Instinct has raised $1 billion in a Series C round at a $10 billion valuation. The round underscores investor interest in consumer AI agents that perform tasks beyond conversation.
The firm uses SMS and texting to interact with users.
The quick successive raises reflect interest in AI agents that handle tasks such as booking travel, making purchases, paying bills and ordering groceries.
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Intel is working with RadixArk to optimize SGLang, an open-source inference stack, for Intel CPUs, GPUs, and accelerators. The November 12 release does not include a speed figure.
United is taking steps to stop unauthorized third-party AI agents from using customer accounts. The airline says those tools can expose logins and can make purchases, account changes, or mileage redemptions the customer did not intend.
IBM has released two experimental Granite 4.1 preview models trained to read and write LLMON, a markup language for model context. The 3 billion and 8 billion previews are meant to separate instructions from data, and the page calls that a learned behavior, not a guarantee.
Google has introduced Gemini 4 Hydrogen, priced at $1.50 per million input tokens and $7.50 per million output tokens. It is rolling out today in the Gemini app, Google Search, and the Gemini API, and it finishes tasks 2.5 times faster than Gemini 3.8 Flash at the default high setting.
Anthropic says self-hosted Claude Managed Agents is in private beta. The harness, sandboxes, credentials, and session history can run in a customer's own cloud or on-premise. Model requests can go to Anthropic, a cloud provider, or the customer's own gateway.
