Techmeme
September 29, 2025, 11:25 AM

Top News

Electronic Arts:
EA agrees to be acquired by Saudi Arabia's PIF, Silver Lake, and Affinity for $210 per share, taking it private at a ~$55B valuation, set to close in Q1 FY 2027  —  Accelerates EA's Strategic Vision to Advance the Future of Entertainment  —  Stockholders to Receive $210 Per Share …
Bloomberg:
EA's $55B sale is the largest leveraged buyout on record and represents a 25% premium on its October 26 close, as the $178B video game industry's growth slows  —  Electronic Arts Inc. agreed to sell to a group of private investors in a deal that values the company at $55 billion, the largest leveraged buyout on record.
Reece Rogers / Wired:
OpenAI launches new ChatGPT parental safety controls for users aged 13 to 18, including parental and law enforcement alerts for chats about self-harm or suicide  —  OpenAI's review process for teenage ChatGPT users who are flagged for suicidal ideation includes human moderators.
Tom Warren / The Verge:
Saritha Rai / Bloomberg:
DeepSeek releases DeepSeek-V3.2-Exp, saying it built the model using a new technique called DeepSeek Sparse Attention, and halves the pricing of its tools  —  DeepSeek updated an experimental AI model Monday in what it called a step toward next-generation artificial intelligence.
Bloomberg:
US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick says the US aims to get “maybe 50% market share” of chip and wafer production to offset Beijing's threats to invade Taiwan  —  Washington is demanding Taiwan move investment and chip production to the US so half of American demand is manufactured locally …
Dominic Chopping / Wall Street Journal:
The UK government underwrites a £1.5B loan to Jaguar Land Rover as the carmaker reels from a cyberattack that has crippled its production for around a month  —  The loan is to support the company's cash reserves and help it pay suppliers  —  The U.K. government has stepped …
Jackson Chen / Engadget:
Snapchat announces it will limit storage for its Memories feature to 5GB for free users and launches paid storage plans, including 100GB for $1.99 per month  —  The introductory plan that offers up to 100GB of storage for Memories will cost you $1.99 a month.
Kim Zetter / Wired:
Researchers: Tile tags broadcast unencrypted MAC addresses and unique IDs; researchers informed Life360 in November 2024 but it stopped replying in February  —  A team of researchers found that, by not encrypting the data broadcast by Tile tags, users could be vulnerable to having their location information exposed to malicious actors.
More: 9to5Mac and Moneycontrol
Bluesky: @mikespecter.comMastodon: @kimzetter@infosec.exchangeForums: r/gadgets and r/technews
Asa Fitch / Wall Street Journal:
How debt is fueling the next wave of the AI infrastructure boom; an analyst estimates Oracle needs to borrow $25B/year over four years to fund its OpenAI plans  —  For aspiring AI players like Oracle, much rides on debt and hope  —  In the initial years of the AI boom, comparisons to the dot-com bubble didn't make much sense.
More: Motley Fool
Simon Willison / Simon Willison's Weblog:
DeepMind says video models like Veo 3 could become general purpose foundation models for vision, like LLMs for text, using zero-shot “chain-of-frames” reasoning  —  Video models are zero-shot learners and reasoners.  Fascinating new paper from Google DeepMind which makes …
Financial Times:
Google DeepMind, Meta, Nvidia, and others are racing to release world models, aiming to navigate the physical world by learning from videos and robotic data  —  Google DeepMind, Meta and Nvidia are developing systems that aim to better understand the physical world
Amrith Ramkumar / Wall Street Journal:
The US Commerce Department says subsidiaries of entity list companies would also be subject to trade restrictions, threatening Chinese companies, from Tuesday  —  Administration officials are particularly concerned about U.S. technology helping China's AI companies

Sponsor Posts

Subquadratic:
Subquadratic: the LLM built for 12M-token reasoning  —  SubQ can reason across entire codebases and document sets in one pass with no RAG workarounds.  Read how SubQ 1.1 Small holds near-perfect retrieval out to 12M tokens.
Equals:
Stop vibe coding analytics  —  Equals AI turns questions about your business into auditable spreadsheet models and dashboards.  Build once, iterate for years.
Zoho:
Turn every support session into a data point that works for you  —  Most support teams close a session and move on.  The issue gets resolved, the ticket gets marked done, and whatever insight that session generated quietly disappears.
IDrive:
Protecting your Cloud Applications Data  —  Backing up Office 365, Google Workspace, Dropbox & Salesforce data is critical to preventing data loss or corruption, complying with laws and avoiding critical downtime in case of a disaster.

Featured Podcasts

Big Technology Podcast:
AI Pioneer Jürgen Schmidhuber: AI Already Feels Pain, Loves, and Is Self-Aware
The Big Technology Podcast takes you behind the scenes in the tech world featuring interviews with plugged-in insiders and outside agitators.
Subscribe to Big Technology Podcast.
Channels with Peter Kafka:
Inside Podcasting's Fight Over Netflix, YouTube, and Creator Control
Media and tech aren't just intersecting - they're fully intertwined. To understand how those worlds work, Peter Kafka talks to industry leaders, upstarts and observers.
Subscribe to Channels with Peter Kafka.
Uncapped with Jack Altman:
Sam Blond from Monaco
Conversations with people I admire about things I'm genuinely interested in.
Subscribe to Uncapped with Jack Altman.
Training Data:
Anthropic's Katelyn Lesse & Angela Jiang: Building an Ecosystem, not a Walled Garden
Sequoia Capital partners host conversations with leading AI builders and researchers to develop a deeper understanding of the evolving technologies and their implications.
Subscribe to Training Data.
Invest Like the Best:
John Kim - How to Raise a Few Billion Dollars
The leading destination to learn about business and investing. We do this by showcasing exceptional talent and ideas.
Subscribe to Invest Like the Best.
Tools and Weapons with Brad Smith:
Connecting the Unconnected: Doreen Bogdan-Martin
Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith speaks with leaders in government, business, and culture to explore the most critical challenges at the intersection of technology and society.
Subscribe to Tools and Weapons with Brad Smith.
 

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 11:25 AM ET, September 29, 2025.

The most current version of the site as always is available at our home page. To view an earlier snapshot click here and then modify the date indicated.

More News

Earlier Picks

Jason Nelson / Decrypt:
Jeff Kauflin / Forbes: