AI

Google has acquired Crusoe's data center site in southeast Wyoming (opens crusoe.ai)

Crusoe's own update on handing its Wyoming data center campus to Google; TechCrunch says the deal shows how hard massive AI data centers are to develop.

AI is dramatically accelerating AI research (opens planned-obsolescence.org)

Organizely — A New AI-Native ERP for American Manufacturers 🇺🇸 (opens ycombinator.com)

An AI-native ERP that models factory operations, predicts bottlenecks and acts to lower production costs.

Thinking Machines debuts Inkling 2 Small amid reported $5B fundraising push (opens siliconangle.com)

Inkling 2 Small is a new Thinking Machines model that can automate AI training tasks; it arrives during a reported $5B fundraising push.

Physicl raises $10M to make the digital world real enough for robots (opens techcrunch.com)

Physicl is attacking the sim-to-real gap for robots with a pipeline originally built to market goods online.

Filing: Google spent roughly $548M to buy around 3M shares of Qualcomm (opens theinformation.com)

Filing: Google spent roughly $548M to buy around 3M shares of Qualcomm, which is pushing into serving the AI data center market — Google's investment arm Google Ventures has acquired nearly 3 million shares of the chip maker Qualcomm, as a result of Qualcomm's purchase of chip software startup…

Meta introduces specialized versions of its existing models, trained using Muse Wonder (opens thenewstack.io)

Meta introduces specialized versions of its existing models, trained using Muse Wonder, bringing Active Memory and Active Focus to all Muse and Meta AI users — Meta trained new models using its frontier Muse Wonder model and is shipping them to all Muse and Meta AI users today, while keeping Wonder…

Dropbox acquires Tigris Data for $350M to bolster its AI infrastructure (opens techcrunch.com)

The deal is expected to support the development of DBX Agent Cloud, a new storage platform aimed at developers building AI models and agents.

Ramp data shows AI spending stalling just as Anthropic nears its IPO (opens techcrunch.com)

AI usage keeps climbing, but spending has stalled. Price cuts and smarter cost controls among the biggest spenders could challenge investor assumptions about AI hypergrowth.

Nasdaq Sinks 5% as Investors Retreat from AI Trade After Election (opens wsj.com)

AI physics startup PSI says a system running a non-public Anthropic model proved the Aaronson-Ambainis conjecture (opens psi.inc)

AI physics startup PSI says a system running a non-public Anthropic model proved the Aaronson-Ambainis conjecture, a quantum computing question open since 2008 — The Aaronson-Ambainis conjecture is now a theorem. — Open since 2008, the conjecture of Scott Aaronson and Andris Ambainis concerns …

How a Blue Wave midterm might reshape the AI industry (opens techcrunch.com)

Democrats’ historic victories in this week’s U.S. midterm elections could also transform the tech industry. The public voted on 41 data center-related ballot measures on Tuesday — in all but one, the majority voted to impose more restrictions on data center development.

Sources: Microsoft has been turning off rented computing capacity from Oracle after declining to renew a 2023 deal (opens bloomberg.com)

Sources: Microsoft has been turning off rented computing capacity from Oracle after declining to renew a 2023 deal, because the hardware used older Nvidia chips — Microsoft Corp.

Claude, make me these parts in Solidworks.... 7 minutes later.... (opens reddit.com)

I had Claude write its own MCP connector to my SolidWorks installation on my computer. I regularly use it to create parts I'm using off Amazon or other sites without a CAD file. Works great. FWIW: I posted the same thing over in r/SolidWorks and they didn't see how cool this was. Downvoted hard.

Taan AI: The most controllable foundation music model (opens ycombinator.com)

Foundation music models that do what you tell them to, when you tell them to.

A $90 Key into Your Company's Secrets (opens tomtunguz.com)

The cost of an autonomous 32-step corporate break-in fell 99% in five months from $7,500 on Claude Mythos Preview in April 2026 to $90 on open-weight GLM-5.3. Attackers run an expected-value calculation on AI compute ($1m of compute for a 1% shot at a $1b payout yields $10m in expected value)…

Axiom Math wants to keep AI slop out of mathematics (opens techcrunch.com)

As AI floods math with unchecked proofs, Axiom Math is betting on verification. The startup’s AI agents just formally verified the Stacks Project, one of the field’s biggest libraries.

Sources: Thinking Machines Lab is raising $5B led by Accel at a $40B pre-money valuation (opens businessinsider.com)

Business Insider reports Accel is leading a $5B round at a $40B pre-money valuation, more than tripling the lab's last public valuation; it debuted Inkling 2 Small the same day.

Sources: major investors are increasingly skeptical Anthropic's IPO can achieve a $1.5T valuation after a market selloff (opens wsj.com)

After the post-election tech selloff, investors told the WSJ Anthropic may need a significantly lower valuation, one saying closer to $1T.

The Nasdaq 100 drops 6%, losing a record $2.3T in value, and the Philadelphia chip index plunges 12%, on concerns over the AI trade after Democrats won Congress (opens bloomberg.com)

Tech stocks fell the most since 2020 as investors exited the AI trade after the election.

Thinking Machines Lab debuts Inkling 2 Small, a MoE model with 594B total and 17B active parameters, and plans to release weights next week (opens thinkingmachines.ai)

Artificial Analysis says it matches Gemini 3.8 Flash (high) on its index and would be the top open model outside China once weights ship.

Tencent Launches Hy4, One of the Leading Open-Source AI Models (opens tencent.com)

Dropbox acquires Tigris Data for $350M, releases new AI productivity features (opens siliconangle.com)

Dropbox is buying cloud storage startup Tigris Data alongside DBX Agent Cloud, a storage service for AI agents.

Claude Code sends your email address to websites (opens github.com)

Five9 buys contact center intelligence startup Level AI after posting narrow earnings beat (opens siliconangle.com)

Five9 announced a $325M all-cash deal for the AI-native contact center rival alongside its Q3 results.

GPT‑6 Cyber: Advancing the frontier of aligned cybersecurity agents (opens openai.com)

OpenAI's cybersecurity model, a version of GPT-6 Astra, finds exploitable vulnerabilities and develops fixes while staying within authorized scope.

Perplexity launches its own take on AI agents for work (opens theverge.com)

Perplexity is taking on OpenAI and Anthropic with its own work-focused AI agents. The startup's new always-on "Teammates" can take on multiple roles within a workspace, while pulling existing projects, skills, and memory from the Perplexity tools you already use.

Show HN: A decent text-to-image model trained for ~$20K (Apache 2.0 Weights) (opens linum.ai)

My brother and I run a 2-person lab that trains our own generative video models from scratch. The ultimate goal is a set of creative tools that make it easier for anyone to make animation. Video models today are too slow/expensive and lack sufficient controls. Creativity is an iterative process.

Meta warns that election backlash against data centers could make AI expansion harder (opens techcrunch.com)

Meta warns that growing political opposition to data centers could threaten future AI investments, as communities push back against massive infrastructure projects.

OpenAI president Greg Brockman says company could be IPO ready in 2027 (opens techcrunch.com)

Speaking at a Wall Street Journal tech conference on Wednesday, the executive touted how the company had been gaining ground in the enterprise market, where rival Anthropic had already successfully made inroads.

Claude can now analyze your spending with its new Personal Finance tool (opens techcrunch.com)

US Claude subscribers on Pro, Max and Ultra can link bank and card accounts through Plaid; Claude can read balances and transactions but cannot move money.

Ocient raises $100 million as agentic AI drives growth in large-scale analytics (opens siliconangle.com)

Ocient Inc., the maker of a speedy data analytics platform, today said it has raised $100 million in a Series C funding to expand its agentic artificial intelligence analytics business.

The Exploit Was the Bottleneck (opens a16z.news)

What 23 Years of Data Say About AI and the Patch Gap

Phaze raises $8.75M to give AI agents remote access to powerful workstations (opens siliconangle.com)

Built by the founders of remote desktop firm Parsec, Phaze gives AI agents remote workstations of their own; a16z wrote up its investment.

Insurer Guardian hands 1 million dental calls a year to Sierra’s AI agents (opens thenextweb.com)

Guardian Life signed a multi-year deal with Sierra to use its AI agents for about 1 million dental benefit verification calls a year, plus payments and claim status checks. It is Guardian’s third AI partnership in a year, after HCLTech and Avantos.

Apple is reportedly cutting budgets for its internal AI usage (opens techcrunch.com)

The tokenmaxxing frenzy has been short-lived as bills for said tokens came due, and companies decided that token rationing might be a more fiscally sensible approach.

Cult.fit builds operational muscle with Codex (opens openai.com)

Cult.fit is using Codex to help teams across functions build tools, move faster, and change how work gets done.

OpenAI to acquire Pierre Computer Company (opens openai.com)

OpenAI announced it will buy the low-profile developer tooling startup; terms were not disclosed, and observers read it as a shot at GitHub for the age of agents.

Conductor is joining Meta (opens conductor.build)

Meta acquired Conductor, whose app runs several coding agents at once; terms were not disclosed.

AI is forcing us to pay off 40 years of technical debt (opens spectrum.ieee.org)