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Techmeme
October 20, 2026, 7:55 AM
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Top News

Bloomberg:
Google says Cloud in its London region is “experiencing issues” starting on Monday at 23:08 PDT; a source says a major Revolut outage is due to Google Cloud  —  An outage at Google Cloud knocked out banking services in the UK including Revolut Ltd. early on 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.
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.
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.
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 …
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 …
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 …
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Developers and vibe coders are using AI tools like Claude Code to get rid of sponsored ads on their smart TVs, disable tracking features, 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 have recently …
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
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  —  The Department of Homeland Security has ordered federal civilian agencies to remove artificial-intelligence technology developed …
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 …
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
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.
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  —  Apple today announced its second experience of the month, taking place next Wednesday, October 28 at 10 a.m. PT. The tagline for this event is: “Pro and tell.”

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About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 7:55 AM ET, October 20, 2026.

The most current version of the site as always is available at our home page. To view an earlier snapshot click here and then modify the date indicated.

From Mediagazer

Brian Stelter / CNN:
CNN Chief International Anchor Christiane Amanpour says she plans to leave in June 2027, after 43 years with the network; her PBS show ends in December

CNN:
Skydance extends Jon Stewart's contract to host Comedy Central's The Daily Show through December 2028, keeping him on through the next presidential election

Maya Yang / The Guardian:
CBS's chief legal correspondent Jan Crawford deletes an X post praising a man who questioned Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed about Muslim Brotherhood

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
John Koetsier / Forbes:
Dream Labs, which offers an API for its Dream-1 robot foundation model trained on human videos, raised a $90M seed led by B Capital and Kindred Ventures
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
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
Brian Krebs / Krebs on Security:
Sources: US investigators pursuing ShinyHunters, which stole FBI data, identified executives at two ransomware negotiation firms who had unusually close ties
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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