Techmeme
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Outside of tech there has been no financial payoff to US companies for using AI, now viewed as a margin-hurting cost center, as VC-backed firms burn more tokens (Torsten Slok/Apollo Global Management)
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Source: Replit recently moved most AI spend from Anthropic to OpenAI, which gave 30%+ off in a deal worth $100M+/year, after Anthropic discontinued its discount (The Information)
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A look at Alpha School, a network of private schools that claims to teach kids 2x as fast using AI; data shows ~50% of K-8 students missed this goal in math (Dana Goldstein/New York Times)
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An interview with Ciena CEO Gary Smith, a veteran of the 2001 telecoms crash, on AI demand outpacing supply for Ciena's optical networking chips, and more (Steven Rosenbush/Wall Street Journal)
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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 (Jay Peters/The Verge)
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Ukraine says Starshield was working normally again on Saturday morning; US officials said Trump asked Elon Musk to restore the service (Wall Street Journal)
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Inside Meta's law enforcement outreach team, which uses AI and human reviewers to analyze social media posts, aiming to prevent threats like school shootings (Rachel Monroe/New Yorker)
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A look at OpenAI's Project Daybreak, which lets vetted partners use its top hacking models to find and fix vulnerabilities and helped uncover PHP2Shell RCE bugs (Thomas Brewster/Forbes)
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The PHP Foundation, which coordinated fixes for two critical PHP flaws, operates on a shoestring budget with one full-time staff member and 14 contractors (Toby Sterling/Reuters)
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Google updates its privacy policy to clarify it could use data shared via Personal Intelligence from connected apps, including Gmail and Photos, to target ads (Shimul Sood/Android Authority)
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Andy Jassy says AWS capacity for 2027 is "largely sold out" and a "good chunk" of 2028 capacity is also sold, though AWS reserves some capacity for on-demand (Catherine Perloff/The Information)
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The UK plans to invest £100M to create the AI Biosecurity Lab to boost defenses against biological threats, supported by OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind (Liv McMahon/BBC)
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OpenAI says it built an "offline world" from cached web content to train isolated frontier models to browse, search for information, and use web apps (OpenAI)
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Utopai, an AI film studio that says it has more than 20 projects in the works, raised $60M at a $1B valuation (Rocket Drew/The Information)
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Memo: Helen Chiang, Xbox's first COO, is leaving Microsoft on October 23, just months after the role was created; she spent 21 years at the company (Tom Warren/The Verge)