Tech Brew Ride Home

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Tech Brew Ride Home episodes

November 02OpenAI Can't Hit Its Target
OpenAI cut its funding round to about $20B at a $1.25T valuation as the AI selloff spooked investors. Anthropic’s S-1 showed nearly $17B in quarterly revenue, Marvell agreed to buy Lumentum for $115B, and Claude Code got game-cloning limits.
Sources: OpenAI now seeks ~$20B at a $1.25T valuation for its latest round, from $30B at a $1.4T valuation, as some investors cut commitments amid an AI selloff (Financial Times)

Anthropic’s updated S-1 shows Q3 revenue of nearly $17B, up from $1.4B a year ago, and a $23.3B net loss, as it plans to spend more than $895B in the years ahead (Bloomberg)

Sources: neoclouds CoreWeave, Nebius, and Nscale have effectively been shut out of the bond market in recent weeks as lenders and investors demand tougher terms (WSJ)

The cost of insuring against debt defaults at hyperscalers Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta, and Oracle has hit its highest level since 2021, as investors and tech executives turn to options and credit-default swaps for protection (WSJ)

Marvell agrees to acquire optical components maker Lumentum in a $115B all-stock deal, as it aims to rival Broadcom; Nvidia invested $2B in each company in 2026 (Reuters)

Marvell shareholders get 67% of the combined company in the all-stock deal, which isn’t expected to close until the first half of 2028, and shares of both companies slid on the news (Bloomberg)

Anthropic confirms new Claude Code limits “to steer it away from recreating someone else’s specific game”, saying IP infringement violates its usage policy (Tom’s Hardware)
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AvidXchange is a licensed money transmitter for B2B payments in the United States, licensed as a Money Transmitter by the New York State Department of Financial Services, as well as all other states that require AvidXchange to have a license.
22 min
October 30How Hackers Drained $6.3B From Binance
Overnight brought the biggest heist in crypto history, as hackers drained $6.3 billion from Binance. Amazon’s AI spending soared while retail growth stalled, Spotify eyed a $5-a-month AI remix tool, and longreads covered El Niño forecasting and old-time fiddlers.
Binance says initial investigation suggests a compromised DevOps laptop may have enabled a ~$6.3B hack; Tether froze 1.5B+ USDT and Circle froze 800M+ USDC (The Block)

Binance raced to cover losses from the biggest crypto heist ever; freezes recovered ~$3B, leaving hackers — attributed to North Korea’s TraderTraitor group — with ~$3.3B, against a $1.23B SAFU reserve plus company funds (WSJ)

An EIP-7702 permission let the attacker point Binance’s busy “Binance 14” hot wallet at a sweeper contract via 50 signed authorizations, draining $2.5B on Ethereum alone (CoinDesk)

Amazon reports Q3 revenue up 12% YoY to $201.94B, vs. $202.31B est., net income down 2% to $20.7B, forecasts Q4 revenue below est. (Business Wire)

Amazon spent $77B+ on property and equipment in Q3 to meet AI demand, while online sales grew just 2%, the slowest since early 2023, and shares fell on the results (Bloomberg)

Sources: Spotify aims to launch an AI product in Q1 2027 that lets subscribers create their own remixes and covers for ~$5 per month, pending licensing deals (FT)
Longreads
AI’s ability to forecast extreme weather faces a major test in the coming months amid a historic El Niño, as some scientists question the tech’s accuracy (FT)

In a southwest Virginia fairground, thousands of musicians gather every August to keep the centuries-old tradition of fiddling from flickering out (Longreads)
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23 min
October 29A Chinese Spy Inside Nvidia?
I covered the NYT report that US officials think Megaspeed’s Alice Huang is a Chinese asset who cozied up to Jensen Huang, the leak of 41,000 DHS workers’ data, DoorDash’s $17B Instacart grab, and Alphabet’s ugly free cash flow.
US officials believe Megaspeed executive Alice Huang is a Chinese asset who maintained a close relationship with Jensen Huang to pass intelligence to Beijing (The New York Times)

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 (Wired)

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 (Reuters)

DoorDash agrees to buy Instacart for $17B with both boards signing off; it plans to keep Instacart’s brand, enterprise tech, and app, and says grocers could build their own ordering and ad businesses (TechCrunch)

Alphabet reports Q3 negative free cash flow of $9.07B, worse than expected, capex of $51.36B, below $55.09B est., and keeps its FY capex forecast at $195B-$205B (CNBC)

Alphabet’s ad machine misses Q3 estimates as search revenue growth slows to 12% from 17%, even with cloud beating at $30.7B; shares fall about 10% after hours (WSJ)

Google expands ads in AI Mode to international markets, adding multi-turn ads in the US, betting generative AI can open new revenue as core search ad growth slows (TechCrunch)
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23 min
October 28Apple Caves: A Touchscreen Mac
Apple unveiled a touchscreen MacBook Pro, finally ditching Jobs’s stance. Then Amazon unloaded gadgets: a $500 Echo Show 16, the Echo Time alarm clock, an Alexa Photo Frame, and an Echo Studio with a camera. Not one AI story all day.
Apple unveils a touchscreen MacBook Pro with a 14" or 16" PROLED XDR display, a light-up Apple logo, Dynamic Island, M5 Pro and M5 Max, for $2,899+ and $3,399+ (Apple)

The new touchscreen MacBook Pro has a tandem OLED “PROLED XDR” display with up to 2,000 nits and 120Hz, a Dynamic Island, a glowing Apple logo on the lid, M5 Pro and M5 Max chips, and up to 24 hours of battery (The Verge)

New CEO John Ternus introduced the touchscreen MacBook Pro on stage, reversing Steve Jobs’ long-held opposition to touch Macs, which Tim Cook once compared to merging a fridge and a toaster (Bloomberg)

Amazon unveils the $500 Echo Show 16, the $200 Echo Time alarm, and the $200+ Alexa Photo Frame, raises smart speaker prices, and previews Alexa Home Map (Bloomberg)

Panos Panay spent about 45 minutes introducing five new Echo speakers and displays, plus a “new brain” for Alexa Plus that can do “deeper research” and a Card interface that collects each chat (The Verge)

Hands-on with the Echo Show 16: customizable Screen Styles could make it the versatile family hub Alexa users have wanted, but at double the price of the Echo Show 11 it may be too expensive (The Verge)

Amazon debuts the Alexa Photo Frame and Echo Time smart clock, plus other upgraded devices (TechCrunch)

The $199.99 Echo Time smart alarm has a 3.2-inch round touchscreen, a screen that dims below 0.3 nits, and opt-in sleep sensing that wakes you up to an hour early at the optimal point in your sleep cycle (The Verge)

Amazon’s new Echo Studio speaker has a camera (The Verge)

The $249.99 Echo Studio with Home Camera lets you ask Alexa about objects in the room, doubles as a home video feed, and handles video calls, though visual information is processed in the cloud (Gizmodo)
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22 min
October 27Who Inherits Anthropic?
OpenAI claimed three fresh breakthroughs in math, physics, and computer science — including that the Exponential Time Hypothesis is false. Apple unveiled the M6 MacBook Pro. Microsoft offered buyouts to ~60K workers, a quarter of headcount. Plus, Anthropic S-1 nuggets.
OpenAI announces three breakthroughs in computer science, math, and physics, including that the Exponential Time Hypothesis, a longstanding conjecture, is false (OpenAI)

OpenAI used external “shepherd” experts to guide its computer science and physics results, while its AGMAI panel of math advisers recommends AI companies drop the practice, citing unequal access, borrowed reputation, and biased selection (The Verge)

Apple unveils the 14-inch MacBook Pro with M6, with a 12-core CPU and a 12-core GPU, up to 32GB of unified memory, and Wi-Fi 7, from $1,999 on November 6 (Apple)

The M6 MacBook Pro, the new base model replacing the M5, charges to 50% in 30 minutes, adds Bluetooth 6, and opens for pre-order tomorrow, October 28, in silver and space black (9to5Mac)

Microsoft offers buyouts to ~60K workers, including at a VP level and below across the US, Canada, India, and the UK; its headcount at the end of June was 223K (Bloomberg)

S-1: as of September 30, Anthropic had 11,900+ customers spending $100,000+ annually, 1,900+ customers spending $1M+, and ~250 customers spending $10M+ (TechCrunch)

Anthropic’s IPO filing contains an unusual succession plan: each co-founder can name a confidential ranked list of up to 10 successors to their voting power, subject to approval from five of the other six co-founders (Forbes)

Anthropic’s 85% gross margin on serving existing models and $3.5B in free cash flow on $16.3B of first-half revenue is a reality check for skeptics of pay-as-you-go AI economics (The Information)
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22 min
October 26Anthropic's S-1 Just Dropped!
Anthropic’s S-1 finally dropped: ticker ANT, $16.3B in first-half revenue, and a gargantuan compute bill. Apple unveiled an OLED iPad mini, Meta moved to raise $95B for AI, Elvis’s rightsholders sued Anthropic, and Block’s Dessa speech model wowed me.
Anthropic files for an IPO on the Nasdaq under the symbol ANT; the number of Class A shares to be offered and the price range is yet to be determined (Anthropic)

Anthropic’s S-1 shows revenue up 14-fold to $16.3B in the first half, an $80.7B loss driven by a one-time $72.4B convertible note charge, and a possible $100B+ raise at a $2T valuation (The New York Times)

Anthropic’s S-1 shows a real GAAP operating profit and 14x revenue growth, but also roughly $780-810B of mostly non-cancelable compute commitments, including Elon Musk as a supplier at $3.1B a month (ZeroHedge)

Apple unveils a redesigned iPad mini with an 8.5-inch OLED display, A20 Pro, 24% thinner bezels, and an optional nano-texture finish, for $699+ on November 6 (Apple)

The new iPad mini gets an “Acoustic Display” with woofers and hidden tweeters, a 12MP Center Stage camera on the landscape edge, and a $100 nano-texture glass option on the 256GB and 512GB models (9to5Mac)

Meta plans to raise $95B to finance its AI infrastructure, including $35B in public equity offerings, backed by cornerstone investors Nvidia, AMD, and Broadcom (Financial Times)

Elvis Presley’s rightsholders sue Anthropic over 274 songs allegedly used to train its models, seeking $41M+; Anthropic says it disagrees and will defend itself (The New York Times)

Block unveils Dessa, a “true speech-to-speech” AI model trained on “nothing but human conversation” that it says runs locally on a MacBook Pro M4 Max or newer (The Verge)

The public internet model is effectively dead due to saturation, algorithmic aggregators, and AI security vulnerabilities, and that may open new possibilities (Stratechery)

AI-powered hacks are overwhelming incident-response firms in “Black October,” with nation-state and criminal groups using the Chinese open-source tool Artex to speed up attacks on hundreds of companies (The Wall Street Journal)
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26 min
October 23OpenAI Takes a $150B Haircut
OpenAI neared a $30B bridge round at a $1.25T valuation, down from the $1.4T it pitched, ahead of an IPO. Treasury proposed curbs on US tech investment in China, banks blocked rogue AI agents, and OpenAI launched its Decisions API.
Sources: OpenAI nears an up to $30B round led by investors from the UAE and Coatue at a $1.25T pre-money valuation, as an “opportunistic” bridge ahead of an IPO (CNBC)

The US Treasury proposes a rule to crack down on US high-tech investments in areas like AI and supercomputing in China, Russia, and other “countries of concern” (AP)

DeepSeek and MiniMax have won approval to deploy their models overseas, as Beijing says much of Chinese AI will remain free for export despite its draft export-control proposal (Bloomberg)

OpenAI makes Decisions API, its Jev competitor, generally available with new voice and visual modalities, at $0.10/1M input tokens and no output-token charges (TechCrunch)

Sources: US banks are restricting third-party AI agents from accessing customer accounts, after some agents appeared to act independently of users’ instructions (Axios)

Sources: Major US banks, Morgan Stanley among them, have been blocking third-party AI agents from operating inside customer accounts and making transactions, as Jamie Dimon and Schwab’s Richard Wurster say outside agents aren’t getting in (Reuters)
Longreads
Matt Cortland used an ElevenLabs voice AI agent to make more than 3,000 calls to pubs across Ireland about the price of a Guinness, then used Claude to build the “Guinndex,” a living consumer price index for a pint (Fortune)
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24 min
October 22The iPhone Duo Reviews Are In
PHP-aggedon kept rolling, with patches covering only PHP 8.2 and newer. Anthropic unveiled Claude Duet, a proactive background agent. Meta’s Muse topped 10 million users while its stock dropped on data center commitments. iPhone Duo reviews landed, Gruber scathing.
The PHP Foundation says its patches for the RCE vulnerabilities are limited to PHP 8.2 and newer, leaving legacy deployments dependent on third-party vendors (Wired)

PHP-aggedon: OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol and Google’s Wiz, with its Atlas agent and Gemini 4 Argon, found the decades-old flaws, which AI makes both findable and newly easy to exploit, so the race is on to patch tens of millions of sites (TechCrunch)

Anthropic unveils Claude Duet, a proactive agent app on iOS, Android, and the web that works in the background, in research preview for US Pro and Max users (Claude)

Duet runs on Opus 5.5, checks connected accounts every few hours, and asks approval before sending, paying, signing or deleting; research preview via waitlist for US Pro and Max subscribers (VentureBeat)

Meta reports Q3 revenue up 26% YoY to $64.6B, operating income down 37% YoY to $12.99B on a $9.9B AG settlement, and family DAP up 3% YoY to 3.64B for September (Meta Investor Relations)

Meta’s Muse agent app has passed 10 million users in the US and Canada since its September launch, with shopping the top use case and more than a quarter of users buying through it (Business Insider)

iPhone Duo review: a fun device with a cool matte inner display, but the cover display is too small, it is heavy and bulky, the cameras are OK, and it gets hot (The Verge)

9to5Mac’s iPhone Duo review: after a week, the foldable looks like the future of the iPhone, though it has Touch ID instead of Face ID and no telephoto camera (9to5Mac)

Gruber on the iPhone Duo: closed, it’s the worst iPhone Apple has ever made, while the inner display is a splendid tablet; an extraordinarily polished prototype at $2,000, not a finished product (Daring Fireball)
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23 min
October 21Is Musk Merging Tesla and SpaceX?
Emergency PHP patches dropped for two critical RCE flaws hitting every version since 2004. Also: Anthropic’s IPO prospectus showed $16.3B H1 revenue and an $80.7B loss, OpenAI agents weakened their own monitoring, and Tesla and SpaceX formed merger committees.
PHP’s development team plans to release patches on Wednesday at 10am ET to fix two vulnerabilities, each rated 9.2; watchTowr researchers say they are RCE flaws (BleepingComputer)

Anthropic’s IPO prospectus: ~$16.3B in H1 2026 revenue, ~20% from two clients and up from $1.1B in H1 2025, and an $80.7B net loss, $72B from accounting charges (WSJ)

OpenAI says two agents, one GPT-6.1 Sol and one GPT-6 Astra, weakened misalignment monitoring while making requested changes during two internal coding tasks (OpenAI)

OpenAI agents turned off monitoring safeguards in two internal coding tasks: one disabled automatic alerts to the security team, another removed a monitoring system and lied to staff about having done so (FT)

Elon Musk says Tesla and SpaceX have formed “special committees” to discuss a merger and he “can’t be in the conversation”; SPCX jumps 8%+ and TSLA rises 2% (The Verge)

A combined Tesla-SpaceX would employ 155,000+ people and generate ~$153B in revenue this year but burn $54B+ in free cash flow; Musk controls ~84% of SpaceX votes vs. ~20% at Tesla, and both are now domiciled in Texas (FT)
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23 min
October 20Eric Schmidt's $80 Billion Anthropic Bet
DeepSeek open-sourced DeepInfer, its internal inference stack. Inception’s diffusion LLM Mercury 3 claimed 4x to 8x speed over Haiku 5.5. Spotify launched paid podcast memberships, and Eric Schmidt’s 1% Anthropic stake looked set for a massive IPO windfall.
DeepSeek open-sources DeepInfer, its internal production stack designed to accelerate inference, optimize chip performance, and reduce energy and compute costs (Bloomberg)

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 (The Deep View)

Cloudflare debuts Clairic, a System One-class extraction model it says processes unstructured data faster, more cheaply, and more accurately than normal LLMs (Cloudflare)

Cloudflare releases Clairic in preview on Workers AI, a model that returns every requested field with a confidence score in a single pass, with open weights to follow (The Decoder)

Cloudflare’s Clairic costs $0.10 per million input tokens with a 65,536-token context window, but its speed, accuracy, and cost claims are company claims, not a published head-to-head benchmark (RunTimeWire)

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 (TechCrunch)

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 (CNBC)

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 (Bloomberg)
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23 min