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Techmeme
October 20, 2026, 9:15 AM
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Bloomberg:
Google says Cloud services in its London region “are experiencing issues”, starting Monday at 23:08 PDT; Revolut says its major outage is due to Google Cloud  —  An outage at Google Cloud knocked out online services including digital bank Revolut Ltd. for several hours through Tuesday …
Saritha Rai / Bloomberg:
DeepSeek open-sources DeepInfer, its internal production stack designed to accelerate inference, optimize chip performance, and reduce energy and compute costs  —  DeepSeek is opening up the software it uses to run its artificial intelligence models at scale, potentially making its technology cheaper and easier for businesses to run.
Jason Hiner / The Deep View:
Inception debuts Mercury 3, a diffusion LLM that it says tops GPT-6 Luna, Claude Haiku 5.5, and GLM-5.3 Flash on agentic benchmarks while being 4x to 8x faster  —  W  —  hile the AI industry has bet heavily on LLMs and the massive data centers needed to scale them, one of the neolabs betting …
Cloudflare:
Cloudflare debuts Clairic, a System One-class extraction model it says processes unstructured data faster, more cheaply, and more accurately than normal LLMs  —  Today, we're announcing a preview of a new class of System One-style models: extraction models.
Bloomberg:
The US sanctions Chinese VC firm MiraclePlus for financing Zhisuan, founded by Ding Linwei, who in 2026 was convicted of stealing Google's AI trade secrets  —  Washington has blacklisted a Chinese venture firm established by ex-Microsoft Corp. AI scientist Lu Qi for alleged ties to a startup accused …
OpenAI:
OpenAI says its new models show major performance leaps in low-resource legacy languages like COBOL, Fortran, and Visual Basic, used by banks and governments  —  Our latest model advances bring stronger capabilities for building and migrating software in low-resource programming languages such as COBOL, Fortran, and Visual Basic.
Reuters:
Sources: OpenAI is racing to secure investor commitments before Anthropic's planned IPO in mid-November, aiming to raise ~$30B; the round may value it at $1.4T+  —  OpenAI is racing to secure investor commitments before rival Anthropic's expected public market debut in mid-November …
Bloomberg:
Sources: Eric Schmidt, who owns ~1% of Anthropic after investing tens of millions in its Series A, is poised to have one of the largest windfalls from its IPO  —  Former Google Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt owns around 1% of Anthropic PBC thanks to his early investment in the startup …
Sam Biddle / The Intercept:
Leaked documents detail ECHOTRIBBLE, a nascent US Army Cyber Command program for agentic AI to autonomously spread across networks to find and eliminate targets  —  Documents obtained by The Intercept show the military is trying to deploy autonomous AI agents to hack its adversaries.
Bloomberg:
Sources: Nscale is in talks for a second deal with Anthropic worth ~$45B to deliver 460MW of computing power at its West Virginia campus using Vera Rubin chips  —  Nscale Ltd., the AI cloud computing firm, is in talks to sell computing power to Anthropic PBC in a deal that could be worth about $45 billion …
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Developers and vibe coders are using AI tools like Claude Code to remove sponsored ads on their smart TVs, speed up app launchers, disable tracking, and more  —  The latest use case for AI?  Dumbing down your smart TV to get rid of the bloat.  A number of developers and vibe coders …
Tim Fernholz / TechCrunch:
Eka Robotics, which is developing a “vision-force-action” architecture for its physical AI models, raised a $150M Series A at a $1.45B post-money valuation  —  Robots still aren't that good at picking things up, despite billions of dollars of investment and endless videos fed into deep learning models.
More: a16z
Bloomberg:
Seoul-based data center infrastructure company Elice falls 30%+ in its Kosdaq debut, the worst-ever opening day for a sizable Korean IPO, after raising ~$151M  —  Shares of data-center infrastructure company Elice Inc. plunged in their trading debut, underscoring lingering concerns about whether …
Dominic-Madori Davis / TechCrunch:
Town, which develops enterprise AI assistants, raised a $108M Series B at a $1B valuation, after announcing a $55M Series A in June  —  Town, a two-year-old, San Francisco-based startup developing AI assistants, nabbed a unicorn valuation on Monday, announcing a $108 million Series B funding round co-led …
Shakeel Hashim / Transformer:
Anthropic's leaked federal AI bill draws widespread criticism from AI safety advocates for being significantly weaker than the bipartisan FRONTIER Act  —  The leaked draft bill is weaker than the FRONTIER Act and makes Anthropic's safety-first pitch ring hollow
Katerina Eva Matsa / Pew Research Center:
Survey: 20% of US adults regularly consume news on TikTok, up from just 3% in 2020; 39% of those aged 18 to 29 and 25% of those aged 30 to 49 do so regularly  —  TikTok is primarily known for short-form video sharing, but it has also become a common place for many people to get news.
Luke Kehoe / Ookla:
Analysis: London fell from 7th to last place out of 18 European capitals for median mobile download speed from 2021 to 2026; 5G adoption has outrun 5G capacity  —  London has slipped from seventh to last among 18 European capitals for median mobile download speed since 2021.
More: The Register

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About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 9:15 AM ET, October 20, 2026.

The most current version of the site as always is available at our home page. To view an earlier snapshot click here and then modify the date indicated.

From Mediagazer

NBC News:
Trump says he was “only kidding” about offering UFC CEO Dana White the press secretary job, after White posted an AI image of himself at the White House lectern

Ed Christman / Billboard:
CISAC Global Collections Report: global music publishing collections grew to nearly $15.89B in 2025, up 5.3% YoY, with digital royalties of $7.25B, up 28% YoY

Washington Post:
An ex-Trump campaign aide and others say Trump ally Laura Loomer was paid $3K-$5K per political X post; she announced a hiatus from her show after an inquiry

More News

Paul Sandle / Reuters:
The UK CMA proposes measures requiring Apple to provide easier access to its contactless tech and reduce access fees, with a consultation until November 17
Wall Street Journal:
Sources: Ted Sarandos complained for months of a lack of new Netflix hit shows and US watch time being down; Netflix just fired its film chief and content chief
Paige Smith / Bloomberg:
Ramp says it applied to the US OCC for a trust bank charter that, if approved, would allow it to offer fiduciary investment management and digital asset custody

Earlier Picks

Engineering at Meta:
Meta details Prometheus, its gigawatt-scale supercluster in Ohio, which will have ~1M GPUs at full scale and was used to train its Muse foundational models
Alex Konrad / Upstarts Media:
Tolan, an AI assistant focused on users that are not tech-savvy, raised $30M from USV, Khosla Ventures, and Homebrew, and says 70% of its users are women
Chance Miller / 9to5Mac:
Apple announces a “Pro and tell” event on October 28 at 10am PT in LA, where its first touchscreen MacBook, a 14-inch MacBook Pro with M6, and more are expected
Todd Bishop / GeekWire:
Amazon launches TorchNeuron, an open-source framework that lets developers run PyTorch code on Amazon's Trainium chips with no rewriting needed, in public beta
MiniMax:
MiniMax launches M3.1 Flash, saying it delivers “a generational leap” in agentic tasks, coding, computer use, and cybersecurity, with weights due October 23
Connor Hart / Wall Street Journal:
The US DHS orders all federal civilian agencies to remove DeepSeek's tech from their IT systems and prohibits future procurement of its products and services
Brian Krebs / Krebs on Security:
Sources: US investigators pursuing ShinyHunters, which stole FBI data, identified executives at two ransomware negotiation firms who had unusually close ties
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