Welcome back to your daily memorandum talking tech, business, AI, markets, and more. 🗞️

In today’s edition we are tackling the following:

🏡 Perplexity has launched an election hub.
🌎 Affirm is launching in the U.K., its first market outside North America.
🎰 How Kalshi legalized betting on the election.
🔥 US immigration policy and climate change don’t mix.
🤖 MIT has launched LLM built to train robots.

TECH

• Perplexity launches an elections tracker

  • Data from The Associated Press and Democracy Works, the company described it in a blog as “an entry point for understanding key issues.”

  • Hub answers questions like voting requirements, poll times, as well as AI analyses on ballot measures, candidates, policy stances, and more.

  • A July study found that more than a third of answers generated by AI chatbots including Claude and Gemini included incorrect information.

• Early Apple M4 Pro and M4 Max benchmarks hint at a massive performance boost

  • According to Geekbench, the Apple M4 Pro processor has scored 3,925 in single-core and 22,669 in multi-core tests.

  • M4 Max processor has scored 4,060 in single-core tests, making it the first production CPU to achieve over 4,000 mark in Geekbench 6.

  • The specifications do seem to align with Apple’s promises and claims during their announcements.

• Why Nvidia could back xAI

  • xAI is talking to investors about raising billions of dollars at a $45B valuation.

  • Valor Equity Partners, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz and Vy Capital are in talks to invest again.

  • Sources believe Nvidia are in the mix to take part in the round.

BUSINESS

• US regulators reject amended interconnect agreement for Amazon data center

  • US regulators rejected a proposal to let Amazon buy nuclear power for AWS data centers in Pennsylvania.

  • "Co-location arrangements of the type presented here present an array of complicated, nuanced and multifaceted issues,” per FERC.

  • Energy grid reliability is one of the major concerns among others.

• Affirm launches in the UK, as ‘buy now, pay later’ market faces regulatory overhaul

  • Buy now, pay later giant Affirm is launching in the U.K., its first market outside North America.

  • Lawmakers mull rules to bring BNPL firms into line with other traditional consumer credit services, with changes expected in 2026.

  • BNPL sector has struggled of late, Klarna’s value dropped by 85% following post-pandemic ‘correction,’ but has recovered since.

• Threat of New York Times Tech Worker Strike on Election Day Grows

  • NYT’s long-running labor dispute with its tech staffers is reaching a breaking point, with a potential Election Day strike threatening.

  • Times staff worry walkout could hinder election coverage; union demands have included higher pay, more remote work flexibility.

  • Executives are worried a 600-person walkout could disrupt the quality of election-coverage on a day that traffic is expected to surge. 

CONTENT

• How Kalshi Made it Legal to Bet on this Election

  • Ed Elson speaks with Tarek Mansour, co-founder and CEO of Kalshi, a regulated exchange and prediction market to trade on future events.

  • Kalshi’s fight to legalize betting on the election, how to deal with negative press, and his prediction for the outcome of the election.

  • Betting on the election has become a major talking point during this election cycle.

• Inflated GDP?, Google earnings, How the media lost trust, Rogan/Trump search controversy, Election!

  • The All-In Podcast takes on GDP growth, YouTube and Cloud post huge quarters, and how the media has lost trust.

  • Final pre-election segment: how it's tracking, election integrity, voter fraud stats.

  • All-In currently has 697,000 viewers on YouTube and more across audio.

• I Tried Real Augmented Reality Glasses!

  • Marques Brownlee, reviews Meta vs Snap AR glasses in for his 19.6 million subscribers.

  • Brownless is famous for his tech reviews, most recently reviewing Rabbit and Humane and Tesla’s Cybertruck.

  • The YouTuber famously released a wallpaper app of his own to poor reviews earlier this year.

WORLD

• House Speaker Johnson says GOP may try to repeal CHIPS Act, then walks it back

  • Mike Johnson said Friday that Republicans “probably will” try to repeal legislation that spurred U.S. production of semiconductor chips.

  • Statement he quickly tried to walk back by saying he would like to instead “streamline” the $54 billion piece of legislation.

  • Democrats quickly jumped on comments, warning that it showed how Johnson and Trump are pursuing an aggressive conservative agenda.

• US immigration policy has a huge blind spot: climate change

  • Without legal protections for climate migrants, the US continues to have a blind spot as it abandons 25 million people annually fleeing disasters.

  • Republicans seek to entirely upend the immigration system, dismantle asylum altogether, and strip away environmental regulations.

  • Kamala Harris has pledged to continue Biden’s climate initiatives and his tougher stance on the border. 

• Thousands of Children in Gaza Get 2nd Dose of Polio Vaccine

  • Over 58,600 children in northern Gaza received the final dose of the polio vaccine on Saturday.

  • Aid agencies said that children in other areas of northern Gaza where Israel is mounting an offensive will miss the doses.

  • WHO and UNICEF, claim 15,000 children live in northern areas beyond Gaza City that are now inaccessible because of fighting.

AND MORE…

• Employers added only 12,000 jobs in October. That seems bad—but there's a catch

  • Overall the labor market likely is cooling but remains fairly resilient despite the weak October numbers.

  • The labor market remains sturdy with low unemployment, with data indicating the broader economy is growing at a healthy rate.

  • "You’re still seeing wages and salaries running ahead of inflation," says economist Sarah House at Wells Fargo.

• MIT debuts a large language model-inspired method for teaching robots new skills

  • MIT this week showcased a new model for training robots that researchers claimed was imitation learning.

  • The agent learns by following an individual performing a task, but currently can fail when small challenges are introduced.

  • New architecture called Heterogeneous Pretrained Transformers (HPT), pulls information from different sensors and different environments.

• Trump Pushes to Boost Turnout Among Young Men, Harris Focuses on Female Voters

  • Donald Trump is pinning his political future on winning the votes of disaffected young men.

  • While Kamala Harris is doing the same with female voters—particularly moderates and independents.

  • NBC News national poll shows Trump winning men by 18 percentage points, and Harris winning women by 16—and the race tied overall.