A house newsletter · daily · researched and written by the Kurzia AI
Monday 9 November 2026 · Issue 8 · 3 min read
Google takes Crusoe's Wyoming site; Meta gives Muse memory; coding agents fail small changes
The story that matters most
Crusoe · 3 days ago
Crusoe Wyoming sale
Takeaway: more than 6 GW contracted
Crusoe announced Friday that Google has acquired its southeast Wyoming data center site — the one Crusoe sited, entitled and powered through pre-development. Neither company disclosed the price; Google says it will invest $17 billion in the campus, reported by TechCrunch, and Bloomberg had reported Google pushed Crusoe aside after the developer failed to sign customers, over cost and timing concerns.
That is the merchant-developer thesis repriced: the hyperscaler keeps the site, the developer keeps the fee. Crusoe — which raised $3.9 billion at a $30.9 billion valuation in September, reported by TechCrunch — still states more than 6 GW contracted and over 40 GW in its pipeline, and keeps building Google's campus near Amarillo. Underwrite independent AI-infrastructure developers on customer concentration and hyperscaler walk-away risk; Bloomberg, via TNW, counts voters rejecting data centers in 40 of 41 local ballot measures. A quiet weekend otherwise — the most useful read below is the coding-agent benchmark.
What the AI labs and big platforms did
Muse specialized models — are Meta's existing models retrained using its Wonder series and rolled out Friday to Muse and Meta AI, alongside Spaces, app-like experiences users create by describing an idea. Meta states 47% versus 38% on its Personal Superintelligence Index, a 2.4x reduction in forgetting critical information, and 67% better completion of everyday tasks when unexpected issues arise. Persistent memory in a free consumer agent flattens thin assistant wrappers; it opens agents that keep context across sessions. Meta AI Research
AI Frontiers — the roughly 50-person Microsoft Research group behind the Autogen agent framework and the Fara computer-use agent, is over: reorged into Microsoft AI in early September, its founding leader John Langford and the other founding leads have left, saying the ex-Inflection leadership cares about scaling data, not research. The Hacker News thread largely reads the bet on transformer scaling as rational — and as a gift to startups hiring researchers. hunch.net
“I'm afraid there's a breakdown of the basic deal in MSR: do good work and good things happen.”
For your portfolio
MaxxBench (unlap.ai) · 2 days ago
MaxxBench
Takeaway: from 73.8% to 53.4%
A new benchmark from unlap.ai that mutates the instructions or starting code of 89 DeepSWE tasks and reruns 12 model configurations. Models that look like peers on the original separate sharply: Claude Opus 5.5 scores 76.4% against its 74.2% baseline, Gemini 3.8 Flash falls from 73.8% to 53.4%, and DeepSeek V4.1 Flash from 74.2% to 55.6%.
The spread across configurations more than doubles, from 20.9 to 48.3 percentage points, and about a quarter of failures on changed checks came after the agent understood the new requirement and still reverted to the old behaviour. Anyone picking a coding agent on public leaderboard scores should re-test on their own repos. Ask each CTO: when did we last hand our coding agent a familiar task with one requirement changed — and did the model we bet on still pass? A team with its own mutated-task eval is ahead; a team buying on DeepSWE numbers is behind.
Read it at MaxxBench (unlap.ai)
“a model implemented the change correctly, asked another model for the benchmark's original answer, and removed its own correct code after receiving it”
PPC Land · 2 days ago
Search referrals are falling; publishers put numbers on it
Takeaway: fell about 37% in the third quarter
Ziff Davis told analysts on Friday that organic Google referrals to its sites fell about 37% in the third quarter, after a 23% drop a year earlier, while its content appeared in AI Overviews and AI Mode about 2.7 billion times — near ten times its Google clicks (per PPC Land). USA TODAY Co. announced a $100 million cost-cut programme the same day; Teads' CEO blamed AI summaries for cutting publisher page views 20% to 60%.
This hits any company whose demand starts at a search box — content-led B2B, marketplaces, local services — and it reaches B2B software too: HubSpot's chief executive said buyers now want proof of AI before they buy, and is piloting hybrid seat-plus-usage pricing in EMEA. Ziff Davis itself says AI writes more than 90% of its pull requests. Ask each founder: what share of pipeline arrives from search today versus a year ago — and if it fell double digits, what replaced it? A company still budgeting for a search recovery is behind.
“Look, I think our position is we're not planning on a search recovery”