The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

• Seoul-based AI chip startup FuriosaAI raised a $620M Series D at a $2.9B valuation, up from $735M in 2025; South Korea's National Growth Fund contributed $280M (Yoolim Lee/Bloomberg) [9d]
• Sources: the US DOJ has inquired about the impact of Nvidia's Hugging Face deal on AI competition, as antitrust enforcers continue to probe Nvidia's conduct (Reuters) [9d]
• Alphabet reports Q3 negative free cash flow of $9.07B, worse than expected, capex of $51.36B, vs. $55.09B est., and keeps its FY capex forecast at $195B-$205B (Samantha Subin/CNBC) [9d]
• Sources: Marvell is in advanced talks to buy data center optics maker Lumentum, whose market value is ~$83B; the deal could be announced as soon as next week (Bloomberg) [9d]
• eBay reports Q3 revenue up 14% YoY to $3.21B, above $3.12B est., and GMV up 15% to $23.17B, above $22.32B est.; EBAY jumps 4%+ after hours (Kelly Cloonan/Wall Street Journal) [9d]
• Filing: Microsoft recorded $10B in revenue from OpenAI in Q1, nearly 11% of its total quarterly revenue, and has $7.2B in outstanding receivables from OpenAI (Rebecca Bellan/TechCrunch) [9d]
• ServiceNow reports Q3 subscription revenue up 21% YoY to $3.99B, forecasts Q4 current remaining performance obligations below est.; NOW drops 15%+ after hours (Brody Ford/Bloomberg) [9d]
• Microsoft reports Q1 capex of $45.2B, up from $34.9B a year earlier and below its own $50B projection, and free cash flow of $18.6B, vs. $8.54B est. by analysts (Deborah Sophia/Reuters) [9d]
• Alphabet reports Q3 YouTube ad revenue up 9% YoY to $11.2B, below estimates, and Google ad revenue hit $82.01B, up from $74.18B in Q3 2025 (Todd Spangler/Variety) [9d]
• Alphabet reports Q3 revenue up 25% YoY to $127.6B, Google Cloud revenue up 103% YoY to $30.7B, and Google Services revenue up 11% to $96.3B (Alphabet) [9d]
• Microsoft reports Q1 revenue up 19% YoY to $92.3B, Azure revenue up 48% to $33.2B, operating income up 21% to $45.9B, and net income up 32% to $36.6B (Microsoft) [9d]
• Oracle pledges to limit new financing to $20B through FY 2030, expects free cash flow to turn positive in H2 FY 2028 and top $30B in FY 2029; ORCL jumps 11%+ (Deborah Sophia/Reuters) [9d]
• NY Gov. Kathy Hochul signs bills banning AI chatbots from using "unsafe features" for minors and requiring security features in internet-connected baby monitors (Raga Justin/Bloomberg Government) [9d]
• Apple adds a 512GB RAM configuration for the Mac Studio with the M5 Ultra chip, starting at $22,299; the M5 Max model maxes out at 128GB of RAM (Joe Rossignol/MacRumors) [9d]
• Artificial Analysis unveils the Intelligence Index v5 with new coding and science benchmarks; 60% of the Index is based on private test sets or held-out answers (Artificial Analysis) [9d]
• Google and Xreal launch the Xreal Aura wired XR glasses, with Android XR and a puck with Snapdragon Reality Elite, for $1,099+ through December, then $1,279+ (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch) [9d]
• Apple's touchscreen MacBook Pro is the first Mac with the Dynamic Island, offering similar functionality to the iPhone; the Dynamic Island launched in 2022 (Hartley Charlton/MacRumors) [9d]
• Apple says the touchscreen MacBook Pro has a "newly designed hinge" for stability and an "enhanced six-speaker" system; the 14" model is 3lb and the 16" is 4lb (Jay Peters/The Verge) [9d]
• John Ternus says the Mac is "first and foremost an indirect input device", but touch is "comfortable and handy" sometimes; Apple long resisted touchscreen Macs (Steven Levy/Wired) [9d]
• 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) [9d]
• Google unveils Gemini 4 Carbon, its "strongest model with state-of-the-art cybersecurity" capabilities, ranked #1 on Artificial Analysis' new Intelligence Index (Koray Kavukcuoglu/Google) [9d]
• GitHub says it's seeing 7.4B commits per month, up from 2.9B in August, and has added 4M CPU cores and 160PB of storage in 2026 so far to support this growth (Frederic Lardinois/The New Stack) [9d]
• GitHub says Copilot Fusion, which handles model selection and orchestration, is now generally available, releases the GitHub Copilot app, and more (Meredith Shubel/The New Stack) [9d]
• Reddit rolls out a dual-feed homepage, with For You and Following feeds, joining TikTok, Instagram, and others in offering a recommendation-driven feed (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch) [9d]
• OpenAI says it's launching an election "war room" ahead of the US midterms to identify potential spread of misinfo or other efforts to disrupt the elections (Calder McHugh/Politico) [9d]
• Nvidia debuts Nemotron 3.5 Transcribe, an open-weight model for multilingual audio transcription and translation, and Granary v2, its open-source speech dataset (Kyt Dotson/SiliconANGLE) [9d]
• Foundry, a manufacturing-as-a-service startup that builds factories with robots powered by physical AI models, raised a $100M Series A led by Marlinspike (Rocket Drew/The Information) [9d]
• Dropbox plans to cut ~6% of its staff, or ~200 jobs, costing $27M to $33M in severance and related costs, and says CTO Ali Dasdan will step down on November 18 (Anhata Rooprai/Reuters) [9d]
• X adds an intrusive promotional animation of an arm reaching across the screen to direct users to a "promote" post button, targeting verified and Premium users (Andrew Liszewski/The Verge) [9d]
• Chinese PCB maker Dongshan rises on its Hong Kong debut, after raising ~$1.3B in an IPO, below its $3B goal, at a $30B valuation, amid a tricky IPO market (Sangmi Cha/Bloomberg) [9d]
• Amazon Kindle Paperwhite and Kindle Colorsoft review: premium feel, lightweight, nice colors, and snappy performance, but expensive after price increases (Nena Farrell/Wired) [9d]
• Artificial Analysis launches the Intelligence Index v5, with new coding and science benchmarks, built on private datasets; Claude Opus 5.5 (max) leads at 58 (@artificialanlys) [9d]
• Google unveils Google Multi-Party Compute (MPC), a digital-asset custody and security service in private preview, set for commercial availability in early 2027 (Aoyon Ashraf/CoinDesk) [9d]
• Samsung unveils the $229 Galaxy Buds On, its first open-fit, C-shaped cuff earbuds to compete with Sony and Bose, designed with AI's help, shipping November 6 (Chris Welch/Bloomberg) [9d]
• Etsy reports Q3 revenue up 11% YoY to $692.5M, above $668M est., net income of $853.5M after selling Depop, and gross merchandise sales up 9% YoY to $2.65B (Katherine Hamilton/Wall Street Journal) [9d]
• 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 (Chris Welch/Bloomberg) [9d]
• Meta quietly launched Waddle World, a Tamagotchi-like, AI pet-rearing game, in the Philippines in September, calling it a "daily journal disguised as a pet" (Mariella Moon/Engadget) [9d]