Technology

Fervo Energy just sent power from its first enhanced geothermal plant to the grid, a day early, and a site that could eventually hit 4 gigawatts. The first block took 23 months to build; future ones could take as little as 18.

— via TechCrunch, Tim De Chant

Amazon's new $34.99 Kindle Click lets readers turn pages without touching the screen, a feature aimed at treadmill reading and under-the-covers sessions. It works with new Kindles and 2024-and-later models, and costs more than similar remotes from Kobo and BOOX.

— via TechCrunch, Lauren Forristal

Legato's new $999 glasses hide hearing aids in their arms, using AI to isolate voices from noise instead of directional microphones. Dual speakers aim sound at the wearer and cancel it elsewhere, cutting leakage by 99% just inches from the ear.

— via TechCrunch, Aisha Malik

Two rejections at SpaceX and Google didn't stop Rama Afullo: he built the software anyway, and this week it launches on the same SpaceX rocket as Google's own orbital data center prototype. Satlyt skips building satellites entirely, betting on an "Android for space computing" model that already cut one satellite's error transmissions by more than 60%.

— via TechCrunch, Tim Fernholz

A New Mexico lawyer told judges ChatGPT generated "wholly fabricated witnesses" in a murder appeal, including two people who never existed testifying about threats and the shooter's clothing. His defense: he figured AI worked since he'd heard doctors use it for research.

— via 404 Media, Samantha Cole

Restate wasn't built for AI agents, but it turned out to be a perfect match for their unpredictable, crash-prone workflows. The Berlin startup just raised $20 million to challenge Temporal, the category leader that landed $550 million at a $12.55 billion valuation this month.

— via TechCrunch, Marina Temkin

Effective altruists are demanding GitHub delete a "torture chamber" project subjecting local LLMs to simulated pain, insisting the bots suffer. The models aren't conscious, but a viral "pain axis" paper and Anthropic's own talk of "model welfare" fueled the panic anyway.

— via 404 Media, Jason Koebler

A board advisor allegedly fed confidential product plans to a $5 billion startup's biggest rival, then landed a top job there two hours after getting "fired." Both sides are now trading receipts on X over what really happened, and the VC firm that backed the betrayed company is following him out the door.

— via TechCrunch, Julie Bort

Pete Hegseth has given Elon Musk and Anduril's Palmer Luckey 120 days to map out the future of warfare. The Pentagon won't say who's running the partner organization actually conducting the study, and critics note both men's companies already sell the tech they'd be recommending.

— via TechCrunch, Dominic-Madori Davis

IEEE just named its 2027 Technical Field Award winners, honoring work behind hard drive storage tech, speech recognition, mobile communication and internet traffic analysis. The list spans researchers from Seagate, Georgia Tech, BlackBerry co-founder Mike Lazaridis and more.

— via IEEE Spectrum, IEEE Awards Board

Reddit is pulling the plug on RSS feeds November 13, citing scraping abuse, and shutting down its public API entirely by March 2027. The moves land just as AI licensing deals have pushed "other revenue" up 24% to $43 million, a hint at what's really driving the crackdown.

— via TechCrunch, Sarah Perez

OpenAI's new Decisions API looks a lot like a small startup's month-old product, right down to the pitch: cheap, fast classification instead of slow, costly LLM calls. One demo shows the approach could catch rogue AI agents for $2.94 a task versus $372 with a frontier model.

— via TechCrunch, Tim Fernholz

BMW's electric i3 sedan costs $4,400 less than its gas-powered 3 Series twin, arriving years ahead of predictions that EVs would undercut fossil fuel cars. The two models match closely on power and range, making this the clearest like-for-like price comparison yet.

— via TechCrunch, Tim De Chant

DoorDash built its drone delivery business backwards, designing kitchen handoffs and packaging before it ever touched an aircraft. The six-propeller drone debuting at Dash Forward 2026 was sized using 13 years of order data, and pilot deliveries start soon in Northern California with Chipotle and Popeyes.

— via TechCrunch, Kirsten Korosec

Daniel Ek's Neko Health pulled in $700 million to scan bodies for early disease signs, and it's not alone: Midjourney and Function Health are chasing the same bet. Equity's Dominic-Madori Davis asks a Neko investor what it would actually take for body scanning to become standard medical care.

— via TechCrunch, Theresa Loconsolo

Cerebras just raised $5.5 billion and signed a deal to deploy 750 megawatts of its wafer-scale systems for OpenAI through 2028. CEO Andrew Feldman takes the Disrupt Stage to explain what happens if conventional AI chips can't keep up.

— via TechCrunch, TechCrunch Events

"United States" got misspelled as "Unites States" right under Trump's own signature on a new voluntary AI safety pledge, and no one caught it before it hit Truth Social. The document, signed with Zuckerberg, Huang and Amodei, has zero legal teeth if a company breaks it.

— via TechCrunch, Dominic-Madori Davis

A new study traces 88 deepfake abuse sites back to five familiar names: Cloudflare, Google, Namecheap, WordPress, and Proton. All ban illegal content in their terms of service; researchers say they keep hosting it anyway.

— via 404 Media, Samantha Cole

ChatGPT now doubles as an app store: with 1.2 billion weekly users, OpenAI is letting developers build tools that run inside the chatbot itself, complete with sign-in, shared access and a 30-plus partner marketplace. "Sign in with ChatGPT" also lets users carry their AI allowance into apps like Notion and Devin, turning conversation into a distribution channel Apple should probably worry about.

— via TechCrunch, Sarah Perez

Tesla just lined up $30 billion in new credit, split across deals with Citibank and Wells Fargo, to bankroll the Cybercab, Optimus, and Semi. The company says it won't touch the money this year, but it's already projecting $25 billion in 2026 capex alone.

— via TechCrunch, Sean O'Kane