Techmeme
October 29, 2026, 1:25 PM

Top News

Stephen Morris / Financial Times:
Alphabet's stock falls 12%+, wiping a record $500B from its market cap, after reporting negative cash flow amid its AI spending; the Nasdaq falls 1.4%+  —  Google owner admits ‘AI mode’ has hurt traditional search as sales and profits undershoot expectations
Simon Sharwood / The Register:
Google reports Search revenue up 12% YoY to $63.25B in Q3 2026, down from 14.5% in Q3 2025, and attributes the slowdown to “lower monetization” in AI Mode  —  Shares in Google's parent company Alphabet dived by almost ten percent on Wednesday, after the web giant admitted AI-powered searches earn …
Lauren Forristal / TechCrunch:
Google plans to expand “high-quality ads within AI Overviews in AI Mode” into international markets, as growth in its core search ad business slows  —  Google is bringing ads in its AI-powered Search experiences to international markets, betting that generative AI can open …
Alphabet:
New York Times:
US officials believe Megaspeed executive Alice Huang is a Chinese asset who maintained a close relationship with Jensen Huang to pass intelligence to Beijing  —  Jensen Huang, the chief executive of Nvidia, is influential at the White House on technology policy and has developed a close relationship …
Reuters:
DoorDash agrees to acquire Instacart in a ~$17B deal, paying $65 per share, a 26% premium to its October 22 close, as the platform delivery market consolidates  —  DoorDash (DASH.O) said on Thursday it would buy Instacart (CART.O) in a deal valued at about $17 billion, stepping up its push …
Wired:
Hackers leak the personal data of 41,000+ DHS employees and contractors, including CBP and ICE agents; DDoSecrets says the data came from DHS' Okta login system  —  The leaked records include the locations of ICE and CBP facilities, workers' cell phone numbers, and the members of groups tied …
Wired:
Bluesky blocks links to a leaked archive containing personal data of 41,000+ DHS employees and contractors, saying it was “shared without their authorization”  —  Bluesky tells WIRED it blocked links to a leaked archive of information on 41,000 ICE, CBP, and other DHS workers …
Rolfe Winkler / Wall Street Journal:
How surging demand from AI hyperscalers has quintupled flash memory prices and shifted market and negotiating power from Apple to suppliers like Kioxia  —  The iPhone maker for years bullied flash-storage makers into steep discounts—until AI hyperscalers bid up prices and gobbled up supply
Radhika Rajkumar / ZDNET:
Mistral releases the weights for Mistral Large 4, or Le Chonk, and says it rivals top open models such as GLM-5.3 on the Artificial Analysis Coding Agent Index  —  Mistral has released the weights for Large 4, along with some impressive Artificial Analysis scores.  —  ZDNET's key takeaways
Reuters:
Sources: the Pentagon is treating the late August freezer malfunctions across 6+ military bases as a suspected cyberattack and is working with French police  —  The Pentagon is treating the spate of mysterious freezer malfunctions that spoiled food at military bases across the United States …
Federico Viticci / MacStories:
Apple's touchscreen MacBook Pro is designed for the iPad generation, with an optimized macOS, and the company is right to move on from Steve Jobs' skepticism  —  Ever since I got my hands on the very first iPad Pro all the way back in November 2015, I've gotten used to a certain type …
Kali Hays / BBC:
Vladimir Putin praises Elon Musk as a “real genius” and says Russia is in “close contact” with Musk and the US to coordinate Rassvet and Starlink satellites  —  Elon Musk is a “real genius”, Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Wednesday after revealing the two are in …
Lauren McCarthy / New York Times:
Kalshi raised $1B led by Sequoia and Wellington Management at a $40B valuation, up from a $22B valuation after raising $1B in May, its last raise before an IPO  —  The prediction market raised $1 billion in a new funding round and landed a market value almost double that of rival Polymarket.
Bloomberg:
Sources: Situational Awareness is pitching clients to invest in Fluidstack alongside it in a round that values the neocloud at $40B, up from $18B in September  —  Situational Awareness is raising money from its investors to plow into neocloud startup Fluidstack Ltd., just three months …
Rocket Drew / The Information:
Source: Dulo, a startup co-founded by Google veteran Sebastian Thrun to build “foundation models for hardware design”, raised a $130M seed  —  Sebastian Thrun, the computer scientist who pioneered several AI projects at Google, has co-founded a new startup focused on creating AI models …
John Collison / Cheeky Pint:
Q&A with Sam Altman on finding PHP bugs, sandboxing superhuman models as an unsolved safety dilemma, robotics scaling data centers, math, agent swarms, and more  —  Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, joins John to break down how models uncovered critical PHP vulnerabilities …
Claire Rychlewski / Axios:
Thrive Holdings agrees to acquire ADT in an all-cash take-private deal, valuing ADT at ~$7.6B in equity value, a ~46% premium over its October 27 closing price  —  Thrive Holdings has agreed to acquire ADT in an all-cash take-private, valuing the home security company at $15.3 billion in enterprise value, the companies announced today.
Reuters:
Sources: the US DOJ has inquired about the impact of Nvidia's Hugging Face deal on AI competition, as antitrust enforcers continue to probe Nvidia's conduct  —  The US Department of Justice has made inquiries about how Nvidia's (NVDA.O) $12.93 billion deal to buy open-source platform Hugging Face …
Ivan Mehta / TechCrunch:
SuperMe, which generates AI-powered chats with simulated profiles of prominent industry experts to let users ask questions, raised $20M  —  When people have career or job questions, they usually tap into their network to find experts who've faced a similar predicament and can offer answers.
Reuters:
Sources: Bloomberg, Susquehanna, and Jump Trading signed up for Truth Social's fast API feed of President Trump's posts, paying $60K to $100K per month  —  Truth Social, the social media platform founded by President Donald Trump, has signed up news and data provider Bloomberg and two Wall Street firms …

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