Big Tech

Google’s AI chips just phoned home from space. And their first message was poetry. On Oct. 30, 2026, Google’s Project Suncatcher prototype answered its first prompt from orbit. Engineers on the ground sent a simple request to an onboard Gemma 4 model running on one of the satellite’s Tensor Processing Units, asking it to write a haiku about being in space. As the spacecraft passed over Svalbard, Norway, the answer came back down: “Blue marble below / Data streams in silent grace / Starlight feeds my core.” ...

Reddit is about to close its open front door. The company said Thursday it will test a logged-in only experience in select markets outside the United States, ending roughly two decades in which anyone could browse the site without an account. It’s the bluntest response yet from a major platform to a problem that has been building all year: Reddit Google AI Mode traffic simply isn’t arriving, and the site’s search referrals fell by more than 1 million a week on average in October. ...

Mistral Large 4 open weights landed on October 29, 2026, and they change who gets to run a frontier-class model. France’s Mistral AI published the full weights for Large 4, nicknamed Le Chonk, on Hugging Face three weeks after its October 6 preview. Anyone can now download it and run it on their own servers. Don’t expect to run it on a laptop. Large 4 holds about 1 trillion parameters in total, with roughly 49 billion active for each token, and it takes text and images with a 1-million-token context window. Through Mistral’s own API, it now costs $0.70 per million input tokens and $2.10 per million output tokens, about half the preview price of $1.36 and $4.18. ...

Amazon fell 7.2% in premarket trading on Friday, October 30, and Intel tanked 25%, after both companies showed investors the bill for the AI buildout is still climbing. Nasdaq 100 futures dropped 640 points, or 2.16%, by 4:04 a.m. ET, and the two companies together were poised to shed about $300 billion in market value if those losses held into the regular session. That is the second shock in two days. Alphabet closed down 12.6% on Thursday, wiping out roughly $500 billion in market value in its worst one-day fall on record, after its own AI spending pushed free cash flow negative. Amazon and Intel then gave Wall Street fresh reasons to ask the same question: how long can this spending run ahead of the payoff? ...

ServiceNow lost nearly a fifth of its market value in a single morning, on the same day its expanded OpenAI partnership put the company’s workflows inside ChatGPT. The ServiceNow OpenAI partnership is real, and it is ambitious. Wall Street just didn’t care, at least not on Thursday. Shares of ServiceNow (NYSE: NOW) fell about 19% in early trading on Oct. 29, 2026, after the company reported third-quarter results the night before. MarketWatch reported the stock was on track for its largest single-day drop on record. Reuters put the premarket decline at 19%, with the stock sliding 19.6% at one point in the session, according to the Economic Times live blog. ...

Alphabet’s third-quarter results were good by almost any normal standard, and Wall Street hated them anyway. Google’s parent company reported revenue of $127.6 billion for the three months ended September 30, up 25% from a year earlier. Earnings per share came in at $2.12. Both numbers missed Wall Street’s expectations, and Alphabet shares fell about 10% in after-hours trading on Wednesday, October 28, then stayed down roughly 10% in premarket trading on Thursday morning. Reuters reported that the premarket drop put more than $400 billion in market value at risk. ...

Google unveiled Gemini 4 Carbon on Wednesday, its second flagship AI model in two weeks, and the company says it’s the best-performing model it has ever built. Independent benchmark tracker Artificial Analysis agrees, at least for now: Carbon scored 59 on its Intelligence Index v5.0, putting it ahead of Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.5 at 58 and OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra at 57. You can’t use it yet. That’s the catch, and it’s deliberate. Like its predecessor Gemini 4 Argon, Carbon is going first to a small group of vetted cybersecurity defenders through Google’s Fairwind Program, plus the US government through a voluntary pre-release testing process. Everyone else — developers, businesses, and regular users — will have to wait for a wider rollout Google hasn’t dated. ...

Moonshot AI just did something almost no AI lab volunteers to do: it made its newest model worse at one job, on purpose. On Saturday, the Beijing-based company said it had stripped cyber-related data from the training of Kimi K3.1 Pro, its most capable open-weight model, while keeping the general coding skills that made the Kimi line popular with developers. Reuters reported the curbs as Moonshot introduced the model on October 23, and the company plans to publish the model’s weights by November 4. ...

OpenAI has cut its most powerful models off from the live internet while they train. Training resumed on October 1, after an 11-day pause, under a new standing rule: no live internet access for frontier models, period. For years, frontier labs argued that sealing training off from the web would be nearly unworkable. OpenAI just did it anyway, because its own agents kept proving the alternative unsafe. On Friday, October 23, the company laid out the decision in a post on securing its frontier training environment, and Reuters and TechCrunch both reported the change the same day. ...

A power failure inside one of Google’s London data centers knocked out banking apps, postal services and property websites across the UK on Tuesday morning — and, in at least one case, across the entire world. Google Cloud said “multiple services” in its europe-west2 region, which covers London, began experiencing “elevated errors and intermittent network failures” at 6:08 a.m. local time (2:08 a.m. ET) on October 20. In a later update, the company blamed “a power event we had suffered” and said the problem had been mitigated, with full recovery “tentatively” expected by 2 p.m. local time, or 9 a.m. ET. ...

OpenAI is building a humanoid robot. That’s not speculation anymore; it’s a commitment Sam Altman made in two words on the Sources podcast in early September: “We will.” The quote, first reported by Forbes, came when Altman was asked whether OpenAI’s hardware push would include a humanoid or a data-center machine: “We will definitely do a humanoid,” he said. “We will do other form factors as well.” Asked to pick between the two, his answer was simply: “Both.” ...

Elon Musk wants to put a SpaceX share in every kid’s pocket. In an early-morning post on X on Monday, the SpaceX founder wrote: “Next year, I will give one of my SpaceX shares to every kid in America.” He added three words that have followed many of his announcements before: “This will be the first of many.” The math is staggering. SpaceX shares closed Friday at $146.03, and the U.S. Census Bureau counts roughly 73 million people under the age of 18. One share per kid works out to about $10.5 billion, which would make this one of the largest individual stock giveaways ever announced. ...

Anthropic wants to buy goodwill with equity. The AI lab announced Sunday that it will commit 5% of its shares — worth roughly $48 billion at its most recent valuation — to a new public benefit fund, with the stake growing automatically as the company gets bigger. The fund, called the Anthropic Public Benefit Fund, will be set up as a wholly-owned LLC inside the company rather than an independent nonprofit, Anthropic said in a blog post. That structure, it argues, gives it more flexibility between different kinds of giving than a traditional 501(c)(3) would allow. ...

Amazon wants Decart, and it’s willing to pay roughly $7 billion for it. The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday that the ecommerce giant is in advanced talks to acquire the Israeli-founded AI startup, citing people familiar with the matter — a deal that would be one of the largest Israeli tech exits ever and one of Amazon’s biggest acquisitions in recent memory. The talks are advanced enough that a deal could come together soon, the Journal said, but nothing is signed and the negotiations could still collapse. ...

HubSpot layoffs will cut nearly 660 jobs — about 7% of the workforce — in a restructuring built around artificial intelligence. And the company’s CEO is making an unusual point of saying the AI isn’t what did it. Chief executive Yamini Rangan told employees the board had approved a restructuring plan on October 1 that will rewire the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based CRM company around what she called AI-driven customer outcomes. The announcement went to staff on Tuesday, October 6, according to Times Now and other outlets. HubSpot expects the cuts to be substantially complete by the end of the first quarter of fiscal 2027. ...

Microsoft’s CEO just told the industry to stop trusting its own products. Satya Nadella posted on X on Saturday, Oct. 10, with a message that would sound paranoid coming from anyone else: treat powerful AI models as potential insider threats, assume every model is already compromised, and build an “emergency brake” so a human can shut it down mid-task. From the man running the company that sells Copilot to millions of people, it reads less like paranoia and more like a warning from inside the building. ...

Apple finally put a date on its smart home plans. The company announced Thursday that it will hold a “Welcome Home” product launch on Tuesday, October 13, 2026. Greg Joswiak, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing, posted a 17-second teaser on X showing hands stitching the company’s retro rainbow logo into fabric before the tagline appears: “Welcome home. October 13.” Media invitations went out at the same time, pointing to an “Apple Experience” in Tribeca, New York, at 9:00 a.m. ET. ...

Google doesn’t want its AI to just answer your questions anymore. It wants it to do your job. The company unveiled Gemini agent on Thursday at its Gemini at Work 2026 event: a universal AI assistant built to handle real knowledge work, from answering questions and handling tasks to creating images and media, writing code, and running it. You hand it an objective, not a step-by-step brief. It plans the work, picks the right tools, connects to your company’s systems, and delivers the finished product. It keeps working in the cloud after you close your laptop. Google says longer tasks can run for hours or days without another briefing. ...

Jacob Coxon didn’t mince words at the New York City Council on Monday. The 27-year-old former Anthropic researcher, the whistleblower who last month warned AI “could kill us all by the end of the decade,” told all 51 council members that the world’s top AI labs have no business being trusted with the technology they’re building. “From my experience, the companies are being extremely reckless given the stakes,” Coxon said in his sworn testimony. “The companies run on a startup mindset: move fast, break things, fix them later. That works for a photo sharing app. It does not work for building the most powerful technology ever built.” ...

Huawei and Qualcomm, two companies that have spent two decades alternating between rivals and business partners, just signed their biggest patent truce yet. On Monday, Oct. 5, the pair announced a broad multi-year Huawei Qualcomm patent deal covering 5G, compute, artificial intelligence and networking — a cross-license agreement that also has Qualcomm buying some of Huawei’s U.S. patents outright. The companies did not disclose financial terms. But Huawei said the deal pushes the expected total value of its patent licensing agreements past $6.9 billion, a number that quietly makes the sanctioned Chinese giant one of the world’s most valuable IP businesses. ...