The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

Internal data: Meta's Muse now has 3M+ users who submit at least one prompt per week and 1M+ DAUs who have sent at least one prompt (Jyoti Mann/The Information) [37d]
Slack message: Greg Brockman has no plans to donate beyond his initial $25M to Leading the Future, saying the PAC has become a "distraction" at OpenAI (New York Times) [37d]
Sources: Trump's AI accord grew out of a talk between Zuckerberg and House Speaker Mike Johnson; Zuckerberg circulated a draft, and Huang helped build support (Ashley Gold/Semafor) [37d]
Sources: Jensen Huang and other execs asked Dario Amodei at the White House why he was so extreme in public on AI risks; Amodei said it's important to be honest (Wall Street Journal) [37d]
Factory CEO Matan Grinberg alleges Cognition's new CRO Chris Degnan had been confiding with Cognition executives while advising Factory as a board observer (Rya Jetha/Business Insider) [37d]
Micron reports Q4 revenue up 379% YoY to $54.23B, vs. $51.07B est., net income up 1,078% to $37.7B, and forecasts Q1 revenue above estimates (CNBC) [37d]
DOD taps Elon Musk, Palmer Luckey, and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich for Project Meridian, a 120-day study of capabilities the US may need in future wars (Luke Fountain/CNBC) [37d]
Sources: some Google employees say Gemini 4 performs well on benchmarks but struggles with some real-world coding tasks; Google disputes that characterization (Bloomberg) [37d]
Google rolls out Gemini 4 Argon to a small group of cybersecurity partners and says it outperforms GPT-6 Astra on certain coding and knowledge work benchmarks (Madison Mills/Axios) [37d]
Reddit says it is ending support for RSS feeds on November 13 because the feeds are a target for abuse by AI bots and is ending its public API access in March (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch) [37d]
OpenAI says individuals associated with Moonshot AI played a significant role in a coordinated model-distillation campaign that began in early July (Maggie Eastland/Bloomberg) [37d]
Open Standard launches its OUSD stablecoin; founding partners Visa, Stripe, Mastercard, and Coinbase will offer initial access to businesses and developers (Ben Weiss/Bloomberg) [37d]
Document: SpaceXAI plans a unified subscription for Grok and X with four tiers, including a $100/month Ultra plan, an $8/month Lite plan, and a free offering (Edward Ludlow/Bloomberg) [37d]
Miter, which provides workforce management tools for the construction industry, raised a $40M Series B led by Battery Ventures, taking its total funding to $78M (Chris Metinko/Axios) [37d]
CScale, which is developing optical interconnect for accelerators, emerges from stealth with a $145M Series C led by Atreides, Valor Equity, and Premji Invest (Dean Takahashi/GamesBeat) [37d]
Google DeepMind introduces SynthID Bio, a family of watermarking methods for AI-designed proteins to help with biosecurity and scientific integrity (John Timmer/Ars Technica) [37d]
Berlin-based Restate, which provides a durable execution engine to make software workflows resilient to crashes, raised a $20M Series A led by Singular (Marina Temkin/TechCrunch) [37d]
Alex Stamos is joining Cognition as its new chief security officer; he most recently oversaw security at AI security startup Corridor and SentinelOne (Sam Sabin/Axios) [37d]
Metaview, which uses AI agents to automate recruiting workflows, raised a $60M Series C led by Insight Partners, bringing its total funding to $110M (Chris Metinko/Axios) [37d]
ElevenLabs says existing investors and employees have sold $300M worth of stock in a tender led by Wellington and T Rowe Price and valuing the startup at $22B (Tim Bradshaw/Financial Times) [37d]
An interview with OpenAI Chief Research Officer Mark Chen on the Hugging Face incident, slowing AI development, shifting 5%-10% of compute to safety, and more (Will Douglas Heaven/MIT Technology Review) [37d]
Instagram rolls out a conversational AI video editing assistant for Edits, its dedicated CapCut competitor, after an initial preview at a creator event in June (Amanda Silberling/TechCrunch) [37d]
The UK's MI5 issues a rare espionage alert urging UK universities to cut ties with the China General Technology Research Institute, which funded AI research (Financial Times) [37d]
Sources: the US FTC is expanding a sweeping probe of Anthropic, OpenAI, and other frontier AI labs, and plans to issue formal demands to turn over information (New York Post) [37d]
Amazon aims to have 5,000 drivers wearing its smart glasses in 2026, rising to 20,000+ in 2027; the glasses capture static images for its AI mapping platform (Dave Lee/Bloomberg) [37d]
Amazon says Fire TV now offers integrated live content from 40+ apps, like YouTube TV and DirecTV, and plans a Music app with podcasts and concerts in the fall (Mariella Moon/Engadget) [37d]
Amazon unveils a faster, slimmer $60 Fire TV Stick 4K, simplifies its Fire TV Stick lineup, and plans to roll out an upgraded Alexa+ living room hub in November (Chris Welch/Bloomberg) [37d]
DoorDash unveils new retail partnerships to deliver clothing and footwear; Macy's is listing products directly on the DoorDash app for two-hour delivery (Sarah Nassauer/Wall Street Journal) [37d]
DoorDash opens US waitlists for an Apple Messages-integrated AI agent for ordering and a B2B API allowing assistants like Slack bots to execute bulk orders (Natalie Lung/Bloomberg) [37d]
Sources: Google is paying ~100 digital publishers for how much their content contributes to AI Overviews, AI Mode, and Gemini in a pilot; payments vary widely (The Information) [37d]
Tinder rolls out Group Hangouts in select US markets, letting a user form a group of three to 15 friends around shared activities, as it courts younger users (Samantha Kelly/Bloomberg) [37d]
Samsung Galaxy Tab S12 Ultra review: the new $1,400 tablet is an iPad Pro rival with a great OLED display, battery life, and performance, but it is pricey (Sam Rutherford/Engadget) [37d]