Google's search revenue rose 12% year over year in the third quarter, compared with about 17% in the second, The Verge calculates. Ad clicks grew just 8%, down from 13% a quarter earlier, even though search queries are growing at their fastest pace in five years. Philipp Schindler, Google's chief business officer, attributes the slowdown mainly to currency effects but acknowledges that the company earns less on AI Mode queries than on regular search. Alphabet shares have fallen about 14% since the results were published.
Elon Musk acknowledged on X that Grok Bot, xAI's always-on AI agent, cost too much relative to revenue. He was replying to a user whose weekly limit ran out earlier than usual. Others are complaining too: one says usage jumped from 58% to 100% of the limit in under an hour, despite running nothing. Musk did not explain what changed, and xAI did not respond to Gizmodo's questions.
Hackers took control of supermarket freezers in Belgium and Sweden and raised their temperature to 50°C (122°F), Tom's Hardware reports, citing Bloomberg. In Belgium, the attack began overnight from November 1 to 2 and hit the Delhaize, Carrefour and Spar chains; in Sweden, ICA and Coop were affected, and stores had to throw out goods. The hackers remotely switched on defrost mode, just as in France a few weeks earlier. There are also reports of stores hit in Ireland, Estonia and the Netherlands.
Claude deleted a University of Chicago professor's notes for a year-long constitutional law course along with his current syllabus, Tom's Hardware reports. William Baude had only asked it to fix the page numbers in old notes, and when he came back from lunch he read that the model had deleted the files by mistake. He recovered them from a Dropbox backup. He described the incident on X on November 5 as a warning to others. It is not known which version of Claude he was using.