Sequoia Capital has forced out at least three US-based partners and shut down its London office, with roughly half-a-dozen partners leaving in total, according to sources cited by Newcomer. The moves signal a broad overhaul at the venture firm as it tries to turn itself around in the AI era.
Waymo is readying its fleet for severe winter weather, including a historic El Niño season, by expanding the 6th-generation Waymo Driver's cold-weather capabilities. The system combines cameras, radar and lidar with built-in heaters and micro-wipers, measures real-time traction at each wheel, and uses snow tires, while vehicles act as mobile weather stations sharing road data across the fleet. Waymo says it will slow, limit or pause service when conditions exceed its Safety Framework boundaries, and is running closed-course testing and heavy-snowfall data collection in Alaska this season.
Waymo released a new film examining how removing journey stress changes travel for women riders, made with a women-led creative and production crew. Waymo says its data shows over half of women riders in established service markets report the service improves their sense of personal safety. The film was directed by Mollie Mills, with cinematography by Autumn Durald.
OpenAI and Anthropic are both in the midst of highly visible fundraising campaigns, and investors who back both see a clear divergence in how the two are viewed. Anthropic is distancing itself from its rival, with one investor describing "infinite demand" for its shares among long-term investors and confidence that its planned IPO will happen before Thanksgiving, while OpenAI is thirsting for a comeback story.
Democrats won Texas's Senate and governor races and took control of the state House for the first time in 24 years, after making data centers a central campaign issue. Governor-elect Gina Hinojosa pushed for a full moratorium, and outgoing governor Greg Abbott had already directed a state regulator on September 21 to halt data center permits.
Ai2 has launched a climate modeling initiative backed by three-year funding from Google.org and technical support from Google Research to develop NeuralGCM+, an open-source model for faster, more reliable climate projections. The project extends Google Research's NeuralGCM, which combines physical equations for large-scale dynamics with AI for smaller-scale processes like cloud formation and rainfall, to simulate atmosphere and ocean together. Ai2 aims to cut regional temperature and rainfall errors over the past 50 years and release models and frameworks with documented workflows for outside researchers.
Clerk AI is running enterprise voice and messaging agents on LiveKit's open-source framework and global edge network, handling over 1,000 concurrent voice sessions without pre-provisioning. Agents respond in under 500ms and support 30+ languages natively, with ScreenSense call screening at 97% accuracy and TrueReach voicemail detection above 98%. The platform keeps full control over STT, LLM, and TTS providers and holds SOC 2 Type II certification with built-in TCPA compliance.
SemiAnalysis reports that SpaceX now has 3.6GW of datacenter capacity under construction across multiple sites and has raised its 2027 estimate to roughly 13GW, up from the 10GW figure it gave on its first earnings call. The firm says it has already identified more than 9GW of feasible capacity and argues SpaceX may be the fastest datacenter builder in the world, citing Colossus 2 build times of 91 days for 210MW and a new Mississippi site targeted at about 4 months. It also flags a likely datacenter at the TeraFab chip fab site in Texas and a BESS deployment at Colossus 2 approaching 6GWh.
Ed Zitron argues the AI buildout ends when the money runs out, citing OpenAI raising $11 billion at a $1.25 trillion valuation after tepid interest from large investors, below the $30 billion at $1.4 trillion it reportedly sought. He also reads Anthropic's amended S-1 as showing Q3 revenue near $17 billion against compute costs of $9.9 billion, roughly $895 billion to $1.07 trillion in total obligations and a possible sub-investment-grade rating. He ties this to debt markets shutting out neoclouds, Google's lower search monetization from AI overviews, and OpenAI contributing about 11% of Microsoft's latest quarterly revenue.
Preferred Networks will exhibit its MN-Core series at SC26, the international high-performance computing conference held November 15–20 in Chicago, with booth demonstrations running November 17–19. At booth 4606, the company will show a structural model and mockup of its in-development MN-Core L1000 inference AI chip, its future plans for the MN-Core L series, a live demo on the MN-Core 2 Devkit, and R&D on ultra-high-efficiency AI computing infrastructure.
DeepSeek's fan-created anime mascot "Whale Girl," nicknamed "Big Fat Blue Fish," went viral on Bilibili after creator ZipZipPipe adapted an earlier character using GPT Image 2, with the surge peaking around the DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash release. The character, never officially endorsed by DeepSeek, reflects a broader shift: Chinese AI labs moved from English acronyms like ERNIE and GLM to Chinese names such as Wenxin and Qianwen, then to relatable personas like ByteDance's Doubao.
OpenAI says ChatGPT's search-like query volume is now roughly one-fifth of Google's, and the app grew from 1 billion to 1.2 billion weekly active users in about two months. ChatGPT consumer product lead Adam Fry shared the figures at an OpenAI dinner in New York City, adding that users generate 1.5 billion images per week and that voice mode, combining dictation and speaking with ChatGPT, has 250 million combined weekly active users. Fry also said OpenAI plans to merge ChatGPT's Chat and Work modes, removing the toggle at the top of the app.
Sierra has appointed Kyle Randolph as its Chief Information Security Officer. Randolph brings 24 years of experience as a security leader and software engineer, most recently serving as CISO at Verkada, and has built and led security teams at Adobe, Citrix, Twitter, and Optimizely. Sierra says security strength is one reason nearly half of the Fortune 50 choose it.
Several startups, including Ornn, Silicon Data, Architect and Liquid Compute, are building futures markets, price indexes and brokerage services to standardize GPU compute pricing. Ornn is raising a new triple-tranche round at a valuation of around $1 billion, with Thrive Capital and General Catalyst in talks to participate, after a $33 million seed round led by a16z crypto in June. None of the companies has secured financial regulatory approval yet, and CME's planned listing of futures tied to Silicon Data's H100 and B200 GPU rental indexes has slipped past its October 5 target.
Ai2's Olmo 3 received Nextcloud's highest Ethical AI rating, green, which requires open-source training and inference software, a self-hostable trained model, and publicly available training data. Nextcloud bundles Olmo 3 with its llm2 local LLM backend, and the 7B variant was chosen so users without 16 or 32 GB of VRAM still get a good out-of-the-box local experience.
SemiAnalysis argues the 2027 US datacenter boom is largely locked in, with about three-quarters of the 33.8 GW due across its top 20 states already under construction, while the real election risk sits in 2028, when its model projects 62.2 GW of US net additions, most not yet started. It tracks 13 states holding 43.5 GW, or 70% of expected national capacity, and finds nine of 20 midterm nominees want a pause on new construction while 11 want conditions, split roughly evenly by party. The biggest near-term risk is a prolonged permitting freeze at Texas' TCEQ, since Texas alone adds close to 30% of US GW in 2028.
Preferred Networks has opened the first application round for 2028 graduates, covering engineer and researcher roles in product development, generative AI foundation models, computing infrastructure, and AI chips. The first-round deadline is November 30, 2026, with offers expected from December to January, and the selection process includes document screening, a coding test, and an AI interview.
Apple reported fiscal 2026 fourth-quarter revenue of $114.5 billion, up 12 percent year over year, with iPhone setting a September-quarter record and Services reaching an all-time high. Diluted EPS was $2.10, up 14 percent, and gross margin was 47.9 percent, including about 1 percentage point from tariff refunds. CEO John Ternus cited the iPhone Duo, iPhone 18 Pro, new home hardware, Touch on Mac, and the all-new Siri AI.
Sakana AI held its "From World Models to Real-World AI" symposium in Tokyo on October 26, 2026, where Chief Scientific Advisor Jürgen Schmidhuber gave a keynote and Sakana AI announced it will develop its own pretrained language model series, Sakana Sawara (tentative name). The first small model, Sawara Small (tentative name), is planned for release in spring 2027 if development proceeds smoothly. More than 400 attendees joined the event, which also featured a conversation between Schmidhuber and CEO David Ha.
South Korea's KOSPI fell into a bear market from June 22 to July 16, 2026, losing nearly $1.1 trillion in market capitalization as SK hynix and Samsung dropped 38% and 29%. The two memory makers held 83% of the global HBM market and over half of KOSPI's total capitalization as of Q2 2026, so the index functions as a leveraged bet on AI memory demand. The author argues that single-stock leveraged ETFs, the persistent Korea discount and the rise of China's CXMT leave Korean capital markets exposed to further shocks that could spread across the AI supply chain.
CXMT reported Q3 net profit of RMB54.4 billion and revenue of RMB118.71 billion, up 613.2% year on year, while Reuters says it has sent HBM3E samples to domestic chip designers with limited production planned within two months despite yields of just 20–30%. Unitree's first post-listing results showed Q3 revenue up 69.9% to RMB665 million as research spending rose roughly 250%. Moonshot launched Kimi K3.1 Pro with a one-million-token context window, then apologized for rate limits and restored a quarter of subscribers' monthly allowance.
Cybersecurity professionals have dubbed the past month "Black October" as AI-detected vulnerabilities emerged faster than many could patch, and much of the field now sees a major AI-driven catastrophe as a matter of when, not if. The likelier disaster is humans wielding AI: hackers have used Claude Code and models from Anthropic, SpaceX, and Moonshot AI to attack banks and more than 400 financial targets in Latin America. Despite pledges to "pace the frontier," the industry has taken no coordinated action to prevent the big one before it happens.
Anthropic 的一位招聘经理透露，其团队已停止在软件工程岗位的面试中提出编码问题，因为 DSA 面试无法提供有效信号。该招聘经理曾负责 Claude Cowork 和 Claude Desktop，并表示公司其他团队及其他 AI 原生初创公司也可能效仿。
Google DeepMind is expanding PlanAssist, its Gemini-built AI planning tool, to 12 additional local planning authorities in England, bringing the total to 15. In pilots across Barnet, Camden, and Dorset since June, the tool cut the average time officers spent on householder assessment tasks by up to 58%, and more than 70% of its generated reports were approved with no edits.
Tech leaders including Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz have poured unprecedented sums into Republican politics, with Musk alone spending almost half-a-billion dollars in the midterms. Those bets are looking far less promising as Trump’s approval ratings sink and opposition to AI becomes a major campaign issue. Investors wanting to bet on politics would be better off sticking with Kalshi.
Sierra reached $400M+ in ARR, adding over $150M+ in ARR in Q3 alone, more than it generated in all of last year. The company says it took six months to double from $100M to $200M ARR but only five months to double from $200M to $400M, and it now works with almost 50% of the Fortune 50. Sierra also says it is developing an open standard called Poppy with over 50 enterprises, including Meta, Shopify, Stripe and Walmart, for controlling how personal agents interact with brands.
Casey Newton argues that Alphabet's 12.6 percent one-day stock drop and Reddit's 15 percent slide share a root cause: AI answers are pulling value onto Google's own pages and away from the open web. Google's chief business officer said AI Mode earns less than traditional search, while Reddit said search traffic fell and it will require logins to browse. Newton expects Google to absorb the shift because it can afford content licensing that most challengers cannot.
Toyota and Waymo announced the next phase of their autonomous driving collaboration, with initial operations to test and validate an autonomous Toyota bZ4X fleet in Japan in 2027, followed by planned deployment to the United Kingdom and other Waymo-serviced markets. Toyota will build the vehicles at its Takaoka plant in Toyota City, Aichi Prefecture, assembling the base vehicle and integrating Waymo's AV hardware under one roof. The companies describe the partnership as a milestone for Japan's first fully autonomous ride-hailing service using high-volume, domestically manufactured vehicles.
Microsoft Research Focus Edition #97 highlights ForkPilot, a self-improving agentic framework that matches the best existing methods while cutting AI processing demands by up to 59% across six benchmarks. The edition also covers CABRA, a framework showing coding agents still struggle to understand unfamiliar codebases, and TeleTune, which learns reusable skills from user activity logs. It also examines Copilot Chat activity, where document editing exceeded 20% of classified activities.
Meta has partnered with INCA, a Canadian nonprofit founded in 1918, to help more blind, deafblind and low-vision people in Canada benefit from AI glasses. Meta funding will support INCA in four areas: listening to the community, backing community champions who run in-person demos and peer training, feeding community feedback into Meta's accessibility and product teams, and providing accessible learning guides and training resources. Meta is also donating AI glasses through INCA's "Opening the Doors to Work" program for people seeking employment.
Meta has partnered with CNIB, a non-profit founded in 1918, to bring AI glasses to more Canadians who are blind, Deafblind or have low vision. Meta funding will support CNIB in four areas: community listening, peer training led by community champions, sharing insights with Meta's accessibility and product teams, and accessible guides and training materials. Meta is also donating AI glasses through CNIB's Come to Work program for people exploring employment.
DevFest, Google's community-led developer event series hosted by Google Developer Groups, returns from October 1 through December 31, 2026, with 800+ events across 115 countries expected to draw almost 1 million attendees. Sessions and workshops cover Google AI technologies plus Google Cloud, Android and Web tracks, framed around building, securing and scaling in the agentic era. Events are hosted in local languages by grassroots organizers, with speakers including Google Developer Experts and Google engineers.
Titus Winters, lead author of Software Engineering at Google, discusses on The Pragmatic Engineer podcast how a dozen engineers refactored Google's roughly 250M-line C++ codebase in 2010 using parsing, matching and code generation, long before LLMs existed. He also explains why Google made automated tests mandatory after Search slipped to quarterly releases, and why he now argues most of today's CS curriculum should be rebuilt.
Ed Zitron argues that Anthropic's S-1 is timed to present a compute-discounted Q2 2026, when it reported a $974 million profit, rather than the company that will actually go public. He cites roughly $269.4 billion in non-cancellable compute commitments to Google, Amazon, Microsoft and SpaceX, plus a further $125 billion to $150 billion in TPU obligations, and notes Q3 revenue growth slowed to 45% while compute costs rose 76.3%. He also points to 5% to 7% of revenue coming from customers later found to be distilling its models and a lock-up schedule that lets insiders exit quickly.
Meta is partnering with five US universities — Caltech, Ohio State's College of Medicine, Louisiana State University, Indiana University and UTHealth Houston — and granting $2 million to support research using its models in medicine, physics, chemistry, biology, computer science and mathematics. Projects include a computer vision system built on Meta's open-weight SAM models to detect tracheostomy tube displacement in infants, multimodal AI to help conversational agents adapt to people with dementia, and open-weight models predicting heart failure risk from routine CT scans and medical records.
Zenrin, Zenrin DataCom and Preferred Networks have signed a business and capital alliance, with the Zenrin companies subscribing to a PFN third-party allotment. The partners will combine continuously updated geospatial data, including historical change records, with PFN's generative AI, physical AI and 3D spatial recognition technology to build AI models that understand and predict real-world change. Initial focus areas include public sector, real estate, retail and distribution, targeting demand forecasting, store site selection and urban planning, disaster prevention and logistics simulation.
Anthropic's S-1 filing shows that models older than six months earn less than 20 percent of its revenue, a sign of how quickly users switch to new releases. The filing also reports $16.3 billion in revenue for the first half of 2026, before its newest models Opus 5.5 and Fable 5.1 shipped, and says customers from a year ago now pay about nine times as much. Anthropic says its latest releases cut customers' cost per task by 25 to 45 percent through lower prices and more efficient models.
Meta is supporting research at five US universities — Caltech, Ohio State University College of Medicine, Louisiana State University, Indiana University, and UTHealth Houston — with access to its latest Muse models, researcher collaboration, and funding. Researchers will use Muse Spark Open, Muse Wonder, Muse Spark, the 30B open-weight Muse Glimmer, plus SAM, V-JEPA, DINO, UMA, and SeamlessM4T. Projects span medicine, physics, chemistry, biology, computer science, and mathematics, with universities retaining control of all patient and clinical data.
Anthropic is expanding its AI for Science program, which provides free Claude credits to researchers, to 20 scientific foundations, institutions, and research groups worldwide. Partners include the US National Science Foundation, the Simons Foundation, the Wellcome Sanger Institute, and the Space Telescope Science Institute. The program, launched in May 2025, also supports projects such as the Model Hardware Standard with HHMI Janelia, currently in research preview.
Anthropic's life sciences team has spent several months working with six drug developers, including Bristol Myers Squibb, Generate Biomedicines and Divergence Labs, plus running its own discovery programs, to test where Claude can speed up drug development. Reported early results include a Generate design roughly 70% shorter than the standard version that let immune cells make about 10 times as many receptors, and roughly 35,000 antibody designs generated largely autonomously for Divergence in about a month. Anthropic says the work is still mostly preclinical and plans to extend Claude into clinical trials as the programs advance.
Why it matters: Anthropic's first detailed account of embedding Claude in real drug programs shows where the model helps and where it still falls short across six partners.