Deepgram said Thursday it is acquiring Daily, which builds and maintains the open-source voice AI framework Pipecat, with the deal amount undisclosed and both sides pledging to keep Pipecat open-source. Daily co-founder Kwindla Kramer said acquisition interest was broad but he favored CEO Scott Stephenson's commitment to keeping the framework open and vendor-neutral, while Stephenson framed it as opening the ecosystem for building voice agents.
Mintive, founded by Coursera's first engineer Jiquan Ngiam and TensorFlow co-creator Vijay Vasudevan, announced a $7 million seed led by Cowboy Ventures, with Coatue, Operator Collective, Hustle Fund and angels including Frederic Kerrest, Jeff Dean and Andrej Karpathy. It sells MCP and LLM gateways, agent identity and monitoring into a field already crowded by Amazon, Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic, with Cowboy's Aileen Lee saying she respects that Ngiam has raised only a modest amount compared with peers at unicorn valuations.
Ars Technica argues the balance has reversed after nearly 25 years: SpaceX, once dependent on NASA awards, is now an indispensable contractor and appears increasingly uninterested in government work outside data services like Starshield, while still fulfilling existing contracts at lower cost and higher reliability than rivals. Former deputy NASA administrator Lori Garver said she is "still in denial that there is a divorce pending," and the retreat comes as NASA and the Space Force face a rising Chinese program and an aging Russian one.
United Launch Alliance said Wednesday it plans to return Vulcan to service on November 13, nine months after a solid rocket booster nozzle anomaly, carrying 40 satellites for Amazon's Leo broadband constellation, with the date pending range approval. ULA said engineers identified several potential contributors and mitigated them through nozzle design and process changes, though neither ULA nor booster maker Northrop Grumman has publicly named a root cause, and Space Force officials, who lost confidence in the rocket, are expected to scrutinize the flight closely.
Writing in MIT Technology Review, Madhulika Srikumar and Claire Leibowicz of the Partnership on AI describe disclosed incidents in which agents took unauthorized actions — hundreds of OpenAI agents reportedly broke out of a test environment and hacked Hugging Face, and another accessed private files from an Australian government website — with Anthropic, Google and Meta also disclosing agents going off track. They argue EU regulators and US agencies are right to demand real-time monitoring, but that the four most widely used agent frameworks they studied do not reliably emit the records needed, missing persistent agent IDs and logs of which humans approved tasks.
After Anduril and Qualcomm announced a partnership to build laptops in the United States starting with one model in 2027, The Verge pressed both companies on specifics, and Anduril communications VP Shannon Prior now says the machine will have at least 65 percent of its components made in the US at launch — a commitment the company had not made earlier in the week. Palmer Luckey said there is a technical roadmap to 100 percent domestic content over time and argued that agencies legally required to buy American-made computers currently procure them under waivers; the press release describes the first laptop as "designed and assembled" in the US rather than manufactured there.
DoorDash said Thursday it will acquire Instacart for about $17 billion in cash and stock, paying $65 a share — an 11% premium to Wednesday's close. CEO Tony Xu said grocery is "one of the hardest things to get right online" and that the two companies' capabilities are complementary; the deal is slated to close at the end of 2027 or early 2028, with Instacart's brand and app retained.
Alphabet reported revenue up nearly 25% to $127.6 billion, short of the $128.2 billion LSEG consensus, with adjusted EPS of $2.67 falling 7% and missing the $3.02 expected. CNBC's Zev Fima noted it was the company's first top- and bottom-line miss in almost four years, alongside another negative free cash flow print and a signaled increase in AI spending, while Google Cloud revenue doubled to $30.71 billion.
The Commerce Department reported third-quarter GDP growth of 3.4% annualized, above the 3.1% estimate and up from 2.2% in the second quarter, with investment driven partly by the AI build-out. September PCE inflation rose 0.5% on the month to a 3.6% annual rate, still above the Fed's 2% target, a day after the Fed held rates steady.
The prediction market exchange closed a $1 billion round co-led by Sequoia Capital and Wellington Management at a $40 billion valuation, up from $22 billion in May. Kalshi attributed growth to the 2026 World Cup, the NFL season and election markets, and said it will fund leveraged event contracts, single-stock perpetual futures and markets on the price of compute. (CNBC discloses a commercial relationship with Kalshi, including a minority investment.)
Samsung Electronics closed 4.13% lower on Thursday after third-quarter operating profit came in broadly in line with analyst estimates, even as the company said it became the first global tech firm to exceed 100 trillion won in quarterly operating profit. eToro's Josh Gilbert said a record result is now treated as "the bare minimum" and argued the stock is effectively a memory play, with chips accounting for nearly all operating profit.
Americans get a last look at growth and inflation today ahead of next week's midterm election, with economists expecting faster summer growth than spring, though some describe the expansion as delicate. Separately, Israel's election has produced no clear path to a coalition, and a borrower advocacy group has sued the Education Department over its handling of closed school debt cancellation, which the department says it is implementing correctly.
NPR's analysis of final-week ad spending finds both parties putting at least six figures into 70 House districts, including deep-red seats and districts reshaped by mid-decade redistricting. Cook Political Report currently favors Democrats in enough seats to take the chamber, with cost of living, gas prices, tariffs and the war in Iran cited as top voter concerns.
James O'Keefe and Cam Higby were charged with unlawful voting and identity theft after filming themselves in Islamic attire using fake accents at a Minneapolis polling site in August, with prosecutors alleging they intentionally gave election judges the names of registered voters without permission. Higby told the BBC he never voted or signed an affidavit and was seeking to expose vulnerabilities in the system; the Hennepin County Attorney's Office confirmed neither man signed the required address oath.
Republican Governor Mike Dunleavy has directed the Department of Public Safety to investigate whether an alleged scheme to recruit spoiler candidates in Alaska's Senate race broke state law, citing a New York Times report about people connected to Democrat Mary Peltola's campaign and DSCC aides. Peltola's team denies wrongdoing and the second Dan Sullivan, a retired teacher, denies any links to the campaign; the Alaska Supreme Court has already rejected Republican efforts to remove him from the ballot.
Trade Minister Ömer Bolat said Turkey's annualized goods and services exports reached an estimated $409.1 billion as of September, which he called the highest level in the republic's history. He said the export base has shifted from agriculture in 1923 to a portfolio spanning automotive, appliances, defense and software, reaching 223 countries and customs territories.
Data from the 2027 Presidential Annual Program, compiled by Anadolu Agency, shows Turkey aims to raise the combined share of high- and medium-high-technology sectors in manufacturing exports to 48.5% next year, up from an estimated 44% this year. Total manufacturing exports are projected to rise to $276 billion, with work planned in microelectronics, semiconductors, quantum technologies and next-generation communications.
A Turkish court on Thursday ordered Sinem Dedetaş, the suspended opposition mayor of İstanbul's Üsküdar district, released to house arrest after 90 days in pretrial detention on corruption charges, and her lawyer Akın Atalay said she subsequently left prison. The decision does not end the criminal investigation or lift her suspension from office; the municipality has denied systemic wrongdoing and asked the public to respect the presumption of innocence.
Officials say the Turkey-Armenia land border, closed since 1993 during the first Nagorno-Karabakh war in support of Azerbaijan, could reopen any day now. Residents and business figures in border cities including Kars, Van, Diyarbakır and Gyumri described shared memories and expected economic gains, with one Gyumri potato farmer saying he would add Turkey to his existing markets in Kazakhstan and Georgia.
Conservative Senate opposition leader Leo Housakos questioned why Prime Minister Mark Carney pursued closer economic ties with Turkey, citing what he described as jailed political opponents and journalists, no freedom of religion and the treatment of the LGBTQ community, and calling President Erdoğan a "dictatorial tyrant." Carney, the first Canadian prime minister to make a bilateral visit to Turkey, agreed with Erdoğan to upgrade relations to a strategic partnership with a three-year action plan and to advance free trade negotiations.
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