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"Touchscreen MacBook Pro launches" and "Gemini 4 Carbon unveiled."

Views expressed in this science, technology, and AI update are those of the reporters and correspondents.  Accessed on 29 October 2026, 0014 UTC.

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Russ Roberts (https://hawaiisciencemonitor.blogspot.com).

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	Wed, Oct 28

Tomorrow's events:  Ripple Swell (day 3); TEDAI (day 2); Earnings: AMZN, INTC, COIN, Samsung Electronics, TWLO, PINS, MBLY, RDDT, RBLX

TOP NEWS

Apple debuts a touchscreen MacBook Pro with a PROLED XDR tandem OLED display, light-up logo, M5 Pro or M5 Max; the 14" model starts at $2,899, the 16" at $3,399 (Apple)

@johnternus:  We're glowing with excitement over the new MacBook Pro. You've gotta touch it to believe it.  @signulll:  apple has introduced a new input modality on the mac without demonstrating a compelling new interaction model to pair with it at all or even any meaningful changes to the user interface for touch.  that has never ever happened in the history of apple, & that has got to send shivers down the spine of anyone following the company.  worse, there is no face id, there is no cellular connectivity, & there is no meaningful new design.  what is happening?!  i am completely lost.  @markgurman:  On the 16-inch: It is thinner (.63-inches versus .66), lighter (4 pounds versus 4.7).

John Ternus says the Mac is “first and foremost” a device “built around the trackpad and keyboard”, but sometimes “it's comfortable and handy to have touch” (Steven Levy / Wired) Apple says the touchscreen MacBook Pro has a “newly designed hinge” for stability and an “enhanced six-speaker” system; the 14" model is 3lb and the 16" is 4lb (Jay Peters / The Verge) Apple's touchscreen MacBook Pro is the first Mac with the Dynamic Island, offering similar functionality to the iPhone; the Dynamic Island launched in 2022 (Hartley Charlton / MacRumors)

Google unveils Gemini 4 Carbon, its “strongest model with state-of-the-art cybersecurity” capabilities, ranked #1 on Artificial Analysis' new Intelligence Index (Koray Kavukcuoglu / Google)

@arena:  Exciting news: Gemini 4 Carbon (High) from @GoogleDeepMind just made a huge debut on Arena, landing #1 in Text Arena, #2 in Agent Arena, and #4 in Code Arena: WebDev...In Agent Arena, Gemini 4 Carbon ranks #2 with a +16.2% net improvement across +21.9K real-world agentic sessions from our global community, surpassing top models GPT-6 Astra and Fable-5.1.  At $1.80 median cost per task, Gemini 4 Carbon (High) costs 72% less than the #1 ranked Claude Opus 5.5 (Max).  @scaling01:  I'm just worried about its cyber capabilities given that previous models including Argon were hallucination machines  @elonmusk:  Impressive

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Alphabet reports Q3 revenue up 25% YoY to $127.58B, vs. $128.22B est., Google Cloud revenue up 103% to $30.7B, vs. $28.7B est.; GOOG drops 9%+ after hours (Alphabet)

@sundarpichai:  Q3 is in the books!  We're now on a half-trillion annual revenue run rate, with Alphabet revenues growing at 25%.  - Our AI investments are driving overall Search query growth, including commercial queries - our YoY query growth rate is the highest it's been in the last five years.  - Google Cloud revenue grew 103%, powered by extraordinary demand for our AI infrastructure and AI solutions.  Our 1P model APIs now process nearly 32B tokens/min (up 40% QoQ).  - Strong momentum in model progress with Argon and Carbon leading the frontier, and Genie 4 our most advanced new world model yet.  @munster_gene:  Sundar recognizes the importance of personalized bots to compete with Muse, Grok Bot, Dot.  Says “Agents will operate as a unifying layer across our products, so you will see us extend these agentic experiences beyond search in the Gemini app to Chrome, Android, and our workspace products as well.”  My take: I want to better understand what a unifying layer means for the user experience.  $GOOG  @john_paul99:  Google Cloud just did $30B+ and beat by $1.6B. Stock still down 8%. The market isn't asking “is AI growing?” anymore. It's asking “is it paying for $200B in capex?” Tonight the answer was “not yet.”

Alphabet reports Q3 YouTube ad revenue up 9% YoY to $11.2B, below estimates, and Google ad revenue up 11% to $82.01B, below $83.6B est. (Todd Spangler / Variety) Alphabet reports Q3 negative free cash flow of $9.07B, worse than expected, capex of $51.36B, vs. $55.09B est., and keeps its FY capex forecast at $195B-$205B (Samantha Subin / CNBC)

Microsoft reports Q1 revenue up 19% YoY to $92.28B, vs. $90.69B est., Azure revenue up 48% to $33.17B, vs. $32.32B est., and net income up 32% to $36.63B (Microsoft)

Microsoft reports Q1 capex of $45.2B, up from $34.9B a year earlier and below its own $50B projection, and free cash flow of $18.6B, vs. $8.54B est. by analysts (Deborah Sophia / Reuters) Filing: Microsoft recorded $10B in revenue from OpenAI in Q1, nearly 11% of its total quarterly revenue, and has $7.2B in outstanding receivables from OpenAI (Rebecca Bellan / TechCrunch)

GitHub says Copilot Fusion, which handles model selection and orchestration, is now generally available, releases the GitHub Copilot app, and more (Meredith Shubel / The New Stack)

GitHub says it's seeing 7.4B commits per month, up from 2.9B in August, and has added 4M CPU cores and 160PB of storage in 2026 so far to support this growth (Frederic Lardinois / The New Stack)

Amazon unveils the $500 Echo Show 16, the $200 Echo Time alarm, and the $200+ Alexa Photo Frame, raises smart speaker prices, and previews Alexa Home Map (Chris Welch / Bloomberg)

SK Hynix plans to return $22B+ in dividends and ~$15B in buybacks to shareholders, on top of its ~$30B buyback program completed in August (Kwanwoo Jun / Wall Street Journal)

SK Hynix expects memory shortages to persist through at least 2030; the company has long-term deals with 14 major buyers for 50%+ of its output in 2027 and 2028 (Simon Sharwood / The Register)

Sources: Anthropic's seven cofounders remain extremely influential and personally tight; Daniela Amodei, who runs operations, is seen as a good balance to Dario (Financial Times)

Anthropic's S-1 implies a $40T+ annual TAM based on knowledge work's economic value in 2025, topping SpaceX's $28.5T estimate, without explicitly naming TAM (Wall Street Journal)

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Nvidia debuts Nemotron 3.5 Transcribe, an open-weight model for multilingual audio transcription and translation, and Granary v2, its open-source speech dataset (Kyt Dotson / SiliconANGLE)

Meta quietly launched Waddle World, a Tamagotchi-like, AI pet-rearing game, in the Philippines in September, calling it a “daily journal disguised as a pet” (Mariella Moon / Engadget)

Research: professional analysts followed AI agents' randomly assigned “leans” on subjective analytical decisions 86% of the time; 77% used the agents' arguments (Anthropic)

Artificial Analysis unveils the Intelligence Index v5 with new coding and science benchmarks; 60% of the Index is based on private test sets or held-out answers (Artificial Analysis)

OpenAI says it's launching an election “war room” ahead of the US midterms to identify potential spread of misinfo or other efforts to disrupt the elections (Calder McHugh / Politico)

POLICY

Letter: Senator Elizabeth Warren asks Dario Amodei for “exhaustive responses” to four pages of questions by November 3 regarding existential risks in its S-1 (Corrie Driebusch / Wall Street Journal)

NY Gov. Kathy Hochul signs bills banning AI chatbots from using “unsafe features” for minors and requiring security features in internet-connected baby monitors (Raga Justin / Bloomberg Government)

Letter: two Democratic senators allege the Trump administration withheld a secret FISC ruling on search filters that let analysts access Americans' messages (Dell Cameron / Wired)

Sources: the US DOJ has inquired about the impact of Nvidia's Hugging Face deal on AI competition, as antitrust enforcers continue to probe Nvidia's conduct (Reuters)

LITIGATION

Lawsuit: the parents of a 31-year-old say OpenAI's GPT-4o guided her through an aggressive tapering plan off epilepsy meds, leading to her death in February (Teddy Rosenbluth / New York Times)

The CFTC files a legal challenge to block Utah's attempt to restrict prediction market betting, asserting it is the sole US regulator of prediction markets (Jesse Hamilton / CoinDesk)

A US federal grand jury indicts OpenAI engineer and Saudi national Abdulrahman “Abdul” Alfozan on a felony charge of interception of oral communications (Sarah Brager / San Francisco Chronicle)

SEMICONDUCTORS

Sources: CXMT plans to start HBM3E production despite yields of just 20% to 30%; its HBM3E performance is closer to that of SK Hynix's previous-gen HBM3 chips (Reuters)

Industry insiders say PCBs and chip substrates are key supply constraints for consumer electronics makers, as AI demand increasingly eats up production capacity (Nikkei Asia)

WEARABLES

Google and Xreal launch the Xreal Aura wired XR glasses, with Android XR and a puck with Snapdragon Reality Elite, for $1,099+ through December, then $1,279+ (Ivan Mehta / TechCrunch)

Samsung unveils the $229 Galaxy Buds On, its first open-fit, C-shaped cuff earbuds to compete with Sony and Bose, designed with AI's help, shipping November 6 (Chris Welch / Bloomberg)

SOCIAL NETWORKS

Reddit rolls out a dual-feed homepage, with For You and Following feeds, joining TikTok, Instagram, and others in offering a For You feed (Aisha Malik / TechCrunch)

X adds an intrusive promotional animation of an arm reaching across the screen to direct users to a “promote” post button, targeting verified and Premium users (Andrew Liszewski / The Verge)

INFOSEC

Email: a hacker attack forced the FEC to temporarily take its filing system offline around 10pm ET on Monday, blocking groups from submitting reports (Dawn Kopecki / Reuters)

Google unveils Google Multi-Party Compute (MPC), a digital-asset custody and security service in private preview, set for commercial availability in early 2027 (Aoyon Ashraf / CoinDesk)

M&A

Sources: Marvell is in advanced talks to buy data center optics maker Lumentum, whose market value is ~$83B; the deal could be announced as soon as next week (Bloomberg)

The US FCC approves Amazon Leo's $11.5B acquisition of Globalstar, giving Amazon access to Globalstar's 24 satellites and mobile satellite spectrum (David Shepardson / Reuters)

Sources: TPG is in talks to acquire UK-based Ark Data Centres, which operates 27 data centers in the UK and Belgium, from Elliott Management at a ~$5B valuation (Financial Times)

Sources: chipmaker Onsemi is in talks to acquire 16-year-old chip startup Ferric for ~$1B; PitchBook: Ferric last raised a $32.1M Series C in December 2024 (Valida Pau / The Information)

EARNINGS

ServiceNow reports Q3 subscription revenue up 21% YoY to $3.99B, forecasts Q4 current remaining performance obligations below est.; NOW drops 15%+ after hours (Brody Ford / Bloomberg)

eBay reports Q3 revenue up 14% YoY to $3.21B, above $3.12B est., and GMV up 15% to $23.17B, above $22.32B est.; EBAY jumps 4%+ after hours (Kelly Cloonan / Wall Street Journal)

Etsy reports Q3 revenue up 11% YoY to $692.5M, above $668M est., net income of $853.5M after selling Depop, and gross merchandise sales up 9% YoY to $2.65B (Katherine Hamilton / Wall Street Journal)

Chinese AI chipmaker Moore Threads reports Q3 revenue up 1,774% YoY to ~$240M and a ~$7.4M net profit; Moore is building a domestic 100K-GPU cluster with JD.com (Rachel Yeo / Bloomberg)

PUBLIC LISTINGS

Chinese PCB maker Dongshan rises on its Hong Kong debut, after raising ~$1.3B in an IPO, below its $3B goal, at a $30B valuation, amid a tricky IPO market (Sangmi Cha / Bloomberg)

Jio Platforms, India's largest telecom and digital services company, jumps 21.4% in its trading debut, after raising ~$3.2B in the country's largest-ever IPO (Priyanka Salve / CNBC)

FUNDING DEALS

Seoul-based AI chip startup FuriosaAI raised a $620M Series D at a $2.9B valuation, up from $735M in 2025; South Korea's National Growth Fund contributed $280M (Yoolim Lee / Bloomberg)

AI and cloud cybersecurity startup Upwind Security raised $400M led by Bessemer at a $3.8B valuation, up from $1.5B in January, for $830M in total funding (Marissa Newman / Bloomberg)

Foundry, a manufacturing-as-a-service startup that builds factories with robots powered by physical AI models, raised a $100M Series A led by Marlinspike (Rocket Drew / The Information)

Toronto-based fintech Wealthsimple raised up to CA$425M led by GIC at a CA$13.8B post-money valuation, up from CA$10B in 2025, and had CA169.2B AUM in September (Reuters)

MORE NEWS

AMD says it will invest $1B in Meta's equity offering, its first Helios rackscale systems are installed at Meta, and its EPYC CPUs power Meta's Muse AI agent (Kai Nicol-Schwarz / CNBC)

Apple adds a 512GB RAM configuration for the Mac Studio with the M5 Ultra chip, starting at $22,299; the M5 Max model maxes out at 128GB of RAM (Joe Rossignol / MacRumors)

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Amazon Kindle Paperwhite and Kindle Colorsoft review: premium feel, lightweight, nice colors, and snappy performance, but expensive after price increases (Nena Farrell / Wired)

Oracle pledges to limit new financing to $20B through FY 2030, expects free cash flow to turn positive in H2 FY 2028 and top $30B in FY 2029; ORCL jumps 11%+ (Deborah Sophia / Reuters)

Malaysia says it seized ~$12.11M worth of AI chips this month, as authorities close in on a syndicate suspected of smuggling through the country's main airport (Rozanna Latiff / Reuters)

How Silicon Valley billionaires raised $333M+ to try to defeat a 5% California wealth tax; Patrick Collison's $33M is his most serious campaign engagement yet (New York Times)

Dropbox plans to cut ~6% of its staff, or ~200 jobs, costing $27M to $33M in severance and related costs, and says CTO Ali Dasdan will step down on November 18 (Anhata Rooprai / Reuters)

How the UK's Slough, a town on the borders of west London, became the largest data center hub in Europe, hosting 40+ facilities, as locals seek more benefits (Financial Times)

Sources: Fujifilm plans to increase magnetic tape production capacity fivefold to meet AI-driven storage demand, its biggest production expansion in ~20 years (Nikkei Asia)

Sources: HP, Asus, and Acer are shifting some PC production from Thailand and Vietnam back to China amid rising component costs; Dell is mulling a similar move (Nikkei Asia)

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