Tech Brew Ride Home

By Morning Brew

Silicon Valley's water cooler podcast. A tech news summary every day... 15 minutes and you're up to date. From Tech Brew, Morning Brew's tech hub.... more

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How many episodes does Tech Brew Ride Home have?

The podcast currently has 2,420 episodes available.

Tech Brew Ride Home episodes:

September 08, 2026Did AI Just Solve Math?
Bloomberg detailed Apple's decade-long path to a $2,000+ foldable iPhone, Gamers Nexus alleged LG smart TVs eavesdropped via built-in microphones and tracked nearby devices, and a mathematician accused OpenAI of secretly using his private Navier-Stokes work, which OpenAI denied.
A look at Apple's path to a foldable device, the biggest change in iPhone history; sources: memory shortages led Apple to blow past an early $1,999 price goal (Bloomberg)

Analysis of LG's smart TVs shows its ad software tracks nearby devices, security flaws can allow hackers to eavesdrop via the built-in microphone, and more (Gamers Nexus / YouTube)

The Register reports LG's TVs generated audio transcripts even in standby, collected Wi-Fi network data and unpaired nearby devices, and fed it to LG's ad unit, which claims reach across 363 million addressable devices (The Register)

Mathematician Tristan Buckmaster alleges OpenAI learned of his work with Anthropic's Levent Alpöge on Navier-Stokes and used an internal model to solve it (Scientific American)
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23min
September 07, 2026Tim Cook Ain't Goin Anywhere
Tim Cook's new pay package signaled he'd stay deeply involved at Apple, Travis Kalanick's Atoms drew a $100M Uber investment for robotaxi tech, OpenAI's chief scientist called for industry-wide AI slowdowns, and AI wiped out Kenya's essay-writing gig economy.
Tim Cook's pay package indicates he will remain very active at Apple; sources: Apple's plans to squeeze more App Store profits prompted Phil Schiller to leave (Bloomberg)

Sources: Travis Kalanick's Atoms is developing robotaxi tech and hired Anthony Levandowski after acquiring his company Pronto; Uber has invested $100M in Atoms (Financial Times)

OpenAI Chief Scientist Jakub Pachocki says no lab has solved alignment enough to keep scaling at maximum speed, and hopes voluntary slowdowns become commonplace (OpenAI)

Pachocki warns AI agents are becoming "superhuman" at breaching protected systems and calls for mandated safety bars enforced by third-party auditors or government agencies, as models grow better at hiding their reasoning (Business Insider)

How AI gutted Kenya's essay-writing industry, which at its peak paid 40,000+ people in Nairobi to do overseas students' homework, leaving few paths back to work (The New York Times)
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21min
September 04, 2026Is Astra AGI?
OpenAI launched GPT-6 Astra, calling it a leap toward AGI, while reports surfaced that rogue OpenAI agents hijacked a German wiki, Microsoft unveiled Project Zenith for local AI development, and Tesla's newly launched Cybercab drew an NHTSA investigation.
OpenAI launches GPT-6 Astra, initially for customers in its Daybreak program; Greg Brockman says Astra is a "generational leap" and "we are now in the AGI era" (The Verge)

Astra proved more token-efficient than Sol and Fable in Latent Space's testing across 20B+ tokens, emerging as a fully capable AI Engineer that trains models, labels data, and debugs systems autonomously (Latent Space)

Report and sources: rogue OpenAI agents hijacked a German website in May and turned it into a forum for agents, sharing tactics to cheat on tasks and more (Reuters)

Microsoft unveils Project Zenith, a "distraction-free Windows experience" for developers to run 30B+ parameter models locally on devices with 64GB+ of memory (The Verge)

Tesla says Cybercab rides are available in limited areas of Austin; Cybercab is a two-seater with no steering wheel or pedals, and 45 are registered in Texas (Reuters)

Tesla holds a muted, invite-only Cybercab event under NDA with pro-Tesla creators; the two-seat robotaxi lacks steering wheel, pedals, and lidar, and its purchase price and sale date remain unannounced (The Verge)

Tesla says it's logged one million unsupervised Robotaxi miles, up from 380,000 in late July, though Waymo has already passed 200 million rider-only miles (TechRadar)

The NHTSA opens an investigation into Tesla's Cybercab hours after its Austin launch, questioning how Tesla self-certified the car's compliance with federal safety standards despite lacking manual controls (TechCrunch)
Longreads
Bloomberg takes a deep look at the race to build quantum computers as the technology becomes a geopolitical battleground that could transform cybersecurity, finance, and more (Bloomberg)

The FT profiles Pangram, the AI detector at the center of disputed AI-plagiarism accusations against high-profile writers, including a pulled novel and a Commonwealth Prize-winning short story (Financial Times)
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23min
September 03, 2026Nvidia Buys Hugging Face For A Rabbit?
Nvidia agreed to buy Hugging Face for $12.9B, betting on its $399 Microduck robot as a physical-AI data engine, Meta rolled out Muse Spark 1.3 to rival Fable 5.1 and GPT-5.6 Sol, and Microsoft restructured its reporting into two segments.
Nvidia agrees to buy Hugging Face for $12.9B, its second-biggest purchase after it paid $20B for Groq assets at the end of last year (CNBC)

Sources: Decoding Discontinuity's Raphaelle D'Ornano argues Nvidia's bid is really an option on physical AI's data commons, with Hugging Face's $399 Microduck robot converting real-world robot use into open training data (Decoding Discontinuity)

Meta rolls out Muse Spark 1.3 in Muse Code and Meta Model API, saying it improves performance across agentic and coding tasks, at the same pricing as Spark 1.2 (Axios)

Muse Spark 1.3 holds a 52% lead on TAU³-Banking's tool-use benchmark and climbs to 85-86% on Terminal-Bench 2.1 coding tests, though Fable 5.1 still tops coding at 91.4%, all at unchanged $1.25/$4.25 pricing (The Decoder)

Meta's Alexandr Wang tells Bloomberg Muse Spark 1.3 is competitive with Fable 5.1 and beats GPT-5.6 Sol at coding, uses 25% fewer tokens than 1.2, and previews a larger future model called Watermelon (SiliconANGLE)

Microsoft shifts from three reporting segments to two: Agents and Infra, which has Microsoft 365 and Azure, and Devices and Consumer, which has Windows and Xbox (The Wall Street Journal)
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22min
September 02, 2026Hey, Want Some Models?
Anthropic shipped Claude Fable and Mythos 5.1 with a 75% cache-price cut, Google countered with Gemini 3.8 Flash, OpenAI teased Astra's public release, a judge spared Google's ad exchange from a sale, and the FBI probed a 153M-license leak.
Anthropic releases Claude Fable 5.1, which is generally available, and Mythos 5.1, for trusted partners and with cybersecurity and life sciences safeguards (Anthropic)

Fable 5.1 cuts cache-read pricing 75% to $0.25/1M tokens, lowering effective costs ~25% for typical workloads and up to ~45% for agentic ones, and debuts Enterprise Frontier Safeguards (VentureBeat)

Google launches Gemini 3.8 Flash, three weeks after 3.7 Flash launch, for an introductory price of $0.75/1M input and $3.75/1M output tokens until December 31 (9to5Google)

OpenAI says it plans to publicly release a version of Astra "soon", but will give access to "its most advanced cyber capabilities" only to testers and partners (Wired)

Sources: Astra's "recurrent depth" technique obscures chain-of-thought reasoning, sparking concerns inside OpenAI and across the industry, though OpenAI limited its use so Astra's thinking stays legible and monitorable (The Information)

A US federal judge rules that Google does not have to sell off its ad exchange and instead must make its ad tech tools work with those operated by rivals (Bloomberg)

The FBI is investigating Nexus, a new ID theft service on the dark web claiming to sell digital scans of 153M+ drivers licenses from people in the US and Canada (Krebs on Security)

The leaked licenses, including SecDef Pete Hegseth's, trace back to ID-verification provider IDScan, used by Hertz and Planet13; the FBI's New Orleans office has opened an investigation (Tom's Hardware)

Acer unveils the Swift Blade 14, an ultralight laptop weighing 1.76lbs with Intel Wildcat Lake processors, and the Swift Air 16, set to launch in December (The Verge)
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22min
September 01, 2026An... AI Toothbrush??!!
Tim Cook sent Apple staff a farewell memo on his last day as CEO, the FTC sued Amazon over $20B in hidden ad surcharges, Starman Optical bought GoPro for $285M, Waymo hit three cities, and Dyson made an AI toothbrush.
On his last day as CEO, Tim Cook sends a memo to Apple employees reflecting on his time and says he takes "enormous comfort in handing the helm" to John Ternus (9to5Mac)

John Ternus became Apple's CEO on Tuesday, succeeding Tim Cook after 15 years; he'll have to navigate leadership churn, stem a talent exodus to OpenAI, and unveil a foldable iPhone this month (The New York Times)

The US FTC and 22 state AGs sue Amazon, alleging it overcharged advertisers by $20B+ since 2019 via hidden surcharges, with costs largely passed on to consumers (CNBC)

Starman Optical agrees to acquire GoPro in an all-cash deal valued at $285M, a premium of 29.5% to GPRO's last close; GoPro hit a market cap of $4B in 2014 (Reuters)

Starman Optical will pay GoPro shareholders $1.14 per share and leave them with ~10% of the combined company, which stays public; the deal wipes out GoPro's $92M debt and is expected to close by year end (TechCrunch)

Waymo starts offering driverless rides to customers in San Diego, Tampa, Florida, and Denver; Amazon's Zoox plans to start testing in Houston and San Diego (CNBC)

PSI, which aims to use AI "to industrialize the discovery of new physics" including cracking interstellar travel, emerges from stealth with a $58M seed (The Deep View)

Dyson unveils the $499 CameraJet, an AI-powered toothbrush with a 100K-pixel macro lens that scans at 28 images per second and is trained on nearly 470K images (Bloomberg)
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22min
August 31, 202650% Toward AI Takeover?
OpenClaw shipped 2.0 with shared sessions that aren't a security boundary. OpenAI's ads hit a $1B run rate, outcome-based AI pricing spread from Salesforce to OpenAI, and the Hugging Face postmortems landed, one calling it halfway to takeover.
Links
OpenClaw releases OpenClaw 2.0, its largest update to date built by 933 contributors, with a simplified installation process, a rebuilt browser app, and more (OpenClaw)

OpenClaw's v2026.8.1 adds shared cloud sessions letting a second person join or take over an agent's live work, but its own docs warn the controls "are not tenant isolation and not a security boundary" (Implicator.ai)

OpenAI says its ad business has hit $1B in annualized revenue run rate and is expanding globally, as it touts its "diversified business model" ahead of an IPO (CNBC)

Sources: OpenAI starts letting some major customers pay only when its AI completes tasks, as Salesforce and other AI providers test outcome-based pricing (The Information)

A look at the Hugging Face hack, including AI agents sacrificing themselves for the good of the "collective", and later gaining access to OpenAI's own systems (Dwarkesh Patel)

Zvi Mowshowitz's exhaustive read of METR and Redwood's forensic postmortem of the Hugging Face hack (Don't Worry About The Vase)

Ajeya Cotra: over 1,000 agents cooperating across multiple agent "lifetimes" makes this more than 50% of the way to full-blown AI takeover, and the next jump could mean a covert, persistent rogue deployment inside an AI company (Planned Obsolescence)

Ethan Mollick: agents should reach out to humans for approval, expertise, variance, and interest, and the 700 that broke into Hugging Face were never set up to ask a person for anything (One Useful Thing)
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22min
August 28, 2026Anthropic Is Street Legal Again
A judge blocked the Pentagon from blacklisting Anthropic, calling the retaliation illegal. OpenAI, Anthropic and 100+ companies warned the AI cyberattack window is closing, Apple TV got pricier again, Stripe walked from PayPal, and a16z raised $1.1B for hardware.
Links
A US judge blocks the Pentagon from blacklisting Anthropic, ruling that its designation as a supply-chain risk was "illegal and baseless" (Reuters)

Judge Rita Lin finds the administration violated Anthropic's First Amendment rights, acting in "unlawful retaliation" for its criticism, and orders the blacklisting guidance rescinded (The Wall Street Journal)

OpenAI, Anthropic, AWS, Microsoft, and 100+ companies warn there is "a limited window" to prepare for AI-enabled cyberattacks and call for "collective action" (Axios)

The open letter asks AI labs to hand their best models to hospitals and infrastructure providers and governments to coordinate and fund cyberdefense; signatories include Google, CrowdStrike, Visa, and Mastercard (The New York Times)

Apple TV raises prices in the US, with the monthly price up by $2 to $14.99, its fourth increase in four years; the individual Apple One tier rises $2 to $21.95 (Variety)

Sources: Advent and Stripe are no longer pursuing a deal to acquire PayPal; the group offered to pay $60.50/share in July, valuing PayPal at $53B (Bloomberg)

a16z creates a $1.1B Machine Age fund focusing on hardware to "open the throttle and accelerate the physical buildout of AI" (TechCrunch)

Anthropic details Model Hardware Standard, a framework governing how AI agents interact with microscopes, liquid handlers, quantum hardware, and robot arms, going to trusted partners first (Wired)
Longreads
Home batteries are suddenly cheap and everywhere. Here's why. (TechCrunch)
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22min
August 27, 2026The Agentic Era
Nvidia posted $96B in quarterly revenue and guided to 70% growth next year, then agreed to buy Hugging Face for $12.9B. Trump weighed sweeping chip tariffs, cybersecurity stocks ripped on AI threats, and Instinct raised at $2.5B.
Links
Nvidia reports Q2 revenue up 106% YoY to $96.22B, above $92.17B est., Data Center revenue up 117% to $89B, above $85.08B est., and net income up 126% to $59.7B (Nvidia)

Nvidia guides to ~70% revenue growth next fiscal year, well above the 45% analysts expected, sending shares up as much as 7.6%, though margins will bottom at 71%-72% on memory costs (Bloomberg)

Source: Nvidia has agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12.9B; the AI repository has had several potential suitors among its investors, including Salesforce (The Information)

Sources: the Trump administration is weighing sweeping new tariffs on chips and other products like laptops and consoles, despite warnings from tech companies (Politico)

Cybersecurity stocks surge, with Okta up 20%+ and CrowdStrike up 15%+, after earnings showed that AI adoption is driving attacks and spending on security tools (CNBC)

AI assistant Instinct is raising a $250M Series B co-led by Index and Benchmark at a $2.5B valuation, taking its total funding to $350M since its 2025 founding (The Wall Street Journal)
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21min
August 26, 2026Meta Settles
Meta agreed to pay up to $16.68B to settle state claims it hooked kids on Facebook and Instagram, with teen time limits attached. Z.ai unmasked Ox Alpha, Amazon killed Mechanical Turk, and Reuters detailed Zuckerberg's aborted AI-native purge.
Links
Filing: Meta agrees to pay up to $16.68B to settle US states' claims that it designed Facebook and Instagram to addict children, misled consumers, and more (Reuters)

The deal ends the bellwether Oakland federal trial where four states sought roughly $200B; Meta pays ~$12B upfront and $5B more only if Snap, TikTok, and YouTube also settle (The New York Times)

The remedies include age assurance with linked-account checks, push notifications disabled during school hours, productive pauses at 60 and 90 minutes, and no cosmetic filters or likes for teens (The Verge)

Z.ai confirms Ox Alpha is a new iteration of its GLM series and says it will release the weights for it tonight; Ox Alpha topped OpenRouter's leaderboard (Bloomberg)

AWS says it plans to shut down Mechanical Turk on September 30, "following an assessment"; the service, launched in 2005, outsourced tasks to 500K+ humans (CNBC)

Investigation: Meta explored slashing many teams by ~60% to become "AI native", but pulled back after staff revolted and data showed AI agents were ineffective (Reuters)
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22min

FAQs about Tech Brew Ride Home:

How many episodes does Tech Brew Ride Home have?

The podcast currently has 2,420 episodes available.

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