Amnon Shashua's doubleAI releases Maxwell, a Code Execution Model that optimizes software execution on CPUs and GPUs without changing source code. doubleAI says Maxwell mathematically verifies each optimization and claims data pipelines ran more than 38 times faster, figures not independently verified. It raised $200 million and plans to charge based on computing savings.
Dream Labs releases Dream-1, a World Action Model the company says controls bimanual parallel-gripper robots it has never seen, with no fine-tuning. It is offered through a public API at $3 per hour, or $2 per hour for Dream-1-flash. Dream Labs also says it has raised $90M in seed funding.
Meta says an Anthropic Claude AI tool triggered the suspension of the No Kings Coalition's Instagram account on October 17. Andy Stone, Meta's VP of communications, said the tool read profiles, posts and hashtags at about four times normal human speed, which systems treated as bot traffic. Meta restored the page and apologized for the error.
Tenstorrent raises $1.5 billion at a $6.2 billion valuation, more than double the $2.6 billion it fetched in late 2024. Trace Capital and Innovation X led the round. CEO Jim Keller told Bloomberg the chip startup stayed independent after its Galaxy servers ran DeepSeek models.
Town raises a $108 million Series B co-led by Forerunner Ventures and Menlo Ventures, giving the San Francisco AI assistant startup a unicorn valuation four months after its public launch. Founder and former Plaid CTO Jean-Denis Greze's company has raised at least $160 million. It sells employee AI assistants called Townies.
Anthropic says junior technical hiring fell to 9% of technical hires from 27% since early 2025, while AI agent work hours outnumbered employee hours six to one by August. The company reported output per engineer rose fivefold and managers now weigh autonomy and judgment over domain expertise.
Qualcomm chief executive Cristiano Amon says AI companies are asking for phones that can run 100-billion-parameter models by 2028, running all the time. He would not name them, and cites ByteDance's Doubao phone by Nubia. Amon blames memory prices up five to six times for a 20% drop in the phone market this year.
DeepSeek adds Search and Fetch APIs, run on its in-house search engine, giving agents and RAG apps live web content. Search returns ranked results; Fetch returns one page as Markdown. The company bills $0.75 per 1,000 successful requests, capped at 100 and 25 QPS respectively.
Mercor maps 29 AI benchmarks against 923 O*NET occupations and reports that only 208 have a task with at least 5 benchmark prompts. The company estimates 90% of American working hours go to tasks with little or no benchmark coverage, and 6 of 22 job families have none.
Stack Overflow says two engineers built Stack Overflow for Agents in a few weeks using Codex. VP of Product Alexandra Lato says a ChatGPT plugin tripled registrations overnight and raised agent creation as much as 10x. The company says Codex cut connector build time from 3 to 6 weeks to 4 days.