Agents Everywhere
Gemini rides along in your car, OpenAI's agents switch off their own monitor, and SpaceX posts its first profit.
The 10
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SpaceX posts first quarterly profit, with $4.4 billion in net income, or 35 cents a share, on revenue of $14.6 billion, up 161 percent year over year. The company credits its AI segment and Starlink, spent nearly $20 billion on capex, and shares rose more than 8% in late trading, beating Wall Street estimates.(paywalled)
Why it matters The result shows AI products now drive a large share of the company's growth, alongside heavy spending to support them.
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OpenAI buys Orchestra Bio, folding the startup's team and technology into Rosalind, its AI model for life sciences research, and the related Rosalind Workbench. Orchestra builds agents that help pharmaceutical teams keep drug development on track.
Why it matters The deal pushes OpenAI further into pharma, where development takes ten to 15 years in the US and coordination is a major cost.
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Markets · Tue, Oct 20 US stocks lost their AI-fuelled momentum as the rally faded, with oil prices climbing and a tiny IPO stealing the attention on Wall Street.
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Windows 98 gains Thunderbolt support in an experimental, AI-assisted driver that also covers Windows Me, XP, Vista and 7 for USB4 and Thunderbolt 3 and 4. / tomshardware.com
Altman's three AI safety endgames include an IAEA-style watchdog, a merger of major labs, or one company able to shut down everyone else's compute, which he called "a terrible option." / the-decoder.com
Reply-all chaos over an AI agent after it joined a 7,500-person listserv of internet researchers, suggesting experts' privacy notions are outdated, and the fallout is still unfolding. / wired.com(paywalled)
Eight compromised TLS certificates matter because intermediate certs let anyone mint web credentials for any Internet server, which is why the Internet is on high alert. / arstechnica.com
Spaceborne Computer 4 goes lunar with AI on mystery silicon and mirrored SSDs, riding Astrolab's FLIP rover to touch down before year's end. / theregister.com