Worth Knowing

Interconnects examines the scale of the open model inference market by tracking public token volume disclosures from startups like Baseten, Fireworks, and Together AI alongside OpenRouter API metrics. The available data indicates near-exponential growth in usage, including Fireworks serving over 40 trillion tokens daily for customized models alone, which the author compares against Google's reported platform token volumes.

Google faces backlash from politicians and antitrust advocates after announcing that K-12 schools using its education software will lose access to Google Search unless they opt in to AI features. In response to criticism that it is coercing schools into adopting AI, Google stated that Gemini, Gemini Notebook, and Search will be turned off by default and can be enabled individually by schools.

Uber executives revealed during a third-quarter earnings call that third-party AI agents arranged only four rides on its platform last quarter. While AI agents placed slightly more Uber Eats orders—around 500 during the week of Halloween—the volume remains minuscule compared to the 320 million total rides and deliveries.

Quanta Magazine explores new research investigating whether artificial intelligence models have the capacity for introspection, or awareness of their own internal thought processes. The piece connects this AI research to broader philosophical and psychological debates regarding consciousness and whether introspection is an illusion.

OpenAI has announced plans to acquire Pierre Computer Company, Inc. The acquisition aims to expand Codex's capabilities for building, understanding, and reviewing code.

UK AI Minister Kanishka Narayan acknowledged that the government's frequently cited claim that AI would add £400 billion to the economy came from a 2023 report commissioned by Google. The government's own central projection estimates the economic boost by 2030 at £120 billion, less than a third of the industry-funded figure.

An editorial from 404 Media reports that American voters in the November 2026 midterm elections broadly rejected candidates backed by the Trump administration and Silicon Valley executives, despite hundreds of millions of dollars in political spending from AI and crypto donors. Voters also approved 39 out of 40 local ballot measures to restrict AI data center projects and elected officials campaigning on data center moratoriums in states like Ohio and New York.

Alphabet's third-quarter earnings showed Google Search revenue growth slowing to 12 percent and paid click growth dropping to 8 percent, even as search queries rose at their fastest rate in five years. Following the report, Alphabet shares fell about 14 percent amid investor concern over the company's plans to spend roughly $200 billion on AI-focused infrastructure this year.

Cybersecurity researchers at Calif, aided by AI tools during an OpenAI-sponsored audit, discovered how to turn a known out-of-memory bug in PHP into a critical remote code execution vulnerability dubbed PHP2Shell. While the PHP Foundation patched the flaw in two months, experts warn that AI's ability to weaponize seemingly minor legacy bugs creates a severe asymmetry between discovering and fixing vulnerabilities.

A Hacker News post highlights that Google's personal AI subscriptions use saved Gemini chat histories to train generative AI models and allow human reviewers to read a subset of transcripts. Users cannot opt out of training without turning off their chat history entirely, and chats selected for human review are retained for up to three years even if deleted by the user.

Ai2 is partnering with Google Research and receiving multimillion-dollar funding from Google.org over three years to develop NeuralGCM+, an open-source hybrid AI and physics climate model. The initiative will extend Google's existing NeuralGCM to simulate both the atmosphere and oceans together for long-term, multi-decade climate projections.

OpenAI has launched Daybreak Red in AWS GovCloud (US-East) via Amazon Bedrock. The release provides approved customers with access to the GPT-5.6 Cyber model for authorized cybersecurity operations.

Leading AI laboratories have established election war rooms to monitor and respond to deepfakes during the midterm elections. The piece examines whether this traditional social media strategy is effective at countering AI-generated election misinformation.

Tianhua Chen has published a 195-page preprint book titled "The Little Book of Generative AI Foundations: An Intuitive Mathematical Primer" on arXiv. The primer provides a derivation-oriented introduction connecting the mathematics of major generative model families, including variational autoencoders, diffusion models, normalizing flows, autoregressive models, GANs, and energy-based models.

U.S. tech giants including Google and Meta have seen their off-balance-sheet AI-related obligations grow by 90% in six months to approximately $3.2 trillion. These commitments for AI infrastructure now reach 80% of the companies' assets, raising concerns among investors over the scale of ongoing spending.

Palantir reported a 96% year-over-year revenue increase to $2.31 billion in the third quarter, with U.S. commercial revenue driven by its AI software surpassing U.S. government revenue for the first time. However, U.S. enterprise total contract value dropped from $2.13 billion in the previous quarter to $1.46 billion as corporate customers increasingly opt for shorter-term trials.

Ukrainian drone strikes have damaged Russian data centers housing AI supercomputers and disrupted cloud services operated by companies like Yandex and Sberbank. In response, the Kremlin is mandating emergency compute reserves for state needs, while Russian firms explore hiding data centers underground in mines.

Apple is rolling out an iOS developer preview that allows Siri AI to perform actions across third-party apps using personal context, natural language prompts, and on-screen awareness. The update also introduces an "app skills" feature that lets developers combine multiple tasks into a single action without requiring users to mention the app by name.