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October 20, 2026, 8:55 AM
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Bloomberg:
Google says Cloud services in its London region “are experiencing issues”, starting Monday at 23:08 PDT; Revolut says its major outage is due to Google Cloud  —  An outage at Google Cloud knocked out online services including digital bank Revolut Ltd. for several hours through Tuesday …
Jason Hiner / The Deep View:
Inception debuts Mercury 3, a diffusion LLM that it says tops GPT-6 Luna, Claude Haiku 5.5, and GLM-5.3 Flash on agentic benchmarks while being 4x to 8x faster  —  W  —  hile the AI industry has bet heavily on LLMs and the massive data centers needed to scale them, one of the neolabs betting …
Cloudflare:
Cloudflare debuts Clairic, a System One-class extraction model it says processes unstructured data faster, more cheaply, and more accurately than normal LLMs  —  Today, we're announcing a preview of a new class of System One-style models: extraction models.
Bloomberg:
The US sanctions MiraclePlus, a Chinese VC firm founded by ex-Microsoft executive Lu Qi, over alleged ties to Zhisuan, accused of stealing Google's AI secrets  —  Washington has blacklisted a Chinese venture firm established by ex-Microsoft Corp. AI scientist Lu Qi for alleged ties …
OpenAI:
OpenAI says its new models show major performance leaps in low-resource legacy languages like COBOL, Fortran, and Visual Basic, used by banks and governments  —  Our latest model advances bring stronger capabilities for building and migrating software in low-resource programming languages such as COBOL, Fortran, and Visual Basic.
Reuters:
Sources: OpenAI is racing to secure investor commitments before Anthropic's planned IPO in mid-November, aiming to raise ~$30B; the round may value it at $1.4T+  —  OpenAI is racing to secure investor commitments before rival Anthropic's expected public market debut in mid-November …
Bloomberg:
Sources: Eric Schmidt, who owns ~1% of Anthropic after investing tens of millions in its Series A, is poised to have one of the largest windfalls from its IPO  —  Former Google Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt owns around 1% of Anthropic PBC thanks to his early investment in the startup …
Sam Biddle / The Intercept:
Leaked documents detail ECHOTRIBBLE, a nascent US Army Cyber Command program for agentic AI to autonomously spread across networks to find and eliminate targets  —  Documents obtained by The Intercept show the military is trying to deploy autonomous AI agents to hack its adversaries.
Bloomberg:
Sources: Nscale is in talks for a second deal with Anthropic worth ~$45B to deliver 460MW of computing power at its West Virginia campus using Vera Rubin chips  —  Nscale Ltd., the AI cloud computing firm, is in talks to sell computing power to Anthropic PBC in a deal that could be worth about $45 billion …
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Developers and vibe coders are using AI tools like Claude Code to remove sponsored ads on their smart TVs, speed up app launchers, disable tracking, and more  —  The latest use case for AI?  Dumbing down your smart TV to get rid of the bloat.  A number of developers and vibe coders …
Bloomberg:
Seoul-based data center infrastructure company Elice falls 30%+ in its Kosdaq debut, the worst-ever opening day for a sizable Korean IPO, after raising ~$151M  —  Shares of data-center infrastructure company Elice Inc. plunged in their trading debut, underscoring lingering concerns about whether …
Dominic-Madori Davis / TechCrunch:
Town, which develops enterprise AI assistants, raised a $108M Series B at a $1B valuation, after announcing a $55M Series A in June  —  Town, a two-year-old, San Francisco-based startup developing AI assistants, nabbed a unicorn valuation on Monday, announcing a $108 million Series B funding round co-led …
Paul Sandle / Reuters:
The UK CMA proposes measures requiring Apple to provide easier access to its contactless tech and reduce access fees, with a consultation until November 17  —  Britain's competition regulator said on Tuesday it was seeking to loosen Apple's grip on contactless payments by proposing …
Shakeel Hashim / Transformer:
Anthropic's leaked federal AI bill draws widespread criticism from AI safety advocates for being significantly weaker than the bipartisan FRONTIER Act  —  The leaked draft bill is weaker than the FRONTIER Act and makes Anthropic's safety-first pitch ring hollow
Katerina Eva Matsa / Pew Research Center:
Survey: 20% of US adults regularly consume news on TikTok, up from just 3% in 2020; 39% of those aged 18 to 29 and 25% of those aged 30 to 49 do so regularly  —  TikTok is primarily known for short-form video sharing, but it has also become a common place for many people to get news.
Luke Kehoe / Ookla:
Analysis: London fell from 7th to last place out of 18 European capitals for median mobile download speed from 2021 to 2026; 5G adoption has outrun 5G capacity  —  London has slipped from seventh to last among 18 European capitals for median mobile download speed since 2021.
More: The Register

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About This Page

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From Mediagazer

Reuters:
Independent Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta plans to shut down after 30+ years, following pressure from Russian authorities and the persecution of its reporters

Bruce Gil / Gizmodo:
Fan fiction site AO3 says it will be offline for two to four weeks after a security incident; it hosts over 18M works and has 11M registered users

Selome Hailu / Variety:
Sources: Reese Witherspoon's Hello Sunshine lays off about 30 employees, roughly 50% of its staff, as it focuses on film and TV projects and its book club brand

More News

Wall Street Journal:
Sources: Ted Sarandos complained for months of a lack of new Netflix hit shows and US watch time being down; Netflix just fired its film chief and content chief
Paige Smith / Bloomberg:
Ramp says it applied to the US OCC for a trust bank charter that, if approved, would allow it to offer fiduciary investment management and digital asset custody
Engineering at Meta:
Meta details Prometheus, its gigawatt-scale supercluster in Ohio, which will have ~1M GPUs at full scale and was used to train its Muse foundational models

Earlier Picks

Alex Konrad / Upstarts Media:
Tolan, an AI assistant focused on users that are not tech-savvy, raised $30M from USV, Khosla Ventures, and Homebrew, and says 70% of its users are women
Chance Miller / 9to5Mac:
Apple announces a “Pro and tell” event on October 28 at 10am PT in LA, where its first touchscreen MacBook, a 14-inch MacBook Pro with M6, and more are expected
Todd Bishop / GeekWire:
Amazon launches TorchNeuron, an open-source framework that lets developers run PyTorch code on Amazon's Trainium chips with no rewriting needed, in public beta
MiniMax:
MiniMax launches M3.1 Flash, saying it delivers “a generational leap” in agentic tasks, coding, computer use, and cybersecurity, with weights due October 23
ProPublica:
Sources: DHS officials asked CISA to hack a voting machine to report vulnerabilities to the White House without telling the vendor; the request wasn't acted on
Connor Hart / Wall Street Journal:
The US DHS orders all federal civilian agencies to remove DeepSeek's tech from their IT systems and prohibits future procurement of its products and services
Dan Mangan / CNBC:
Filing: US prosecutors say OpenAI suspect Abdulrahman Alfozan maintained frequent WhatsApp contact in 2025 and 2026 with an unnamed Saudi Royal Family member
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