The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

Two US officials and a Western official say the order to limit Ukraine's access to SpaceX's Starshield came from inside the White House (Reuters) [22d]
Netflix Chief Content Officer Bela Bajaria is leaving the company and will be replaced by former Disney and Fox executive Peter Rice, who starts October 26 (Rebecca Rubin/Variety) [22d]
Bluesky expands Attie, its AI tool for building custom feeds, with a "social vibe coding" feature to create sites, games, quizzes, and more on the AT Protocol (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch) [22d]
Sources: some Anthropic investors discussed a ~$1.5T valuation for its IPO, down from ~$2T they had expected, after disclosures showed slowing Q3 revenue growth (Reuters) [22d]
Experts say Meta's new terms of use will allow scraping of websites, including news sites, "associated with" business accounts on its platforms, with no opt out (Nieman Lab) [22d]
Thoma Bravo-owned cybersecurity company Proofpoint plans to buy data security firm Varonis Systems in an all-cash deal valued at about $6.3B (Jaspreet Singh/Reuters) [22d]
A US official says Trump didn't order any limitations on Ukraine's access to SpaceX's Starshield; Elon Musk said any limits are ultimately decided by POTUS (Kate Sullivan/Bloomberg) [22d]
A researcher says modern neural networks are far more interpretable than believed, with most neurons understandable in models up to trillions of parameters (Nick Cammarata/Goodfire) [22d]
Perplexity open sources SPACE, its AI agent sandbox, and says partners including CoreWeave, Akamai, and Crusoe agreed to offer SPACE to customers (Reed Albergotti/Semafor) [22d]
Sources: top DOJ officials halt career prosecutors' Biden-era investigation of Meta over facilitating illegal drug sales and are weighing more lenient options (Ben Penn/Bloomberg Law) [22d]
Google says it has 400+ publications in its News AI pilot, which tests features like overviews; participants include Financial Times, CNN, and The Texas Tribune (Andrew Deck/Nieman Lab) [22d]
Two workers have been killed and another seriously injured at Intel's Kiryat Gat fab in Israel in an explosion resulting from a gas cylinder malfunctioning (CTech) [22d]