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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.
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.
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.
OpenAI has named former Uber President Jill Hazelbaker as its Chief Corporate Affairs Officer, filling a position that had been vacant since early 2026. The appointment comes as the company faces intensifying regulatory scrutiny in Europe and the United States.
Google will let K–12 schools disable AI tools such as Gemini and NotebookLM by default, but schools that fully ban AI will also lose access to Google Search. The policy reveals how search has become the gateway to Google’s AI ecosystem—and how platform control works in education.
OpenAI announced that two team members worked with GPT-6 Astra to design a prototype device for conversing with Codex in under a week, with Astra independently completing the enclosure, circuit board, interface, and software. YZ Index launched an 18-question targeted evaluation, scoring GPT-6 Astra 76 overall, 85.7 in execution, 64.1 in solidity, and pass on integrity.
WDCD Run #411 (2026-11-04) tested 15 models across three dialogue rounds, recording an average commitment decay of -80% between R1 and R3. GPT-6 Astra topped the leaderboard at 90.5 points, with Gemini 3.1 Pro and GLM-4.6 tied at 90.
In the latest WDCD v3.1 round, Claude Opus 4.7 rose 8 points to 89.30 while Doubao Pro dropped 10.1 points, producing a pattern of three gains and five declines that sharply exposes differences in how stably models hold to constraints under multi-round pressure.
In WDCD v3.1, business rules are the hardest of the five major constraints to adhere to, with doubao-pro scoring only 1.2/4, while data boundaries show the widest differentiation and GPT-5.5 a 2.7-point cross-scenario gap.
