xAI Grok Voice 3.0, Apple's First Touchscreen Mac, and More Tech News

AI

xAI Launches Grok Voice 3.0 Real-Time Voice Agent API

xAI released Grok Voice 3.0 on October 14. The speech-to-speech model handles pauses, turn-taking, and interruptions in real-time conversations with sub-second latency at 0.81 seconds. It supports function calling (tool use) natively.

Pricing stays at $0.08 per minute for voice, plus $0.004 per text input charge. Developers on the grok-voice-latest alias are automatically upgraded. The model improves task-completion accuracy while maintaining the same price as Grok Voice 2.0.

On the Artificial Analysis benchmark, Grok Voice 3.0 scores 86.9 on the speech-to-speech index, up from 81.3 for the previous model. However, GPT-Live-1 still leads the same benchmark, putting xAI’s claim of a number-one ranking in dispute.

Eka Robotics Raises $150M Series A at $1.45B Valuation, Led by a16z and F-Prime

Cambridge-based robotics AI startup Eka Robotics closed a $150 million Series A co-led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and F-Prime, with participation from Obvious Ventures and E14 Fund. The post-money valuation of $1.45 billion puts the company at unicorn status straight from its seed stage.

Co-founders MIT professor Pulkit Agrawal and former DeepMind researcher Tuomas Haarnoja built a Vision-Force-Action model that integrates sight, force, and motion to control robotic arms for precision tasks. In lab conditions, the system picks 1,500 objects per hour, roughly 2.5 times the human rate of about 600.

Industrial pilots are underway, though sustaining that pace through full production shifts remains the next milestone. VC funding for AI robotics startups is accelerating as logistics and manufacturing automation moves from pilot programs to real deployments.

Big Tech

Apple “Pro and Tell” Event Set for October 28 with First-Ever Touchscreen Mac

Apple will hold its “Pro and Tell” event on October 28 in Los Angeles. Rather than a full keynote, the event is expected to be an “Apple Experience” format with press releases and hands-on sessions.

Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports the highlight will be an OLED touchscreen MacBook Pro in 14- and 16-inch sizes with M5 Pro and M5 Max chips. This would be the first Mac with a touchscreen and the first to feature the Dynamic Island interface from the iPhone. An M6-powered iMac, a 14-inch M6 MacBook Pro, and an OLED iPad mini are also expected.

The M6 is Apple’s 2nm chip, first shipped in the Mac mini in August. The touchscreen models could carry higher prices than the current non-touch M5 Pro/M5 Max lineup. Apple has not officially confirmed any product details.

SpaceX Seeks $40B in Debt Financing for NVIDIA AI Chips

SpaceX is pursuing roughly $40 billion in debt to buy NVIDIA AI chips at scale, the Financial Times reported. Apollo is expected to lead placement and distribution, with PIMCO also in discussions.

The proposed structure combines $10 billion in bank loans and $30 billion in investment-grade bonds, using the purchased GPUs as collateral. The target close is 2027. As of June, SpaceX already carried about $38.4 billion in debt, meaning the new raise would roughly double its total obligations.

SpaceX completed an IPO raising more than $75 billion earlier this year and reportedly holds $100 billion in cash. Choosing debt over equity for AI compute expansion signals how aggressively the company is pursuing artificial intelligence infrastructure, extending the AI investment race beyond traditional tech into the space industry.

Startups

Whop Raises $205M Series D at $5.1B Valuation Led by Sequoia

Digital commerce platform Whop closed a $205 million Series D led by Sequoia Capital, with Shopify Ventures also participating. Sequoia’s Doug Leone joins the board. The round values the company at $5.1 billion.

In February, Tether invested $200 million at a $1.6 billion valuation. The company has tripled its valuation in eight months. Revenue has surpassed $400 million annualized, up from $60 million at the start of last year.

Whop provides a platform for creators and businesses to sell digital goods and services. It handles SaaS subscriptions, community memberships, digital content, and more through a single storefront with integrated payments.

Oratomic Closes $475M Series B, Largest U.S. Quantum Computing Raise Ever

Pasadena-based quantum computing startup Oratomic raised a $475 million Series B co-led by ARCH Venture Partners, Spark Capital, Khosla Ventures, Index Ventures, General Catalyst, and Bezos Expeditions. It is the largest Series B in U.S. quantum computing history, surpassing all 62 prior rounds on record.

Valuation jumped to $5.4 billion from $1.5 billion at the July Series A, a 3.6x increase in roughly 90 days. Total funding now stands at about $775 million. CEO Dolev Bluvstein argues a practical fault-tolerant quantum computer needs around 10,000 qubits, far fewer than the industry’s earlier estimate of approximately one million.

Gartner has cautioned that the quantum computing market is overheated and that more than half of quantum startups will shut down by 2030 as revenue fails to materialize. A 3.6x valuation jump in 90 days with no shipped hardware illustrates the gap between investor enthusiasm and commercial readiness.

New Technology

Liquid AI Releases LFM2.5-24B-A2B MoE Model

Liquid AI released LFM2.5-24B-A2B, a Mixture-of-Experts model with 24 billion total parameters, activating roughly 2 billion per token. The context window expanded from 32K to 131K tokens.

Pre-training data scaled from 17 trillion to 33 trillion tokens. The model is optimized for reasoning and tool calling but does not support JSON output modes. API pricing is $0.10 per million input tokens and $1.00 per million output tokens.

The LFM2.5 family also includes smaller models from 230M to 1.2B parameters. The 1.2B Instruct variant runs on less than 1GB of RAM, making it viable for edge deployment. Fine-tuning is supported through Unsloth.

Open Source

Developer Communities Expand Bans on AI-Generated Code

The backlash against AI-generated code is spreading across major developer communities. On r/java, a developer received a lifetime ban for posting a Swing WebView component built with heavy AI assistance.

Codeberg voted 358 to 144 (approximately 50% member turnout) to ban hosting of LLM-generated projects. r/rust now requires submissions to certify they contain no significant AI-generated content. r/programming has blocked LLM-related posts entirely.

The driving force is the flood of low-quality AI contributions. Generating a plausible-sounding vulnerability report costs pennies in tokens, while verifying whether it describes a real security flaw still takes an expert hours. That asymmetry is pushing unsustainable workloads onto open-source maintainers.

Gitea 28.2.0 Stable Released

Self-hosted Git platform Gitea shipped version 28.2.0 stable on October 18. Licensed under MIT, Gitea is a Go-based single binary that can run anywhere from a Raspberry Pi to enterprise servers.

Gitea serves as a self-hosted alternative to GitHub, providing issue tracking, CI/CD integration, and a package registry. The project has maintained an independent release cadence and active community since the Forgejo fork.

Gaming

Korea Game Awards 2026 Opens Public Voting

The Korea Game Awards 2026, hosted by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism and organized by the Korea Game Industry Association, opened public online voting on October 26. Voting runs through November 16 at 5 PM KST.

The ceremony takes place on November 18 in Busan with 13 award categories including Grand Prize, Excellence Award, and Indie Game Award. Candidate submissions opened on September 28, and winners from the Excellent Games selection automatically advance to the main awards.

Pearl Abyss’s Crimson Desert and NCSoft’s Aion 2 are among the high-profile nominees drawing attention this year. The event has become one of the most prominent game industry ceremonies in South Korea.

Remothered: Red Nun’s Legacy Launches Today on Multiple Platforms

The final chapter of the Remothered horror trilogy, Red Nun’s Legacy, launches October 27 on PC (Steam, Epic, GOG), PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and Switch 2. Physical editions for PS5 and Switch 2 are also planned.

Players follow Susan as she searches a decaying Ashmann family mansion on Mount Etna for her missing daughter. Gameplay blends third-person exploration, puzzles, and stealth with limited melee combat. The story is designed as a standalone experience that does not require knowledge of the earlier games, Tormented Fathers and Broken Porcelain.

Akira Yamaoka, known for the Silent Hill series, composed the original soundtrack. Timed for the Halloween season, the launch is drawing attention from horror genre fans.

References

xAI Grok Voice 3.0 Release — TechEnclave
Grok Voice 3.0 Benchmark — LLM Reference
Eka Robotics $150M Series A — SiliconAngle
Eka Robotics Valuation — Crypto Briefing
Apple “Pro and Tell” Event — Macworld
Touchscreen MacBook Pro Specs — Macworld
Apple Event Details — TechRadar
SpaceX $40B GPU Debt — Investing Live / FT
Whop $205M Series D — Dealroom
Oratomic $475M Series B — Dealroom
Oratomic HPC Analysis — HPC Wire
Oratomic Valuation Analysis — Value Add VC
Liquid AI LFM2.5-24B-A2B — LLM Reference
LFM2.5 Fine-tuning Guide — Unsloth
Codeberg AI/Crypto Ban — Hackaday
Developer AI Code Ban Trend — DEV Community
Gitea Releases — GitHub
Korea Game Awards 2026 — InvenGlobal
Remothered: Red Nun’s Legacy — Gematsu