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Intel Punches Back
00:21:21
Intel tries to punch its way back to relevancy with the release of Panther Lake, the first chip built on its 18A process. Is Cursor so successful it’s about to rocket to a $30 billion valuation? Big raise for a US Deep Seek competitor? And are we starting to get the first models moving beyond attention based architecture?
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Welcome to the Techbrew Ride Home for Thursday, October 9, 2025. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, intel tries to punch its way back to relevancy with the release of Panther Lake, the first chip built on its 18 a process is cursor so successful it's about to rocket to a $30 billion valuation. Big raise for a US Deep Seq competitor and are we starting to get the first models moving beyond attention based architecture? Here's what you missed today. In the world of tech, when your business evolves, so does the risk of data loss. But with Veeam, your data is always on the map. Partner with Veeam for coverage that keeps you moving, and get protection for workloads of all shapes and sizes, even the ones you haven't created yet so you can stay resilient as you scale. With Veeam, it's all good. Get workload coverage that works for your business@veeam.com that's V E E A M.com Big positive news from intel today. For a change, intel this morning unveiled Panther Lake or Intel core Ultra Series 3, the first chip built on its 18A process coming to laptops and handhelds in late this year or early next year. Intel says 18A based Panther Lake chips can deliver 50% more performance at similar power to Lunar Lake chips. Intel CTO Sachin Khadi said 18A and Panther Lake are foundational to our future, and manufacturing is mission critical not just for intel, but for the United States. Quoting the Verge Panther Lake is the most important chip intel has made in years. It's the one that will tell the world if a smaller, more focused intel can still meet or beat the competition from Apple, AMD and Qualcomm. It's the first on Intel's 18A process, the one Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger claimed would right the ship and make Intel a manufacturing leader before he was unceremoniously shown the door last December. That's a lot riding on one piece of silicon when it arrives in late 2025 and early 2026. But what is Panther Lake, aka Intel Core Ultra Series 3 actually going to bring to a laptop or handheld near you? Well, more battery life, more performance, more gaming graphics, more affordability. That's the idea anyhow. Oh, and Panther Lake isn't just for thin and light machines. This time, intel has built three different flavors of this chip so it can replace both the lighter weight Lunar Lake and the heftier Aerolake H you find in more laptops. Right now, intel will sell eight and 16 core CPUs, each with four brand new XE3 graphics cores, as well as a 16 core CPU with 12 XE3 graphics cores and 12 ray tracing units, the most integrated graphics horsepower it's shipped to date and a preview of what might come if intel continues to ship desktop gaming GPUs. With the last generation, we gave you a dilemma, says intel chief CPU architect Stefan Robinson. You could buy a Lunar Lake and get fantastic battery life, or you could buy Arrow Lake that had more throughput. Now intel is trying to solve that dilemma, he tells me. Although Panther Lake abandons the onboard memory that helped make last year's Lunar Lake so efficient and adds the low power E cores that were holding Meteor Lake's battery life back, intel claims you'll actually see up to 10% lower power than Lunar Lake across the entire chip. And Robinson tells me that should genuinely mean better battery life than Lunar Lake. In real world use cases, including Microsoft Teams diving into theoretical workloads, the chips sound even more impressive. Intel's brand new Cougar Cove performance cores, P cores and Darkmont Efficiency cores or E cores on the 18A process let intel claim 40% lower power at similar single threaded performance or 50% more multithreaded performance at similar power, seemingly leaving Lunar Lake in the dust. Meanwhile, Intel's new graphics claim to offer over 50% more GPU power than their predecessors too, but it will depend on which of Intel's three new kinds of chips you're buying. Of course, while the top flight Panther Lake with 12 xe3 GPU cores might offer 50% more GPU power than the Lunar Lake chip with 8 xe2 GPU cores, it isn't yet clear to me how the new chips with just 4xe3 GPU cores might compare, or whether one might have a battery life advantage over another. That said, even the 12xz3 core variant shouldn't be too beefy to fit into a handheld like the MSI Claw 8. That surprised me. Last month, intel fellow Tom Peterson suggested as much on stage during Intel's architecture event, and when it does, it should have more stable performance because of a new intelligent bias control v3, which sends hints to Windows to offload gaming tasks to E cores instead of P cores so the system can divert that extra power to graphics where the games really need it. We're more heavily relying on our E cores for gaming because they're beefy E cores and that frees up more power for the gpu, robinson tells me. End quote. And intel really wants you to know that this is being made in the usa. Quoting Bloomberg intel executives explain the benefits of their latest offerings in presentations hosted near a new factory at its Osotillo site in Arizona. Known as Fab 52, the facility is the first to go into mass production with the 18A technique. Intel also is shouldering the costly burden of trying to update its factories. Fab 52 alone required more steel than the Eiffel Tower to build, and contains machines that cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Over three days of presentations at the event, intel executives repeatedly asserted that 18A is the most advanced chip production technology developed and deployed in the US That Made in America spirit lines up with a Trump administration push to bolster domestic manufacturing and reduce reliance on factories in East Asia. The company can make 18A equipped for factories, pay for themselves by producing chips for its own needs, intel said. But the next phase, a technology called 14A, will require outside customers and a high volume of orders to be cost effective. Getting the new 18A chips to market in products that demonstrate better performance for consumers will be the first step toward re establishing Intel's credibility, according to Kevin O. Buckley, general manager of the company's foundry business. Don't trust us until we can do that, said the executive, who's tasked with persuading other companies, including rivals, to use its factories. We know we have a long way to go to deliver trust for our customers. End quote. Something, something My threshold for covering breach stories that I always tell you about. Discord estimates that 70,000 of its users government ID photos may have been exposed in a 1.5 terabyte data breach of third party customer service provider Zendesk, which happened on September 20. Quoting the Verge, a tweet by VX Underground said that the company was being extorted over a breach of its Zendesk instance by a group claiming to have 1.5 terabytes of age verification. Related Photos 2,185,151 Photos when we asked about the tweet, Discord spokesperson New Wexler shared this statement following last week's announcement about a security incident involving a third party customer service provider, we want to address inaccurate claims by those responsible for that are circulating online. First, as stated in our blog post, this was not a breach of Discord, but rather a third party service we used to support our customer service efforts. Second, the numbers being shared are incorrect and part of an attempt to extort a payment from Discord. Of the accounts impacted globally, we have identified approximately 70,000 users that may have had government ID photos exposed which our vendor used to review age related appeals. Third, we will not reward those responsible for their illegal actions. All affected users globally have been contacted and we continue to work closely with law enforcement, data protection authorities and external security experts. End quote.
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Learn more@WhatsApp.com Couple of interesting raises for you here. The information says Any Sphere, the company behind Vibe coding sensation Cursor, is considering investment offers at around a $30 billion valuation. Cursor apparently generates $500 million in ARR as of June, the third highest for any AI app. The funding discussions signal a remarkable run up in anysphere's price from the start of this year, when investors including Thrive Capital and Andreessen Horowitz valued the San Francisco startup at around $2.5 billion. The company then raised money again in June at a $9.9 billion valuation. Over the summer, the startup at a valuation of between $18 to $22 billion but declined to accept it, according to people involved in the conversations. The company, which employs more than 150 people, previously raised more than $1 billion from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Thrive Capital, Accel and DST Global. After OpenAI and Anthropic, cursor is generating more revenue than any other AI native application, generating $500 million in annual recurring revenue as of June, up 10 times from its revenue pace in November, according to the Information's generative A. It's expected to generate $1 billion in annual recurring revenue by the end of this year, Bloomberg has reported. Any sphere is increasingly competing with the biggest AI companies that have also developed their own coding tools. Google, which has several coding assistants, earlier this year agreed to pay $2.4 billion to hire the founder and some senior staff of coding tool developer Windsurf. AI coding startup Cognition bought Windsurf's remaining assets. Anysphere has been developing its own AI models, which could cut the costs it pays Anthropic and OpenAI for their models, and has been trying to focus more on large corporate customers rather than individual users. Its corporate customers include Figma and Stripe, according to Cursor's website. On Wednesday, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said on CNBC that Cursor is his favorite enterprise AI service and that every Nvidia engineer is assisted by AI coders. The chip giant company also uses several coding assistants, including Cursor, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. In recent months, AnySphere held preliminary discussions with AI coding model developers including Xai, OpenAI and Anthropic, about potentially licensing the data it gets from customers, such as what coding suggestions they approve or what are most common requests from developers. Besides paying for models to run its assistant, the company has expanded to multiple offices in San Francisco and has opened an office in Manhattan, according to job postings, End Quote and Reflection AI is developing an open source AI model to compete with Deepseek, and it has raised $2 billion, led by Nvidia, valuing the company at $8 billion, up from 545 million just back in March. Quoting the Times. The move shows that investors are willing to invest not only in the proprietary software sold by OpenAI and Google, but open source models which are free to share and modify. Skeptics of open source AI say the approach could cause significant harm, yet Reflection AI argues that the United States needs an equivalent to Deep Seq, an open source model developer whose software can compete with top closed source models to maintain technological superiority around the world. Existing Western open source AI models are underperforming Deep Seq and other Chinese rivals, which may lead to greater adoption of Chinese created models, according to Misha Lashkin, Reflection AI's co founder and chief executive. Among the Western companies making open source models are Meta Mistral, AI of France and even OpenAI, though that company is primarily focused on proprietary software. There's a deep sea shaped hole in the US which I think is what makes it critical for a lab like ours to exist, Mr. Laskin said in an interview, comparing the situation to the Cold War space race. But developing any AI model, open source or not, requires ever higher amounts of computing power and research talent in short money. That is why Reflection AI raised $2 billion just seven months after raising $130 million in March. In recent months, Reflection AI held talks with potential investors and closed the round within a matter of weeks, Mr. Laskin said. Nvidia wrote the biggest check, $800 million, and had several engineers work with Reflection AI to optimize its most recent generation of AI chips, according to a person with knowledge of the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the deal's details. Other participants in the existing backers like Lightspeed Venture Partners and Sequoia Capital. New investors included DST, the former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt and 1789 Capital, the investment firm that counts Donald Trump Jr as a partner. End quote well, speaking of smaller models, Samsung has introduced the tiny recursion model a 7 million and I said million, not billion 7 million parameter model that can outperform LLMs 10,000 times larger like Gemini 2.5 Pro or O3 mini on specific problems. Quoting VentureBeat the goal is to show that very highly performant new AI models can be created affordably without massive investments in the graphics processing units and power needed to train the larger multi trillion parameter flagship models powering many LLM chatbots today. The results were described in a research paper published in open accessarchive.org entitled less is More Recursive Reasoning with Tiny Networks. The idea that one must rely on massive foundational models trained for millions of dollars by some big corporation in order to solve hard tasks is a trap, wrote Alexia Jolicoeur Martineau, senior AI researcher at Samsung's Advanced Institute of Technology on the social Network X. Currently there is too much focus on exploiting LLMs rather than devising and expanding new lines of direction. End quote Jolicoeur Martineau also added with recursive reasoning it turns out that less is more, a tiny model pre trained from scratch, recursing on itself and updating its answers over time, can achieve a lot without breaking the bank. TRM's code is available now on GitHub under an enterprise friendly, commercially viable MIT license, meaning anyone from researchers to companies can take, modify it or deploy it for their own purposes even commercial applications. TRM is apparently a radical simplification of HRM or the technique called hierarchical reasoning model. Instead of two cooperating networks and fixed point math, it uses a single two layer model that recursively updates a latent state and its answer until stable plus a lightweight halting rule. Iteration substitutes for depth and size, delivering high accuracy with a tiny parameter count rivaling Deepseek R1, Gemini 2.5 Pro and O3 Mini, the minimalist design generalizes better. Adding layers often overfits small data sets for small fixed context Sudoku, for example. A simple MLP apparently outperforms self attention for larger grids. Attention still helps, however. Finally, today, the Journal says Microsoft is planning a major healthcare push for copilot in partnership with Harvard Medical School as it seeks to reduce its dependence on OpenAI. Mustafa Suleyman, chief executive of Microsoft AI, has made healthcare a focus of the division's efforts as he has increased staffing at an internal AI lab that competes with OpenAI. In June, the company, which employs clinicians, said an AI tool it developed can diagnose disease at a rate four times more accurate than a group of doctors and do so at a fraction of the cost. Despite a tentative agreement announced last month to extend the partnership between Microsoft and OpenAI, there remains urgency within Microsoft on building up a measure of technological independence from OpenAI, the people familiar with the matter said. Last week, Microsoft Chief Executive Sachin Adela said he would hand off some duties to a deputy so he could concentrate on the company's biggest AI bets. Microsoft, which created its division dedicated to consumer AI and research in 2024, is training its models with the goal of eventually replac workloads from OpenAI, the people said. Achieving that might take years. The company has said that OpenAI will continue to be our partner on frontier models and that its philosophy is to use the best models available. Microsoft trails OpenAI in consumer AI the Copilot smartphone app has been downloaded 95 million times, while ChatGPT has been downloaded more than a billion times, according to Sensor Tower, a research firm. Microsoft in August said that it had started to test publicly a homegrown AI model that could be used for its Copilot Chatbot. Researchers and engineers, especially those recently hired away from Google's DeepMind AI lab, are focused almost entirely on advancing Microsoft's own models. Already, Microsoft is using non OpenAI models for some of its other software. It now deploys models from OpenAI's rival Anthropic, to power AI tools within its 365 products. Nothing more for you today. Talk to you tomorrow.