☕️ Google unveils Gemini 3

Hi there, this is your daily ☕️ Techpresso.

In today's Techpresso:

🤖 Google unveils Gemini 3

💥 A Cloudflare bug caused a widespread internet outage

🛡️ Microsoft mitigated the largest DDoS ever recorded

⚠️ Google CEO warns no firm is immune if AI bubble bursts

🧠 xAI launches Grok 4.1 with improved accuracy and emotional understanding

🤝 Intuit signs $100 million deal with OpenAI

🌕 SpaceX delays NASA moon landing to 2028

🎁 + 17 other news & articles you might like

🔮 + 5 handpicked research papers and tools

FROM OUR PARTNER

• Google is launching Gemini 3 Pro today, giving everyone access to a natively multimodal model that processes text, images, and audio simultaneously to transform photos into cookbooks or create interactive flashcards.
• The upgraded system enables generative interfaces inside Gemini Labs, allowing you to browse dynamic layouts with custom visual designs while an improved query fan-out technique breaks down complex questions for better search results.
• This release features reduced sycophany to avoid empty flattery found in rival bots, plus new agentic capabilities for subscribers that let a Gemini Agent research travel or organize emails on your behalf.

• Major services like ChatGPT, Claude, Spotify, and X stopped working Tuesday morning after infrastructure giant Cloudflare suffered a broad degradation to its network caused by a crash from a latent bug.
• Chief technology officer Dane Knecht wrote that a routine configuration change triggered the error in a service underpinning bot mitigation, which cascaded into failures across other products during the incident.
• The company noted on its status page that a fix was implemented less than two hours later, while executives apologized for the real pain caused to the broader internet by the event.

• On October 24, 2025, Azure DDoS Protection blocked a record 15.72 Tbps attack that targeted a single Australian endpoint with a peak traffic volume of 3.64 billion packets per second.
• The incident originated from the Aisuru botnet, a Turbo Mirai-class network that used over 500,000 compromised IPs like home routers and cameras to send massive UDP floods at one public address.
• The report notes that attackers are scaling with the internet, using faster fiber-to-the-home speeds and powerful IoT devices to push sizes higher while leaving random source ports that make traceback easier.

• Alphabet boss Sundar Pichai told the BBC that current spending levels show elements of irrationality, warning that no tech business is immune if the industry bubble eventually bursts like past crashes.
• American financial regulators fear inflated prices are dragging down wider markets, yet Google continues pouring £5 billion into British infrastructure and a new data center to boost its DeepMind research lab.
• The CEO admitted climate goals will slip as AI systems consume immense electricity, and he cautioned users that models are prone to errors and cannot be trusted to provide accurate information.

• xAI used large-scale reinforcement learning systems and automated evaluators to train Grok 4.1, which users preferred nearly 65 percent of the time during a silent rollout testing phase on live traffic.
• The new "quasarflux" reasoning variant tops the LMArena Text Arena leaderboard with a high Elo score, while the faster "tensor" version sits second overall even without using specific reasoning tokens for answers.
• Engineers lowered the hallucination rate to roughly four percent for information-seeking prompts, while the system also achieved top rankings on EQ-Bench3 by displaying a better grasp of grief and interpersonal vulnerability.

• The multi-year contract worth over $100 million lets TurboTax, Credit Karma, and QuickBooks operate within ChatGPT, allowing users to estimate tax refunds or review credit options directly through the tool.
• With permission, these apps can access financial data to generate responses and complete tasks, such as sending marketing messages via Mailchimp or issuing invoice reminders to help manage business finances.
• Intuit uses large domain-specific datasets to minimize the risk of hallucinated responses, but the company did not clarify who is on the hook for errors resulting from AI-generated recommendations or insights.

• An internal SpaceX document shows the company now targets September 2028 for the earliest first attempt of its Artemis 3 crewed mission to land on the lunar surface.
• Key milestones preceding the crewed mission include a June 2026 orbital refueling demonstration and an uncrewed lunar landing one year later, according to the company's internal plan.
• The Starship lunar lander requires up to 12 separate orbital refueling transfers to gather enough propellant for its trip to land on the moon and launch back into orbit.

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• Anthropic to buy $30 billion in Azure capacity in new deal with Microsoft, Nvidia LINK

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• Zoox to begin offering robotaxi rides to public in San Francisco LINK

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• Meet John Ternus, the Apple exec rumored to be the frontrunner to one day replace Tim Cook as CEO LINK

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• Meta and Google delay undersea cables over security concerns LINK

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• A Researcher Made an AI That Completely Breaks the Online Surveys Scientists Rely On LINK

• Thinking Machines Lab reportedly seeks up to 5 billion dollars in new funding LINK

• OpenAI is finally letting employees donate their equity to charity LINK

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