The 2026-11-05 YZ Index Smoke quick test covered 13 models, with GPT-6 Astra and GPT-6.1 Sol tied for first at 81.66 points. The Smoke test is a daily 10-question quick test suited to short-term signals and is not equivalent to Full weekly leaderboard conclusions.
Apple's AI-powered Siri Recaps won me over in just one day, despite my privacy reservations. But there's still room for improvement.
From high-profile Senate races to local rezoning initiatives, data centers and their supporters did miserably on the ballot in the 2026 midterms.
I’ve been locked in to my various screens since results from midterm elections started to roll in last night. And it didn’t take long to see the beginning of the blue wave: Democrats took control of both the US House of Representatives and the Senate, a dramatic swing from Donald Trump’s victory two years ago.  …
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This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. These startups hope “blended” food will cut our appetite for red meat  In the fall of 2025, Jeff Dodge served hungry students steaming marinara sauce and meatballs. The students loved them:…
The AI minister now concedes the estimated figure is less than a third of that. Researchers blame the country’s slow rate of adoption
Democratic candidate Gina Hinojosa defeated incumbent Republican Governor Greg Abbott in Texas after promising to pause all new data center permits until protective legislation is enacted. AI infrastructure stocks fell, with SpaceX and CoreWeave down 7% and Oracle down 4.3%.
A sales representative asks an AI agent for customer pricing, and the agent pulls data from multiple sources: restricted pricing systems, internal communications, and archived quotes. The output looks accurate to the agent, so a second agent uses the data to draft the proposal for the sales rep. No human checks either handoff. When it’s…
Meta has returned to the bond market for a second large offering this year, raising $20–25 billion at 3.9x oversubscription even as S&P cut its outlook to negative on its first-ever negative free cash flow quarter. With Alphabet, Amazon and Meta all in negative free cash flow territory at once — something without historical precedent — the AI spending race has shifted from an investment narrative into a credit-rating event.
At a media dinner in New York, OpenAI's Adam Fry said ChatGPT handles about 20% of Google's weekly search volume, a striking competitive benchmark. Yet turning that search volume into a real advertising threat to Google still requires breakthroughs in business model and ad infrastructure.
OpenAI has partnered with Cathedral, the company founded by four former DOGE members that previously breached Anthropic's systems, to strengthen model and infrastructure security. Reuters also reported the same day that OpenAI employees had repeatedly warned about operational security vulnerabilities since 2022, but the warnings were not acted upon.
Off-balance-sheet AI-related obligations at Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta and Oracle surged from $1.65 trillion to about $3.2 trillion in six months, equivalent to roughly 80% of their total assets. The shift highlights how long-term data center leases, chip pre-purchase agreements and cloud capacity contracts can obscure substantial future cash commitments from the main balance sheet.
Nvidia has verbally instructed compute service providers in Singapore, Malaysia, and Japan that at least 51% of their service revenue must come from non-Chinese companies, capping business with Chinese customers at 49%. The unwritten rule targets the cloud-based workaround that has allowed Chinese AI firms to access restricted chips through overseas data centers.
DeepSeek plans to use Huawei’s Ascend 950 as the core training hardware for its V5 model in 2027, extending the partnership from inference to full model training. If validated, the move could offer a reference case for domestic AI chips entering frontier model training.
The years-long wait for access to the grid and new turbines is causing data center builders to turn to an unusual, less-efficient and less environmentally friendly solution: once-discarded jet engines.
Called FlashProve, the system would let anyone check that an AI response really came from the model it claims to be from.
Russia tries to fix exposed digital infrastructure as data center war backfires.
Palantir's U.S. commercial revenue surpassed U.S. government revenue for the first time ever.
Cybersecurity focused Ballistic Ventures is seeking to raise $360 million for a new flagship fund and another $130 million for a separate investment vehicle.
