Instacart was valued at $39B during the pandemic. Five years later, it’s reportedly exploring a sale to Uber or DoorDash, with a potential price of $16–17B.
Grocery delivery didn’t disappear after COVID. However the idea that Instacart would become a dominant independent commerce platform hasn’t played out.
https://www.reuters.com/business/instacart-talks-sale-information-reports-2026-10-23/
OpenAI is joining Anthropic in cutting off internet access when evaluating its latest frontier models following dozens of hacking attempts and successful hacks by its models during cybersecurity training.
The only question is why this wasn’t the default?
“Texas is not for sale.” - New campaign ad from James Talarico featuring the world’s first trillionaire
Finding out that one of the private keys of eMudhra, an Indian certification authority which has issued 60 million certificates, was simply the number ‘4’
Elon Musk got to decide which government workers got to keep their jobs, if hungry African children get fed by US farmers or if Ukrainian soldiers can defend themselves from Russian attacks.
An unelected trillionaire who posts racist memes on X gets to decide if and how millions live.
I typically don’t comment on Meta’s earnings reports because I work there.
However there were several key ideas of note about AI.
Mark said Meta expects >10x improvement in Muse’s compute cost efficiency next year. Susan cited smaller models, higher GPU utilization and inference optimizations.
10M+ people set up Muse in the US and Canada in ~6 weeks, with about 25% using it on any given day.
Shopping is its most popular use case, with over 25% of weekly active users engaging in shopping-related tasks.
To me, this seems like clear evidence of consumer demand for AI agents beyond chatbots.
Susan Li made an interesting point about enterprise AI.
Some of today’s leading companies didn’t exist a few years ago.
If startups can establish themselves so quickly, why can’t Meta?
It has competitive models, infrastructure and an estimated 500M small businesses using its apps.
All of the above is taken from yesterday’s earnings call.
https://earningscalls.dev/transcripts/meta-platforms-inc_meta_earnings_call_transcript_2026-10-21
OpenAI had to lower its target valuation from $1.4T to $1.25T after failing to get investors at the higher number.
Still seems a bit high to me given they were getting lapped by Anthropic just a few short months ago.
https://www.ft.com/content/bb564eb1-79d4-4694-aa24-1155202a9abc
It’s the end of an era. AirBnB is banning hosts from requiring excessive chores like washing dishes, stripping beds, or taking out the trash.
Some hosts are upset but given AirBnB is now closer to a “hotel with chores” than a user to user service, this change is way overdue.
https://www.theverge.com/tech/1015844/airbnb-chores-house-rules-update
In a major divergence in strategy, Walmart is building a gateway for AI agents to shop on behalf of customers while Amazon blocks outside shopping agents.
Walmart wants the sales, regardless of who brings the customer.
Amazon wants to avoid losing control of product discovery and the advertising revenue that comes with it.
The rise of personal AI agents is creating a challenge for banks, especially since LLMs don’t always follow instructions and can take unexpected actions with destructive consequences.
Standards for delegating authority to agents and confirming user consent have become an urgent need.
AI agents going rogue on your bank account is a risk that went from science fiction to real in the past year.
That awkward moment when you have to explain to your boss that you built your website on Personal Home Page (PHP) technology and it turns out to have a massive security flaw.
It’s a joke so you don’t have to point out that we use PHP at my work as well.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/22/world/php-vulnerability-websites-cybersecurity-ai.html
Electronic Arts is cancelling the next Mass Effect game, laying off 400 people and shutting down Bioware to cut costs.
This is the first major move after the company was taken over by Jared Kushner's private equity firm and the Saudi Arabian government's sovereign wealth fund. A huge loss for gaming.
Ken Paxton was impeached by his own party, divorced by his Republican state senator wife for cheating and has been indicted for felony securities fraud.
Elon Musk has spent at least $190M towards helping Ken Paxton win the Texas senate election against James Talarico.
Welcome to American democracy
Time to commit as many crimes as possible before Trump leaves office.
The funniest thing about this tweet is that it’s actually less crazy than the actual statements from Republican politicians.
Anthropic has launched a preview of Claude Duet, their response to the popularity of Meta’s Muse app.
As I’ve recently stated, effort is no longer a moat and the rise of agentic coding tools mean competitors can now copy each other within days compared to months.
It also shows how little product strategy seems to matter these days. Anthropic was merging Cowork into Claude, only to launch a separate Duet app.
Product strategy by FOMO.
Disclaimer: I work at Meta.
https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/1015843/anthropic-claude-duet-ai-agent
The chickens are coming home to roost after decades of the software industry treating security as an afterthought.
Anthropic’s warnings of a software security apocalypse from AI models like Mythos now seem less like hype and more like sober warnings.
This video of Donald Trump stopping to chat, wave and salute non-existent people is a reminder that you’re never too old to have imaginary friends.
The Musk empire turducken is about to reach its final form as Elon makes his biggest play yet to stuff his struggling companies into his more successful ones.
More signs point to neo clouds and data center companies as the first major casualties of the AI bubble.
They’re borrowing billions to build data centers in anticipation of huge AI demand, but power constraints, construction delays and rising financing costs are increasingly threatening those bets.
