Techmeme
November 5, 2026, 11:10 AM

Top News

Dina Bass / Bloomberg:
OpenAI pledges to change how it handles data center deals, including avoiding NDAs and lowering power usage during peak times, after Democrats' midterm wins  —  OpenAI said it will avoid nondisclosure agreements when it negotiates data center deals and ensure residents don't pay for the electricity …
Wall Street Journal:
Sources: at Jensen Huang's midterms event, tech executives expressed concern over anti-data center results; OpenAI discussed resetting its 2027 capacity plans  —  Americans' vote for anti-data center candidates and ballot measures could rein in AI's expansion and hobble economic growth
Andrew E. Freedman / Tom's Hardware:
MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display review: a gorgeous screen, touch is useful for some apps, and excellent speakers with deep bass, but pricey and no Face ID  —  Sure, touch is there, too.  —  Reviews … Why you can trust Tom's Hardware Our expert reviewers spend hours testing …
Jaron Schneider / PetaPixel:
Andrew Webster / The Verge:
An interview with two Nintendo producers on the new Ocarina of Time remake for the Switch 2, which features modern gameplay mechanics like full camera control  —  Producers Eiji Aonuma and Hidemaro Fujibayashi talk about bringing the first 3D Zelda to a whole new audience.
Takashi Mochizuki / Bloomberg:
Sony reports Q2 revenue of ~$21.7B, operating profit of $3.94B, both above est., and 2.6M PS5 sales, as GTA VI sparks a US sales jump, especially of the PS5 Pro  —  Sony Group Corp. raised its profit outlook after a string of entertainment hits propelled better-than-expected results in the September quarter.
OpenAI:
OpenAI details a pipeline that used an upcoming cyber model to validate and patch 948 local privilege escalation vulnerabilities in Linux for $1.2M in API costs  —  Security research that once required a separate, sustained investigation for each finding can increasingly be run as a systematic process.
Emma Roth / The Verge:
OpenAI launches Images 2.6 in ChatGPT, Codex, and its API, saying it generates images 50% faster, and adds animated GIF creation from a prompt or a photo  —  You can use ChatGPT to edit a GIF's animation speed and individual frames. … ChatGPT can now create GIFs using a prompt or a photo uploaded to the AI chatbot.
Carl Franzen / VentureBeat:
Ricursive releases Ripple-65B Preview, a general-purpose variant of its AI model for advanced chip design, under Apache 2.0, costing $0.60 per 1M output tokens  —  There's another American victory worth paying attention to today: a new, open weights AI model that its creators claim scores …
Tom Warren / The Verge:
Discord is moving its desktop app from Electron to Rust for improved speed and memory safety; its CTO shares an image of the Windows app using just 290MB of RAM  —  Discord is moving its apps fully over to the Rust programming language. … Discord is finally giving up on Electron …
Mark Gurman / Bloomberg:
Sources: Apple cut some engineers' daily AI spending cap from $300 to $200 and plans cuts to as little as $100, as cost cutting stokes employee fears of layoffs  —  Apple Inc. is reducing employee budgets for artificial intelligence usage as part of a cost-cutting effort …
Jay Peters / The Verge:
X is rolling out a redesigned web app country by country for signed-in users, with a single unified server, saying it improves load times over slow connections  —  X is moving signed-in users to its new web app one country at a time, but it's already using the rewrite for X's logged-out web experience.
David Keohane / Financial Times:
Sources: China told SoftBank it will not allow the $5.4B acquisition of ABB's robotics division to go ahead; the Swiss-Swedish company employs ~12,700 in China  —  Swiss-Swedish company's unit is focused on Chinese market and has mega-factory in Pudong  —  China has told SoftBank …
Maxwell Zeff / Wall Street Journal:
OpenAI President Greg Brockman says H1 2026 was “pretty rough”, but agentic coding tools, GPT-5.6 Sol, and ChatGPT Work drove a “revenue inflection” in Q3  —  The ChatGPT maker's president said it experienced a ‘revenue inflection’ in the third quarter of 2026, driven by a growing enterprise business
More: Wccftech and Reuters
Isabelle Bousquette / Wall Street Journal:
Mercedes-Benz rolls out conversational models that run directly on its cars instead of the cloud through a partnership with MIT spinout Liquid AI  —  The automaker is working with Liquid AI, a startup that spun out of MIT, to run AI models directly in the car, rather than the cloud
Stephen Council / Business Insider:
Catherine Wu, who left Anthropic last week, says she joined OpenAI as Product Lead for Core Products; Wu was the Head of Product for Claude Code for two years  —  Cat Wu, who left Anthropic last week after becoming one of the company's highest-profile product managers, is joining OpenAI.
Ivan Mehta / TechCrunch:
ElevenLabs says users can now publish AI-generated music made with ElevenMusic directly on SoundCloud and that users have created 25M+ tracks using its models  —  Audio AI company ElevenLabs on Thursday said users will be able to publish AI-generated music created using its ElevenMusic platform directly on SoundCloud.
More: The Verge.  X: @rrhoover
Tess Owen / Wired:
Pro-AI PAC Leading the Future ended the midterms with $20M+ in the bank, from ~$100M, after focusing on safe bipartisan candidates; its riskier bets fell flat  —  Leading the Future, backed by Silicon Valley's biggest billionaires, had a war chest of $100 million and an aggressive stance against AI regulation.
Ben Schoon / 9to5Google:NEW
Motorola launches the $1,599+ Signature 27, featuring a Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 chipset, a 6.8-inch Tandem OLED display, and seven years of OS updates  —  Motorola is officially back in the flagship space, with its new Signature 27 phone available for pre-order starting today, but it'll cost a pretty penny.
Rya Jetha / Business Insider:NEW
Humble Robotics, which is building cabless electric autonomous trucks for regional routes under 250 miles, raised $51M, taking its total funding to $75M  —  Many self-driving truck companies are trying to teach existing trucks to drive themselves.  Humble Robotics thinks the truck itself needs a rethink.
Bloomberg:
Study: UK consumer AI spending passes £1B annually, with 5.1% of adults paying for subscriptions as of July 2026; Claude is rapidly catching up to ChatGPT  —  UK consumers are spending over £1 billion ($1.4 billion) a year on artificial intelligence subscriptions …
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Subquadratic:
SubQ Snap 1.1: the first long-context decision model for real enterprise work  —  Tied for #1 on the AA Decision Index, Snap is a multimodal model with a 384k-token context window for fast reasoning and agentic decisions.
Zoho:
Labels that build themselves: Simplified Label Automation in Zoho Writer  —  Anyone who ships every day knows this feeling.  Forty orders, each with a different number of items, and every item needs its own label.
IDrive:
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WebBrain:
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Andrew J. Hawkins / The Verge:

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