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October 20, 2026, 9:55 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 …
MacKenzie Sigalos / CNBC:
Apple commits up to $100M over three years to Pennsylvania-based Perryman Company, a titanium supplier for the iPhone Duo, and expands its Qnity partnership  —  Apple is adding a U.S. titanium supplier for its new iPhone Duo and expanding domestic production of camera components for the iPhone 18 Pro …
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.
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 …
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 …
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
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.
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.
Reuters:
Sources: OpenAI is racing to secure investor commitments before Anthropic's expected mid-November IPO, at a $1.4T+ valuation; source: OpenAI could raise ~$30B  —  OpenAI is racing to secure investor commitments before rival Anthropic's expected public market debut in mid-November …
Kate Rooney / CNBC:
Arda, which develops AI software and agents to accelerate assembly line programming and manufacturing automation, raised $230M at a $1.5B valuation  —  OpenAI's former research chief has been quietly building a startup that aims to bring manufacturing back to the U.S. using AI.
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 navigate networks to identify and neutralize targets  —  Documents obtained by The Intercept show the military is trying to deploy autonomous AI agents to hack its adversaries.
Katie McQue / NPR:
TikTok staff depositions: TikTok executives ignored internal warnings over child sexual exploitation on Live, where staff said minors appeared in livestreams  —  TikTok employees repeatedly raised concerns internally about the risks the short-form video app posed to children …
More: The Verge
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 …
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
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  —  Britain's competition regulator said on Tuesday it was seeking to loosen Apple's grip on contactless payments by proposing …

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This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 9:55 AM ET, October 20, 2026.

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From Mediagazer

Rajeev Syal / The Guardian:
A UK jury convicts two Iranians of assisting Iranian intelligence in a plan to “eliminate” journalists at London-based Persian broadcaster Iran International

Finya Swai / The Hill:
In an unprecedented move, Reporters Without Borders calls for impeachment of FCC Chair Brendan Carr, accusing him of politically tinged investigations and more

Mark Stenberg / Adweek:
Q&A with WaPo Executive Editor Matt Murray, who says the outlet is close to breaking even financially and expects 2027 will be its best year in seven years

More News

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

Earlier Picks

John Koetsier / Forbes:
Dream Labs, which offers an API for its Dream-1 robot foundation model trained on human videos, raised a $90M seed led by B Capital and Kindred Ventures
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
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
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
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
ProPublica:
Sources: DHS officials asked CISA to hack a voting machine to report vulnerabilities to the White House without telling the vendor; the request wasn't acted on
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