Posts

Sources detail the rise and fall of Builder.ai, as founder Sachin Duggal's alleged financial transgressions fueled the first big bust of the generative AI era (Bloomberg)

A look at Big Tech's AI talent wars with massive compensation packages; sources: Meta told potential hires they would be allotted 30K GPUs for their AI research (New York Times)

Mark Zuckerberg says "We'll need to be rigorous about mitigating" new risks posed by superintelligence and "careful about what we choose to open source" (Michael Kan/PCMag)

Google plans to start rolling out ML-powered age estimation in the US "over the next few weeks" to detect if users are under 18 and enable existing protections (Abner Li/9to5Google)

Dropbox says it will discontinue Dropbox Passwords, launched in 2020, on October 28 to focus on its core product, and recommends 1Password as a replacement (Richard Speed/The Register)

Source: over a dozen people at Thinking Machines Lab were approached by Meta; one offer was $1B+ over a multi-year span; not a single person has taken the offer (Kylie Robison/Wired)

YouTube is rolling out age estimation tech in the US to identify teen users and serve more age-appropriate content, regardless of the birthday given at signup (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

Faculty and students on Chinese campuses are enthusiastically embracing AI, and the level of public excitement for AI in China is far greater vs. the US and UK (Caiwei Chen/MIT Technology Review)

Fable, a startup offering AI-generated security training for employees, comes out of stealth having raised $31M, a source says at a $120M valuation (Thomas Brewster/Forbes)

Samsung announces a $16.5B deal to produce chips that runs through the end of 2033 and boosts its underperforming foundry unit; source: Tesla is the customer (Bloomberg)

AI tools like ChatGPT are helping neurodivergent individuals navigate social encounters with real-time guidance, though some experts warn of overreliance (Hani Richter/Reuters)

AIUC, which offers enterprises insurance policies and audits for AI agents, emerges from stealth with a $15M seed led by Nat Friedman at NFDG (Sharon Goldman/Fortune)

Berlin-based Buena, which is building AI-powered software to automate property management tasks, raised $58M, including a Series A led by GV (Cate Lawrence/Tech.eu)

Germany-based Makersite, which helps clients like Microsoft improve product sustainability during the design process, raised a €60M Series B (David Cendon Garcia/EU-Startups)

The Johns Hopkins University Press will license its authors' books to train AI models, citing concerns that "the window may be closing" for making AI deals (Ellie Wolfe/The Baltimore Banner)

A look at the tensions between Meta, Apple, and Google on whether apps or app stores should check if a user is a minor, as states work on age verification bills (Emily Birnbaum/Bloomberg)

Sources: KKR is in talks to buy ST Telemedia Global Data Centres in a deal that could value the Asian digital infrastructure provider at more than $5B (Bloomberg)

Sources: Microsoft is investigating whether a leak in its early alert system for cybersecurity companies let Chinese hackers exploit SharePoint flaws (Bloomberg)

Core Devices CEO says the company has recovered the Pebble trademark, allowing it to rename its new smartwatches as Pebble 2 Duo and Pebble Time 2 (Victoria Song/The Verge)

Walmart consolidates its AI agents into four "super agents", for customers, staff, engineers, and sellers/suppliers, using Anthropic's Model Context Protocol (Isabelle Bousquette/Wall Street Journal)

C3.ai founder and CEO Thomas Siebel steps down due to health issues related to an autoimmune disease that resulted in visual impairment in early 2025 (Hanh Truong/Silicon Valley Business ...)

The Trump administration plans to vet AI models for "ideological bias" and limit government contracts to tech companies whose models offer "objective truth" (Financial Times)

Goldman Sachs and BNY partner to let institutional investors purchase tokenized money market funds, with ownership recorded on Goldman's blockchain platform (Hugh Son/CNBC)

Google DeepMind unveils Aeneas, an AI model for contextualizing ancient Latin inscriptions, to help historians interpret and restore fragmentary texts (Google DeepMind)

Amazon is acquiring Bee, which sells a $50 device that resembles a Fitbit, is always listening, transcribes conversations, and serves up daily AI summaries (Emma Roth/The Verge)