TLDR 2026-11-02

OPENAI RAISES LESS THAN HALF OF $30 BILLION TARGET IN LATEST ROUND

OpenAI's latest funding round received tepid interest from investors. The deal values the AI lab at $1.25 trillion, less than the $1.4 trillion valuation it had earlier hoped to achieve. Investors appear to have grown pickier about which companies they want to back and on what terms. The industry recently experienced a brutal selloff tied to disappointing earnings results from giants, including Google, Amazon, and Intel.

CISCO GIVES 27-YEAR-OLD ENGINEER UNLIMITED AI TOKENS TO REWRITE 98% OF THE COMPANY'S LEGACY CODE IN 24 MONTHS

Cisco has given Padmanabhan Krishnamurthy, a 27-year-old ex-startup founder who joined the company through an acquisition, the job of refactoring 98% of the company's legacy code within 24 months. Krishnamurthy has four weeks to produce a proof of concept. He has been given a budget of unlimited tokens to achieve the goal. Cisco is looking to hire more employees that fit Krishnamurthy's mould.

SPACEX NO LONGER NEEDS NASA, AND THAT'S A PROBLEM FOR AMERICA'S SPACE AGENCY

NASA is no longer an indispensable customer for SpaceX. SpaceX is now increasingly disinterested in the US government for most contracts outside of data services. The company is still fulfilling its existing contracts with the government, and at a lower cost and generally higher reliability, but it is no longer signing many large new contracts for spaceflight and services in the traditional launch and in-space flight domains. It sees the vast bulk of its future revenue coming from AI.

META REPORTEDLY BUILT A HUMANOID ROBOT PROTOTYPE THAT CAN DO HOUSEHOLD CHORES

Meta's Max robot is designed to help out around people's homes. The prototype was built with the help of a Chinese robotics company in roughly three months. Powered by Nvidia's Jetson Thor chips, the robot weighs roughly 106 pounds and is about 1.5 meters tall, and has a display that can show facial expressions, a built-in speaker, and hands designed to pick up small objects. Meta is already working on a second prototype with updates to the design of the robot's torso and hands, as well as a projector and additional sensors to help it handle stairs better.

POSTGRES 19 IS LATE, AND IT'S AI'S FAULT

Postgres 19 most likely won't be released until November and could possibly be postponed further. Several large features were reverted quite late in the beta period. AI has made it easier to identify bugs, and this has resulted in a lot more bug reports that the PostgreSQL committers have to work on. This has taken the focus off development of new features, as the project cares about quality.

A PROPOSAL: HOW TO HIRE JUNIOR ENGINEERS IN THE AGE OF AI

With product engineering, figuring out what the requirements are is still most of the job. This post presents an interview model where LLMs can be used in interviews to roleplay as customers, and engineers talk to the models to extract requirements. The approach rewards candidates who think of edge cases, approach things sideways, and think about whole systems at once. It's relatively cheap and can be used in conjunction with a standard human interview.

SENIOR SOFTWARE ENGINEER, APPLIED AI AT TLDR ($300K BASE + $60K BONUS, FULLY REMOTE)

TLDR is hiring a senior engineer to build the agent-first operating layer used across the company. We're looking for a builder who has taken an LLM agent to production and still owns it. Click here to learn more [13].

HOW BINANCE'S $6.3 BILLION HACK WENT DOWN

A string of unusual transactions started to cause alarm at Binance on Thursday afternoon. Binance's top executives put together an informal war room with about 100 participants in response and worked through the night to navigate one of the most damaging crises in Binance's history. The company was forced to halt deposits and withdrawals as more than $6 billion was drained from the exchange. This article details how the hack unfolded based on interviews with people with knowledge of the events and analyses by crypto forensics firms.

DIGITAL MINIMALISM

Digital minimalism is about being intentional about how you access digital technology. It is about making a conscious choice rather than something that you get sucked into by default. We need social media, the internet, and the web less than before due to AI, and there's so much you can now do purely locally and offline. The flaws of the previous paradigm are now reaching their apex, making digital minimalism more and more necessary.

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A RISING TIDE RAISES ALL RENTS

This post looks at how society could give everyone a stake in productivity improvements in a way that still keeps the natural self-regulation of the free market.

SHOPIFY REDUCES STRIPE DEPENDENCY

Shopify Shop Pay now works inside personal agents and for brands that are not on Shopify.

WAYMO PICKS TOYOTA BZ4X AS ITS NEXT ROBOTAXI, STARTING IN JAPAN IN 2027

Toyota will build a custom version of its bZ4X electric SUV with the Waymo Driver integrated right on the line.

ROBOTICS' NEW ERA AFTER ASTRA

GPT-6 Astra can outperform several specialized robotics models despite not being designed as a robotics foundation model.

THE OFFICE OF THE FRONTIER

The fight to regulate AI and reform American science runs through the Office of Science and Technology Policy, an underutilized office run by Michael Kratsios, who had previously worked with Peter Thiel.

MATHEMATICS HAS CHANGED. LET'S ACT LIKE IT

We are on the verge of a new era of mathematics as AI has opened up many great new opportunities, possibilities, and reasons to be optimistic.