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The Nuclear Regulatory Commission granted X-energy a construction permit for four Xe-100 small modular reactors to be built at a Dow chemical facility in Texas. Each unit would generate 80 megawatts of electricity and 200 megawatts of heat, with X-energy saying the plant won't be operational until the early 2030s. The company calls it the first such approval for an advanced reactor at a US industrial site.
An Entrepreneur contributor argues that Black Friday offers opportunities not just for big retailers but for local 'boring' businesses like bakeries, salons and cleaning companies. The piece cites Tailor Brands data showing cleaning and home-service business formations grew 60% to over 300% in 2026, and notes inBeat reporting that 202.9 million Americans shopped over the Thanksgiving-to-Cyber-Monday period in 2025, up from 197 million in 2024. It recommends tactics such as handwritten offers, AI-discoverable deals, abandoned-cart automation, radio ads and free offers to attract higher-value customers.
New data cited in the report shows that most solopreneurs turn to AI tools to handle tasks like accounting, marketing, customer service and sales rather than bringing on employees. The trend reflects how solo founders are managing the growing list of responsibilities that come with running a business alone.
A contributor writing for Entrepreneur, affiliated with Fix Your Search, argues that small businesses often make the mistake of assigning social media duties to whoever seems comfortable online rather than someone trained in strategy. The piece outlines seven reasons why training a social media team—covering platform knowledge, consistent execution, and understanding what drives engagement—is essential for organic growth. It emphasizes that organic social media can build trust and brand loyalty without ad spend, but only when run strategically.
Thinking Machines Lab, founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, has launched Inkling 2 Small, a 594-billion-parameter model that accepts images but only outputs text. Third-party evaluator Artificial Analysis gave it a score of 31 on its Intelligence Index, putting it on par with Gemini 3.8 Flash, though the company says it will not release the model's weights publicly until next week.
Startup Underdog launched Woof, a 31.7MB text-to-speech model with 31 million parameters that runs entirely in a browser without internet access. The company showcased it through a retro-themed browser game where users can type text for the model to speak and manipulate a music tuner, all voiced by Woof. Underdog made the model open for download, and the demo follows the company's earlier release of Bark, a 167MB speech-to-text model for edge devices.
The developer unveiled Inkling 2 Small, a Mixture-of-Experts model with 594 billion total parameters and 17 billion active, supporting image inputs and variable effort levels. The model scored 31 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, a notable jump from the company's prior generation, with gains attributed to more efficient pre-training and a unified reinforcement learning run. It is currently accessible only through the Tinker platform with closed weights, ahead of a planned Apache 2.0 open-weight release next week pending safety testing.
Owners of small business websites say they are being hit with heavy traffic from Meta's AI web crawlers, straining servers and disrupting normal operations. The complaints follow Meta's announcement of upcoming terms changes that would expand how AI crawlers can access data from business accounts.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology released a new white paper, Small Business Cybersecurity: Non-Employer Firms, aimed at the roughly 28 million U.S. solopreneurs who run businesses alone. The guide updates an earlier, broader publication on small-business information security and instead focuses specifically on protecting digital systems, using plain language drawn from the NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0.
An Entrepreneur contributor argues that many small businesses overestimate their disaster readiness and lays out two concrete fixes: adding a secondary internet connection, such as fixed wireless or a mobile hotspot, so a single line failure doesn't halt operations, and setting up automated cloud backups that are tested quarterly to confirm both file integrity and restore time.
A longtime small-business owner writing for Entrepreneur outlines seven lessons learned from two decades of using independent contractors, warning that savings from avoiding payroll taxes and benefits can be offset by higher hourly rates, turnover and other hidden costs. The piece advises comparing the total cost of a contractor versus an employee for each role rather than assuming contractors are automatically cheaper.
Apple TV will air season finales for three shows within days of each other: comedy Brothers (Matthew McConaughey, Woody Harrelson) and British comedy Small Prophets both close out on November 4, while docuseries Knife Edge: Chasing Michelin Stars ends November 6. None of the three has yet been confirmed for renewal by Apple.