- Google plans to buy carbon removal credits from direct air capture provider Holocene for $100 per ton, far below current prices, for delivery by the early 2030s (Justine Calma/The Verge)
- Sources describe how Stripe was forced to scramble after its payments partnership with Wells Fargo ended and Goldman Sachs decided against taking up the role (Michael Roddan/The Information)
- The NYT tech guild of 600+ staff, the largest US union of tech workers with bargaining rights, authorizes a strike after two years of talks without a contract (Sara Fischer/Axios)
- Google starts rolling out a Google One "Lite" plan in India that offers 30GB storage for Rs. 59, or ~$0.70, per month (Ben Schoon/9to5Google)
- Waymo: its cars in Phoenix and SF had 48% fewer crashes/mile than humans and 73% fewer injury-causing ones; humans rear-ended Waymos in 16 of the 23 worst ones (Timothy B Lee/Understanding AI)
- Paris-based Neat, which helps other companies sell insurance products to their own customers, raised a €50M Series A, with ~60% in equity and the rest in debt (Romain Dillet/TechCrunch)
- Microsoft says it has demonstrated, with Quantinuum, logical operations with the largest number of error-corrected qubits yet, and partners with Atom Computing (John Timmer/Ars Technica)
- A total of 42 state and territory AGs call on Congress to pass legislation requiring warning labels on social networks that warn of social media's risks to kids (Emma Roth/The Verge)
- Sony announces the PS5 Pro, offering a better GPU and faster memory for up to 45% faster game rendering, but no disc drive, available from November 7 for $700 (Scott Stein/CNET)
- Election officials across the US say false election rumors spread by Elon Musk to his 197M+ followers often coincide with calls by locals to purge voter rolls (Washington Post)
- Sources: OpenAI aims to release its reasoning-focused Strawberry AI within two weeks as a model users can pick in ChatGPT; it will lack multimodal capabilities (The Information)
- Glean, which uses AI to offer unified search across apps used at a company, raised $260M+ at a $4.6B valuation, after raising $200M at a $2.2B valuation in Feb. (Amy Thomson/Bloomberg)
- Israel-based Quantum Source, which is developing photonic quantum computers, raised a $50M Series A led by Eclipse, bringing its total funding to $77M (Meytal Vaizberg/Globes Online)
- Smartcat, which provides AI-powered translation tools for businesses, raised a $43M Series C led by Left Lane Capital, bringing its total funding to $70M (Kyle Wiggers/TechCrunch)
- South Korean police arrest two former Samsung officials on suspicion of stealing tech worth $3.2B+ to build a chipmaking plant in China (Yoolim Lee/Bloomberg)