Weekly Intel - 2026-11-01

This week Google Search slipped below half of Alphabet’s revenue, Microsoft offered buyouts to about a quarter of its staff, and tech stocks closed out their worst month since March 2025.

Tech Industry

DoorDash to acquire Instacart. DoorDash announced on October 29 a definitive agreement to buy Instacart for $65.00 per share, an equity value of about $17 billion and a 26% premium to Instacart’s October 22 closing price. At least 75% of the payment will be cash, with DoorDash stock capped at 25% of the total. The deal needs antitrust review and is expected to close at the end of 2027 or in the first half of 2028.

Google Search is now less than half of Alphabet’s revenue. Google Search brought in $63.4 billion of Alphabet’s $127.6 billion in revenue for the quarter ending in September, or 49.7%, according to Kadoa’s analysis of Alphabet’s results. In Kadoa’s data going back to late 2018, Search had never been below 52.8% of revenue. Search still grew 12% year over year, while Google Cloud grew 103% to $30.7 billion, or 24.1% of the total.

AI & Software

OpenAI releases GPT-6.1 Terra. OpenAI released GPT-6.1 Terra on October 26, a model built for visual reasoning and computer use on everyday work like drafting proposals, reading technical drawings, filling out forms and editing video. API pricing is $1 per million input tokens and $5 per million output tokens, half the price of both GPT-5.6 Terra and GPT-6.1 Sol. OpenAI says that price makes high-volume work practical, such as reading incoming invoices and entering them into accounting software.

Mistral releases the weights of Mistral Large 4. Mistral released the open weights of Mistral Large 4 (nicknamed Le Chonk) on October 29, after a public preview that started October 6. It’s a 1-trillion-parameter, natively multimodal model, and Mistral reports gains in agentic coding, defensive cybersecurity and reasoning efficiency, including a 13-point jump to 41% on Terminal-Bench 4.0.

Google introduces Gemini 4 Carbon. Google announced Gemini 4 Carbon on October 28, a model aimed at cybersecurity and long-running tasks, two weeks after it launched Gemini 4 Argon. Google says Carbon ranks first on version 5.0 of the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index with a score of 59, and scores 88.2% on SEC-bench Pro for finding vulnerabilities, 54.8% on ExploitGym for exploiting them and 71.0% on CWE-bench for patching them. Google also reports that Carbon makes about half as many unsupported claims as Argon.

Markets

Tech stocks fall as AI spending worries spread. Intel shares fell about 28% on Friday, October 30, the stock’s worst day since 1974, a day after Alphabet dropped more than 12%. Reddit and Amazon also fell on Friday. Meta, Alphabet, Oracle, Amazon and Microsoft have committed to a combined $800.6 billion in AI spending for 2026, the BBC reported, and the Nasdaq lost 5.3% in October, its worst month since March 2025.

Economy & Labor

Microsoft offers voluntary buyouts to about 60,000 employees. Microsoft offered buyouts on Monday, October 26, to about 60,000 employees, roughly a quarter of its 223,000-person workforce, covering staff at vice president level and below in the U.S., Canada, India and the U.K. Eligible employees have until early December to decide, with departures set for December 31. A company spokesperson said 3,000 or fewer are expected to accept, about 5% of those eligible.

Legal & Regulation

House Democrats introduce a resolution opposing an AI bubble bailout. Rep. Greg Casar (TX-35), chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and Rep. Maxine Waters (CA-43), ranking member of the House Financial Services Committee, introduced a resolution on October 29, with 11 other Democrats, warning of economic risk from an AI-related asset bubble and opposing any federal bailout of companies or executives if it collapses. The resolution backs federal action to protect workers, retirees and low-income communities in a downturn.

Stanford writers sue Anthropic outside the $1.5 billion settlement. Stanford faculty members Tobias Wolff and Chang-rae Lee are among the authors who opted out of the $1.5 billion Bartz v. Anthropic class settlement and are suing Anthropic separately, The Stanford Daily reported on October 27. The settlement pays about $3,000 per work, and the separate suit, Cruz v. Anthropic, seeks up to $150,000 per work. In the Bartz case in 2025, Judge William Alsup ruled that training on legally bought books was fair use and that downloading pirated copies to build a permanent library was not.

AI Industry Moves

Why OpenAI and Anthropic cut LLM prices so fast. Max Woolf’s analysis tracks how far model prices fell over the summer. OpenAI launched GPT-5.6 Luna on June 26 at $1 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens, then cut it 80% on July 30 to $0.20 and $1.20. Anthropic launched Claude Sonnet 5 at $2 and $10 and Claude Opus 5 at $5 and $25, close to OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol after Sol’s August cut to $4 and $20.

That’s what I’m watching. What caught your attention this week?

-Eric