The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

• AuxoAI, which helps large businesses build and deploy AI systems, raised a $20.7M Series A led by NTTVC to accelerate growth and scale (Kyt Dotson/SiliconANGLE) [16d]
• SAP: Q3 cloud revenue up 25% YoY to €6.67B, vs. €6.57B est., total revenue up 12% to €10.27B, current cloud backlog up 26% to €24.1B, all in constant currencies (Christina Kyriasoglou/Bloomberg) [16d]
• IBM reports Q3 revenue up 5% YoY to $17.1B, above $16.82B est., net income up 26% to $2.19B, software revenue up 8% to $7.8B, and infrastructure revenue up 4% (Elias Schisgall/Wall Street Journal) [16d]
• GitLab patches a critical flaw that lets unauthenticated attackers run code on self-managed servers, affecting every release since 7.0 in 2014 (Swati Khandelwal/The Hacker News) [16d]
• Texas Instruments reports Q3 revenue up 28% YoY to $6.06B, above $5.93B est., net income up 78% YoY to $2.43B, and forecasts $5.8B-$6.3B in Q4, vs. $5.73B est. (Ian King/Bloomberg) [16d]
• Mark Zuckerberg says Muse has drawn 10M+ users since its launch and 25%+ of users are making purchases through the app, with an average purchase size of $200+ (Business Insider) [16d]
• Meta expects its 2026 capex to be $135B-$145B, vs. $130B-$145B previously, and forecasts Q4 revenue of $73B-$76B, vs. $73.6B est.; META jumps 3%+ after hours (Riley Griffin/Bloomberg) [16d]
• 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) [16d]
• Filing: Meta says Mark Zuckerberg is considering leaving California if it passes a one-time 5% tax on billionaires; voters will decide on the measure next month (Pierre Paulden/Bloomberg) [16d]
• Meta says it will create a new class of nonvoting stock to raise the capital it needs for developing AI models, with an effective date in January 2027 (Meghan Bobrowsky/Wall Street Journal) [16d]
• Meta reports Q3 revenue up 26% YoY to $64.6B, operating income down 37% to $12.99B on a $9.89B AG settlement charge, and family DAP up 3% to 3.64B for September (Meta) [16d]
• OpenAI, PerturbAI, and Scripps say thousands of GPT-Rosalind agents analyzed data on millions of mouse brain cells in 32 minutes, a job that takes humans months (OpenAI) [16d]
• Microsoft reveals pricing for Xbox Cloud Gaming without Game Pass, for Xbox Insiders now and others next month: 10 hours for $3.99, 25 for $7.99, 50 for $11.99 (Tom Warren/The Verge) [16d]
• Flapping Airplanes, which is working on methods to train AI models on less data and compute and make the chips more efficient, raised $1B at a $6B valuation (Rachel Metz/Bloomberg) [16d]
• A New Mexico court orders Meta to pay $25B in penalties after a jury found Meta misled residents about its data practices in the Cambridge Analytica scandal (Jonathan Vanian/CNBC) [16d]
• Source and leaked memo: EA plans to cut ~400 jobs, or ~3% of its total staff, and shut down BioWare; EA went private in August following a $55B leveraged buyout (Jason Schreier/Bloomberg) [16d]
• The PHP Foundation says its RCE patches are limited to PHP 8.2 and newer, leaving legacy deployments dependent on third-party vendors (Wired) [16d]
• Recursive releases Flint, an open-weight, 40B-parameter coding model developed with its Eureka Machine AI system, which automated most of the development (Will Knight/Wired) [16d]
• Watchtower, which uses AI and simulation software to help the US Armed Forces make logistical decisions, emerges from stealth with a $35M seed (Alex Konrad/Upstarts Media) [16d]
• The PHP Foundation details how it found and fixed the two flaws, and says it had to release patches a day early after the CVE IDs began circulating online (The PHP Foundation) [16d]
• Several government, school, and hospital websites in Europe were taken offline as organizations rush to protect themselves from two critical PHP security flaws (Reuters) [16d]
• Whop, which helps people start, run, and scale businesses and uses AI to suggest business decisions, raised $205M led by Sequoia Capital at a $5.1B valuation (Natasha Mascarenhas/Bloomberg) [16d]
• OpenAI says the PHP flaws, found using GPT-5.6 Sol, "are among several significant vulnerabilities" it found and expects "similar findings to increase sharply" (OpenAI) [16d]
• Mach9, which develops AI-powered CAD software trained on proprietary, in-house AI models using multimodal image and laser scan datasets, raised a $34M Series A (Sean O'Kane/TechCrunch) [16d]
• Cloudflare says it deployed default WAF mitigations for all free and paid tier customers to combat two PHP flaws, roughly nine hours ahead of public disclosure (Cloudflare) [16d]
• Claude flagged 493 security issues across 25 open-source projects, covering 5M+ lines of C, C++, Java, PHP, and Python code; one went unnoticed for 21 years (Chris Rohlf/Anthropic) [16d]
• PHP discloses a critical memory-management vulnerability, dubbed "PHP2Shell", that affects up to 70% of websites, discovered using GPT-5.6 Sol in August (Robert McMillan/Wall Street Journal) [16d]
• PHP releases security fixes for two critical unauthenticated RCE vulnerabilities, urging all PHP users to update; all web-serving deployments are affected (PHP) [16d]
• ServiceNow and Nvidia launch Arc, a personal, long-running enterprise AI agent for productivity tasks across email and Teams, for RTX Spark and Nvidia OpenShell (Radhika Rajkumar/ZDNET) [16d]
• Stockholm-based legal AI startup Legora raised a $550M Series E at an $8.8B post-money valuation, up from $5.55B after raising a $550M Series D in March (Rosie Harris-Davison/City A.M.) [16d]
• OpenAI expands ChatGPT ads to 26 additional countries, taking the total to 83 countries, and says the platform's advertiser base is 100K+, up from 20K in August (Alix Coutures/The Information) [16d]
• Apple says it plans to add Reachability for the iPhone Duo later in 2026, helping people with smaller hands more easily access the left or right display edges (Julian Chokkattu/Wired) [16d]
• Spotify launches its first standalone, native in-car app built on Android Automotive OS, debuting on select Audi models, with a custom UI controlled by Spotify (Andrew J. Hawkins/The Verge) [16d]
• Nvidia launches its OpenShell Reference Architecture, a framework to secure, monitor, and govern AI agents, and partners with Canonical, AWS, BBVA, and others (Thomas Claburn/The Register) [16d]
• GTC Berlin: Jensen Huang pushes Europe on AI adoption, saying "for Europe to benefit from AI ... you need all the end markets, the end industries to adopt AI" (Bloomberg) [16d]
• OpenAI says it will make its AI models available on Google Cloud's model garden and Antigravity coding tool in the coming weeks, after launching on AWS in April (Jordan Novet/CNBC) [16d]
• iPhone Duo review: fun to play with and cool matte inner display, but small cover display, heavier and bulkier than other phones, average cameras, and gets hot (The Verge) [16d]
• Memo: eBay is cutting ~9% of its workforce to simplify operations and reallocate resources toward high-growth areas; eBay cut 6%, or ~800 staff, in February (Reuters) [16d]
• The EU Commission launches a DSA probe into Booking Holdings' Booking.com to determine whether it is doing enough to combat fraudulent listings and phishing (Foo Yun Chee/Reuters) [16d]
• AI code-testing startup Blacksmith raised a $66M Series C led by Sequoia Capital at a $1B valuation, up from $550M after raising a $45M Series B in August (Beatrice Nolan/Fortune) [16d]
• A look at Elon Musk's planned SpaceX-Tesla merger, which would create a $3.6T company but faces serious hurdles like shareholder votes and regulatory probes (Financial Times) [16d]
• Coherence Neuro, which is developing AI models and brain implants to help combat brain tumors, raised a $45M seed from the OpenAI Startup Fund and Founders Fund (Emily Mullin/Wired) [16d]
• Demis Hassabis says he expects AGI within two to three years, down from his three-to-five-year prediction earlier in 2026, and discusses AI's science potential (Ben Cohen/Wall Street Journal) [16d]
• Dario Amodei says Anthropic's "race to the top" makes AI safer, cites nine safety decisions with "substantial costs", and admits mishandling a draft AI bill (Dario Amodei/@darioamodei) [16d]
• Nvidia unveils the DSX POD, a modular containerized version of its Vera Rubin reference architecture to cut data center deployment from six months to 14 days (Charlotte Trueman/DatacenterDynamics) [16d]
• China criticizes the US DHS's DeepSeek ban, vowing "resolute countermeasures" while rejecting allegations from the FBI and AI labs of illicit distillation (Ephrat Livni/New York Times) [16d]
• Anthropic and Citrini Research use an internal Claude model to autonomously generate protein minibinders against five scorpion neurotoxins, testing 211 designs (Anthropic) [16d]
• Micron and the union of workers at its Taichung facility sign a multi-issue agreement, without giving details, resolving tensions at its largest Taiwan site (Reuters) [16d]
• Memo: Nscale CEO Josh Payne says it has "more than $100B in contracted revenue"; sources say it still plans to list by the end of 2026 at a $30B-$35B valuation (Kieran Smith/Financial Times) [16d]
• A look at Chinese philosophical views on AI: one says aligning AI to human values may be a "suicidal mistake", another fears the "machinization of humans", more (Arnaud Bertrand) [16d]
• OpenEvidence says nearly two-thirds of ~1M US physicians use its AI search engine; a source says it is on track to generate $400M-$500M in 2026 ad revenue (Rafe Rosner-Uddin/Financial Times) [16d]
• Sources: Samsung and SK Hynix are upgrading their China fabs to produce NAND flash chips with 200+ layers, aiming to fend off fast-growing Chinese rival YMTC (Reuters) [16d]
• Google, Temasek, and Bain: online spending in SE Asia to rise ~17% YoY to $368B in 2026 despite economic headwinds, as businesses harness AI to spur spending (Gabrielle Ng/Bloomberg) [16d]
• Netflix executives and industry insiders say co-CEO Ted Sarandos devised its mass-market and international growth strategy, which Bela Bajaria executed (Financial Times) [16d]
• An unconfirmed report claims PHP2Shell enables RCE on PHP sites; watchTowr says the exploit allegedly affects all versions since PHP 5, released in 2004 (Dan Goodin/Ars Technica) [16d]
• NextDC's stock fell as much as 44% to A$5.15 after the Australian data center company cut its earnings forecast by over a third; shares were above A$16 in June (Nic Fildes/Financial Times) [16d]
• 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) [16d]
• Sources: DayOne is weighing options for its US IPO, including a delay or smaller listing that could raise $2.5B to $3B, after initially seeking up to $5B in Q4 (Bloomberg) [16d]
• An interview with Goodfire researcher Nick Cammarata, whose viral blog post claimed LLMs are easier to understand than thought, as other researchers push back (Will Douglas Heaven/MIT Technology Review) [17d]
• Thiel's leaked Rome lectures cast EA and AI "safetyism" as Antichrist forerunners, Bill Gates as "Mr. Hyde", and Eliezer Yudkowsky as "more Luddite than Greta" (David Gibson/The Verge) [17d]
• Sources: Nvidia is in talks to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in Firmus, which pulled its IPO earlier this month, citing market volatility (Phoebe Liu/The Information) [17d]
• Reliable Robotics, which develops an autonomous flight system, raised a $115M extension for its $160M Series D, pushing its valuation to $1B+ (Kirsten Korosec/TechCrunch) [17d]