a toast 🥂 to the future of ai we cordially invite you, builders extraordinaire, to join @usekernel @modal @braintrust and yours truly on october 13 for cocktails and conversation, to kick off techcrunch disrupt. request your spot below!
Huawei's OceanStor M900 and Nvidia's CMX move reusable inference KV cache into a shared storage tier, but no agreed SSD specification exists for it. A storage executive said endurance requirements for one design rose from 3 to 9 drive writes per day and could change again. Industry sources expect convergence to take 6 to 12 months, with another year for development and validation.
OpenAI expects to reach or exceed $70 billion in annualized revenue by the end of 2026, according to people familiar with the matter. The growth is driven largely by its enterprise business.
Peter Thiel, Palantir and Founders Fund co-founder, argued in $100-per-ticket Nashville lectures that government attempts to regulate AI are evil, according to recordings obtained by Politico. He attacked former President Barack Obama and Pope Leo XIV over AI, and criticized effective altruism as a belief system that could form a one-world government to stop AI progress. The article notes Thiel's wealth is heavily invested in AI, including a $418 million AI-focused portfolio at Thiel Macro LLC.
OpenAI published 719 AI-generated math proofs covering 372 result families, after withdrawing 3 for a symbol error. Reports say the release falls short of the AGMAI advisory group's standards, since it uses proprietary models, includes reasoning chains for only 10 manuscripts, and leaves about 42% unformalized. Terence Tao argues that rapidly solving famous problems harms the mathematical community's understanding and collaboration.
Google Cloud unveiled Gemini Agent at its Gemini at Work 2026 event, a general-purpose work agent for enterprise customers that works across Gemini Enterprise and Workspace. Currently the agent supports Gemini and Claude models, with an API planned so developers can integrate it into third-party applications.
Factory has appointed Connor Maloney as Head of Federal to lead its expansion into the public sector. Maloney previously served as Vice President of Federal at Rubrik and began his career as a Program Manager at the Department of War. Factory also recently announced a partnership with Carahsoft and says it can run in managed, private cloud, on-premises, or fully air-gapped deployments.
i'm pulling out my suit for this Huge shoutout to @imaanxsultan and everyone else for organizing!
Jasmine says that she accidentally accessed an executive's email that OpenAI had explicitly given her access to, even although she had explicitly requested that OpenAI remove her access, and IT had failed to do so. Which implies Jasmine was fired for IT's failure?
Snyk moved its internal support agent, Snyk Assist, into the core Snyk product in September 2026, giving every paying customer access. Built on LangChain and LangGraph with observability in LangSmith, the agent answers questions in plain language and can open support cases or log feature requests. It runs as a single agent behind Slack, web and API surfaces, with tools attached per user permissions.
Anthropic has barred users from exhibiting "sustained and needless abusive or cruel behavior" toward its models, according to a policy change first reported by The Verge. The company's online user policy says the ban does not cover common user frustrations, model testing, or "dark creative themes." Anthropic has not yet explained what counts as "abusive or cruel" behavior.
Australian AI data center operator Firmus, backed by Nvidia, has withdrawn its planned initial public offering, citing market volatility and conditions. Its board concluded the proposed terms did not adequately reflect the company's business strength and long-term growth outlook. Firmus said it will now pursue private market capital and consider other public and private options.
Anthropic updated Claude's usage policy, effective November 12, to prohibit users from engaging in persistent and unnecessary abuse or cruelty toward Claude. The rule stems from Anthropic's model welfare research, and violators may face warnings, rate limits, suspension, or termination.
Micbot says a procurement dispute with a Zhejiang customer over four wheeled-quadruped robots has been settled through negotiation, after reports of late P2 deliveries, a balance fault in a Curiosity S01 and a disagreement over secondary-development rights. The buyer, which ordered two P2 units for 580,000 yuan and later two S01 units at 160,000 yuan each, had refused research-only terms for software access. Micbot's October 6 statement said it supports customer secondary development but requires clear authorization and protection of core technology.
Tencent introduced roughly eight vertical AI agent products between July and September, each built on an existing business such as games, music, WeChat or video conferencing. CraftBuddy generates 2D and 3D games from natural-language prompts with more than 40,000 prebuilt art assets, while MusicBuddy adds an AI chat panel to multitrack music editing. The products extend the "Buddy" family alongside WorkBuddy and CodeBuddy.
At IROS 2026 in Pittsburgh, the Best Paper Award went to Yumin Lee, Hyoseok Ju and Giseop Kim for LT-Mem, a volatility-aware spatio-temporal memory system for lifelong robot scene understanding. The Best Student Paper Award went to Pei-An Hsieh and colleagues for flatness-preserving residual learning enabling real-time tight quadrotor formation flight. Other honors included a humanoid tennis-skills paper and SteadyTray, a humanoid tray-transport study.
The Chinese Academy of Sciences Hong Kong Innovation Research Institute's CAIR centre launched CARES 4.0, a multimodal clinical agent system built on a Harness agent framework, at the 4th Hong Kong clinical robotics and embodied AI symposium. Unlike its predecessor, which only answered questions, CARES 4.0 can carry out tasks such as generating department reports and assisting diagnosis from CT, MRI, ultrasound, endoscopy and EEG data. The framework and general toolkit are released, with the medical toolkit to follow.
Huawei launched the OceanStor M900 and Nvidia introduced CMX Context Memory Storage to manage inference KV Cache in tiered storage, reducing repeated computation on cache hits. Sources say SSD requirements for this workload are not standardized: some plans have moved from 3 DWPD to 9 DWPD, and the industry may need 6–12 months to reach a common product standard.
Naive AI, a Tsinghua-linked company founded seven months ago, has raised $400 million across three rounds at a post-money valuation of $1.42 billion. The company's founder is Dai Jifeng, an associate professor in Tsinghua's Department of Electronic Engineering, and its team has not given interviews or published a product introduction.
BASAL Intelligence (本溯智能), founded by Tsinghua AIR's first PhD graduate Li Jianxiong, has raised funding led by Fifth Source Capital, with Ivy Capital, Linear Capital and WestSummit Capital participating. The company is pursuing an action-native, in-context embodied foundation model that lets robots adapt to new scenes in minutes from a few human demonstrations and self-attempts, rather than retraining.
Qi An Xin ranked first in China's network information security market with 4.39 billion yuan in revenue in 2025, according to a CCID Consulting report on a 93.08 billion yuan market. The company also led the endpoint security, security management platform, and security services segments, with a 17.5% endpoint share and 18.3% security management platform share.
At the Apsara Conference, Alibaba's Qwen team outlined a roadmap of Qwen4 followed by Qwen4.5 and Qwen5, aiming for 5T to 10T parameters. The article notes that Qwen3.8 reached 2.4T parameters and that Qwen3.8-Flash activates 6B parameters per inference while cutting training cost to one-ninth. It also describes Qwen3.8-Max running model-driven experiments in chip design and inference optimization, and multimodal updates including a video model slated for November.
Elon Musk announced on X on October 7 that Grok Bot will select the most suitable backend model for each specific task, explicitly naming Claude Opus 5.5. The source text is truncated, so the full list of other models and any further details are not available.
According to the excerpt, GPT-6 Astra produced an answer to a fusion problem open for 59 years in 20 minutes and 34 seconds. The physicist who posed the question added only a brief encouraging prompt, and the excerpt does not include the full text.
OpenAI has announced the full release of GPT-6, making it available to ChatGPT's more than 1.2 billion weekly users worldwide. The source provides no further details on benchmarks, pricing, or context length.
OpenAI began rolling out GPT-6 to free and Go ChatGPT users on October 8, replacing GPT-5.6 Luna with GPT-6 Luna, while paid users receive GPT-6 Sol. The update adds Intelligent UI, which generates charts, buttons, and interactive tools inside chat answers. OpenAI's safety report shows gains on jailbreak and instruction-hierarchy tests but also regressions in some self-harm, sexual, and emotional-dependence evaluations, including for under-18 users.
🍁 🦃 Canadian Thanksgiving in SF with @brhydon!
China's Xiongan New Area is accelerating efforts to attract technology firms, officials and sources said, aiming to nurture local industries alongside state institutions relocated from Beijing. Officials are targeting companies that could reach valuations of 10 billion yuan (US$1.4 billion) and list on markets including Hong Kong within a few years.
Meta, Walmart, Stripe and Sierra Technologies are partnering on a Personal Agent Protocol that would define how AI agents interact with businesses online. Sierra co-founder Bret Taylor said it will handle authentication and give companies visibility into personal agents' activity, and it is open for anyone to implement. The effort responds to concerns from six major banks, which urged the industry last month to set standards around transparency, safety, privacy, choice and interoperability.
Caterpillar and CoreWeave are working to cut the time needed to train construction machines from months to hours, according to Caterpillar's Brandon Hootman. Caterpillar's ecosystem holds about 18 petabytes of federated machine, dealer and customer data, and a single machine can generate terabytes of LiDAR, camera and control data in a day. The partners use AI models, working with Nvidia, to annotate incoming field data so it can feed simulation and training within the same workday.
Nous Research, developer of the open-source Hermes AI agent, raised $90 million in a Series B round led by Robot Ventures, with Nvidia and Samsung participating. The company is now valued at $1.5 billion and says Hermes has been downloaded more than 24 million times. The source also reports $36 million in annualized revenue as of mid-September and expects it to exceed $100 million by year's end.
US venture capital deal value reached a record $515.8 billion in the first nine months of 2026, driven largely by giant AI rounds for OpenAI and Anthropic, according to the PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor. Exit activity has not kept pace, with third-quarter exit value heavily dependent on SpaceX's $60 billion all-stock purchase of Anysphere, and IPOs remaining sparse.
Gallatin AI raised $50 million in a Series A round led by contributors including 8VC and Silent Ventures, following a $15 million seed raise in 2024. The El Segundo, California company's Navigator platform helps the U.S. military manage supply chains, with the U.S. Army and U.S. Air Force listed as customers. Gallatin says it will use the funds to enhance Navigator's AI capabilities and hire more engineers.
A Financial Times report said OpenAI told prospective investors its annualized revenue was approaching $50 billion, below the $68 billion widely reported two months earlier. The gap was attributed to gross revenue including partner revenue in the earlier figure versus net revenue in the newer one. The Nasdaq fell 1.25% and Oracle dropped 5.5%, while OpenAI and Anthropic prepare for IPOs.
President Donald Trump is launching a new AI task force while balancing competing factions as he pursues American AI supremacy. The source text provided is brief and does not detail the task force's members, mandate, or policies.
The FCC is considering loosening rules on political robocalls that use AI voices ahead of the midterms. Federal law currently bans most robocalls to cellphones unless the caller obtains prior consent.
Rohit Prasad, a longtime Amazon AI executive, will lead robotics pioneer Boston Dynamics as it prepares to manufacture humanoid robots at scale. The source provides no further details on the appointment or production timeline.
NASCAR says increased automation is helping it expand what it offers fans. The source provides no further details on specific tools, models, or figures.
A new poll finds 64% of Americans believe AI is developing "too fast." The source text provides no further details on the survey's methodology, sample, or other findings.
Meta's Muse AI agent has millions of users and can handle tasks such as refunds and insurance shopping. Its broad access to personal data is already producing unnerving mistakes.