AI news, distilled.

Franchisee reconciles cash in 94% less time with ChatGPT Work

An independent Schlotzsky’s and Cinnabon franchisee cut menu repricing time by 95% and built a workflow that could free up $100K in cash flow.

A visit to Samsung’s massive new semiconductor hub

Generative AI models run on powerful chips known as GPUs, which depend on stacks of specialized memory chips packaged with the processor. To meet growing demand for memory, Samsung is building a massive new semiconductor manufacturing complex in Pyeongtaek, South Korea. Three fabs already operate around the clock, and a fourth is coming online. Construction…

Terminal X matches senior investor judgment 88.6% with GPT-6.1

Terminal X’s Eval Agent grades outputs against a 54-criterion rubric, catching 25% more deviances from a fund’s mandate with GPT-6.1 Sol.

Mamdani says feds have abdicated on AI, urges New Yorkers to push back

Mayor Zohran Mamdani said Monday night that New Yorkers must resist the narrative that an AI takeover is inevitable and demand regulations that protect the public and put power back in their hands.

OpenAI acquires Orchestra Bio

OpenAI is acquiring Orchestra Bio to bring AI-powered operations to life sciences R&D, helping biopharma teams accelerate drug development and advance new treatments.

Hugging Face ❤️ TorchTPU: TPUs, Natively

AnyLanguageModel 1.0: One Year of Local Models on Apple Platforms

MPS in PyTorch 2.15

Nscale and Anthropic are reportedly in talks for yet another $45 billion compute deal

In August, Nscale and Anthropic announced a $45 billion compute deal. The two companies are reportedly discussing yet another deal of the same magnitude.

Embedded AI evaluators won’t be an easy solution, Hugging Face’s policy chief says

AI labs have staked their reputations on model benchmarking — the supposedly neutral and accurate system of evaluations that are designed to measure whether one AI product is better than another. However, the methods behind these evaluations are complicated and still maturing, said Irene Solaiman, Hugging Face’s chief policy officer, during a discussion at TechCrunch […]

Microsoft says AI agents are like insider threats as ‘frontier models can’t be trusted’

Microsoft wants enterprises to closely watch the agents employees use with systems not controlled by AI labs like OpenAI and Anthropic.

The fossil fuel comeback is here

The US is building more fossil fuel infrastructure than it has in a decade while renewable energy growth slows down, a new report shows. Electricity demand is also climbing faster than it has in more than a decade with more data centers, factories, and electric vehicles plugging into the grid. Despite those growing demands, the […]

CoreWeave’s debt is becoming the whole AI industry’s problem

CoreWeave had a bad week last week. Its bonds slipped into distressed territory by a common definition - when investors demand 1,000 basis points more in yield than they'd get from government bonds. Last Tuesady Chamath "SPAC King" Palihapitiya noticed the distressed debt, and also asked whether the AI buildout was a private credit bubble. […]

Amazon is taking its biggest shot at Nvidia yet with new TorchNeuron dev tool

Amazon wants to break Nvidia’s hold on PyTorch, the free toolkit used to build most AI apps, so that more developers run their apps on alternative chips like its own.

Hackers hit AI coding tool OpenCode, running up charges on users’ AI accounts

OpenCode is an open-source AI coding agent that's become a popular alternative to Claude Code and Cursor. But hackers got into part of its online platform and stole some users’ API keys, and the AI tools it turned to for help kept refusing to look at the malicious code.

Tolan snags $30M for its AI companion that helps users navigate life

AI companion app Tolan has raised another $30 million after attracting more than 250,000 active users.

Replika’s founder built the AI assistant she pitched at Disrupt 12 years ago

Eugenia Kuyda's newest startup Wabi is positioned to take advantage of an idea she had more than a decade ago. Wabi offers a personal AI assistant with a twist, free and downloadable to anyone today.

Tenstorrent hits $6.2B valuation to scale open-weight AI chips

After drawing acquisition interest earlier this year, the Nvidia challenger raised $1.5 billion to remain independent.

Making the internet better for AI agents might make it worse for everyone else

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Until recently, you could divide internet users into just two categories: bots and people. Websites have long allowed bots to perform automated tasks, like capturing the content of web pages, but rules…

“We were looking at it wrong”: The explosive claim that’s upended the AI world

“I think I have good news about the nature of neural networks.” With those simple words of optimism, Nick Cammarata, a researcher at the AI startup Goodfire, kicked off a 26,000-word blog post that has knocked the AI world on its head, sparking wild speculation as well as cautious (and not-so-cautious) celebration. Cammarata’s claim is…