AI news · Wednesday, November 4, 2026

Anthropic's compute costs are rising, not falling

Anthropic's new IPO filing shows revenue hit $17 billion last quarter, up from $11.5 billion. But the cost of running its AI (compute) ate 58% of revenue, up from 48% the quarter before, because demand grew so fast the company had to pay premium rates for extra computing power. It shows even a fast-growing AI leader can't yet make its underlying costs shrink as it scales.

The catch: Investors watching Anthropic's upcoming IPO will read this as a warning sign: growth is not the same as getting cheaper to run.

via TechCrunch AI

Data centers now run on old jet engines

Stuck waiting years for grid power, some AI data center builders are installing rebuilt jet engines, pulled from retired aircraft, to generate their own electricity. A standard grid hookup in Northern Virginia takes about seven years; jet-engine power can get a data center running in 24 months. xAI has already installed eight at a Mississippi site. They're less efficient and pollute more than normal gas plants.

Zoom out: It shows how far the race to build AI computing power has outrun the electric grid's ability to keep up.

via TechCrunch AI

Google will cut off search, not just AI, for schools

Google announced schools can turn off its AI tools like Gemini for students, but there's a catch: doing so also disables Google Search entirely, since AI features are now built into it. Schools must choose all of it or none. The change affects Gemini, NotebookLM, Gemini in Classroom, and Search. Administrators get to flip the switch, with details coming in the next few months.

The catch: It shows how deeply AI is now welded into everyday tools, making opting out a much bigger decision than it sounds.

via TechCrunch AI

ChatGPT searches now one-fifth the size of Google's

OpenAI says the volume of search-style questions people ask ChatGPT now equals 20% of Google's search volume. For comparison, Microsoft's Bing only reached about 3% market share after more than a decade of trying. OpenAI did not disclose where it got the Google figure it compared against. OpenAI is also leaning into ads, saying backlash has been minimal so far.

Zoom out: A search habit built over 25 years is visibly shifting toward chatbots, reshaping how people find information online.

via The Verge AI

AI video startup Fal doubles value to $16 billion

Fal, a startup that runs AI video, image and audio models for other companies, raised $1.3 billion led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with Nvidia also investing. That values the five-year-old company at $16 billion, double its $8 billion valuation in April. Fal has passed $800 million in yearly revenue.

Follow the money: The real money in AI right now is flowing to the unglamorous infrastructure layer that runs models, not just the chatbot brands.

via TechCrunch AI

Trump orders agencies to rebrand AI as 'Super Intelligence'

Following a September executive order, US government agencies are swapping the term 'artificial intelligence' for 'Super Intelligence' across websites and documents. Compliance has been uneven: a Federal Trade Commission release last week still used the old term, and even Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has slipped up in interviews. Trump has criticized outlets like the Wall Street Journal for not adopting the new phrase.

The twist: Past Trump rebrands suggest the real goal is less about vocabulary and more about turning word choice into a test of political loyalty.

via MIT Technology Review

Chatbots get election facts wrong 40% of the time

A Forum AI study found almost 40% of chatbot answers about the US midterms contained at least one factual error, including Google's Gemini giving the wrong mail-in ballot deadline for Pennsylvania. Separately, NewsGuard found ChatGPT cited fake partisan 'news' sites in over 70% of election-related searches, versus 30% for xAI's Grok, the best performer tested. About 8% of US adults say they've used a chatbot to research midterm candidates.

The catch: People are already trusting chatbots with decisions as important as voting, even though these tools were never built to be accurate news sources.

via Wired AI

Anthropic builds a way to prove which AI wrote an answer

Anthropic is developing FlashProve, an open-source tool that gives a mathematical proof confirming which specific AI model produced a given answer. It would stop a company from secretly swapping in a cheaper, worse model to cut costs while claiming it's still the premium one. Labs would publish a 'fingerprint' per model without revealing its private internal workings. It's an early research idea, not yet deployed anywhere.

What's next: As businesses pay for specific AI models, being able to verify what they're actually getting becomes a real trust problem worth solving.

via TechCrunch AI

Ukraine drone strikes push Russian data centers underground

Ukrainian drone strikes have damaged Russian data centers running AI systems and disrupted cloud services, including banking and ride-hailing apps, for millions of users. In response, Russian companies are now considering burying data centers in old mines, and Putin signed a decree requiring operators to reserve 10% of computing capacity for government emergencies. Russia's heavy reliance on a few centralized tech companies like Yandex has made the disruptions worse.

Zoom out: It shows AI data centers have quietly become wartime infrastructure targets, not just corporate assets.

via Ars Technica AI

Fintech cut AI coding bills 10x by self-hosting its own model

British fintech Revolut reportedly cut its AI coding costs by a factor of 10 by dropping Claude and switching to a self-hosted open model it runs on its own hardware instead of paying per use through Anthropic's API. It's a concrete example of the build-vs-buy tradeoff more companies are now weighing.

Follow the money: As AI coding tools become routine at big companies, the economics are pushing some toward owning their own models instead of renting one.

via r/LocalLLaMA

What is RAG, letting AI read your own documents?

Normally a chatbot only knows what it learned during training and has never seen your company's files. Retrieval-augmented generation, or RAG, fixes this by letting the AI search documents you give it and use relevant bits to answer. Think of it like an open-book exam: the AI gets the exact pages it needs first. A law firm might use RAG so a chatbot answers using only its case files, reducing made-up answers.

For you: RAG is why many business AI tools can accurately answer questions about internal documents instead of guessing or making things up.

Original explainer

Netflix adds mood-based 'AI Discover' tab to find shows

Netflix is rolling out a new 'AI Discover' tab on TVs that recommends shows by theme, like 'Something Light' or 'Family Movie Night,' instead of just genre. Pick a theme and Netflix shows matching titles; say no to one and it remembers for next time. It's starting in the US for English-language TV users.

For you: It's a low-stakes, practical example of AI quietly reshaping a daily habit most people already have, rather than a flashy new product.

via TechCrunch AI