📰 BlockBeats Daily Report 2026-10-04 | 1 article
1. a16z leads the investment in Conway Research. Sigil Wen, who is betting on the Silicon Valley “half the poker table” without a college diploma, and the core product is Underdog, a local AI inference engine.
2. Etched’s valuation soars to $21 billion. A Transformer-specific ASIC chip has secured a $700 million funding round from Jane Street.
3. Underdog’s in-house Husky inference engine is 4.5× faster than Apple MLX on the M5 Max, focusing on offline local AI and data sovereignty.
4. Sigil launches the open-source Automaton project. AI Agents have on-chain wallets for autonomous economic activity, and must pay for compute power or they will “die.”
5. Extraordinary handles O-1/EB-1A visa applications with annual revenue in the millions of dollars, building a global network of early technical talent.
$ETH #AI #a16z #Conway #Underdog