Nscale has closed a $3.36B pre-IPO convertible note round led by Third Point, with Nvidia, Apollo, Citadel and the Abu Dhabi Investment Council among the investors, three weeks after it was reported to be seeking up to $3.5B. The London company filed to list on the New York Stock Exchange last week under the ticker NSCL.

Nscale has raised $3.36B in a pre-IPO convertible note round led by Third Point, Bloomberg reported. Nvidia, Apollo, Citadel, Hudson Bay Capital, the Abu Dhabi Investment Council and 8090 Industries took part. The company is based in London and filed last week to list in New York.

It asked for more than that.

Three weeks ago it was reported to be seeking $3.5B, split between convertible notes led by Third Point and a larger cheque from Nvidia. What closed is about $140M short of that. Goldman Sachs acted as placement agent.

Nvidia’s money arrives later.

The total includes a $2.36B tranche and a separate $1B commitment from Nvidia expected in mid-November. The notes convert into ordinary shares when the listing completes, or into non-voting shares in Nvidia’s case. The listing itself may raise as much as $3B on top of what has just been committed.

Nvidia has done this before.

It bought SB Energy stock at 90% of its IPO price this month, also in non-voting form, also before a listing. It now holds around $99B of shares in companies that buy its chips. Nscale is one of them.

The conversion terms name a number.

The notes are priced at the IPO price minus a double-digit percentage discount, and that discount is adjusted up to a $30B valuation, above which the conversion price does not move. The filing is reported to seek up to $35B. Nobody has explained which way that gap cuts.

The accounts are still young.

Revenue reached $140.6M in the first half of this year, more than thirteen times what it took in the same period last year, against a net loss of $1.02B. The contracted backlog stands at $103.4B, up from $38B at the end of last year. Most of that backlog is revenue not yet earned.

The company is British.

It was spun out of a cryptocurrency mining operation in early 2024, and its board includes Sheryl Sandberg and Nick Clegg, a former British deputy prime minister. Twenty-two banks are working on the offering. All of them are preparing a listing that will not happen in London.

The Pentagon wants $30.3m over five years to build an AI lie detector that reads the body without touching it. The programme, called Polygraph+ or Polygraph Next, appears in the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency’s 2027 budget request.

Inside Defense first reported the plan. MIT Technology Review’s Amit Katwala asked experts whether it could work. The agency, known as DCSA, runs background checks for the federal government. It did not respond to MIT Technology Review’s request for details.

What the budget says

DCSA asks for $6.42m in 2027, then between $5.65m and $6.45m a year up to 2031. Congress has not yet approved the request.

The programme aims to “modernize federal polygraph and credibility assessment technologies”, the budget document says. It lists “standoff sensing”, or taking physical readings from a person without attaching a device, along with AI and machine learning scoring, automated scoring and decision aids.

The tools would be used to vet staff and for “insider threat detection”. DCSA also plans cloud storage and data analysis tools to refine the software.

Leak hunts and prototypes

Under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, the Pentagon has turned more often to polygraph tests to find the sources of leaks to the press, MIT Technology Review reported. In September, The New York Times reported that about 50 officers on the Joint Staff had been tested.

The Pentagon has tested this kind of technology before. In 2023, its Defense Innovation Unit picked two companies to build prototypes. Presage Technologies says it can measure heart and breathing rates with ordinary cameras. Altec Research’s prototype tracks head movement, facial skin temperature and pore activity.

The science problem

A polygraph does not detect lies. It records breathing, pulse, blood pressure and sweat, and an examiner reads the changes. In 2003, the US National Research Council called the evidence for its accuracy “weak at best”.

The American Polygraph Association says the test is 80% to 94% accurate. At that level, a screening programme could still produce many errors. The Pentagon employs 2.8 million people, MIT Technology Review noted.

Kyri Kotsoglou, a legal scholar at Northumbria University in the UK, calls adding AI to the polygraph “the worst of both worlds”. It adds uncertainty on top of invalidity, Kotsoglou told MIT Technology Review.

“Even if you have all the records in the world from polygraph tests, you don’t know whether those polygraph tests are right or not,” Marion Oswald, a law professor who has written with Kotsoglou, told MIT Technology Review.

Sophie van der Zee, who studies deception at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, said AI could combine several measures into one score that is harder to game.

“There is still no Pinocchio’s nose,” van der Zee told MIT Technology Review.

Earlier AI lie detectors have not lasted, MIT Technology Review reported. The EU funded iBorderCtrl, a border pilot built on a system that scored deception from video. It faded away, like the US AVATAR border project.

Other tools that use AI to read people are already in use, from AI voice analysis of US prison calls to facial recognition alerts in UK shops and AI camera searches by US police.

Child predators are arguably the most reviled demographic in society.

So when someone like Chris Hansen, the former NBC Dateline journalist and host of the To Catch a Predator series, decides to take up the mantle of exposing them to the public, he is naturally praised as a hero.

But, as is revealed in Lance Oppenheim’s Primetime—a dramatized snapshot of Hansen’s life at the show’s peak—it’s not as simple as that. Exposing allegedly bad people for public entertainment brings up a lot of ethical concerns and unintended consequences. And while many of the vigilantes carrying out these sting operations claim they are doing a public service, their motivations become a lot more suspect when fame and money are involved.

To Catch a Predator launched in 2004. In the show, Hansen’s team would pair up with civilian watchdog group Perverted Justice, using adult “decoys” to pose as minors online and exchange messages with men in chatrooms and private DMs. After the conversations became sexual, the crew would set up a sting, inviting these men to a home to meet the decoy, only to have Hansen confront them, uttering his catchphrase, “Have a seat.” The men were technically free to leave instead of sitting for an on-camera interview, but often police were waiting outside to arrest them.

The show developed an intense fandom that remains active to this day in subreddits like r/tcap, which has 52,000 weekly visitors, despite the fact that NBC stopped airing the original series in 2007.

In A24’s Primetime, a darkly told character study in theaters September 25, Hansen (Robert Pattinson) clearly enjoys the praise and seems desperate for more accolades. He brags to his two young sons that he’s about to be on prime-time television, despite them not understanding the importance of that, and complains that the show has “never won an Emmy or any of the significance it deserves.” When a fan recognizes Hansen on a flight and becomes bloodthirsty, asking the TV host if he ever wants to “bleed” the predators he’s outing, Hansen smiles and admits that what he does by disgracing them on national television is “a little worse.”

In real life, Hansen cofounded the streaming service Trublu in November 2022, where he continues his investigations into alleged child predators. But these days, he’s far from alone. His work has inspired copycats, who thrive on social media and streaming platforms like YouTube, Kick, and Facebook. These groups and individuals are largely disorganized, and as such, hard to track, but a 2022 Washington Post investigation identified at least 160 in the US. Arguably, the people running these operations are more reckless, in part because they’re driven by virality.

One of them, who goes by Skeet Hansen, was featured in the 2025 MTV documentary Predators, about the Dateline show. In the film, directed by David Osit, Skeet Hansen responds to the criticism of the movement by saying, “There’s never been a detective that solved a murder that didn’t get paid for it. So why shouldn’t I be able to monetize off of catching these guys like the original show and making this content for people’s entertainment?”

One of many issues with that argument is that these hunters aren’t professional investigators—and sometimes they get things wrong.

In April, YouTuber and Kick streamer Vitaly Zdorovetskiy apologized after publicly—and wrongly— accosting a man of Indian descent. He accused the man of wanting to “rape a 16-year-old” in a mock Indian accent and called him “Mr. Mumbai.” In March 2025, The New York Times reported that Zdorovetskiy’s tactics for ambushing suspected creeps included beating some of them up, dressing like the Joker; the Times piece found that there have been more than 170 violent vigilante attacks by predator-hunting groups since 2023.

Apple’s diminutive speaker is returning for a second generation, sporting the same spherical design in a few new colors.

The upcoming HomePod mini lineup swaps the current-gen yellow and orange for a new powder pink and forest green. Blue, black, and white will be making a return, though.

The information originates from Apple’s code, spotted by MacRumors contributor Aaron Perris. It showcases the product in the aforementioned colors.

Apple has yet to announce the HomePod mini 2. However, the images in the code suggest a release could be coming soon.

The first-generation HomePod mini made its debut in October 2020. Shortly after, Apple retired the full-sized, first-generation HomePod.

Apple allowed the HomePod mini to carry the lineup for nearly two full years. In January 2023, it released a second-generation full-sized HomePod.

If you worry AI could eventually make your Walmart bill depend on who you are, or charge you more than the shopper next to you, Walmart wants to clear that up. CEO John Furner says Walmart will not use personal information to set different prices for individual shoppers.

What is Walmart promising about AI pricing?

Furner made three commitments in an open letter:

• First, your income, shopping history, urgency, or what Walmart thinks you can afford won’t change what you pay, and neither will the time of day.
• Second, Sparky, Walmart’s AI shopping assistant, won’t use what you tell it to raise your price or hide cheaper options.
• Third, you decide how much personal information to share, and Walmart says it will be clear about how that data is used.

The prices can still rise when items cost more to buy or ship. Furner also defended the digital shelf labels spreading across Walmart’s 4,600 stores, saying they keep shelf prices accurate while saving employees time previously spent replacing paper tags. Walmart adds that the labels have no cameras, microphones, or facial recognition.

RELATED COVERAGE:

Why is Walmart saying this now?

The pledge comes as regulators and lawmakers examine how personal data could influence pricing. The letter arrived the same day public comments were due on a proposed Federal Trade Commission policy. It warns that businesses may be breaking the law if they don’t explain how personal data shapes prices. The concerns aren’t hypothetical either, as Instacart’s AI pricing tests showed.

Lawmakers from both parties are also pressing retailers, and Rep. Frank Pallone sent pricing questions to 25 companies, including Walmart. Meanwhile, Financial Times reported that Walmart received two patents this year for automated pricing tools. One described using data like payment methods and even ID numbers to recommend prices.

Furner says people will keep overseeing pricing, and Walmart will test its tech against these promises. For now, the bottomline is that AI can personalize your experience, but your data will not become a reason to charge you more.

Peter Thiel has called Pope Leo XIV a “useful idiot” for the Chinese Communist Party over the pope’s call to regulate AI. The PayPal and Palantir co-founder spoke to Axel Springer chief executive Mathias Döpfner on the MD Meets podcast, released on Thursday.

The interview came before Thiel received the Axel Springer Award in Berlin on Thursday. Axel Springer owns Politico, which reported the remarks first, and Business Insider. Fortune reported on his comments about Germany.

“The Communist Party of China is not going to listen to the pope. There’s a chance people in the U.S. will. And so in effect, the Pope’s encyclical was working for the Communist party,” Thiel said.

“I’m not saying he was an agent of the communists, but he was at least acting as a useful idiot for the CCP,” he added.

The encyclical

Pope Leo published his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, in May. In it, he called on world leaders to regulate AI. Thiel argued that the text would do nothing to slow China, Politico reported. Instead, it could lead the US and its allies to impose heavy rules on AI, he said.

The Vatican did not respond to requests for comment from Politico or Business Insider. The Vatican has since expanded its AI campaign with an AI4Peace association.

It is not the first time Thiel has attacked the pope over AI. Speaking in Colorado in July, he said the pope was acting as a “Chinese communist agent” by calling for regulation, Politico reported.

‘What we’re doing to ourselves’

Thiel also said Americans themselves, not China, are mostly to blame for the growing US backlash against AI. He was “inclined to believe” China could be fuelling some anti-AI content, he said. But China was not the main force behind the shift.

“This is mainly what we’re doing to ourselves. It’s often somewhat too easy to simply blame it on China,” Thiel said.

Germany’s ‘fear of success’

Thiel, who was born in Frankfurt, also criticised German entrepreneurs. German founders tend to sell their companies before they grow into global businesses, he said.

“If you have something that works, you’re not going to scale it to this extreme degree like an Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg,” he said.

Among the richest Germans of Generation X or younger, all had inherited their wealth, Thiel said. In the US, most had built it themselves.

Thiel is a partner at Founders Fund, which has invested in OpenAI, Palantir and Scale AI, among other AI companies.

from the ctrl-alt-speech dept

Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a weekly podcast about the latest news in online speech, from Mike Masnick and Everything in Moderation‘s Ben Whitelaw.

Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice — or go straight to the RSS feed. To get extended episodes with additional coverage, support us on Patreon.

In this week’s episode, Mike and Ben cover:

And in the extended episode for Patreon supporters, they cover:

Our fun links this week include Jev, the super fast new AI classifier, and Persodex, the context layer for your Contacts (PS. hit Ben up if you’re in New York in mid-October).

Follow us on Instagram, YouTube, and Bluesky for video clips from this week’s episode!

If you’re already a Patreon supporter, you can get the extended episode on Patreon.

Filed Under: age verification, ai, artificial intelligence, content moderation, ofcom, trust and safety

Companies: aylo, discord, youtube