Daily Tech Brief · October 9th

Enterprises, it appears, are getting much better at deploying artificial intelligence than at demonstrating the return on investment. The latest McKinsey Global Survey on the state of AI reveals gap between widespread use and business impact. Although 80% of respondents say AI has improved their productivity, only 37% say it has made a meaningful difference to their organisation’s bottom line. And a mere 6% qualify as AI high performers, or organisations reporting an earnings before interest and tax (EBIT) impact of at least 5%.

An Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent on the scene of a shooting in upper Manhattan on Thursday has repeatedly been accused in federal court of unlawful arrests and using force during arrests in New York and Minneapolis, a WIRED investigation finds. On Thursday afternoon, ICE agents shot a man, identified by city authorities as Oscar Belgal, in Manhattan’s Marble Hill neighborhood, near the Bronx. Mayor Zohran Mamdani said agents surrounded the man’s car, in which a 5-year-old child was sitting, before firing multiple rounds—as many as seven, witnesses told local media.

Hey , another banger AI week, let me catch you up! We say this often but this week we all felt the acceleration! Just look at one Tuesday. OpenAI dropped 722 math manuscripts. Meta( With Stripe, Shopify and Walmart) announced a new agent protocol. OpenAI opened up the Decisions API. Mistral came back with Le Chonk (Mistral 4), Claude moved into Google Docs, and we at CoreWeave shipped RL Rollouts. That was ONE day.

It is Thursday, and I am on the road again in New York. Today’s theme is much, much ‘more of the same’ in AI land. The competition is heating up, the numbers are getting bigger, and the macro environment is getting a bit gnarlier. In this AI Tech Wave, that is not a complaint. It is how a tech wave builds: the same forces, compounding. Three events today. More competition at the top, with prices falling. More debt to pay for the AI chips. And more pressure from rising interest rates. Then the Gadget AI, where Microsoft and Nvidia take aim at Apple’s Mac minis for local AI.

OpenAI’s math breakthroughs may trigger an identity crisis for mathematicians. Who’s next? OpenAI’s math breakthroughs may trigger an identity crisis for mathematicians. Who’s next? Calls for a new kind of slowdown were the talk of The Curve. PLUS: Slinking back to X With safety questions still swirling, the company introduces a more business-focused take on agents On the eve of the company's developer conference, it cancels a new model over safety fears Meta has a new vision to sell, but it may be getting ahead of itself. (The VR Glasses are amazing, though)

Fun fact: Billionaire PayPal, Founders Fund, and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel, when he’s not busy exerting his ghastly influence over the U.S. government, moonlights as a touring theorist and lecturer on Christianity, the end times, and the antichrist. Thiel and his team have tried to create an air of secrecy around the ‘Antichrist’ lectures, which began with a 2025 series in San Francisco. Thiel’s complete lack of qualifications to speak on theology, of course, pale in comparison to his fame and wealth.

Russian web giant Yandex says one of its cloud availability zones is unavailable due to a drone attack. Yandex is Russia’s rough equivalent of Google, and dominates the local market for search, email, and mapping services. The company also operates a cloud computing service whose status page says its ru-central1-b availability zone is down. “The incident was caused by a fire caused by a drone attack on Yandex's data center in Sasovo, which affected part of the Yandex Cloud infrastructure.

Google seems to be making a strategic play to control the AI infrastructure layer, not just roll out another shiny new agent. At its Gemini at Work 2026 event this week, the tech giant unveiled what it calls a “single, universal agent” and API in Gemini that can be kicked off from a simple prompt box. Like other available agents, it is plugged into skills, tools, and enterprise systems, can answer questions, create media, and write and run code, return finished work via of documents, inboxes, and developer environments, and spin up sub-agents to help it do its job.

Google seems to be making a strategic play to control the AI infrastructure layer, not just roll out another shiny new agent. At its Gemini at Work 2026 event this week, the tech giant unveiled what it calls a “single, universal agent” and API in Gemini that can be kicked off from a simple prompt box. Like other available agents, it is plugged into skills, tools, and enterprise systems, can answer questions, create media, and write and run code, return finished work via of documents, inboxes, and developer environments, and spin up sub-agents to help it do its job.