Techtonic

It’s been four years since Amazon bought MGM for $8.5 billion. But coming off the blockbuster success of this year’s hit movie Project Hail Mary, Hollywood has become a lucrative business for the e-commerce giant. Prime Video, Amazon’s streaming service, “has emerged as a significant business with a revenue run rate in the tens of […] More

Reddit has long attracted millions of users to its site through Google, with many even appending the word “Reddit” to their search queries for better answers. But as search traffic dries up amid the shift to AI-powered search, Reddit is rethinking its relationship with the open internet. In its third-quarter earnings on Thursday, the company […] More

A study in Environmental Research Letters in September, synthesizing the results of previous papers, found that the additional carbon dioxide and methane released from thawing permafrost, intensifying wildfires, hotter lakes and reservoirs, and wetter, warmer wetlands alone could drive global average temperatures up 0.2 °C to 0.4 °C this century. That would come on top […] More

Here’s another early-stage, agent-management startup to watch because of the backgrounds of the founders and the sheer number of big names it has already attracted as investors: Mintive. Mintive has raised $11 million total, including a newly announced $7 million seed led by Cowboy Ventures. Additional investors include Coatue, Operator Collective, and Hustle Fund; angels […] More

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Opinion: We urgently need to monitor AI agents’ actions in real time —Madhulika Srikumar and Claire Leibowicz from the Partnership on AI, a nonprofit advancing best practices in AI governance. AI […] More

The deal combines the two largest grocery delivery platforms in the US. Poetra.RH/Shutterstock DoorDash has struck a deal to acquire rival Instacart in a deal valued at $17 billion. The purchase will combine the two biggest grocery delivery services in the US, assuming it isn’t stymied by antitrust scrutiny.  DoorDash gained popularity as […] More

Blood pressure readings are typically evaluated based on their average values, but growing evidence suggests that fluctuations throughout the day may be equally important. Rapid or excessive changes in blood pressure can independently increase the risk of heart disease, stroke, and brain injury, even when average readings fall within the normal range. Researchers at the […] More

Google is bringing ads in its AI-powered Search experiences to international markets, betting that generative AI can open up new revenue opportunities even as growth in its core search advertising business slows. The announcement came Wednesday during Alphabet’s third-quarter earnings call, as the company reported $127.6 billion in revenue, up 25% year over year. But […] More

Agents present new kinds of problems that generative AI alone does not. They inherit the unpredictability of the LLMs they are built on, but where a generative AI system produces a single output for a human to act on, an agent performs longer tasks—it plans, picks tools, spawns sub-agents, and takes actions. So an agent’s […] More

This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 4: Ghost in the Machine What I Built What if a machine could report unusual operating conditions and an AI assistant could explain what the readings might mean? I built Factory Ghost, an educational industrial motor monitoring demo combining simulated sensor readings, rule-based warnings, […] More

Hackers exploited a critical Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN flaw, fixed in February, to plant custom malware inside the systems that control an organization’s SD-WAN network. The malware, called KeyDrift, is designed to copy the keys that encrypt traffic between sites and store them for later use, Cisco Talos said on October 28. Talos calls the attacks historical but […] More