This week had a theme of money and hacks. Big tech lost almost $900 billion in market cap over AI spending, Binance suffered crypto's biggest-ever $6.3 billion hack, while Mistral open-sourced the weights of its trillion-parameter model.
AI
Mistral open-sourced the weights of its trillion-parameter Large 4
The French company released the weights of its flagship model and aimed it at cybersecurity. The model got three more weeks of fine-tuning before release, and API access got almost twice as cheap.
DeepSeek released a prototype coding agent
The Chinese lab showed off a more autonomous coding agent, taking aim at Anthropic's Claude Code.
Software
Cursor's marketplace had its Claude Code extension swapped for a malicious one
The compromised version tried to steal data and open remote access for about 11 hours, potentially affecting up to 5,000 users. Cursor pulled the entire marketplace and brought it back after a review.
Someone ran a RISC-V processor inside Qwen3.5's weights
The author built a working deterministic processor straight into the model's weights, with DeltaNet layers standing in for memory.
Robots and hardware
110 AgiBot humanoids danced in sync
The Chinese company set a Guinness World Record in Jinan: the robots jumped, formed waves, and lined up to spell out "2026." A coordinating program tracked them to within a centimeter.
Intel's stock dropped more than 20%
The revenue forecast came in weak: the AI industry is buying up memory and components, PCs are getting pricier, and demand is falling. The government's stake lost $12 billion in value.
The RTX 5080 is now going for $2,000
The card costs two to three times its $999 MSRP and has vanished from stock. Rumor has it a 24GB version ships as soon as December.
Business
Binance lost $6.3 billion in a hack
It's the largest theft in crypto history. Blockchain analysts linked it to North Korean hackers. The exchange promised to cover the losses and has replenished about 90% of the stolen assets, with withdrawals set to resume on Sunday.
DoorDash is buying Instacart for $17 billion
The deal combines the two biggest players in US delivery.
OpenAI cut its funding target by $10 billion
Per the FT, the company is now seeking around $20 billion at a $1.25 trillion valuation: the AI stock selloff and Anthropic's upcoming IPO have made fundraising harder.
Big tech lost almost $900 billion in a day after earnings
The market got spooked by AI spending. Amazon showed AWS growth of 39% to $45.98 billion, but tapped an $80 billion supplier credit line to help fund it. S&P downgraded its outlook on Meta's credit rating to negative.
Nvidia is getting hit from two directions
The US Department of Justice is looking into Nvidia's $12.93 billion purchase of Hugging Face. And per the NYT, a Singaporean cloud executive charged with smuggling Nvidia chips into China may have been a Chinese spy operating right next to Jensen Huang (Nvidia CEO). Huang called the ties to the company "normal."