News snapshot

A saved snapshot of selected stories for this date.

October 16, 2026 — 22 articles Snapshot updated Oct 16, 10:59 PM CDT

General News
AI News
Perplexity Open-Sources SPACE, a Firecracker MicroVM Sandbox for AI Agents
MarkTechPost Developer tools Oct 16, 7:09 PM CDT

Perplexity has open-sourced SPACE, the sandbox platform behind every task in Perplexity Computer. The Perplexity SPACE sandbox gives each agent task its own Firecracker microVM. Credentials and outbound traffic are controlled from outside that VM. The code ships under Apache 2.0 on GitHub. For teams

Replit is no longer working with Anthropic, CEO says
TechCrunch Business Oct 16, 4:22 PM CDT

Masad said the decision was made for a number of different reasons, including cost. Replit announced a partnership with OpenAI in August, but there was never any indication that it was no longer with Anthropic.

Reflection AI open-sources Beam’s weights, post-training recipes
SiliconANGLE Developer tools Oct 16, 5:52 PM CDT

Startup Reflection AI Inc. today made the weights of Beam, its first large language model, available on Hugging Face. The company also released technical resources that will enable developers to customize the algorithm. Originally introduced last week, Beam is one of the industry’s most advanced ope

An Nvidia insider-turned-VC on why robotics hasn’t hit its ChatGPT moment, yet
TechCrunch Robotics Oct 16, 11:30 AM CDT

Amulya Vishwanath, who spent seven years leading product marketing for NVIDIA’s robotics platforms, says robotics is currently in its “Lego era,” with the basic building blocks like actuators, robotic hands, software, and safety standards still being rebuilt. This view runs counter to those who beli

Physical AI is more than robots, says the Nvidia veteran now investing in it
TechCrunch Robotics Oct 16, 11:30 AM CDT

Amulya Vishwanath, who spent seven years leading product marketing for NVIDIA’s robotics platforms, says robotics is currently in its “Lego era,” with the basic building blocks like actuators, robotic hands, software, and safety standards still being rebuilt. This view runs counter to those who beli

Microsoft reveals cutting-edge MAI-Base-2 model with 2T parameters
SiliconANGLE Models Oct 16, 7:39 PM CDT

Microsoft Corp. has developed a new large language model that it says is significantly more efficient than leading open-source alternatives. The company’s artificial intelligence research group detailed the algorithm on Thursday. MAI-Base-2 is not a full-fledged LLM but rather a base model, a kind o

RapidCanvas raises $29M to develop custom AI applications for enterprises
SiliconANGLE Business Oct 16, 3:19 PM CDT

Software development startup RapidCanvas Inc. today announced that it has raised $29 million in funding. Vertex Ventures SEA & India led the Series B round with contributions from Hitachi Ventures, Accel, Peak XV Partners, Valley Capital Partners and Titanium Ventures. The deal follows a $16 million

The agentic AI era is forcing security and resilience into a single discipline
SiliconANGLE Applications Oct 16, 3:09 PM CDT

For two decades, security and data resilience have been neighbors who share a fence but rarely a budget. Security kept bad actors out, while resilience brought the business back when they got in. Agentic artificial intelligence is tearing down that fence, yet most organizations haven’t noticed. Last

Meta’s new terms may allow it to train AI on news sites for free
The Verge Applications Oct 16, 9:02 AM CDT

Meta's new terms appear to give it permission to crawl and scrape websites "associated" with the businesses that use its platforms - including online publishers, according to a report from Nieman Lab. The new terms, which go into effect on October 30th, say Meta can use this outside content to "deve

Meta and Apple team up to make Muse AI models run better on Macs
The Verge Models Oct 15, 1:15 PM CDT

Meta announced the Muse Spark Open AI model today, claiming that it's the "most capable US open-weight model to date." But the company also says that it's the "the first model in its class" that can "run on your desktop using two Apple M5 Ultra Mac Studios with the latest MLX framework." Meta and Ap