Prashanth (Manohar) Velidandi

Anthropic is telling IPO investors that its 15-person chip team is already using Claude to speed up chip design, potentially giving it an advantage over established chipmakers like Nvidia and AMD. Read more: thein.fo/4zBsdSc

Ten million people have watched a comedian accidentally destroy the entire TED talk industry. He filmed the talk once at TEDxNewYork in 2014 and openly admitted he had nothing to say. Speaking coaches charge $5,000 to teach the exact tricks he used in 6 minutes to say nothing at all. His name is Will Stephen. He is a comedian from Late Night with Seth Meyers who was invited to give a real TED talk and used it to prove the format is a costume anyone can wear. Every TED speaker opens with a question, tells a personal story, cites a scientist, and shows a chart. Stephen did all four in six minutes with zero content. His entire formula fits on a napkin. Gesture with both hands. Ask the audience a question anyone can answer. Tell a mildly embarrassing story so they say aww. Point to a stranger on a slide and call them important. Flash a chart of random numbers. Wear glasses with no lenses. The audience will think you are brilliant. That last trick alone has probably cost the public speaking coaching industry a hundred million dollars in sessions clients should have skipped. "If you watched me on YouTube with the sound off, you would think I was a genius." That is Will Stephen on the TED stage, three minutes into the talk he was paid to give. He wasn't lying. Executives pay $15,000 for a keynote coach and still open with a joke the room never laughs at. Founders rehearse their pitch for weeks and still sound like Stephen at minute four, saying "wagga wah, gabba gabba" with authority. The talk is free on YouTube. The method is written across every TED speaker's playbook for ten years. Stephen still writes for Seth Meyers. Almost none of the ten million viewers have stopped nodding at empty slides since. The formula is free. The willingness to actually say something before your next keynote, pitch, or townhall is the entire edge.

Under pressure from Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the Trump administration may be within days of launching a nuclear strike on Iran. The target would be Pickax Mountain in central Iran, where Israeli intelligence claims the Iranian government has restarted its nuclear enrichment program. No conventional weapon in the American arsenal can penetrate 300 feet of solid granite to destroy the tunnels where enrichment is supposedly taking place. The only military option is a nuclear strike. Netanyahu has been pushing hard for one. “Bibi calls Trump about it every day,” says an informed observer. Netanyahu is cornered and desperate. After last week’s election results, he can’t form a government unless Trump intervenes directly in Israeli politics and brokers a deal with other parties that gives Netanyahu 61 seats in the Knesset. Otherwise, he is out as prime minister and on his way to ignominy, investigations and possibly jail. Netanyahu must stay close to Trump. He needs this war. To that end, he’s applied maximum pressure to his closest allies in the administration, including Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and CENTCOM commander Brad Cooper. Both oppose a negotiated settlement to the war they’ve so grievously mismanaged; both are pushing to restart major combat operations. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and CIA director John Ratcliffe are also following Netanyahu’s lead, as are leaders of the Democratic Party. In a recent meeting on the subject, former president Barack Obama said he opposes the current Iran peace deal being drafted in Doha. The rest of America’s longtime allies in the Middle East are terrified by the prospect of more war. On September 27th, Netanyahu flew secretly to Abu Dhabi to enlist the UAE in his lobbying effort for a final attack on Iran. The Emiratis refused. After eight months of conflict, Gulf economies are teetering. So are global energy and fertilizer markets. They won’t recover soon. Globally, there are a total of about 850 supertankers used to transport oil from producers to the rest of the world. In October alone, 11 of them were badly damaged in Hormuz. At this pace, a global depression is imminent. A nuclear strike would radically accelerate the destruction. Fallout from a ground explosion at Pickax Mountain would contaminate the Persian Gulf, poisoning the water supply for 100 million people. And those are just some of the immediate consequences for the region. The rest of the world is every bit as exposed. No country other than the United States has ever used a nuclear weapon in war. Some would like to. An American nuclear attack on Iran would set a new precedent. The Russians have already told at least two other governments that an American nuclear strike on Iran would free them to use nuclear weapons against Ukraine. Pakistan and India would be tempted to do the same against each other, as would North Korea against Seoul. After the first nuclear strike, World War Three is inevitable. That war would be short and final. We’ve been sleepwalking toward this moment for months. Since February, the administration has quietly rewritten America’s nuclear doctrine to make first use of so-called “battlefield nukes” easier and therefore more likely. No one in Washington in either party seems bothered by this. Now we’re on the brink of it. Close observers say Trump is likely to decide by next weekend whether or not to use nuclear weapons. That would be November 7, six days from now. To his credit, he’s hesitating. At the moment, Trump is listening to his vice president, JD Vance, and to his envoy and friend Steve Witkoff, both of whom argue a deal with Iran can be made. They’re right, though it won’t be simple. The Iranians are famously frustrating to negotiate with under any circumstances, and elements of that government have become more radical since Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his family were killed in February. After decades of isolation, even relatively moderate Iranian leaders seem confused by how decisions are made in the West. (There is a widespread belief in Tehran, for example, that the United States government controls Israel.) But overall, people who have spoken to decision-makers in Iran say there is consensus there that more war is bad for everyone and a deal is worth making. One group that hasn’t been consulted so far is the global population — the hundreds of millions of people who will be killed along with their children if Trump is pushed by Netanyahu into launching a nuclear strike next week. Now would be the time for them to speak up.

Own your intelligence. Anyone that opposes this has something to sell you (perhaps your own intelligence back to you.) Local models need to continue proliferating. The “absolute unit” massive models may be out of reach for now locally, so your best option is to, indeed, keep your options open. Own your harness, data, connections, runtime: your agents. Embrace open source.

We’re currently hitting 96% cache hit rate among roughly 81,000 input tokens per request on average. What’s interesting isn’t just the token volume. It’s maintaining that level of cache reuse across tens of thousands of requests, each potentially carrying different context and conversation history. As AI agents move toward longer, multi-turn workflows, efficient context caching is becoming increasingly important. We’re seeing this firsthand at InferX. We’re monitoring and seeing where else we can optimize.

We made Deeseek v4.1 flash-1017 Free again. This time it’s here to stay until further notice. ✅#1 on OpenRouter ✅100% ZDR maintained Check it out: Inferx.net

🚀 DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017 is here! Stronger benchmark performance, faster task completion, and shorter outputs than the previous version—a Pareto improvement in performance and cost. Now live on our website, app, and API. 🛠️ Optimized for @DeepSeekHarness, Tencent CodeBuddy, WorkBuddy, and more. Upgrade to DeepSeek Harness v0.2.1-rc.1 or later for the best experience with the new model. 1/4

1/16 the ai industry is making an unusual bet: buy compute for years, sell intelligence by the token. banks, commodity merchants, airlines, utilities and cloud providers each explain a different part of the risk.

Microsoft will offer buyouts to about 60,000 workers, part of the company’s efforts to trim costs and retool its workforce for the artificial intelligence era bloomberg.com/news/articles/…