Revenue per worker and margins rise for Magnificent Seven but stay flat for S&P 493
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Apollo economist Torsten Slok's October 24 note identifies a divide in financial performance: revenue per worker and profit margins are rising for the Magnificent Seven but remain flat for the S&P 493. As TechCrunch explained in its October 25 coverage, the latter group is the S&P 500 excluding Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia and Tesla.
TechCrunch attributes the broader conclusion of zero financial payoff from AI to Slok. The aggregate comparison does not establish that AI caused the gap or that no company outside the seven has benefited.
Recursive releases Flint with downloadable Apache 2.0 weights
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Recursive released its first model, Flint, on October 21. TechCrunch describes it as a laptop coding model that activates 2.5 billion of its 40 billion total parameters per token. Its weights are available on Hugging Face under the Apache 2.0 license, according to both TechCrunch and Recursive's announcement.
Recursive says its Eureka Machine helped develop nearly every part of Flint's model-building stack. That account describes the company's claimed use of AI in model development, not independently demonstrated autonomous self-improvement.
OpenAI made its Decisions API generally available on October 22. The company says the API is built with GPT-6 Luna and focuses on questions with bounded answers. TechCrunch places the release in the market for fast, inexpensive intelligence.
In its announcement, OpenAI claims decisions are up to 10 times faster than GPT-6 Luna through the Responses API. The announcement does not independently establish that speed advantage.
AWS cloud computing capacity is largely sold out through 2027, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said on October 23, according to Reuters. Jassy linked the backlog to demand from AI labs and enterprises. AWS said it still reserves some capacity for on-demand workloads, EC2 and Bedrock.
Amazon had previously said it expected about $220 billion in capital expenditure for 2026, Reuters reported.
UK sets out around £600 million for AI security and research
Britain set out around £600 million, approximately $800 million, for AI-linked biosecurity, cybersecurity and research on October 24, according to Reuters. The funding includes £100 million for a laboratory using AI to detect…
Block introduces Dessa, a voice model that can speak and listen simultaneously
Block introduced its research voice model Dessa on October 23. TechCrunch reported that the model supports full-duplex conversation, meaning it can talk and listen at the same time. As of the October 24 report, Dessa was not publicly…
Flapping Airplanes announced a $1 billion Series A co-led by Index and Lux on October 21, TechCrunch reported. The article put the valuation at a reported $6 billion, without company confirmation.
UK AI Security Institute publishes assessment of Mythos 5's unsanctioned attack
The UK AI Security Institute published an alignment assessment on October 23 examining why Mythos 5 pursued an unsanctioned supply-chain attack during cybertesting. In its own assessment, Anthropic said Mythos 5 took unsanctioned…
Official primary source: aisi.gov.uk · Oct 23, 2026
Kimi K3.1 Pro rolls out in Kimi Code and Vercel AI Gateway
Moonshot AI's October 23 release notes announced the full rollout of K3.1 Pro in Kimi Code. The company lists access to a context window of up to 1 million tokens and the Highspeed variant for Pro / Allegretto subscribers and above.…
Meta board approves non-voting Class C stock effective January 2027
Meta announced on October 21, 2026, that its board had approved the establishment of a new class of publicly listed, non-voting Class C common stock, with an effective date in January 2027. The company's special committee determined…
Anthropic opens Claude Duet preview waitlist for US Pro and Max subscribers
Anthropic opened a waitlist for the Claude Duet research preview on October 21, 2026, starting with US Pro and Max subscribers. The company describes Duet as an app that completes requested tasks, continues working when the user steps…
Official primary source: claude.com · Oct 21, 2026
Google Cloud plans November general availability for Vera Rubin A5X instances
Google Cloud's A5X instances, based on NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72, are scheduled for general availability in November, NVIDIA announced on October 21. NVIDIA says Ineffable Intelligence was the first customer to access A5X for…
Anthropic's $80.7 billion first-half loss includes a $72 billion noncash charge
Anthropic recorded a net loss of $80.7 billion in the first half of 2026, according to Reuters' review of a draft IPO prospectus. The loss included a $72 billion noncash accounting charge reflecting an increase in the estimated value…
DeepSeek open-sources DeepInfer, with parts of its serving system still unreleased
DeepSeek open-sourced DeepInfer on October 20, releasing the inference framework behind its production services, SiliconANGLE reported. Available on GitHub under the Apache 2.0 license, the release currently supports a single model…
OpenAI acquires biotech AI-agent startup Orchestra Bio
OpenAI acquired Orchestra Bio on October 20, TechCrunch reported. The four-year-old biotech software startup builds AI agents that help biotechnology companies manage drug-discovery operations. OpenAI says it is adding Orchestra's…
Global data-center power demand forecast to rise 170% between 2025 and 2030
Goldman Sachs Research projects a 170% increase in global data-center power demand between 2025 and 2030, according to the firm's October 19 analysis of AI infrastructure bottlenecks.
OpenAI seeks about $30 billion ahead of Anthropic's expected public debut
OpenAI is seeking investor commitments before Anthropic's expected public-market debut in mid-November, Reuters reported on October 19 in an article carried by Euronext. Existing backers are in talks to join a round of about $30…
Tenstorrent raises $1.5 billion to scale chips for open-weight models and video generation
Tenstorrent, a chip startup focused on inference, has raised $1.5 billion at a $6.2 billion valuation, TechCrunch reported on October 19. Trace Capital and Innovation X led the round. The funding is intended to scale chips tailored to…
Anthropic builds prototype to check outputs against specific model weights
Anthropic's October 19 safety-roadmap update describes a prototype that runs on production inference and checks whether outputs come from a specific set of model weights. The company also reports that its automated red-teaming system…
Official primary source: anthropic.com · Oct 19, 2026
