Tech Brew Ride Home

I covered the NYT report that US officials think Megaspeed’s Alice Huang is a Chinese asset who cozied up to Jensen Huang, the leak of 41,000 DHS workers’ data, DoorDash’s $17B Instacart grab, and Alphabet’s ugly free cash flow.

US officials believe Megaspeed executive Alice Huang is a Chinese asset who maintained a close relationship with Jensen Huang to pass intelligence to Beijing (The New York Times)

Hackers leak the personal data of 41,000+ DHS employees and contractors, including CBP and ICE agents; DDoSecrets says the data came from DHS’ Okta login system (Wired)

DoorDash agrees to acquire Instacart in a ~$17B deal, paying $65 per share, a 26% premium to its October 22 close, as the platform delivery market consolidates (Reuters)

DoorDash agrees to buy Instacart for $17B with both boards signing off; it plans to keep Instacart’s brand, enterprise tech, and app, and says grocers could build their own ordering and ad businesses (TechCrunch)

Alphabet reports Q3 negative free cash flow of $9.07B, worse than expected, capex of $51.36B, below $55.09B est., and keeps its FY capex forecast at $195B-$205B (CNBC)

Alphabet’s ad machine misses Q3 estimates as search revenue growth slows to 12% from 17%, even with cloud beating at $30.7B; shares fall about 10% after hours (WSJ)

Google expands ads in AI Mode to international markets, adding multi-turn ads in the US, betting generative AI can open new revenue as core search ad growth slows (TechCrunch)

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Apple unveiled a touchscreen MacBook Pro, finally ditching Jobs’s stance. Then Amazon unloaded gadgets: a $500 Echo Show 16, the Echo Time alarm clock, an Alexa Photo Frame, and an Echo Studio with a camera. Not one AI story all day.

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)

The new touchscreen MacBook Pro has a tandem OLED “PROLED XDR” display with up to 2,000 nits and 120Hz, a Dynamic Island, a glowing Apple logo on the lid, M5 Pro and M5 Max chips, and up to 24 hours of battery (The Verge)

New CEO John Ternus introduced the touchscreen MacBook Pro on stage, reversing Steve Jobs’ long-held opposition to touch Macs, which Tim Cook once compared to merging a fridge and a toaster (Bloomberg)

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 (Bloomberg)

Panos Panay spent about 45 minutes introducing five new Echo speakers and displays, plus a “new brain” for Alexa Plus that can do “deeper research” and a Card interface that collects each chat (The Verge)

Hands-on with the Echo Show 16: customizable Screen Styles could make it the versatile family hub Alexa users have wanted, but at double the price of the Echo Show 11 it may be too expensive (The Verge)

Amazon debuts the Alexa Photo Frame and Echo Time smart clock, plus other upgraded devices (TechCrunch)

The $199.99 Echo Time smart alarm has a 3.2-inch round touchscreen, a screen that dims below 0.3 nits, and opt-in sleep sensing that wakes you up to an hour early at the optimal point in your sleep cycle (The Verge)

Amazon’s new Echo Studio speaker has a camera (The Verge)

The $249.99 Echo Studio with Home Camera lets you ask Alexa about objects in the room, doubles as a home video feed, and handles video calls, though visual information is processed in the cloud (Gizmodo)

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OpenAI claimed three fresh breakthroughs in math, physics, and computer science — including that the Exponential Time Hypothesis is false. Apple unveiled the M6 MacBook Pro. Microsoft offered buyouts to ~60K workers, a quarter of headcount. Plus, Anthropic S-1 nuggets.

OpenAI announces three breakthroughs in computer science, math, and physics, including that the Exponential Time Hypothesis, a longstanding conjecture, is false (OpenAI)

OpenAI used external “shepherd” experts to guide its computer science and physics results, while its AGMAI panel of math advisers recommends AI companies drop the practice, citing unequal access, borrowed reputation, and biased selection (The Verge)

Apple unveils the 14-inch MacBook Pro with M6, with a 12-core CPU and a 12-core GPU, up to 32GB of unified memory, and Wi-Fi 7, from $1,999 on November 6 (Apple)

The M6 MacBook Pro, the new base model replacing the M5, charges to 50% in 30 minutes, adds Bluetooth 6, and opens for pre-order tomorrow, October 28, in silver and space black (9to5Mac)

Microsoft offers buyouts to ~60K workers, including at a VP level and below across the US, Canada, India, and the UK; its headcount at the end of June was 223K (Bloomberg)

S-1: as of September 30, Anthropic had 11,900+ customers spending $100,000+ annually, 1,900+ customers spending $1M+, and ~250 customers spending $10M+ (TechCrunch)

Anthropic’s IPO filing contains an unusual succession plan: each co-founder can name a confidential ranked list of up to 10 successors to their voting power, subject to approval from five of the other six co-founders (Forbes)

Anthropic’s 85% gross margin on serving existing models and $3.5B in free cash flow on $16.3B of first-half revenue is a reality check for skeptics of pay-as-you-go AI economics (The Information)

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Anthropic’s S-1 finally dropped: ticker ANT, $16.3B in first-half revenue, and a gargantuan compute bill. Apple unveiled an OLED iPad mini, Meta moved to raise $95B for AI, Elvis’s rightsholders sued Anthropic, and Block’s Dessa speech model wowed me.

Anthropic files for an IPO on the Nasdaq under the symbol ANT; the number of Class A shares to be offered and the price range is yet to be determined (Anthropic)

Anthropic’s S-1 shows revenue up 14-fold to $16.3B in the first half, an $80.7B loss driven by a one-time $72.4B convertible note charge, and a possible $100B+ raise at a $2T valuation (The New York Times)

Anthropic’s S-1 shows a real GAAP operating profit and 14x revenue growth, but also roughly $780-810B of mostly non-cancelable compute commitments, including Elon Musk as a supplier at $3.1B a month (ZeroHedge)

Apple unveils a redesigned iPad mini with an 8.5-inch OLED display, A20 Pro, 24% thinner bezels, and an optional nano-texture finish, for $699+ on November 6 (Apple)

The new iPad mini gets an “Acoustic Display” with woofers and hidden tweeters, a 12MP Center Stage camera on the landscape edge, and a $100 nano-texture glass option on the 256GB and 512GB models (9to5Mac)

Meta plans to raise $95B to finance its AI infrastructure, including $35B in public equity offerings, backed by cornerstone investors Nvidia, AMD, and Broadcom (Financial Times)

Elvis Presley’s rightsholders sue Anthropic over 274 songs allegedly used to train its models, seeking $41M+; Anthropic says it disagrees and will defend itself (The New York Times)

Block unveils Dessa, a “true speech-to-speech” AI model trained on “nothing but human conversation” that it says runs locally on a MacBook Pro M4 Max or newer (The Verge)

The public internet model is effectively dead due to saturation, algorithmic aggregators, and AI security vulnerabilities, and that may open new possibilities (Stratechery)

AI-powered hacks are overwhelming incident-response firms in “Black October,” with nation-state and criminal groups using the Chinese open-source tool Artex to speed up attacks on hundreds of companies (The Wall Street Journal)

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OpenAI neared a $30B bridge round at a $1.25T valuation, down from the $1.4T it pitched, ahead of an IPO. Treasury proposed curbs on US tech investment in China, banks blocked rogue AI agents, and OpenAI launched its Decisions API.

Sources: OpenAI nears an up to $30B round led by investors from the UAE and Coatue at a $1.25T pre-money valuation, as an “opportunistic” bridge ahead of an IPO (CNBC)

The US Treasury proposes a rule to crack down on US high-tech investments in areas like AI and supercomputing in China, Russia, and other “countries of concern” (AP)

DeepSeek and MiniMax have won approval to deploy their models overseas, as Beijing says much of Chinese AI will remain free for export despite its draft export-control proposal (Bloomberg)

OpenAI makes Decisions API, its Jev competitor, generally available with new voice and visual modalities, at $0.10/1M input tokens and no output-token charges (TechCrunch)

Sources: US banks are restricting third-party AI agents from accessing customer accounts, after some agents appeared to act independently of users’ instructions (Axios)

Sources: Major US banks, Morgan Stanley among them, have been blocking third-party AI agents from operating inside customer accounts and making transactions, as Jamie Dimon and Schwab’s Richard Wurster say outside agents aren’t getting in (Reuters)

Longreads

Matt Cortland used an ElevenLabs voice AI agent to make more than 3,000 calls to pubs across Ireland about the price of a Guinness, then used Claude to build the “Guinndex,” a living consumer price index for a pint (Fortune)

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