Desk
Broad artificial intelligence coverage.
Google’s education policy lets schools disable Gemini, but keeping Search means keeping AI Overviews and AI Mode. DuckDuckGo is pitching a working opt-out to districts. The fight is over who decides when AI answers show up in a student’s workflow.
MIT Technology Review reports Democrats won the Texas governorship, a Senate seat and the state House after a campaign centered on data centers. Multi-gigawatt projects like Stargate Frontier and Anthropic-linked Nexus Hubbard now face a moratorium-minded governor-elect, though local politics complicate a hard stop.
CUDA 13.5 takes Vera Rubin from early access to production GA and piles on MPS scheduling, multi-GPU Tile communication, Python ergonomics, and Nsight tools — the software floor for the next Nvidia hardware generation.
On TechCrunch’s Equity, Hugging Face’s chief policy officer walks through four tensions in open AI: when open beats closed on cost, how anyone makes money on free weights, whether Chinese models become the default, and how to secure an open stack without closing it.
OpenAI’s Images 2.6 lets ChatGPT make GIFs from a prompt or photo, with speed and frame-level edits, rolling out to all ChatGPT and Codex users. The API adds GPT-Image-2.6 Flare and Sunburst. The scale makes provenance a policy question.
NVIDIA is pitching a disciplined loop for fixing agents: read the traces, write a test for the failure, change the harness, and prove it on tasks the fixer never saw.
On its Q3 call, Uber disclosed four agent-booked rides and about 500 Uber Eats orders during Halloween week, against 320 million rides and deliveries. It welcomes third-party agents while building its own AI to keep customers in its app.
After calling it “quite terrible” that so much DRAM sits in rarely used PCs, Altman said on X he wants the world to have tons of memory. Intel expects the shortage to last through at least next year and SK Hynix has suggested 2030. The original framing revealed a worldview worth examining.
OpenAI is buying Pierre Computer Company, whose Trees and Diffs libraries already power review inside Codex. With its Pando source-control backend, OpenAI is moving to own the layer where agent-written code is stored, tracked and reviewed.
WIRED reports the UK’s headline figure for AI’s economic gain originated in a 2023 Public First report paid for by Google. The AI minister has told Parliament the government’s central estimate is £120 billion by 2030, and called even that hugely uncertain.
A sponsored piece argues that when agents pass data to other agents, security stops being about guarding systems and starts being about knowing where every piece of data came from.
Alphabet said queries are up sharply, yet Search revenue growth slowed to 12% and paid-click growth fell from 13% to 8%. Google concedes AI Mode monetizes at a lower rate. Advertisers are steady but can’t measure AI placements, and a $200 billion infrastructure bill looms.