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Quest Diagnostics confirms patient information accessed in cyberattack, systems temporarily shut down
Quest Diagnostics temporarily suspended access to several systems following a cyberattack involving patient information.
Indiana men’s basketball listed as a top NIL spender ahead of 2026-27 season
Indiana, fresh off a transfer portal roster reload, was listed as a big spender by CBS Sports ahead of the season.
SpaceX and Tesla have high election stakes as Elon Musk pours $366 million into campaigns
Musk’s biggest political bet is on the Senate, where control could shape future investigations, federal spending and regulations affecting SpaceX and Tesla.
Analysis | The Republicans who aren’t endorsing Trump
In today’s edition … Immigration fear heats up Trump-Haley clash, dominates late GOP ad spending … Twelve House hard-liners sink a procedural rule in protest of Johnson’s bipartisan government funding deal.
Report: Arizona men’s basketball roster spending trails top programs
Arizona men’s basketball’s budget for building a Final Four-caliber team is significant, but the UA is far from one of the top spenders in the sport, according to a new report on roster spending. Arizona will spend approximately $15-17.5 million on its men’s basketball roster, CBS Sports’ Matt Norlander and Isaac Trotter reported this week. […]
How both Texas parties have shifted their political ad messaging
Democrats have moved from healthcare to taxes and corruption, while Republicans have ramped up ad spending on property taxes, crime and transgender issues, an analysis of AdImpact data shows.
Goldman Sachs spends big to give small businesses an AI boost
The Wall Street giant is committing $500 million to expand its 10,000 Small Businesses program and launch an AI institute, partnering with Google, Meta, OpenAI and Anthropic to bring AI know-how to Main Street. NBC's Christine Romans spoke exclusively with Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon and with small businesses figuring out how to make AI work for them.
Marvel's Wolverine leads US September charts, achieves highest monthly dollar sales for a Sony-published title since Helldivers 2
PlayStation 5 spending rose 43% year over year, while unit sales increased 22%
Nearly $61M pours into Iowa's biggest political races
Donors are spending big as Iowa becomes a 2026 political battleground.
Merck Animal Health SVP: to promote human health, invest in protecting animals
While humans invest billions each year to protect ourselves from disease, less than 1% of global health spending goes toward animal health.
AI Founders Have Poured Millions Into Politics. Voters Aren't Convinced
Survey data suggest the AI industry's political spending isn't working with voters who are concerned about jobs and data centers.
Money in politics puts residents on the backburner
Endless outside spending in L.A. elections disenfranchises voters.
The New Rules of Global Brand Growth
Last week, BoF, ESW and Shopify gathered senior fashion and retail executives from Thom Browne, Reebok, Alo Yoga, Harvey Nichols, Bang & Olufsen and more in London to discuss how brands can win back consumer spend, protect margins and localise in a climate where global growth requires more consideration than ever.
Health Brief: Inside health care’s lobbying spending
Regulatory fights are giving the health care industry reasons to spend
Families angry about ads featuring brutal loved ones’ murders
Republicans are spending millions on ads that talk about brutal killings to make Democrats look soft on crime. Victims’ families say they’re shocked and furious over the use of their loved ones’ deaths. CNN’S Isabelle Chapman reports.
Michigan's 7th District House race is nation's most expensive for political ads, outraging both candidates
Political ad spending in Michigan's 7th Congressional District has topped $61 million, making it the nation's most expensive U.S. House race for advertising. Both candidates call the spending outrageous but disagree on how to rein it in.
Leading Employers Back Expansion of Electronic Prior Authorization to Self-Funded Health Plans
More patients and doctors could spend less time navigating faxes, phone calls, and paperwork as leading employers work to expand electronic prior authorization
Trump’s political groups spend nearly $277 million in late midterm blitz on behalf of GOP candidates
It’s an unprecedented expenditure for a sitting president.
Science magazine’s climate plan is a wealth transfer scheme in disguise
Climate policies too often seem to be schemes to transfer wealth and power to special interest groups and spending programs.
Editorial: Chicago needs more jobs. Brandon Johnson wants to tax them.
Mayor Brandon Johnson's revived corporate head tax would make hiring more expensive when Chicago needs jobs, investment and serious spending reform.
City sales tax builds on upward trend, exceeding budget projections to date
Sales tax revenue continues to trend above expectations in Sioux Falls this year, driven largely by business spending versus consumers.
Mastercard boosts NYC Marathon businesses with spending lift
NYC Marathon boosts LIC Bar's business. Brian Porter and Mastercard use strategic planning to turn event foot traffic into growth.
Rural hospital independence depends on making technology count
At Nemaha County Hospital, careful IT spending, faster revenue processes and expanded access to care are central to staying viable without joining a larger health system.
Mastercard Selects Extend as Financial Operations Platform
Deal said to bring ‘modern spend and expense management’ to issuing banks
Marshall faces final debate in fight for political life
In today’s issue: Marshall, Hamilton meeting in final debate Trump unveils fraud whistleblower program Big midterm spending in final weeks Backlash to controversial Ramaswamy ad Sen. Roge…
Ramstad: With DFL nearing trifecta, business hopes Klobuchar keeps excesses in check
A moderate governor will have to rein in the big-spending DFLers in the House and Senate.
In China, scientists found a nearly 5-pound fungus so unique it required a new family
The team also found signs that the fungus may spend part of its life hidden inside living trees.
Montana voters to decide limits on corporate political spending under I-194
Montana voters will be asked to weigh in on several ballot measures this November, including Initiative 194.The proposal would restrict how corporations and oth
Lombardo check rejected as evidence during Fiore hearing
A Nevada judicial discipline panel rejected Gov. Joe Lombardo’s $5,000 check as evidence in proceedings against suspended Pahrump Justice of the Peace Michele Fiore.
MAGA Inc. Unleashes Millions to Turn Out Republicans At the Polls
MAGA Inc. is now flooding the social media platforms with targeted ads as it seeks to turn out Republicans amid the president’s historically low approval ratings.
United misses estimates, squeezed by soaring jet fuel costs
High fuel costs threaten to overwhelm the benefits for U.S. airlines of higher fares and robust spending by wealthier travelers.
Sports Entertainment Gaming Global Received Notice of Delisting
On October 14, 2026, Nasdaq staff issued a determination to delist the company’s common stock and warrants after it failed to file its Q2 2026 Form 10-Q, violating Listing Rule 5250(c)(1). Trading would be suspended on October 23, 2026 absent a hearing request; the company has requested a hearing a…
Mike Bloomberg starts spending blitz to help Democrats retake the House
Former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg, a Democratic megadonor, has poured more than $80 million into the midterms over the last two months.
SpaceX Swings to a Profit, Even as A.I. Spending Soars
Elon Musk’s rocket company also said its revenue had more than doubled, driven by its Starlink internet satellite service and artificial intelligence products.
SpaceX quarterly revenue jumps, beats estimates as AI business surges
Oct 20 (Reuters) - Elon Musk's SpaceX on Tuesday said its third-quarter revenue more than doubled, beating estimates as AI and Starlink grew, while capital spending nearly tripled as it invested in compute infrastructure, sending its shares up about 3%...
Cafeteria license at Advocate Illinois Masonic suspended after health inspection reveals cockroaches, black slime
The Chicago Department of Public Health has suspended the kitchen license at Advocate Illinois Masonic Medical Center in Lakeview.
Trump says his political operation is spending $400 million on midterms
The spending includes ads, rallies, get-out-the-vote efforts and election monitoring.
Medicare paying billions in Utah health care, new study shows
Medicare is spending $6 billion on Utahns yearly as enrollment in the health insurance program inches closer to 500,000. That’s the most any federal health care program is spending on the Bee…
Senate Democrats launch first ad in Mississippi as their midterm optimism spreads in the South
Senate Democrats' campaign spending group is wading into Mississippi's Senate race for the first time this cycle.
Sundar Pichai: Google’s Frontier Imperative, Compute Scarcity Dilemmas, Future AI Products and Businesses
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai has little patience for doubts about Google’s willingness or capacity to compete at the frontier of AI. His company’s latest Gemini 4 Argon model — long-promised and recently delivered — beats OpenAI and Anthropic’s latest public models on coding, math, science, and knowledge-work benchmarks and has placed Google’s AI back among the world’s best. Amid chatter that Google was fine with good-enough lightweight ‘Flash’ models, Pichai pushed back hard against any suggestion that company is limiting its research ambitions. “We won’t do it any other way,” he told me in a Big Technology Podcast interview recorded this week at Google’s Mountain View headquarters. Pursuing cutting-edge research is costly for Google, requiring compute and chips that otherwise could be sold at a high markup by its cloud business. But Pichai said allocating resources to frontier AI development is “ground zero” for Google. “Our cloud business is at any given moment in time forgoing short-term revenues because we are making compute trade-offs to support frontier AI development,” Pichai told me. In our conversation, we discussed Argon (which Pichai says processed three times as many tokens as Gemini 3 in the 72 hours after launch), AI’s role in developing better models, the AI interface of the future, competition with OpenAI, Google’s partnerships with Anthropic and Apple, data centers in space, and the nature of his optimism. You can read the full conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity, below, or listen to it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice. Alex Kantrowitz: Google is back at the frontier with Gemini 4 Argon, which beats OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s public models on benchmarks spanning coding, math, science, and knowledge work. The conventional wisdom was that Google had given up on the frontier to focus on fast, good-enough models for its products. That was wrong? Sundar Pichai: Very wrong. Look, we are so committed to being at the frontier. It’s in our DNA. We won’t do it any other way. We’ve been thinking about the AI frontier for well over a decade now. The frontier is very dynamic. It’s very competitive. It’s very exciting. I couldn’t be more pleased with how Argon has come together. We took our time with it. We made sure we tested it safely and deployed it carefully. We took a bit longer than our other models, given its capabilities. Across the board, be it for agentic work, knowledge work, coding, creative tasks, Argon is one of the really good frontier models. The first 72 hours since we launched, it’s almost up to 25 trillion tokens used, which is about three times what Gemini 3.0 had in the first 72 hours. And we are capacity constrained as we are serving it. Excited, but there are always areas….. You know, the frontier is very dynamic, and you have to keep evolving the models. There are areas which we can see we need to improve as well. We’ll be at work on all of that as well. Which areas? On any given model, Argon would be across the board better at everything if you just look even two months back. But the space is so evolving. Even on coding, for example, there are pockets where we know we need to do better, and there’s clear feedback. We’ll make it better. The argument for standard models is that they’re already good enough to build great products, with the frontier valuable only for certain tasks. Meta built Muse with good models rather than the best, and Google could put standard models into Maps, Gmail, and Search. Why isn’t that sufficient? It’s definitely not how I have thought about it at all. We are deeply committed to driving the state of the art and actually pushing where this technology can go, all the way from transformers. That’s a journey we’ve been on. You will see us continue to do that. When you’re at the frontier, you get an earlier look into the emerging capabilities, earlier than others, which helps you better prepare for the future. We are fortunate to have a wide set of opportunities across consumer and enterprise. Some of our cloud customers, for sure, want the model at the frontier. The frontier models will be better at developing the next set of models in an era of recursive self-improvement. I would argue it matters there. Internally, we have definitely seen a steep point of inflection by deploying Argon to our developers. It definitely tackles problems which our previous models could not do. Being at the frontier puts you at the innovation frontier and helps you drive that as well. There is room for models of all sizes and capabilities. That’s why we did Flash, Flash-Lite, etc. I agree with you that you can develop very good product experiences with not necessarily the most frontier model, because they tend to be slower and more expensive too. But we care about the Pareto frontier, and we’re committed to doing all of that. You said developing frontier models gives you a look at what’s coming. What do you see on the horizon? What makes this moment so exciting is you build something which you think is a culmination of months of work, and you put it out. You already see clear headroom ahead. We’ve all been working on these agentic, long-horizon capabilities, but clearly the frontier is going to have multiple of these agents working together to do things. That’s an example of an exciting paradigm underway. It’s also clear to me that users, both in consumer and enterprise, will have access to some multi-agent framework for them, working all the time doing things. It feels like a moment of infinite possibilities. Sergey Brin said one of Argon’s core innovations was relying more on the model to help develop the model. Yet incidents involving OpenAI’s bots breaking containment and Google’s bots accessing a site they shouldn’t have suggest these systems still aren’t perfectly aligned. Isn’t there reasonable cause for concern about accelerating toward recursive self-improvement? There are three parts to your question. Let’s first talk about RSI itself. You’re right, Sergey mentioned RSI being a critical contributor as we are developing Argon. But to be very clear, today, in a continuum, we are pretty far from the end state of RSI or something like that. The right way to describe it is you have RSI loops along with AI researchers in various aspects of model development. You almost have agents helping AI researchers in some automated way work together to build these models. It’s good to at least understand where we are today, and it’s super exciting. I expect that continuum to keep making progress as we go into next year. The second question is around safety. Security comes from defense in depth. You’re talking about alignment, obviously. We all are doing a lot of work to make sure the models are as aligned as possible. But it’s an active area of research, and there are clear gaps. That’s not the only thing we rely on. You have the work you do on alignment, but beyond that, we put a lot of effort into real-time monitoring as these models are working. Making sure you have good telemetry into what’s happening so that you can intervene in real time if you see unexpected behaviors. How you do that, the architecture with which you do that, how you make sure it’s all sandboxed and isolated in a way that it can continue doing its job during real-time monitoring — these are all areas of investment. Obviously, when we deploy these models, giving customers, enterprises, control, both with real-time monitoring, but their ability to decide where they deploy, what type of data which models ever have access to, etc. All that work is very, very important, and we are doing a lot of that. As an industry, we need to constantly up our game and take the time to do all this stuff, including dedicating the compute required to make sure you can safely deploy these models. The third part is: Is it all enough? This is why there are a lot of conversations in the industry, and I think it’s reasonable to be worried. The right way to approach something you worry about is early on thinking about what more we can do. As an industry, you’re definitely seeing increased levels of work on alignment, testing for safety, etc., as we deploy these models. The next step would be developing better standards so there are cross-industry standards of how we do these things, including the ability to evaluate using independent evaluators. If you look at areas like financial controls, we have accounting standards, we have independent auditors. Those are all the next natural steps for us as an industry to work toward, and regulation will end up playing a role as we go through all of that as well. Google pursues both language models and world models, while some other AI companies like OpenAI have focused more heavily on LLMs as the path to AGI. Why is world-model research important to you? As humans, you obviously perceive the world around you, and you’re taking all those inputs. Making sure these models are able to understand the laws of physics, simulate the world in high fidelity. All that, I think, are key enabling blocks for intelligence. We are working across all possible applications of this. Take an area like robotics. It’s not an accident: If you look at embodied reasoning benchmarks, Argon is state of the art. That all comes from our experience building world models. Inherently, I would expect there will be architectures which will converge all of this in the future. But for us, we view this as, today, this jagged frontier that is intelligence. We want to be at the frontier of all the possible approaches, and that will help us both drive better research, better insights, and develop a much better AGI model, is how we think about it. Some people argue Google should focus on selling its computing resources rather than using them for AI research. Cloud wants to sell compute at a high markup, while researchers need a very big computer to build the best models. How do you balance those demands? Ground zero for us is making sure we are investing in the compute that’s needed to be at the AI frontier. In 2015, I set the company to be AI-first. AI is that key horizontal ingredient across everything we do, all the way from Search to Cloud to Waymo. That is ground zero for us, making sure both for research and developing the models that we have enough compute needed. Beyond that, we have these independent businesses which each have their own long-range plans. They’re using those long-range plans to project forward, and we plan for compute for all of them. The cloud team, they have a business and they have a projection and they have demand signals. They have committed contracts. With that help, we can plan on a long-term compute trajectory for them. We’re fortunate to have this wide set of opportunities. There’s no company in the world which isn’t making trade-offs at any given moment in time. But the first principles we operate on is making sure we have enough compute to invest in the frontier, and that’s non-negotiable, and everything else works on top. Remember, we are building our own compute, our own data centers. There are long lead times. The compute we have today is a function of decisions I made in 2024. Even if you think back to a year from today, last year the agentic coding takeoff hadn’t happened. Today, obviously, when you sit and look at anything, everyone is short—not just us, other companies—and everyone wishes you had two times what you had planned for. That comes with the territory. At any given moment in time, we are planning for what we would need two to three years out in the future. You’re going to find some decisions you make may look suboptimal two years out, depending on where the state of the art is. I don’t spend too much time thinking about it. The way I think about compute allocation is making sure Google DeepMind, both for research and frontier model development, is cutting edge in terms of compute access. After that, we plan for all our businesses. It’s great we can provide our compute to other people too, like we have done. It allows us to scale that up, get real tests for it in the widest application set possible, test it in the real world, and make sure we are at the cutting edge of technology at every layer of our AI stack as well. Ben Horowitz relayed on a podcast that Andy Jassy had said compute was sold out until 2028. Are you seeing the same thing? If today a customer is coming out and asking us for compute in ’27, that is incredibly difficult to do. Even last year we went out and leased some short-term compute to accommodate some customers and help them out. But yes, we are all dealing with similar timelines. Every major technology shift seems to involve overbuilding, from railroads to fiber. Do you think that’s happening here? It depends on the time frames you’re looking at. This level of build, if I take a long enough time frame, it makes complete sense to me. We are at early stages of the most consequential technology ever, and this is not like fiber. It’s not dark. We are using it. We are capacity constrained on a daily basis. The applications, the underlying technology is improving rapidly. But running a company, the way I work through the moment is you look at your demand signals. You look at your committed revenue opportunities that you’re getting in the form of contracts. You balance that with the underlying technical capability, or internally you balance how we are using it internally, the model trajectories. Based on all that, you take a disciplined approach—a confident, aggressive, but disciplined approach—to plan out compute. But when you talk about the broader economy as a whole, you’re having people operate with various levels of risk. I focus on what I can control as a company and plan through it. If your question is, can there be an overbuild? Yes, because you can have some constrained components. Remember, what matters is a set of everything you need to build out that compute. Memory, electricity, electricians…. Land. Like 2,000 components or more. You could get constrained at some point. There could be things which cause bottlenecks, and then you could have overbuilds. There could be external shocks to the economy. There are macro risks. All that is possible at any given time. But am I confident that the compute we are planning for, we will have uses for it given enough time? Absolutely, yes. I was in the room when you said AI would be as profound as fire and electricity. If you believe that, shouldn’t you give researchers the biggest possible computer, even at the expense of today’s cloud profits? We’re all doing some form of that. Our cloud business is at any given moment in time forgoing short-term revenues because we are making compute trade-offs to support frontier AI development. What you’re seeing is true already. But you want to be thoughtful. Even our AI researchers have some constraints, which are also good. That’s what inspires creativity. That’s what helps you come up with a more efficient algorithmic breakthrough, maybe to use less memory. What we are committed to is to invest what’s needed to stay at the frontier. OpenAI President Greg Brockman told me a few months ago that the ideal AI product might have no interface at all—just as natural as conversation. What do you think the interface looks like in the age of AI? Computing historically has been humans adapting to computing. With AI, it’ll be the other way around. The technology will adapt seamlessly to how humans live and go about their day-to-day life. You want to be able to speak to that AI when you want to. It has context. It can be persistently running somewhere, give you continuity. You’re not dealing with a lot of complexity. It’s natural. All that makes sense to me. That doesn’t mean it won’t have any interface, however. Nowadays, even on my phone, Gemini voice models are so good. I can just press the microphone button. I can just ramble. That’s why we call it Rambler. I can ramble. It intelligently corrects with my personal context. Even my friends’ names, weird names, it gets it right, even if it first guesses it wrong. It’s amazing. I’m not going in, backspacing, editing once I finish saying it. It’s remarkable how good it’s gotten. But there are going to be moments you will need an interface. You may want to entertain yourself. You may want to watch a video. You may ask your AI to create something, and you want to watch it, consume it. The way I think about it is, you want it to be as seamless and as natural as possible, and that you are not doing the hard work adapting to whatever the interface is. The technology is adapting to how you’re working at any given moment in time. When I asked Sam Altman about competition from Google, he argued that OpenAI was building AI-native products and implied Google was bolting AI onto existing ones. Do you accept that framing, and can a “bolt-on” compete with an AI-native product? First of all, it’s a very dynamic moment. We are all pushing each other. OpenAI has pushed us as a company too. This is not just we are doing something to them. Far from it. Yes, Google went into its own version of a code red too. In the AI moment, all of us have to respond with varying levels of urgency at any given moment in time. We are constantly building new products as well. Gemini was built from the ground up as a product—the Gemini app I’m talking about. Or tomorrow, as all of us are adapting to agents, are you bolting agents onto ChatGPT, or are they building it natively? How would you think about that? You can always put these questions back. I don’t think of it that way. I think of it as you want to build world-class product experiences that are AI-native and they are winning. Some of it is adapting products, some of it is rethinking new experiences. They will all be part of how you approach this moment. How do you expect to make money from these AI interfaces? If an agent recommends a product and I buy it, should it take a cut of the sale, even if that’s disclosed? I’m going to put enterprise aside. Consumers are going to increasingly value this technology. Take software developers today. Developers are willing to pay for these coding models because it really helps make them more productive. Nobody would want to code the way they were coding three years ago, or even the same time last year. When you’re delivering value, there’s value to be had. I’ve never seen examples where consumer products really scale to billions of users, where people are using it intensely, and haven’t had monetization to go along with it. If you’re providing value to people, there is inherent value to be had. The nature of it may change. You’re asking a scenario in which agents are doing stuff for you. At the end of the day, you will have commercial needs. The agents need to fulfill those commercial needs. The providers on the other side are going to see value in that. There’s going to be some mechanism by which it gets fleshed out. That’s what an efficient system does. But what matters is that you’re building those world-class consumer experiences. I promised myself one product feature request: Can you make Gemini-powered search in Gmail as good as searching Gmail through ChatGPT? What’s going on here? One of the exciting things we announced recently is the unified Gemini agent for enterprise, and we’re bringing that to consumers. These are persistent agents which run 24/7 in the cloud. We’re spinning up a micro VM effectively for every query, and from the runtime, the harness, the model—it’s all a headless service. It’ll work everywhere, and it has your context with you. You can address this agent whether you’re in Workspace, in Search, in Gemini. Agents are going to drive this unification from a customer experience, which people are looking for. When you have a broad product portfolio and you’re moving forward fast, there are always areas where you’re moving forward faster than some other areas. That’s valid feedback. But we are putting a lot of time and effort into making sure, as we build out our agentic experience, that unification and that capability works well across all these services. People have asked where Google’s equivalent of Muse or Dots is. Do you anticipate creating a new product to compete with them? Our goal with Gemini is to be a personal, proactive, and powerful assistant. That’s what we are working toward. You saw us describe the early versions of it at Google I/O this year with Spark. Effectively, already, if you open the Gemini app as a Pro or an Ultra user, you see Chat and Task, and they start giving you that agentic experience. With Argon now, that capability is dramatically accelerated. What we announced recently in our enterprise event, we are bringing that to consumers as well. Soon in Gemini, you will be able to ask something, and it’s a continuum. You don’t need to think about whether you’re asking a chat or an agentic task. It’ll just automatically do the right thing, and it can work persistently in the background securely and get things done for you. Already, empirically, when I look at what’s coming into Gemini in our app, last year you would have tagged them and most of them would have been chats. But a steadily growing percentage is already agentic tasks in Gemini. Yes, we are going to bring personal agents to our consumers. It’ll work in the Gemini app. It’ll work in Google Search. It’ll work in Gmail. You can address it, call it, etc. We want to make sure we’re getting it right. It’ll be powered by Argon, and we are very excited to bring it to our users. Google has invested and committed tens of billions of dollars to Anthropic. What do you see in Dario Amodei that makes you want such a deep investment and partnership? Very early on, when we looked at the founding team of Anthropic, it was very clear to us this was a world-class team which was involved in some of the earliest GPT models. We were quickly able to assess that they would be at the frontier. We’ve always tried to identify and partner with companies which would be at the cutting edge of technology. We’ve done that with SpaceX. We’ve done that with Anthropic. That’s what we saw, and we had a chance to partner. Is your partnership with Apple to license Gemini for Siri expanding, contracting, or standing still? For both us and Apple, that partnership was about translating the capabilities of AI into better experiences for users. I thought Apple has done a phenomenal job of incorporating—they customize these models and build it into Siri—and it’s been great to see the reception. We are committed to doing more. You’re going to do more with them? There’s nothing specific to comment, but it’s a partnership. It’s working well. What have you learned so far about the feasibility of data centers in space? It’s a very exciting project. Projects like this remind me—I still recall that moment in the desert for the DARPA Grand Challenge, watching the Stanley car compete in it, which ended up being the basis for Waymo. With all these technologies, you’re at a moment in time where it looks a bit like sci-fi, but 10 to 20 years down the line, it’s actually working in a meaningful way. I feel the same in space. We’ve always believed in betting big on these technologies. Quantum has been a great example of it. We’re probably 10 years into the journey. Waymo, we are almost 20 years into the journey. Space, we are two to three years into the journey. It’s clear to me that it’s an approach which will make a lot of sense in the future. Being in sub-synchronous orbits with 24/7 access to the most abundant form of energy we have access to will make a lot of sense for this exponential increase in compute that we are going to need. Having said that, this is a challenging project. The team has disciplined milestones. It was a super exciting milestone to send the TPUs up to space. Sometime, as we are speaking, we are expecting a “hello world” moment from them. I look forward to seeing that happen, and we’ll continue investing here too. You previously said 25% of the code written within Google was written by AI. What’s the number today? That number in our world today is meaningless in the sense that every part of what we now touch is influenced by AI deeply. What we are tracking with Argon, for example, it’s been a point of inflection. People are using Argon to really go tackle complex projects, including projects which affect millions of lines of code. In the four weeks since we have launched Argon, we have seen a 30% increase in CLs, and more importantly, almost a similar increase—a one-third decrease in rollbacks. People are writing code more productively and better code with it. We are tracking it with newer metrics now. How are you dealing with opposition to data centers? If you can’t build in the U.S. the way you want to, where else do you go? We’re very committed to building our data centers very responsibly. When I look at our largest data centers in some of the communities where we have been the longest, I visit them, I talk to people. There are people who come and tell us their kids have gone to college because of our investments in these communities, and we’ve grown in those communities. To me, this is about doing it right. Engaging with the communities early, doing it transparently. We are committed to making sure we are bringing incremental power, and we cover 100% of the cost of our power needs for these projects. It’s understanding the impact on neighborhoods and making sure you’re working thoroughly to address them. Done rightly, you can continue making progress. But we are constantly taking feedback into account. I do worry not everyone operates the same way. People have been surprised by data centers showing up in their backyard. Those are all important. As an industry, we should continue to do better. But part of the reason, in a 20-year time frame, we are thinking about things like data centers in space is making sure we are able to put these data centers where maybe the trade-offs will be different. What unproven area of AI is Google working hardest to crack? Is it continual learning—getting models to keep updating after release—or something else? There are multiple parallel paths. You saw with Argon we have a million output tokens. With our Gemini models early on, we had a one-million context window on the input side. These are all examples of breakthroughs we are constantly working on. How do you think about synthetic data? How do you think about continual learning? How do you think about more efficient architectures? We do dedicate a meaningful percentage of our compute to these research bets too. It always goes hand in hand, including our world models. Those are all bets we are placing. Sometimes, as part of these bets, there are ideas that emerge which just make their way into the mainline models. Maybe we don’t fully talk about it, but we have multiple steps in these areas. Working in technology requires optimism that building something will improve the world, but those bets can leave real consequences when they fail. I recently returned to a town in El Salvador where enthusiasm for Bitcoin had given way to unfinished construction and something resembling a ghost town. How do you maintain the optimism you spoke about in your Stanford commencement address while accounting for those risks? I genuinely have a deep conviction that improving technology and improving access to technology makes people’s lives better. It’s been my personal experience in my life, out of which comes that deep conviction, optimism. But with that, I’ve always felt humanity’s journey is always about working hard to harness that technology to make it work well for society. The optimism is not an optimism that you just build whatever you want, whenever. You work hard to make sure you’re building technology in the service of humanity, to make the human condition better. That’s got to be the defining goal as we are approaching it. With that framework, I’m very, very optimistic. We are in very early stages of the kind of progress that we are going to see on many areas. We’re all talking about areas like healthcare. A lot of the progress is ahead. The ability to make things in a fundamentally cheaper way on many things where things have been getting expensive for a long, long time, discovering new materials, etc., which really bend the curve—it’s tough to step today and understand the impact of all that, but they’re going to be very profound. I’m very optimistic, but we have to be rightfully concerned about all the ways this technology can go wrong. Sundar, I know you don’t do many of these. Thank you. Thanks, Alex. Appreciate it.
Can Democrats win a Senate seat in deep-red Mississippi? They’re spending like they think so
The Rural Health Transformation Fund is delivering for NC
The real measure of success will be whether a rural hospital can keep its doors open, whether a young doctor chooses to practice in a small town, and whether a family can get the care it needs without spending half a day on the road.
Senate Democrats launch first ad in Mississippi as their midterm optimism spreads to the South
WASHINGTON (AP) — Senate Democrats' top campaign spending group is wading into Mississippi's U.S. Senate race for the first time this year, an aggressive move i
Lahn raises more, but Sand holds cash advantage in Iowa governor’s race
New campaign finance reports show Republican Zach Lahn received more money from national political groups, while Sand spent more as the campaigns’ combined spending topped $46 million.
Perspective on CPW’s wolf depredation decision
As state representatives from the Western Slope and Eastern Plains, we are united in standing for our agricultural communities. Colorado Parks and Wildlife’s decision to suspend its chronic wolf-depredation directive breaks faith with voters, with agriculture and with the communities that have borne the true burden of wolf reintroduction. When Proposition 114 narrowly passed in […]
A note to readers: Science, accountability and elections
Dear readers, As early voting begins, I wanted to share some news — and why it connects to the decisions we make at the ballot box. I’ve been selected for the inaugural cohort of the South Atlantic Climate Journalism Hub mentorship program, hosted by Covering Climate Now. I’m excited to join this group, learn from scientists and fellow journalists, and expand my science reporting. Science directly ties to governance. Local officials make decisions about where development goes, how infrastructure is maintained, what emergency preparations receive funding, and how communities rebuild after disasters. Understanding the evidence behind those decisions helps us evaluate whether our government is serving us well. Here in western North Carolina, those connections are all around us, in Lake Lure and beyond. Flood maps inform decisions about property and development. Engineering assessments help identify risks at dams and bridges. Rainfall forecasts guide emergency preparations. Geological information helps explain landslide hazards. Water testing gives communities information they need to assess conditions. Meteorologists’ knowledge and public perception of weather events shape public safety. Each involves scientific or technical knowledge. Each also raises questions about public responsibility: What did officials know? How did they use that information? What did they tell the public? What did taxpayers receive for their money? A study can identify a problem. Elected officials still have to decide what to do about it, how to pay for it, and how to explain their choices. Reporting should examine both the evidence and the response. That is where I want to strengthen my work. My reporting on Helene recovery, infrastructure, flooding, public safety, and public spending has repeatedly brought me to questions that require scientific expertise alongside public records. This mentorship may help me better understand the research, ask more precise questions, and explain the answers clearly. I also bring the perspective of someone living with these concerns. I live downstream of Lake Lure Dam, and landslides affected my property during Helene. Those experiences bring urgency to my questions. Careful reporting helps establish the answers. Readers deserve to know what the evidence shows, where uncertainty remains, and whether officials accurately describe the information guiding their decisions. You also deserve scrutiny of proposed solutions: what they cost, what they are expected to accomplish, and what risks remain. Access to that information matters. As a mostly deaf journalist who relies on written communication, I will continue pressing for written public warnings, records, and explanations that people can read and use in real time. As you consider the candidates seeking your vote, consider how they approach evidence, preparedness, and transparency. Do they support local journalism, even when it’s not parroting a press release? Do they explain weather events clearly in plain English and explain their decisions after them? Make supporting records available? Acknowledge uncertainty? Follow through when a report identifies a risk? Those are practical questions about governing. Thank you for supporting Cops & Congress and the work that makes these questions part of the public conversation. I’m grateful to David Dickson and the CC Now team for this opportunity, and I look forward to bringing what I learn back to you. Annie DanceEditor & Publisher, Cops & Congress — Learn more about this newsletter, ethics policy, how you can help shape this work, and support it. Follow on X and Facebook. Send constructive criticism, fan mail, and tips with public documents for future stories: CopsandCongress@gmail.com ICYMI: View the Cops & Congress archive — Annie Dance is the publisher of Cops & Congress, a newsletter that analyzes what happens when crime, courts, disaster, democracy, and small-town policies collide. Views expressed here are covered by the First Amendment. Dance has a Bachelor of Arts from Manhattan University in Communication with a focus in Journalism and Government. She has been a journalist for over 20 years. Share Upgrade now or give a gift subscription
The AI industry’s race for influence includes $100 million in campaign cash
Leading AI companies have set up political action committees to support both Republican and Democratic candidates in the midterm elections. The effort by…
'They’ve awakened him’: How a wealth tax fight made Brin a political force
After years of sporadic giving, the Google co-founder has unleashed spending that spans from the billionaire tax to housing and environmental policy.
Can Real Estate Out-Organize Tenants in New York? This Group Will Try.
A new organization, Built for New York, plans to raise money to mobilize voters in the real estate industry, which has endured several political losses in recent years.
ABB says data centre business booming, Q3 figures in line with forecasts
ZURICH, Oct 20 (Reuters) - ABB is continuing to see a boom in spending on data centres used to power artificial intelligence, the engineering group said on Tuesday, as it
ABB says data centre business booming, Q3 figures in line with forecasts
ABB is continuing to see a boom in spending on data centres used to power artificial intelligence, the engineering group said on Tuesday, as it reported its latest earnings.
Here's how Central District Health plans to spend over $200k on the Treasure Valley's growing rat population
Here's how Central District Health plans to spend over $200k on the Treasure Valley's growing rat population
SnakePit Post-season GDT, #17
Two ways tonight can go. We either see a Rays victory, and they move on to the World Series, starting on Friday in Milwaukee. We spend the next three days staring out the window, twiddling our thumbs and waiting for that to start. Or the Guardians prevail, and we look forward to a winner-take-all battle […]
Brain drain beyond Israel: Scientists are leaving the US, too
Delays in research grants and concerns about the future of American science are pushing researchers to seek opportunities overseas; One scientist who was sure she would spend her entire career in the US: ' I don’t think here is our home anymore '
Dodgers’ Free Agent Sends Heartfelt Message to Fans
Los Angeles Dodgers free agent reliever Alex Vesia sent a message to Dodger fans before heading into free agency this offseason. Vesia played all but five games of his MLB career thus far with the Dodgers, spending his last six MLB seasons in Los Angeles. He has a 2.66 ERA through 367 games with the […] The post Dodgers’ Free Agent Sends Heartfelt Message to Fans appeared first on LA Sports Report.
Cockroach infestation leads to suspension of Chicago hospital cafeteria license
A cafeteria at a Chicago hospital had its license suspended after health inspectors discovered a cockroach infestation.
Kansas girls flag football championship halted following fatal crash
Depositphotos Kansas championship games suspended after fatal incident at soccer complex Kansas’ inaugural girls high school flag football championship was interrupted on October 17 after a fatal incident at Stryker Sports Complex in Wichita left 2 people dead and 10 others injured. The incident occurred on a nearby youth soccer field, prompting the Kansas State…
New Debit Card Coming for Military’s Health Care Flexible Spending Accounts
Military households became eligible for federal tax-advantaged health care FSAs in 2025.
William Penn School District reinstates some sports teams following suspensions
The school district in Delaware County previously suspended all athletics, pointing to “an alleged incident that implicates culture and climate.”
Cristiano Ronaldo fined £215 for Portugal walkout
Cristiano Ronaldo has been fined £215 and suspended for 30 days by the Portuguese Football Federation after walking out on the national team following a row with manager Jorge Jesus.
Pakistan suspends Iran border trade, amid violence on both sides
Islamabad cites security concerns, while Tehran points to technical issues as Pakistan mediates between Iran and the US.
Liverpool want move for £60m Premier League star
Richard Hughes left Liverpool with a lot of work to do to their team. Even though the Reds' former sporting director managed to spend way over £600 million during his time with the Anfield outfit, th...
200 supporters rally for Hinojosa as Abbott is expected to campaign in Houston-area this week
Democratic candidate for governor Gina Hinojosa rallies with supporters the day before the state of early voting. The race has tightened in recent weeks. Governor Greg Abbott is also expected to spend time in the southeast Texas this week.
How a Massive Chinese Crime Ring Hacked Staples to Steal Millions
A sophisticated organized crime gang hacked into Staples, issued millions of dollars worth of gift cards, and went on a spending spree across the U.S.
Nobody should buy the $299 Apple TV 4K, but it could have been worse
My colleague Zac Hall described HomeView as one of the best ways to spend $299 on an Apple device and...
Meet the researchers leaving the US because of Trump's funding cuts and politicization of science
NEW YORK (AP) — Halley Froehlich was sure she'd spend her scientific career in the United States. Her family has been in America since the 1700s.
Pens Points: Korczak embracing fresh start with Penguins
Here are your Pens Points for this Monday morning… Sidney Crosby, Evgeni Malkin and Kris Letang recently marked 20 years since they first played together on Oct. 18, 2006. Twenty years later, the partnership—and friendships—still endure. [Post-Gazette] Defenseman Kaedan Korczak is embracing a fresh start in Pittsburgh after spending the first several years of his […]
Acrisure Amphitheater fuels a sales surge for downtown businesses
Grand Rapids businesses saw sales surge during Acrisure Amphitheater's first season, but downtown spending data reveal a more mixed bag.
Roaring exports lift China’s economic growth; violent French protests put pressure on euro and bonds
World’s second-largest economy on track to meet Beijing’s 2026 growth target, though consumer spending lags behind factory output
Massachusetts GOP ticket rocked by alleged drunken crash as candidate abruptly halts campaign
Massachusetts Republican Shawn Oliver suspended his lieutenant governor campaign after a DUI arrest following a rollover crash in New Bedford.
Lt. Governor candidate Shawn Oliver suspends campaign after being arrested for allegedly drunk driving
Oliver, a 42-year-old Republican, struck five parked cars along Dartmouth Street in New Bedford just before midnight on Saturday.
Massachusetts GOP lieutenant governor candidate suspends campaign after arrest in car crash
The Republican candidate for lieutenant governor in Massachusetts has dropped out of the race hours after he was arrested in a suspected drunk driving crash.
Amazon, data centers and the race for Oregon governor
Amazon is stepping up political spending and community pledges in Oregon as voters and gubernatorial candidates push for a data center moratorium.
Massachusetts Republican lieutenant governor candidate suspends campaign after OUI arrest
Police said Shawn Oliver’s vehicle overturned after hitting five parked vehicles, two of which were extensively damaged.
Oliver suspends campaign for lieutenant governor
Shawn Oliver, the Republican candidate for lieutenant governor, has suspended his campaign hours after he was arrested on a charge of operating under the influence late Saturday night.
Outrage after Meta suspends No Kings Instagram account during protests
‘Meta owes us an explanation,’ group says as organizers fear censorship after account goes dark for several hours
After Oliver’s OUI arrest, Minogue asks him to suspend campaign
Shawn Oliver, the Republican nominee for lieutenant governor, was arrested on a charge of operating under the influence late Saturday night, authorities said, leading his running mate Mike Minogue to
Trump's immigration crackdown tests Republicans' hold on Texas voters
The race between Democrat James Talarico and Republican Ken Paxton is hotly contested and enormously expensive, with total ad spending topping $500 million.
In tight Texas Senate race, Trump's immigration crackdown tests Republicans' hold on voters
The race between Democrat James Talarico and Republican Ken Paxton is hotly contested and enormously expensive, with total ad spending topping $500 million.
ConnectWise Suspends Cloud Backup After Attackers Compromise Microsoft 365 Tenants
ConnectWise disabled seven application identities and suspended Cloud Backup after attackers compromised Microsoft 365 tenants.
Meta says suspending No Kings account was done 'in error'
Meta blamed an automatic trigger for the suspension that made the No Kings account go dark.
State of Texas: Tight races test voters, parties and a new political map
The race for U.S. Senate is the biggest story in Texas politics, and it's getting nationwide attention. Campaign spending between Ken Paxton and James Talarico is on pace to set records, and the race ...
State of Texas: Tight races test voters, parties and a new political map
The race for U.S. Senate is the biggest story in Texas politics, and it’s getting nationwide attention. Campaign spending between Ken Paxton and James Talarico is on pace to set records, and …
A.J. Brown activated from Injured Reserve
Patriots WR A.J. Brown returns to 53-man roster after spending time on IR
California's billionaire tax promises healthcare relief. The fine print is murkier
It’s unclear how much money Prop. 40 would raise, how quickly the funding would become available, and how lawmakers would spend it.
Continuous glucose monitors help type 2 diabetes patients spend 5 more hours a day in healthy blood sugar range
Continuous glucose monitors (CGMs) could transform diabetes management for millions of Americans with type 2 diabetes who don't take insulin, according to findings published in the New England Journal ...
Marin community health centers warn against Prop. 44
The initiative on the Nov. 3 ballot that would require community health clinics to spend 90% of their revenue on program services.
Rayo-Athletic to be played behind closed doors
The Rayo-Athletic Club match was suspended after 20 minutes of play on October 10. Now, the sole competition judge has decided that the match will be played at a press conference.The match was suspend...
Journalist Ronan Farrow on Elon Musk's trillion-dollar political influence
Elon Musk, the world's first trillionaire, has influence across the economy and politics. NPR's Scott Simon talks to reporter Ronan Farrow of The New Yorker about Musk's campaign spending and more.
Pro-Palestinian politician threatens Berlin left's election victory over Israel stance
Pro-Palestinian politician Vanessa Emde has plunged Berlin's Die Linke into crisis after rejecting Israel's right to exist, prompting the Social Democrats and Greens to suspend coalition talks and threatening the party's chances of forming a government
It’s not just you. There are more Maine political ads than ever this year.
Spending in Maine has broken records set in the 2020 election cycle.
Trump suspends new Russia sanctions following deal to purchase diesel, citing ‘national interests’
Passed by Congress with bipartisan support, the sanctions were intended to limit Russia’s revenue streams as the country continues its war against Ukraine.
Cookies, liquor and mocking Nazis fuel final stretch in fiery Texas House race
Katy Padilla Stout's Texas Democratic campaign reported over $4,300 in cookies, beer and wine, and Mexican restaurant spending per FEC records.
Top global climate science body suspends meeting without deal on major review timeline
By Sudarshan Varadhan Oct 16 (Reuters) - A meeting of the members of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was suspended without an agreement on a timeline to publish its next review of
Top global climate science body suspends meeting without deal on major review timeline
By Sudarshan VaradhanA meeting of the members of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was suspended without an agreement on a timeline to publish its next review of the latest science on the warming planet, the IPCC said on Friday.The impasse over the timeline, which has lasted near…