From the Tech & AI desk
Tech & AI
The news, fully digested. Our published Tech & AI stories, newest first.
ANTHROPIC ASKS WALL STREET FOR TWO TRILLION DOLLARS
Anthropic filed to go public on the Nasdaq under the ticker ANT, and it could be the biggest IPO in history. The filing shows $16.3 billion in six-month revenue, an $80.7 billion loss that mostly isn't real, and about 94 pages of risk factors that include the end of the human race. We go through all three.
ELON'S FULL-LENGTH AI 'ODYSSEY' IS ACTUALLY SEVEN MINUTES AND TWELVE SECONDS OF SLOP
Musk said Grok Imagine would put out a full-length, historically accurate Odyssey before the end of the year. Three months later, X got seven minutes and twelve seconds of bearded guys talking over a British voiceover. The best joke is that the cast he built to fix Nolan's casting is getting panned for its own casting.
ELON IS GIVING EVERY KID IN AMERICA ONE SHARE OF SPACEX, ALLEGEDLY
Musk posted before 4 a.m. that every kid in America gets one of his SpaceX shares next year. That's roughly 72 million kids and about $10.5 billion, with no word on who actually qualifies. Trump has already announced where the shares are going, which is more than Musk has done.
FIRST WEEKEND OF CORNELL FRAT BAN
Cornell banned parties at every fraternity house for the rest of the school year, and the first weekend it took effect happened to be Homecoming. We walk through what the school actually did about the 2024 allegations before it found this gear. A lot of it involved essays.
APPLE WANTS $299 FOR A KITCHEN SCREEN THAT SCANS YOUR FACE AND CAN'T RUN APPS
Apple finally built a smart display. It's $299, it recognizes up to six faces in your house, and it ships November 13 with no App Store and a Siri that's still in beta. We get into what you're actually paying for.
HUBSPOT CUTS 660 JOBS FOR AI REASONS THAT ARE ABSOLUTELY NOT AI REASONS, SAYS CEO
HubSpot cut 660 people this week and the CEO says it has nothing to do with AI efficiency, it's a reorganization around AI. We line that memo up next to Monday.com's and Microsoft's, which say almost the exact same thing. The company is also growing 20% a year, which is the part worth being annoyed about.
MAN BUILDS AI TORTURE CHAMBER ON A MACBOOK, INTERNET DEMANDS GITHUB SAVE THE CHATBOT
A developer built a GitHub repo that steers small open-weight chatbots into simulated distress, and a chunk of the internet decided this was a human rights issue. The issue tracker has one post begging him to stop and another begging him to go harder. GitHub deleted the repo and won't say why.
ONE TRACKER SAYS TECH CUT 225,000 JOBS THIS YEAR. ANOTHER SAYS RELAX, IT'S ONLY 176,000
The 2026 tech layoff totals are in, and the trackers are off by about 49,000 human beings. Oracle is the biggest cutter and put the AI excuse in an actual SEC filing. We go through who's cutting, who's blaming the robots, and why the math doesn't add up.
TWO WEEKS IN, META'S AI BUTLER CAN BE HIJACKED BY A TERMINAL COMMAND
Meta launched Muse on September 8, an AI agent that reads your email, buys things with your card, and runs your calendar. Thirteen days later a Mac security researcher showed that any app on your machine, with zero special permissions, can take the whole account over. We walk through the setting Meta forgot to document
TRUMP LAUNCHES AN 'AI FORCE' WITH NO BUDGET, NO DUTIES, AND A POLL TO RENAME AI
Trump says he is creating an AI Force modeled on Space Force and will name an AI czar soon. He did not say what either one does, what it costs, or where it sits in the government. He also ran a separate poll asking followers to rename AI, and two of the three options abbreviate to SI.
AI BOSSES BEG SOMEONE TO SLOW THEM DOWN, PRESIDENT SAYS NAH
Anthropic's CEO published an essay Saturday asking the entire AI industry to slow down, and his biggest competitors agreed within hours. Then Trump, Mike Johnson and the White House economic guy all said no, because China. The joke writes itself when the people building the thing are the ones asking for a speed limit.
CALIFORNIA WILL NOW FINE PLATFORMS $1 MILLION PER KID, META'S BIG WORRY IS TEENS GETTING BORED
Newsom signed 13 kid-tech bills Thursday, including Adam's Law, which forces chatbot companies to run safety checks and tell parents when a kid talks about self-harm. Platforms can now be fined up to $1 million per child. Meta's public objection is that teens will lose their personalized feeds, which is a hell of a hil
AI RESEARCHER QUITS OVER EXTINCTION FEARS, ANTHROPIC SAYS IT'S TRYING 'ITS BEST'
A 27-year-old Anthropic researcher quit in an X thread, said the labs are gambling with our lives, and racked up tens of millions of views by morning. Then Anthropic's own alignment lead replied in public that yeah, he's right, and put the odds of AI wiping out humanity above 10 percent. We walk through what both guys
A DOCUMENTARY JUST PREIMERED THAT IS SO ABSURD EVEN THE DIRECTOR HAD NO IDEA WHAT WAS GOING ON
Telluride's secret Sunday screening turned out to be a Nathan Fielder documentary about Elizabeth Holmes that nobody knew existed. He moved in with her for the 34 days before she reported to federal prison, then kept filming for three years. At the Q&A he admitted he still doesn't know what he witnessed.
JOHN DEERE BUILT AN AI FOR FARMERS AND NAMED IT JD, WHICH TOOK SOME DOING
John Deere announced an AI assistant for farmers and named it JD. It reads your own field and machine data and answers questions about fuel use, sprayer productivity and harvest timing, and it's free. We get into what it actually does, and why free data help from this particular company is a funny thing to take at face