Show Notes
OpenAI said the FBI arrested a staffer after it found a hidden recording device in its offices. Netflix cut about 1,000 jobs, Microsoft patched a record 1,416 vulnerabilities, and the FBI shut down North Korean laptop farms in Texas.
OpenAI says the FBI arrested one of its staffers after the company found a hidden recording device in its offices and used its models to understand the device (X)
Saudi national Abdulrahman Alfozan, on OpenAI’s product team for over a year, is charged with wrapping a thumb-sized recorder in toilet paper and plugging it into the USB port of a conference room TV (WSJ)
More on the alleged OpenAI spy: Alfozan, who cited Elon Musk as a role model, was a fixture between Silicon Valley and Saudi Arabia and was due to speak at Stanford last Friday (FT)
Memo: Netflix is cutting 6% of its staff, or ~1,000 jobs globally across product, tech, legal, and HR, its biggest layoffs since 2022, amid slowing growth (WSJ)
Microsoft releases updates fixing 1,400+ security vulnerabilities, surpassing September’s record of 972, which was already ~10x the normal monthly patch load (Krebs on Security)
October Patch Tuesday fixed 1,416 Microsoft vulnerabilities, 85 of them critical including 67 remote code execution flaws, one already exploited in the wild, with over 1,000 across Windows versions (PCWorld)
The FBI says it worked with CrowdStrike to dismantle 40+ laptop farms across Texas used to help North Koreans get remote US tech jobs under stolen identities (The New York Times)
A look at OpenAI’s safety concerns over loop transformers before shipping its next major model; Microsoft accidentally confirmed GPT-6.1 Sol uses the technique (The Information)
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DeepSeek open-sourced DeepInfer, its internal inference stack. Inception’s diffusion LLM Mercury 3 claimed 4x to 8x speed over Haiku 5.5. Spotify launched paid podcast memberships, and Eric Schmidt’s 1% Anthropic stake looked set for a massive IPO windfall.
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Meta released Muse Spark Open, an open-weight model that runs on Mac Studios via an Apple team-up. An OpenAI model used a wallet it didn’t own, Accenture capped Claude spending at $29 a month, and BofA hired 1,000 patching contractors.