US deploys additional Patriot systems to Saudi Arabia and Qatar, prepares for potential escalation of the situation.

Beating AI Insight News Brief: Elon Musk acknowledged on October 30 that the development of Grok 4.8 took longer than expected, but guaranteed the new model "will not disappoint". He noted that the team does not optimize for benchmark tests, and he does not care about benchmark scores, focusing instead on the model's practical applications. On September 14, Musk revealed that Grok 4.8 has 2.5 trillion parameters, uses a new C++ training system, and was expected to complete pre-training by the end of that week before moving to reinforcement learning. More than six weeks later, the new model remains unreleased. Musk’s emphasis on not caring about benchmark scores stems from Grok 4.7’s underwhelming performance. Independent evaluation firm Artificial Analysis found that under the same xhigh inference setting, Grok 4.7’s composite intelligence index only rose by 2 points from Grok 4.6 (44 to 46), while average output tokens per query jumped from around 38,000 to 81,000. Users in the Cursor community also complained that Grok 4.7 consumes quotas faster with negligible real-world improvements. In an interview with China Central Television (CCTV) in September, Musk admitted Grok 4.7 is inferior to Claude Opus 5.5, and is not expected to catch up with top-tier models until 2027. In October, he further proposed that Grok Bot call external models including Claude based on task requirements, and plans to have the high-speed version of Grok 4.8 handle a large volume of simple requests.

According to monitoring by ai_9684xtpa, the whale address "58bro.eth" (0x58bro) sold 8,000 ETH in the past hour. The trader redeemed ETH worth over $17.96 million from Aave, then transferred the funds in batches to OKX, and has now withdrawn 10.5 million USDT from the exchange to repay borrowings. Currently, the address still holds 4,911.05 WETH as collateral on Aave, has borrowed 2.51 million USDT, with a health factor of 3.69.

Indian crypto trading platform CoinDCX announced that futures trading has fully resumed. Four tokens—SOPH, ERA, GTC, and LA—remain in position-only reduction mode for risk control purposes, while all other markets are now operating normally. Earlier on October 21, CoinDCX was suspected of being hacked, leading to losses of approximately 15.99 million USDT and a portion of TRX.

According to an official announcement, South Korean crypto exchange Bithumb has decided to terminate trading support for Blur (BLUR) and Core (CORE) on its platform. The announcement notes that for BLUR, the project team’s submitted explanatory materials failed to adequately address issues related to its designation as a transaction-alert asset. After a comprehensive assessment of factors including changes to its business plan, execution status, and token utility, the platform determined BLUR no longer meets the criteria for maintaining trading support. CORE was delisted because the reasons for its transaction-alert designation remain unresolved. Specific timelines are as follows: Trading support will end at 15:00 KST on November 30, 2026; Withdrawal support will end at 15:00 KST on December 30, 2026. Following delisting, API trading support for the relevant assets will cease, and all outstanding orders will be canceled uniformly. Bithumb reminds users to withdraw their assets in advance and register whitelist addresses for overseas virtual asset service providers or personal wallets as soon as possible. The above timelines may be subject to changes due to internal platform circumstances.

According to an official announcement, Upbit will terminate trading support for Blur (BLUR) at 14:00 on November 30.

According to Caixin, Kristalina Georgieva, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), announced that IMF Deputy Managing Director Li Bo will step down upon the expiration of his term on November 30, 2026, and proposed that Liao Min, Vice Minister of China’s Ministry of Finance, take over the post, with the appointment effective December 1, 2026. Over the past five years, Li Bo led the launch of the IMF’s first enterprise risk management policy and roadmap, and promoted the modernization of its data governance framework. Additionally, he has guided the IMF’s work in areas such as digital currencies and cross-border payments, played a pioneering role in stablecoin regulation, and in recent years has led the fund’s initiatives in the field of artificial intelligence (AI).