Techmeme
October 20, 2026, 10:10 AM

Top News

Saritha Rai / Bloomberg:
DeepSeek open-sources DeepInfer, its internal production stack designed to accelerate inference, optimize chip performance, and reduce energy and compute costs  —  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.
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 …
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 …
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.
MacKenzie Sigalos / CNBC:
Apple commits up to $100M over three years to Pennsylvania-based Perryman Company, a titanium supplier for the iPhone Duo, and expands its Qnity partnership  —  Apple is adding a U.S. titanium supplier for its new iPhone Duo and expanding domestic production of camera components for the iPhone 18 Pro …
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 …
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.
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.
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 …
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 …
Katie McQue / NPR:
TikTok staff depositions: TikTok executives ignored internal warnings over 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 …
More: The Verge
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.
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
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 …
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.”
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 …
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 …

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Engineering at Meta:
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