Evening AI brief: money, models, security, and scale

Hacker News links a Reuters report that Stripe and Advent have made a joint offer to acquire PayPal.

The reported valuation is above $53 billion.

No follow-on filing details are present in the scraped material.

The thread currently has 272 upvotes and 141 comments, making it one of the highest-engagement fintech stories in this batch.

Thinking Machines Lab, the AI startup founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, released its first in-house AI model Wednesday morning, called Inkling . And unlike the flagship models from OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google, it’s open-weight, meaning outside developers and companies can download it and modify it directly.

Inkling is a mixture-of-experts system with 975 billion total parameters, though it only draws on a fraction of that — about 41 billion — for any given task, a common design that keeps very large models faster and cheaper to run. It was trained on 45 trillion tokens of text, image, audio, and video, and reasons natively across all four, according to the company’s own release materials.

The model is Thinking Machines Labs’ first public proof point after a year and a half spent building AI infrastructure largely out of public view. Some of that work had already surfaced in a May research preview of “interaction models” — AI designed to listen and speak (and even interrupt) instead of stop and wait as with typical chatbots.

Inkling is designed to give calibrated answers, including flagging uncertainty rather than guessing, and lets users dial “thinking effort” up or down when they want to trade for speed. On one benchmark, the company says, Inkling uses a third as many tokens as Nvidia’s Nemotron 3 Ultra — its latest generation open-weight model — to hit the same coding performance.

Thinking Machines doesn’t claim Inkling is best-in-class. Its newest blog post states explicitly that Inkling is “not the strongest overall model available today, open or closed.” What it’s evidently going for instead is well-rounded performance.

Microsoft released a record number of security patches for Windows, Office, and other tech product lines this week, citing the use of AI to aid the discovery of code vulnerabilities.

The technology and cloud giant issued patches for 570 security flaws on Tuesday as part of its monthly scheduled release of fixes, which security researchers have long dubbed “Patch Tuesday.”

At least two of the vulnerabilities are classified as zero-days , meaning that they were exploited before Microsoft was made aware of them. One bug affecting Windows Server allows hackers to escalate their privileges from a limited user to a system administrator. Another bug affects the SharePoint file sharing server — the U.S.

The huge patch update comes a week after Microsoft said in a blog post that it expected its usual batch of monthly security patches to be far higher in number than before. The company cited its use of AI to help its employees uncover previously undiscovered security bugs in its software.

“As AI helps defenders discover more issues, customers will see a higher volume of security updates included in each security release,” said Windows boss Pavan Davuluri.

OpenAI is reported to have detailed GPT-Red, an internal model dedicated to automated red-team testing.

The purpose is to scale discovery of prompt injection weaknesses before broader rollout.

The stated outcome is bug discovery and remediation earlier in the release lifecycle.

This positions AI safety validation as part of production engineering, not just policy documentation.

OpenAI is officially entering the hardware market with the launch of a $230 light-up keyboard designed to pair with its AI coding assistant, Codex.

The device comes equipped with light-up “Agent Keys” that show agent status, customizable Command Keys that act as shortcuts for frequent Codex actions, and a joystick for launching common workflows. It also has a dial that adjusts how much “reasoning” — essentially, how much time and computing power — an agent uses on a given task (agent reasoning level).

The idea is that, instead of managing your agents through your phone or desktop app, you can now use the Micro as your “command center for agentic work,” as OpenAI puts it. It’ll also probably just look really cool sitting on your desk. The device is controllable and customizable via the ChatGPT desktop app.

OpenAI told TechCrunch in an email that the Micro is a limited-run collaboration, signaling that it’s more of a novelty item than a product designed for mass appeal. It seems like a flashy bauble designed to herald the company’s entrance into the hardware market.

The more consequential hardware news arrived Tuesday. A yet-to-be-released OpenAI device that Bloomberg revealed sounds like it is being designed for the long haul. It’s described as a portable, screenless smart speaker that integrates with ChatGPT and involves “mechanical elements that can move on their own.”