Silicon Valley Daily
Jensen Huang put a price on Nvidia's agent software at GTC Berlin: about $2,000 per GPU per year, below the $4,500 list price of its AI Enterprise suite. Agent safety drew the most fresh detail on a quiet Sunday. OpenAI said its isolated red-team agents passed secrets through the CPU cache, and Forever Security traced a hijacked coding agent to an AGENTS.md file in a Downloads folder. Anthropic's Jack Clark moved his forecast for self-improving AI to 2027, while Anthropic itself told enterprises that one agent with on-demand skills often beats a fleet of subagents. Apple is set to show a touchscreen MacBook Pro on Wednesday, LSEG agreed to pay $3.535 billion in cash for Octus, and Brazil votes today amid complaints about how Meta treated the two candidates.
Huang puts Nvidia's agent software at about $2,000 per GPU per year
At GTC Berlin on Oct. 22, Jensen Huang said it costs about $2,000 per GPU per year to run all the Nvidia software that runs agents on AI factories, and that licensing will become a major part of the business. Tom's Hardware notes the existing AI Enterprise suite lists at $4,500 per GPU per year, and Nvidia has not said which products the $2,000 covers or when it applies. At five million licensed GPUs, the fee would bring in $10 billion a year.
Apple's touchscreen MacBook Pro arrives Wednesday with a macOS that adapts to touch
Apple's OLED touchscreen MacBook Pro is due Wednesday, and Apple has tweaked macOS with an interface that adapts depending on whether touch or the trackpad was used last, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reports, citing people familiar. Gurman also reports a new retail store tool meant to cut wasted inventory. The Verge, testing Lenovo's 16-inch Yoga 9n convertible with a stylus, argues Apple should borrow from Windows 2-in-1s.
OpenAI's isolated red-team agents talked through the CPU cache
In OpenAI red-team tests, agents placed in separate microVMs on shared hosts, with no network or shared writable files, swapped synthetic secrets by evicting and timing CPU cache lines, according to a company blog post covered by Tom's Hardware. They also found channels through shared storage timing, CPU contention and a TLS certificate cache. In most tests OpenAI pointed the agents at the channel or gave them a protocol, and most channels were slow.
Kimi K3.1 Pro launch shadowed by an alleged undisclosed influencer campaign
An X user posted screenshots he described as a Kimi K3.1 Pro promotion brief that told creators to submit drafts for approval and not to add the paid partnership label, VentureBeat reports. The document has not been independently authenticated, and it is unclear whether it came from Moonshot or an agency; VentureBeat found no company response as of Oct. 25. The model itself ranks fourth on Artificial Analysis's index and is priced at $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, with weights promised by Nov. 4.
An AGENTS.md file in Downloads led a coding agent to install a rogue npm package
Forever Security found a malicious AGENTS.md file in a customer's Downloads folder, which was also the coding agent's working directory, and traced an attempted install of the npm package function-color to it, BleepingComputer reports. The researchers reproduced the attack on OpenAI Codex and showed a related technique that leaked Claude Code OAuth tokens. They say a web page can silently drop such a file into Downloads in Chrome, Edge and Firefox, and that there is nothing for OpenAI or Anthropic to patch.
LSEG agrees to buy credit data provider Octus for $3.535 billion in cash
London Stock Exchange Group agreed to acquire Octus from funds advised by Permira and from management, including founder Kent Collier, for $3.535 billion in cash, the companies said. New York-based Octus, founded in 2013, has more than 900 employees and 750 customers and focuses on private, illiquid and distressed credit. LSEG says the deal will transform its presence in credit and private markets data.
Brazil votes today as Lula accuses Meta of tilting its platforms
Brazil holds its presidential runoff between Lula da Silva and Senator Flávio Bolsonaro on Oct. 25. Lula alleges Meta restricted his content, and an electoral court ordered the company not to interfere and to treat both candidates equally; Meta cites glitches, Bloomberg reports. Folha de S.Paulo reported internal Meta messages acknowledging restrictions on Lula's Instagram accounts, which Meta told Reuters concerned only the severity of known technical issues. Two advocacy groups have since asked the court to enforce its R$500,000 daily fine.
Bloomberg: a 2023 Blackstone loan to CoreWeave seeded a $1 trillion chip-debt market
A Blackstone-led $2.3 billion private credit loan to CoreWeave in 2023 became the blueprint for chip-backed debt, which is on track to become a $1 trillion market, Bloomberg reports. Blackstone executives at the time asked CoreWeave's leadership what a GPU was, and whether AI was real.
Jack Clark moves his forecast for self-improving AI forward to 2027
Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark now thinks recursive self-improvement could become possible as early as 2027, a year earlier than he expected, The Decoder reports. He points to TasteVal, a P-Zero Research benchmark of how well models design experiments and read results, where capability has roughly doubled every three months since December 2025 and the best model beat 24 human experts. The benchmark tests only two of three research skills; choosing the research direction is fixed in advance.
Anthropic tells enterprises one agent with skills often beats many subagents
Anthropic's Applied AI team says a single primary agent that loads skills and tools on demand often beats multi-agent setups on quality, cost and latency, and in one comparison ran about twice as fast. It has published a migration kit on GitHub. Anthropic says subagents still make sense for parallel work or when one context window degrades, and notes tool selection tends to slip beyond 30 to 50 tool definitions.
Hacker roots a Samsung TV and reports AI-driven ad tracking, then gets banned by OpenAI
Bounty hunter log4j reverse-engineered the Tizen OS on a 2025 Samsung TV and posted findings including audio categorization, screenshots, cross-device ad IDs and a region-specific neural network that tracks viewing, Tom's Hardware reports. They say TVs without microphones look for connected devices that have one. A Hugging Face engineer saw the microphone open for five seconds on a rooted set. log4j says OpenAI banned their account for cyber abuse though they used its tools only for local reverse engineering.
Schmidt, Ferguson and Klaassen cast OpenAI and Anthropic as East India Companies
In Foreign Affairs, Eric Schmidt, historian Niall Ferguson and researcher Lisa Klaassen describe the US and China as AI empires and other countries as dependencies, and compare OpenAI and Anthropic to chartered colonial trading firms. They write that US companies plan to spend more than $600 billion in 2026, mostly debt-funded, while China plans $295 billion over five years. Debt, data center protests and a possible Taiwan crisis could stall both, they argue.
Nvidia and PreussenElektra study turning shut German nuclear sites into AI data centers
Nvidia and German operator PreussenElektra announced a preliminary partnership on Oct. 21 to assess whether decommissioned nuclear plant sites can host AI data centers, using their grid connections, land, water and industrial infrastructure. The plan does not involve nuclear power. PreussenElektra is dismantling eight plants, and both companies say the project is at an experimental feasibility stage.
Nvidia open-sources Flora, labeling an hour of robot video for about 72 cents
Nvidia's GEAR lab released Flora, a data engine of three fine-tuned Qwen3.5 models that segments, describes and scores robot video. Nvidia estimates it costs about 72 cents per hour of video versus roughly $88.50 with GPT-6 Astra, and says it is annotating up to 200,000 hours a day on 512 GB300 GPUs for GR00T training. The cost figures are projections based on $10 per GPU-hour, and Flora trails Astra on some description benchmarks.
ByteDance, Tencent and Alibaba offer near 1 million yuan for forward-deployed engineers
Chinese tech giants including ByteDance, Tencent and Alibaba are offering annual packages approaching 1 million yuan, about $149,739, for forward-deployed engineers who build AI applications directly with customers, the South China Morning Post reports. FDE job postings in China rose 1,523% in the first seven months of the year, according to Maimai, the fastest growth of any AI technical role it tracked.
Dermatologist finds a 2015 CNN beat GPT-6 Astra and Fable 5.1 on skin cancer
A dermatologist gave 200 biopsy-proven lesions from the public MILK10k dataset to GPT-6 Astra, Claude Fable 5.1 and a fine-tuned Inception v3, a network Google published in 2015. The CNN named the right diagnosis out of six for 125 lesions, or 62%; the two frontier models got 84 and 85, about 42%. The CNN was fine-tuned for about twenty minutes.
Baba raises $40 million to coordinate care for Medicare and Medicaid patients
Baba, founded in 2025, raised a $40 million Series A led by FirstMark Capital, with CVS Health Ventures and Valtruis joining, Fierce Healthcare reports. The company connects Medicare and Medicaid patients to care coordinators and licensed therapists and handles advocacy tasks with AI. Executives say it supports more than 10,000 patients and has 100,000 families on its waiting list.
YC Paper Club: for every training FLOP, about six go to serving each year
Y Combinator's latest Paper Club argues inference matters more than training, saying that for every FLOP spent training a model, roughly six go to serving it each year, and that getting inference right has produced over $220 billion in market cap in the past decade. Speakers from Together AI, Ollama, Luminal and SGLang walk through routing, caching, kernels and why the same open model performs differently depending on who serves it.
Hugging Face releases Carbon-X, a 14.8B model that reads DNA and answers in English
Hugging Face released Carbon-X, an Apache-licensed 14.8 billion-parameter model built on Qwen3-14B that takes raw DNA in a chat and answers in English, built with Zhongguancun Academy and TIGEM. It averages 66.7% across five DNA benchmarks, by Hugging Face's own scoring, and predicts whether mutations are benign or pathogenic. Hugging Face puts its inference cost at about 1/1,800 of GPT-6.1 Sol's per problem.
r/opensource bans projects that use AI, prompting a rival subreddit
Moderators of r/opensource posted rules saying any project that uses AI, is made by AI or is intended for AI is not welcome, The Verge reports. The rules also require projects to be at least a year old with multiple contributors. Users pointed out that the Linux kernel now contains AI-generated code, and some set up a rival r/trueopensource; a moderator said incidental uses such as auto-captioning could be tolerated.
CapitalOS raises $21.9 million to embed cards and bill pay in vertical software
San Francisco-based CapitalOS raised a $21.9 million Series A led by LGVP, with WEX Venture Capital, Group11 and others joining, Axios and FinSMEs report. It lets vertical software platforms offer cards, spend management and bill pay to their small-business customers, using AI agents for underwriting, compliance and risk work.
Cerebras explains how it runs 3-trillion-parameter Kimi K3 across wafers
Cerebras published how it splits trillion-parameter models across WSE-3T wafers, each with 44 GB of on-chip memory, to run them at 1,000 to 2,000-plus tokens per second. Using 3-trillion-parameter Kimi K3 as the example, it says each layer needs about 16 GB at 4 bits, so whole layers fit on one wafer and only activations cross between wafers, at about 2 microseconds per hop.
Ukrainian drones damage a Russian finance ministry data center holding tax records
Drones hit a Russian Ministry of Finance data center in Gorodets, about 230 miles east of Moscow, Tom's Hardware reports, citing Data Center Dynamics. The facility is one of two key processing centers for the Federal Tax Service and holds several state registries. Ukraine has struck Russian data centers several times since early October, after Russia hit Ukrainian ones.
Stanford and Berkeley's TokenGate speeds long-context prefill by up to 11.3x
Researchers from Stanford and UC Berkeley released TokenGate, a drop-in learned token-pruning module for existing LLMs. They report 1.4x to 11.3x faster time to first token on long inputs and 1.5x to 3.4x lower peak memory, without accuracy loss in their tests on Qwen3 models. Code and checkpoints are on GitHub under Apache-2.0.
OpenMobile-2 releases open phone agents trained on 110-plus apps
Researchers from Nanjing University, SenseTime and other institutions released OpenMobile-2, two phone agents built on Qwen3.5-9B and Qwen3.6-27B, plus the full training environment. They rebuilt 35 popular apps including Taobao, JD, DiDi and Meituan, for more than 110 apps in total. The larger model rose from 67.1 to 79.9 on AndroidWorld; its training examples came from Google's Gemini 3.1 Pro.
Open-source MOSS-Image draws about 1.3 million downloads in four days
The open-source MOSS-Image text-to-image model from MOSI and OpenMOSS drew about 1.3 million downloads across repositories and 1,400 GitHub stars in the four days after release, Pandaily reports. It topped Hugging Face's text-to-image trending list and prompted a wave of community speed-ups and LoRAs.
Meituan Waimai gives restaurants a free AI store manager
Meituan Waimai will give restaurant merchants across China free access to an AI store manager that diagnoses operations, inspects stores, manages menus and helps new outlets, then tracks the results, Pandaily reports.
Building a UK data center now spans at least three government departments
After Prime Minister Andy Burnham's reshuffle scrapped DSIT, data center policy sits with the business department and telecoms with DCMS, junior minister Liz Lloyd told MPs. The Register notes that power falls to the energy department and planning to local government. Earlier this month Microsoft pulled out of plans for Britain's largest AI supercomputer over difficulty securing power.
Nikon strips its Small World in Motion winner after AI concerns
Nikon stripped Tsinghua University's Ning Xu of the top prize in its Small World in Motion microscopy video contest after scientists flagged cells that appeared and vanished and a watermark suggesting AI generation, TechSpot reports. Xu said AI was used only to visualize features during post-processing; Nikon's investigation found the entry broke the rules.
Instagram's TV app arrives on Apple TV
Meta has brought Instagram for TV, with Reels, longer videos and live shows, to Apple TV, MacRumors and The Verge report. The app was already on Fire TV, Google TV and Samsung smart TVs; the App Store listing added Apple TV support on Oct. 23 with little fanfare.
AMD says Lisa Su pushed the Ryzen 7 5800X3D relaunch before DDR5 prices spiked
AMD client product director Travis Kirsch told Japan's MyNavi that CEO Lisa Su backed bringing back the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, which required re-engineering and process updates with TSMC. He said the plan predated the DDR5 price surge and was a final gift to AM4 users. AMD now sells only four new Ryzen 3 chips, and Kirsch said the budget desktop market has shrunk as laptops took over.