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October 20, 2026, 2:40 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.
More: GitHub, Gizmodo, The New Stack, Techstrong.ai, Quartz, Crypto Briefing, and RuntimeWire
| 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: BleepingComputer, The Decoder, Thurrott, Portland Oregon startups …, Engadget, Developer Tech News, Digit, RuntimeWire, Tech in Asia, and Crypto Briefing
X: @openai, @davidpattersonx, @cgtwts, @rodydavis, @scaling01, @tokengremlin, and @xodud_rkd
Forums: Hacker News and r/accelerate
| 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, Revolut System Status, The Register, The Verge, Neowin, The Guardian, Security Affairs, New York Times, BBC, FStech, RTÉ, Insurance Journal, Silicon Republic, The Paypers, Wall Street Journal, Daily Star, ITV News, BleepingComputer, tovima.com, TechRadar, The Independent, Türkiye Today, Financial Times, Mashable, TRT World, Associated Press, Quartz, Cyber Security News, DailyCoin, Business Reporter, The Stack, Tom's Guide, Protos, The Standard, The Hindu BusinessLine, 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
| Sarah Perez / TechCrunch: |
Sensor Tower: Muse had 10.9M downloads since its September debut, 10.2M of those in the US, becoming the 12th app to hit 10M US downloads in its first 40 days — Meta's AI companion, Muse, is now one of only a dozen mobile apps to have reached 10 million U.S. downloads in its first 40 days on the market.| 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 … | Mike Allen / Axios: |
Joel Kaplan, Meta's chief global affairs officer, plans to leave in 2027 after 15+ years as Mark Zuckerberg's top DC adviser; Kaplan has 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.
More: Moneycontrol, New York Times, Reuters, The Information, Business Insider, Bloomberg, Quartz, and Newsmax
Bluesky: @timkarr, @gregpak.net, @aidanobrien, @michaelsderby, and @stevekovach
| 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
| 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.| 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, Unite.AI, and RuntimeWire
X: @stefanoermon, @volokuleshov, @scaling01, @baseten, @mark_k, @stefanoermon, @stefanoermon, @stefanoermon, @modal, @adityagrover_, @tri_dao, @youdotcom, @mikelecheve, @therundownai, @p0, @timt, @javiergonzalez, @rohan10395971, @designarena, @_inception_ai, @lbunzel, and @volokuleshov. LinkedIn: Michael Giannangeli. Forums: Hacker News
| 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, DatacenterDynamics, Neowin, Wall Street Journal, The Crypto Basic, and Quartz
LinkedIn: Mariangela Marseglia, David Zapolsky, and Stu Jackson
| Madison Mills / Axios: |
OpenAI acquires Orchestra Bio, which builds AI agents for managing drug development, and plans to integrate its tech into OpenAI life sciences suite Rosalind — OpenAI has acquired Orchestra Bio, a startup building AI agents to help pharmaceutical companies manage drug development, the ChatGPT maker shared exclusively with Axios.
More: OpenAI, Crypto Briefing, and Tech in Asia
| Bloomberg: |
Sources: Polymarket investors pressured CEO Shayne Coplan to add stricter financial and operational controls; Elon Musk's lawyer, Alex Spiro, joined its board — When Founders Fund considered investing in Polymarket in 2025, it learned that the prediction-market startup's young chief executive …
X: @bobbyallyn, @bdanweiss, @eventwavesio, @bdanweiss, and @bdanweiss
| 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.| 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, Bruegel, and Barron's Online
X: @thezvi, @peterwildeford, @hamandcheese, and @_nathancalvin
| 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 … | 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
| 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 … | 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 … | 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: Salesforce, The Information, MarketWatch, Barron's Online, Axios, Livemint, Finimize, CNBC, Proactive, Investor's Business Daily, Motley Fool, Fast Company, Dow Jones Newswires, Wall Street Journal, 24/7 Wall St., Techstrong.ai, Quartz, Pulse 2.0, Salesforce Ben, Channel NewsAsia, Constellation Research, The Stack, and Yahoo Finance
LinkedIn: Rafael Beckenkamp, Braze, Bill Magnuson, Carlos Garcia, and Subhayan Deb
| 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 — As global governments and tech giants reckon with widespread of revelations of autonomous AI agents unexpectedly breaking into computer systems …
More: Gizmodo, Tom's Hardware, The Decoder, Help Net Security, WinBuzzer, Federal News Network, and Defense News
X: @theintercept and @samfbiddle
| Luc Cohen / Reuters: |
A US judge dismisses a civil sexual abuse lawsuit brought against Sam Altman by his sister, after she refused to appear for an independent medical examination — Sam Altman on Tuesday won the dismissal of a civil lawsuit filed by his sister accusing the OpenAI co-founder and chief executive … | The Information: |
Sources: Sam Altman told OpenAI staff of three AI endgames: an IAEA-style regulator, a CERN-like lab merger, or one lab using RSI to “melt everyone else's GPUs” — OpenAI CEO Sam Altman last week told employees about three proposals the industry has discussed for how to safely develop AI …
More: The Decoder and Crypto Briefing
| Joann Muller / Axios: |
Oro Mobility, a Hertz-owned fleet management business that has a deal to manage Uber's planned Lucid robotaxi fleet starting in San Francisco, raised $80M — Billionaire hedge fund investor Steve Cohen is backing a new $80 million investment in Oro Mobility, a Hertz-owned business positioning itself …
More: Silicon UK, Motley Fool, Crypto Briefing, Zag Daily, and Government Technology …
| 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 … | Dennis Crowley / Teendrama Snippets: |
Foursquare co-founder says the company was acquired a month ago in a deal resulting in a $0 payout for equity holders, and faults leadership installed in 2021 — After 17 years, FSQ's ending has been written. Some thoughts on our final years, an effort to honor the team … | 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: FinSMEs, SiliconANGLE, and Pulse 2.0
| 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 … Sponsor Posts
Command Line:
Copilot to autopilot: Why no single safeguard is enough — Microsoft designed a layered model that lets an AI agent resolve network incidents on its own within defined boundaries.
Copilot to autopilot: Why no single safeguard is enough — Microsoft designed a layered model that lets an AI agent resolve network incidents on its own within defined boundaries.
Will Reed:
The best sales leaders aren't job hunting. Here's how to reach them without months of cold outreach. — Our team came from Box, Square, and Brex, so we already know the GTM leaders worth meeting.
The best sales leaders aren't job hunting. Here's how to reach them without months of cold outreach. — Our team came from Box, Square, and Brex, so we already know the GTM leaders worth meeting.
Zoho:
UK tax compliance with Zoho Books — The evolving tax landscape in the UK has added an additional responsibility to business owners, accountants, and bookkeepers to ensure their choice of accounting software supports compliance …
UK tax compliance with Zoho Books — The evolving tax landscape in the UK has added an additional responsibility to business owners, accountants, and bookkeepers to ensure their choice of accounting software supports compliance …
IDrive:
Protecting your Cloud Applications Data — Backing up Office 365, Google Workspace, Dropbox & Salesforce data is critical to preventing data loss or corruption, complying with laws and avoiding critical downtime in case of a disaster.
Protecting your Cloud Applications Data — Backing up Office 365, Google Workspace, Dropbox & Salesforce data is critical to preventing data loss or corruption, complying with laws and avoiding critical downtime in case of a disaster.Featured Podcasts
Big Technology Podcast:
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Cheeky Pint:
How Toto Wolff built the most valuable team in F1
Stripe cofounder John Collison interviews founders, builders, and leaders over a pint.
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Training Data:
Inside the Robot Data Factory: Mecka's Josh Gao on Sensorizing Humans to Train Robots
Sequoia Capital partners host conversations with leading AI builders and researchers to develop a deeper understanding of the evolving technologies and their implications.
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The leading destination to learn about business and investing. We do this by showcasing exceptional talent and ideas.
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Grit:
The 20-Year Bet to Make Fusion Energy Work | Jeff Lawson
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