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October 20, 2026, 12:40 PM
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| Saritha Rai / Bloomberg: |
DeepSeek open-sources DeepInfer, its high-performance inference framework that powers its production services, starting with support for DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash — DeepSeek is opening up the software it uses to run its artificial intelligence models at scale, potentially making its technology cheaper and easier for businesses to run.| Bloomberg: |
Google says Cloud services in its London region are recovering after a “power event” caused a multi-hour outage that affected Revolut and several European banks — A Google Cloud outage in Europe that knocked out digital bank Revolut Ltd. and other online services for several hours …
More: Reuters, Google Cloud Status, Business Insider, The Register, Revolut System Status, The Register, The Verge, Security Affairs, Neowin, The Guardian, New York Times, Silicon Republic, RTÉ, Financial Times, Insurance Journal, BBC, Business Reporter, The Hindu BusinessLine, Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, Quartz, The Paypers, Wall Street Journal, Daily Star, ITV News, BleepingComputer, tovima.com, TechRadar, The Independent, Türkiye Today, Mashable, TRT World, Cyber Security News, DailyCoin, The Stack, Tom's Guide, Protos, The Standard, Channel NewsAsia, Dow Jones Newswires, and Daily Sabah
X: @revolut, @alexinexxx, @siteground, @gergelyorosz, @maxkarpis, @theroborourke, @rmncr, @martinslaney, @gergelyorosz, @gergelyorosz, and @ownsomeshares. Bluesky: @mrsdeborahlynn. Forums: r/Finanzen
| OpenAI: |
OpenAI says its new models are better for building and migrating software in low-resource legacy programming languages like COBOL, Fortran, and Visual Basic — Our latest model advances bring stronger capabilities for building and migrating software in low-resource programming languages such as COBOL, Fortran, and Visual Basic.
More: Thurrott, Engadget, Portland Oregon startups …, Developer Tech News, Digit, RuntimeWire, Tech in Asia, and Crypto Briefing
X: @openai, @davidpattersonx, @cgtwts, @rodydavis, @scaling01, @tokengremlin, and @xodud_rkd. Forums: r/accelerate
| 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 …
More: Inception, Forkast, The Neuron, and Unite.AI
X: @stefanoermon, @volokuleshov, @baseten, @scaling01, @mark_k, @mikelecheve, @therundownai, @stefanoermon, @p0, @stefanoermon, @timt, @javiergonzalez, @stefanoermon, @modal, @rohan10395971, @adityagrover_, @tri_dao, @designarena, @youdotcom, @_inception_ai, @lbunzel, and @volokuleshov. LinkedIn: Michael Giannangeli. Forums: Hacker News
| Kate Rooney / CNBC: |
Arda, which builds AI software and agents to accelerate assembly lines and manufacturing, raised $230M at a $1.5B valuation led by Altimeter, Accel, and Khosla — OpenAI's former research chief has been quietly building a startup that aims to bring manufacturing back to the U.S. using AI.| MacKenzie Sigalos / CNBC: |
Apple says it will commit up to $100M over three years to Pennsylvania-based Perryman, a titanium supplier for the iPhone Duo, and expand its Qnity partnership — Apple is adding a U.S. titanium supplier for its new iPhone Duo and expanding domestic production of camera components … | Mark Bergen / Bloomberg: |
Amazon pledges to spend €16B+ in Germany in 2027 on AWS and AI data centers, its Leo satellite internet, Prime Video media production, and a Berlin robotics lab — Amazon.com Inc. said it will invest more than €16 billion ($17.9 billion) next year in Germany for operations including data centers …
More: About Amazon, Neowin, The Crypto Basic, Quartz, and Wall Street Journal
LinkedIn: Stu Jackson, Mariangela Marseglia, and David Zapolsky
| Ivan Mehta / TechCrunch: |
Note-taking tool Otter.ai raised $320M in non-dilutive capital from General Catalyst's Customer Value Fund; PitchBook says it raised $50M prior to this round — Meeting note-taking tool Otter.ai announced on Tuesday that it has raised $320 million from General Catalyst's Customer Value Fund …
More: Reuters, Otter.ai, Tech Funding News, Pulse 2.0, Unite.AI, and RuntimeWire
| Tim Fernholz / TechCrunch: |
Eka Robotics, which is developing a “vision-force-action” architecture for its physical AI models, raised a $150M Series A at a $1.45B post-money valuation — Robots still aren't that good at picking things up, despite billions of dollars of investment and endless videos fed into deep learning models.
More: Andreessen Horowitz, Unite.AI, and Crypto Briefing
| Politico: |
Sources: OpenAI has retreated from advocating for strict export controls on US chipmakers selling to China, a boon for Nvidia and aligning with President Trump — OpenAI has changed its tune on China. Nvidia is a big winner. — OpenAI for much of last year advocated for strict limits …
More: TechCrunch, Barron's Online, and Bruegel
X: @thezvi, @peterwildeford, @hamandcheese, and @_nathancalvin
| Sarah Perez / TechCrunch: |
Spotify launches paid podcast memberships in 34 markets, including the US; creators can offer perks like bonus content or fewer ads and keep 90% of revenue — Spotify on Tuesday launched paid memberships, a new way for podcasters to make money from their biggest fans beyond paywalled bonus episodes.| Katie McQue / NPR: |
TikTok staff depositions: TikTok executives ignored internal warnings about child sexual exploitation on Live, where staff said minors appeared in livestreams — TikTok employees repeatedly raised concerns internally about the risks the short-form video app posed to children … | Bloomberg: |
The US sanctions Chinese VC firm MiraclePlus for financing Zhisuan, founded by Ding Linwei, who in 2026 was convicted of stealing Google's AI trade secrets — Washington has blacklisted a Chinese venture firm established by ex-Microsoft Corp. AI scientist Lu Qi for alleged ties to a startup accused … | Sam Biddle / The Intercept: |
Leaked documents detail ECHOTRIBBLE, a nascent US Army Cyber Command program for agentic AI to autonomously navigate networks to identify and neutralize targets — Documents obtained by The Intercept show the military is trying to deploy autonomous AI agents to hack its adversaries.
More: Gizmodo, Tom's Hardware, The Decoder, Federal News Network, Help Net Security, and WinBuzzer
X: @theintercept and @samfbiddle
| Mike Allen / Axios: |
Mark Zuckerberg says Joel Kaplan, Meta's chief global affairs officer and his top DC adviser for 15+ years, is set to leave in 2027; Kaplan had close Trump ties — Joel Kaplan, Meta's chief global affairs officer, will leave Meta next year after 15+ years as Mark Zuckerberg's top Washington adviser.
X: @zamaan_qureshi, @mikeisaac, @zerohedge, @axios, and @danprimack
Bluesky: @aidanobrien, @michaelsderby, and @stevekovach
| Bloomberg: |
Four Z.ai founders participated in a 2018 to 2021 research project co-funded by CGTRI, which the UK's MI5 said had “very strong ties” to China's main spy agency — Four founders of one of China's most promising artificial intelligence companies, Z.AI Co., worked on research … | Paul Sandle / Reuters: |
The UK CMA proposes that Apple lower fees and remove technical barriers to its contactless tech to help Apple Pay rivals; a consultation runs until November 17 — Britain's competition regulator said on Tuesday it was seeking to loosen Apple's grip on contactless payments by proposing …
More: GOV.UK, BBC, AppleInsider, iClarified, 9to5Mac, Neowin, MacDailyNews, Telegraph, Computerworld, Sharecast, Bloomberg, Capital Brief, Dow Jones Newswires, and Telecompaper. X: @cmagovuk
| Chris Metinko / Axios: |
Firefly, whose AI software connects with existing cameras, radios, and sensors to detect incidents and coordinate real-time responses, raised a $20M Series A — Firefly, a physical AI safety startup, emerged from stealth with a $20 million Series A led by Definition Capital, CEO James Batt Buckley tells Axios Pro exclusively.
More: SiliconANGLE and Pulse 2.0
| Dana Wollman / Bloomberg: |
Salesforce agrees to acquire AI-powered marketing platform Braze for nearly $5.7B in enterprise value, paying $47.50 per share, set to close from February 2027 — Salesforce Inc. has agreed to buy Braze Inc., an artificial intelligence-powered platform for marketers, for almost $5.7 billion in enterprise value.
More: CNBC, Barron's Online, MarketWatch, Finimize, Salesforce, Investor's Business Daily, Proactive, Fast Company, Dow Jones Newswires, Wall Street Journal, Salesforce Ben, Techstrong.ai, Quartz, 24/7 Wall St., Constellation Research, Channel NewsAsia, Pulse 2.0, Yahoo Finance, and Motley Fool
LinkedIn: Braze, Carlos Garcia, Subhayan Deb, and Bill Magnuson
| 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.
More: The Decoder, Constellation Research, Help Net Security, Unite.AI, and RuntimeWire
X: @intuitmachine, @dok2001, @ritakozlov, @cloudflare, and @michellechen. Bluesky: @timkellogg.me. Forums: r/CloudFlare
| Jeremy Kahn / Fortune: |
Daytona, which is building cloud infrastructure for AI agents, raised a $60M Series B led by FirstMark at a $1B valuation, bringing its total funding to $91M — AI agents need somewhere to work—and Ivan Burazin thinks the existing cloud providers aren't the right answer.
More: FinSMEs, Tech.eu, and Crypto Briefing
| 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 …
More: 24/7 Wall St., Livemint, Quartz, Reuters, The Straits Times, Storyboard18, and Crypto Briefing
X: @mattzeitlin, @daniellefong, @andrewcurran_, and @nmasc_
| 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
More: Truthout, Washington Post, and The Information
X: @ajcimino, @ketanrama, @_nathancalvin, @charliebull0ck, @so8res, @charliebull0ck, @_nathancalvin, @robertwiblin, @bradrcarson, @shakeelhashim, @ben_guggenheim, @jeffladish, @davidskrueger, @thezvi, @emilyakopp, @itsclintsteel, @segyges, @jayshooster, @sneharevanur, @shashj, @scott_wiener, and @matthew_petti
| Ram Iyer / TechCrunch: |
Estonia-based web traffic security company Blackwall raised a $100M Series C led by AVP at a $2.2B valuation, after raising a $49.2M Series B in March 2025 — Estonia-based Blackwall, which builds web traffic security tools for hosting providers, said on Tuesday that it has raised $100 million at a $2.2 billion valuation.| Bloomberg: |
ASI, which makes AI tools for the military and air traffic controllers, raised a $325M Series C at a $3B valuation, after winning an $875M FAA contract in June — Startup ASI raised $325 million in new funding from investors, allowing the company to expand an artificial intelligence system … | Reuters: |
Sources: ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent ordered 3M+ of Nvidia's new RTX PRO 5500 GPUs worth $35B+, in a rush to secure less powerful, export-compliant chips — ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent have ordered more than 3 million of Nvidia's new RTX PRO 5500 graphics cards with a collective sticker price …
More: Tom's Hardware, ZeroHedge News, Reuters, Crypto Briefing, Seoul Economic Daily, and Bloomberg Law
Forums: r/NvidiaStock and r/NVDA_Stock
| Angus Whitley / Bloomberg: |
An Australian minister says the eSafety Commissioner plans to sue Meta, TikTok, Snapchat, and YouTube over alleged breaches of the under-16 social media ban — Australia to Sue Social Media Firms on Alleged Breaches — Video Player is loading. — Unmute — Current Time 0:00 Loaded: 100.00% Playback Rate| Financial Times: |
Alibaba, Tencent, and Huawei are pouring billions into data centers in Shaoguan, a hinterland region with cheap power and a cool climate, angering some locals — Residents in remote region of Shaoguan hope country's AI infrastructure push will deliver boom that has long eluded them
X: @liumanuel and @liumanuel
| Reuters: |
Sources: OpenAI is racing to secure investor commitments before Anthropic's expected mid-November IPO, at a $1.4T+ valuation; source: OpenAI could raise ~$30B — OpenAI is racing to secure investor commitments before rival Anthropic's expected public market debut in mid-November …
More: Gizmodo, 24/7 Wall St., Quartz, WinBuzzer, CTech, Tech Funding News, Bitcoin Insider, PYMNTS.com, Storyboard18, Crypto Briefing, and Finimize
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