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October 20, 2026, 2:20 AM
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| Jason Hiner / The Deep View: |
Inception launches Mercury 3, a diffusion LLM it claims 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, The Neuron, Unite.AI, and RuntimeWire
| 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 …
More: CyberScoop, BBC, Bloomberg, Quartz, Ghacks, Decrypt, Cointelegraph, Reuters, SiliconANGLE, The Asia Business Daily, New York Post, The Register, The Washington Sun, Gizmodo, Implicator.ai, Daily Sabah, PYMNTS.com, Engadget, RuntimeWire, The Hill, and Crypto Briefing
X: @jeremiahdillon, @zackkorman, @sentoddyoung, @hamandcheese, @davidle76335983, @zackkorman, @firstadopter, @josephjacks_, @jessi_cata, @marcidale, @kimmonismus, @andrewcurran_, @0sm0s1z, @sentomcotton, and @jeremiahdillon. Bluesky: @marypcbuk. Forums: r/singularity
| 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: Help Net Security, Unite.AI, and RuntimeWire
X: @michellechen, @ritakozlov, @cloudflare, and @dok2001. Bluesky: @timkellogg.me. Forums: r/CloudFlare
| 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.”
More: Bloomberg, Business Standard, TheStreet, MacRumors, CNBC, Quartz, TidBITS, PYMNTS.com, The Gadgeteer, The Shortcut, Pocket-lint, iDrop News, Mashable, Thurrott, Tom's Guide, PCMag, iPhone in Canada, The Apple Post, MobileSyrup, TechRadar, CNET, Redmond Pie, t2Online, Appleosophy, Digital Trends, iThinkDifferent, The Independent, The Verge, and Macworld
X: @gregjoz, @mkbhd, @markgurman, @sethrubenstein, @rsgnl, @mweinbach, @tomwarren, @lucaisdesigning, @markgurman, @joannastern, @rsgnl, @samifathi, and @leakerapple. Forums: Slashdot
| 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.
More: Gizmodo and Federal News Network
X: @theintercept and @samfbiddle
Bluesky: @harmscommitted.com, @maverickhammed, and @sambiddle.com
| 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 … | 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 …
More: TechCrunch, Reuters, Financial Times, The Straits Times, Channel NewsAsia, Crypto Briefing, and Finimize
X: @edzitron, @jackchan_xyz, @firstadopter, @oliviasolon, and @firstadopter
| 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 …
More: Town.com, Inc., Town, Menlo Ventures, SiliconANGLE, Unite.AI, RuntimeWire, and Crypto Briefing
| 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 — Space Bunny 🐰, which processed more than 200 trillion tokens while operating anonymously, was an early version of MiniMax M3.1 Flash.
More: Artificial Analysis, Wccftech, VentureBeat, The Decoder, Reuters, The Deep View, Forkast, SiliconANGLE, The New Stack, and Unite.AI
X: @minimax_ai, @artificialanlys, @openrouter, @haider1, @jun_song, @koltregaskes, @tphuang, @renleanna, @kimmonismus, @adxtyahq, @nutlope, @sophiamyang, @arena, @notjazii, @jenzhuscott, @teortaxestex, @aibattle_, and @kimmonismus. LinkedIn: Linda Sheng. Forums: Hacker News
| Ellen DiMauro / Semafor: |
Sources: Waymo aims to expand its fleet to 8K by the end of this year, up from 4K today, and to 20K by the end of 2027, after raising $5B in debt this month — THE SCOOP — As Waymo expands into new cities with its self-driving cars, the company plans to use the $5 billion it recently borrowed to massively increase its fleet.| 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 …
More: It's FOSS and XDA Developers
X: @doooyle, @gathint, @devmuzzammil, @doooyle, @codybrown, @romainhedouin, @robertcourson, @prince_jain17, @lucataco, and @mchlhess
Bluesky: @pogue.omg.lol, @eleanor.lockhart.contact, and @ernie.tedium.co
| 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's government is set to sue Facebook, TikTok and other major digital platforms for alleged non-compliance …
Bluesky: @joshtaylor and @paleofuture
| Reuters: |
Sources: OpenAI is racing to secure investor commitments before Anthropic's expected IPO in mid-Nov. and aims to raise ~$30B; the round could value it at $1.4T+ — OpenAI is racing to secure investor commitments before rival Anthropic's expected public market debut in mid-November …
More: CTech, Storyboard18, Finimize, Crypto Briefing, and Tech in Asia
Bluesky: @mgsiegler.com and @conorsen
| 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 — A new software tool from Amazon aims to make switching from Nvidia to the company's own AI chips about as simple as changing a setting.
More: TechCrunch, PyTorch, Reuters, About Amazon, The Motley Fool, Crypto Briefing, and Amazon Web Services
X: @amazon. LinkedIn: Andy Jassy, Bojan Jakimovski, MSc, Kalyani Namburu, Sarang O., and Junjie Tang
| 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 — Reporting Highlights — An Unusual Request: Political appointees at the Department of Homeland Security wanted the agency …
More: The Dispatch, The Parnas Perspective, and The Verge
X: @brewjew308, @joeoltmann, @dallokat, @adamscochran, @adamscochran, @intcyberdigest, @chriso_wiki, @propublica, @brennancenter, and @davidphinney
Bluesky: @ianjames, @whumpitup, @ericjgeller.com, and @serghei
Forums: r/UnderReportedNews, r/USNewsHub, r/newhampshire, r/50501, r/centrist, r/fednews, r/anticapitalism, r/technology, r/pwnhub, r/cybersecurity, r/law, r/politics, and Slashdot
| 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 — Company is overhauling creative leadership as it struggles to get domestic audiences to watch more — Netflix is writing a new script.
More: Seoul Economic Daily, Variety, and Breitbart
| 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 — - With the recent release of the Muse family of foundational models, we want to take you inside the infrastructure that has made it all possible.
More: Unite.AI, Crypto Briefing, StorageReview.com, and NeoTeo
| 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 — The Saudi national charged with planting a recording device in a sensitive OpenAI executive conference room in San Francisco was …
More: New York Times, BBC, Digit, Honolulu Star-Advertiser, CBS News, Business Insider, Crypto Briefing, The Asia Business Daily, ABC7, Reuters, Fortune, ZeroHedge News, The Information, Associated Press, New York Post, International Business Times, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Fox News, PCMag, The San Francisco Standard, Bloomberg, and The Verge
X: @emilyforlini and @andrewcurran_
| 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 — This voice experience is generated by AI. Learn more. … Want to make your dumb robot smart? $3 an hour is all it costs.
More: Dream Labs, SiliconANGLE, Ventureburn, Pulse 2.0, and RuntimeWire
X: @jhong, @tanayj, and @dreamlabs_ai
| Todd Bishop / GeekWire: |
Microsoft debuts new security tools in Microsoft 365 E7 and its Project Perception system that treat AI agents as potential insider threats via risk assessments — Microsoft is coming out with new security tools that treat AI agents as potential insider threats, continuously assessing …
More: Microsoft Security Blog, Microsoft, TechCrunch, Storyboard18, The Indian Express, SiliconANGLE, The Motley Fool, Windows Report, MediaPost, Cyber Security News, Thurrott, The Verge, Neowin, Times of India, The Next Web, Blockchain.News, Microsoft Security on YouTube, Unite.AI, Sky News on YouTube, Sky News, and The Chosun Daily
X: @satyanadella, @rorycrave, and @skupor
LinkedIn: Naseem Tuffaha and Hayete Gallot
| Eric Newcomer / Newcomer: |
Mercury CEO Immad Akhund says the fintech hit $1B in annualized revenue, up ~50% YoY, has more than 450K customers, and is launching a payroll service — I sat down with Mercury CEO Immad Akhund — We just published my conversation with Mercury CEO Immad Akhund on the Newcomer Podcast.
More: Newcomer on YouTube
| The Information: |
Sources: DeepSeek and Huawei are collaborating on future AI chip designs; DeepSeek plans to start using Ascend 950DT for pre-training as soon as 2026's end — DeepSeek is working closely with Huawei Technologies to shape the design of future AI chips, two people familiar with the matter said … | Saritha Rai / Bloomberg: |
Chinese robovan maker Neolix raised a $400M Series E led by Boyu, taking total funding to $1.4B+; it operates 30K+ vehicles in 300+ cities across 20 countries — Neolix Technologies Co., a Chinese maker of driverless delivery vehicles, raised $400 million to fuel its global expansion.
More: DealStreetAsia and Crypto Briefing
| Bloomberg: |
Korean data-center company Elice falls 30%+ in Kosdaq trading debut; sources: Australian data center operator AirTrunk delays real estate investment trust IPO — Shares of data-center infrastructure company Elice Inc. plunged in their trading debut, underscoring lingering concerns about whether …
More: The Straits Times, ZeroHedge News, The Japan Times, and Reuters
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