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Techmeme
November 18, 2025, 12:40 AM
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Top News

xAI:
xAI unveils Grok 4.1, saying it's 3x less likely to hallucinate compared to its previous models and Grok 4.1 Thinking holds the top spot on LMArena's Text Arena  —  Grok 4.1 is now available to all users on grok.com, 𝕏, and the iOS and Android apps.
Bloomberg:
Amazon raised $15B in its first US dollar bond offering in three years; sources: the proceeds will be used for acquisitions, capex, share buybacks, and more  —  Amazon.com Inc. raised $15 billion in its first US dollar bond offering in three years, adding to a spree of jumbo debt sales …
@artificialanlys:
Artificial Analysis announces AA-Omniscience, a benchmark for knowledge and hallucination across 40+ topics; Claude 4.1 Opus takes first place in its key metric  —  Announcing AA-Omniscience, our new benchmark for knowledge and hallucination across >40 topics, where all but three models are more likely to hallucinate than give a correct answer Embedded knowledge in language models is important for many real world use cases. Without [image]
Cade Metz / New York Times:
Sources: AI startup Project Prometheus raised $6.2B, including from Jeff Bezos, who is its co-CEO, his first operational role since leaving Amazon in July 2021  —  Called Project Prometheus, the company is focusing on artificial intelligence for the engineering and manufacturing of computers, automobiles and spacecraft.
Emily Mason / Bloomberg:
Ramp says it is now valued at $32B following a $300M raise led by Lightspeed and an employee tender offer, up from a $22.5B valuation in July  —  Corporate spending management platform Ramp reached a $32 billion valuation after a $300 million primary financing round and an employee tender offer.
Pierluigi Paganini / Security Affairs:
Microsoft says it mitigated a 15.7 Tbps DDoS from the Aisuru botnet on a single Australian Azure endpoint in October, the largest cloud DDoS ever recorded  —  Microsoft says the Aisuru botnet launched a 15.7 Tbps DDoS on Azure from 500k IPs, using massive UDP floods peaking at 3.6 B pps.
Joe Wertz / Bloomberg:
Google DeepMind releases WeatherNext 2, a weather model that it says offers faster, more accurate two-week forecasts and includes more tools for energy traders  —  Google DeepMind has released a new artificial intelligence weather model that it says is faster and more accurate than anything it's built …
Lori Ann LaRocco / CNBC:
Eric Gillespie, the founder of Govini whose AI software is used by the US military, was arrested last week for allegedly soliciting pre-teens for sexual contact  —  Govini founder Eric Gillespie urged a person whom he believed to be a dad offering his 10-year-old daughter to be sexually abused …
Bloomberg:
Filing: Peter Thiel's Thiel Macro sold its entire Nvidia stake, worth ~$100M as of September 30, during Q3, amid rising concerns about an AI investment bubble  —  Peter Thiel's hedge fund Thiel Macro LLC sold its stake in Nvidia Corp. during the third quarter, marking yet another retreat …

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From Mediagazer

Benjamin Mullin / New York Times:
Arkansas PBS severs ties with the PBS network, the first state public TV system to do so since Congress cut CPB funds, citing the annual $2M+ membership cost

Pamela McClintock / The Hollywood Reporter:
Disney's Zootopia 2 surpasses $1B at the global box office, the fastest PG-rated film to do so after just 17 days in release

Sam Roberts / New York Times:
Arthur L. Carter, who started a Connecticut newspaper in 1981, bought and sold The Nation, and founded the New York Observer in 1987, has died at 93

More News

Julie Bort / TechCrunch:
Runlayer, which aims to make it easy for companies to securely scale MCP servers, emerges from stealth with an $11M seed from Khosla Ventures and Felicis
CNBC:
Pro-AI super PAC Leading the Future targets NY State Assemblymember Alex Bores, co-sponsor of the RAISE Act, a bill imposing safety and disclosure requirements
Cloudflare:
Cloudflare acquires Replicate, which hosts over 50,000 AI models and simplifies AI model deployment via a single API call; Replicate will keep its brand
Andrew J. Hawkins / The Verge:
Ford and Amazon partner to let people purchase certified pre-owned Ford vehicles via Amazon Autos, initially available in Los Angeles, Seattle, and Dallas

Earlier Picks

Alex Konrad / Upstarts Media:
Span, which aims to help companies measure the value of AI-assisted coding, raised $25M in seed and Series A rounds from Alt Capital, Craft Ventures, and others
Ben Bergman / Business Insider:
In an informal survey of 300+ Cerebral Valley AI Conference attendees asking which $1B+ valuation startup to short, most voted Perplexity, followed by OpenAI
New York Times:
Investigation: $28B+ in crypto tied to illicit activity flowed into crypto exchanges like Binance over the past two years, as President Trump embraced crypto
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