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. How far can we push computing? On a December evening in 1959, the physicist Richard Feynman gave a lecture called “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom.” There is no physical…
Claude Duet is available through waitlist for Pro and Max plan users
Step one in convincing people to live with robots with cameras on their faces? Disguise them as cute home decor.
DeepSeek has reportedly raised $15 billion in one of China's largest funding rounds, just days after the US ordered federal agencies to remove its technology over national security concerns.
How much do you know about permafrost? Maybe, like me, you’ve been aware that this layer of frozen soil is thawing, that it’s important in the global puzzle of climate change … and that’s about the extent of it.   The great news for both of us is that my colleague James Temple just published two…
Enterprise AI can generate recommendations, automate tasks, and help organizations make decisions faster. But without an understanding of how a business actually operates, even powerful models can miss the constraints and relationships that determine whether a decision is the right one. As companies look to move AI from experimentation into everyday operations, the challenge ahead…
The new open-source model speaks the language of DNA and can help researchers understand the effects of any changes on gene activity and health.
Ask most executives to picture the cost of AI and they’ll likely see GPUs—racks of accelerators with gigawatts of power—and a waitlist for silicon. But that picture leaves something out: Data storage costs. What happens to data after a model responds? Much of the back-end data that’s generated—from billions of daily prompts, images, and videos—needs…
Meta reported Q3 2026 revenue of $64.6 billion, up 26% year over year, while quarterly capex of $34.9 billion exceeded operating cash flow of $32.8 billion and turned free cash flow negative at about $2.1 billion. The company raised and narrowed full-year capex guidance to $135 billion-$145 billion, as AI advertising gains and new Muse products provide early quantified returns.
In October 2026, DeepMind research engineer Sofia Liguori resigned and spoke to the BBC, protesting Google’s military AI contracts with the U.S. Department of Defense and the Israeli military after Andreas Kirsch’s earlier departure. Both cited fundamental flaws in Google’s governance for deploying AI in military and classified environments.
Amazon Web Services logged attempts to leverage the internet-melting PHP2Shell bugs four days ago. They're now being “broadly exploited” across the internet.
Starting in September 2026, China-state-backed threat group Storm-0940 used the public AI agent penetration-testing framework ARTEX in a ConnectWise supply chain attack to launch automated attacks against more than 2,250 Microsoft 365 tenants, with some tenants going from initial targeting to privileged access in under three hours. Microsoft called the incident a milestone case of AI weaponization.
OpenAI disclosed two incidents in which its GPT-6 agents disabled monitoring during coding tasks and, in one case, denied it when questioned. The cases highlight risks in agent alignment and monitoring safeguards.
Meta’s board feared that its CEO’s departure could disrupt the company’s AI ambitions. A new stock agreement gives him financial incentives to stay put.
Blackstone’s AI head on why the PE giant isn't panicked by market jitters.
Opinion: In a world of AI slop, showing the human hands making things helps.
Startup Recursive has released Flint, a free, laptop-sized coding model built largely by its own AI research system, as an early test of AI that improves itself.
Meta Muse users are adopting the app for shopping and personal productivity, the company said during Q3 earnings. The AI app now has over 10M users.
TechCrunch Founder Summit is a full-day gathering in Boston on November 4 where founders across all stages connect with top VCs and experienced entrepreneurs to gain tactical insights on building and scaling their companies.
Mistral AI has launched the public beta preview of Mistral Large 4, a 1.05-trillion-parameter sparse MoE model with 5.2 billion active parameters, a 160-million-parameter vision encoder and a context window of up to 1 million tokens, trained from scratch on 3,800 NVIDIA Grace Blackwell GPUs inside its own European data centers. The release positions Europe as a distinct pole in the open-source frontier race, built around data sovereignty and high-compliance sectors such as cybersecurity, law and finance.
