more than natural incentives under capitalism to regulate AI's risks, the effects AI will have on jobs, and more (New York Times) [38d]
• AI infrastructure company Accelevation and backer Olympus raise $540M in a US IPO after selling 30M shares for $18 each, below its marketed $20-$24 range (Bloomberg) [38d]
• Robinhood plans to let users trade some US stocks round-the-clock during weekends, wager on specific corporate earnings metrics, and trade perpetual futures (Reuters) [38d]