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October 2, 2025, 5:45 PM
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Shirin Ghaffary / Bloomberg:
Source: OpenAI completed a secondary share sale that let staff sell ~$6.6B at a $500B valuation, making it the world's most valuable startup, ahead of SpaceX  —  OpenAI has completed a deal to help employees sell shares in the company at a $500 billion valuation, propelling …
Reuters:
Source: OpenAI employees sold shares to a consortium of investors including Thrive Capital, SoftBank, Dragoneer, Abu Dhabi's MGX, and T. Rowe Price  —  OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, has reached a valuation of $500 billion, following a deal in which current and former employees sold …
Jason Koebler / 404 Media:
OpenAI's Sora 2 generates copyright infringing content, including numerous AI-generated clips featuring SpongeBob, Pokémon, Mario, Rick and Morty, and Star Wars  —  Within moments of opening OpenAI's new AI slop app Sora, I am watching Pikachu steal Poké Balls from a CVS.
New York Times:
As Sora clips go viral, users express awe and delight as others warn about IP theft and that its Cameos could lead to new kinds of misinformation and scams  —  This week, we — the two authors of this article — spent hours scrolling through a feed of short-form videos that featured ourselves in different scenarios.
M.G. Siegler / Spyglass:
Sora, which is fun and simple to use, shows that OpenAI remains good at creating viral products, unlike Meta, whose Vibes video feed feels half-baked and obtuse
Charles Rollet / Business Insider:
Perplexity is making its AI browser Comet, previously $200/month with Perplexity Max, free, with rate limits; Perplexity says Comet has millions on its waitlist  —  Follow Charles Rollet … Saved  —  Add us on  — Perplexity is making its $200-a-month browser free for everyone.
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Meta unveils communities on Threads, starting with 100+ dedicated spaces for casual conversations around topics like basketball, television, and K-pop music  —  Instagram Threads, Meta's X rival that now has over 400 million monthly active users, is officially launching a new feature …
Bloomberg:
A Google executive and sources: a ransomware group that says it has Cl0p ties is sending extortion emails, claiming it stole data from Oracle's E-Business Suite  —  Executives and technology departments at large organizations are being extorted by a notorious ransomware group that claims …
Jagmeet Singh / TechCrunch:
Google adds a new command-line interface and public API to its AI coding agent Jules, allowing it to plug into terminals, CI/CD systems, and tools like Slack  —  Google is bringing its AI coding agent Jules deeper into developer workflows with a new command-line interface and public API …
Jess Weatherbed / The Verge:
Disney says that Hulu will replace the Star hub on Disney+ from October 8 in non-US markets, in an effort to turn Hulu into an internationally recognized brand  —  Starting on October 8th, Hulu will replace Star on Disney Plus in international markets.
Google Developers Blog:
Google says Gemini 2.5 Flash Image, aka Nano Banana, is now generally available and supports more aspect ratios, priced at $0.039/image and $30/1M output tokens  —  Our state-of-the-art image generation and editing model which has captured the imagination of the world, Gemini 2.5 Flash Image 🍌 …
Russell Brandom / TechCrunch:
Anthropic hires former Stripe CTO Rahul Patil as its new CTO, taking over from co-founder Sam McCandlish, who will move to a new role as chief architect  —  Anthropic has a new chief technical officer, former Stripe CTO Rahul Patil.  Patil started at the company earlier this week …
Lawrence Abrams / BleepingComputer:
Red Hat confirms a breach of a GitLab instance after the extortion group Crimson Collective claimed to have stolen ~570GB of data from 28K internal repositories  —  Correction: After publishing, Red Hat confirmed that it was a breach of one of its GitLab instances, and not GitHub.  Title and story updated.
Mercor:
Mercor launches the AI Productivity Index (APEX), which evaluates AI models' ability to perform “economically valuable knowledge work”; GPT-5 leads the index  —  APEX v1.0 consists of 200 cases split evenly across investment banking, law, consulting, and medical practice.
Antonio Regalado / MIT Technology Review:
Microsoft researchers say AI models can be used to design toxins that evade biosecurity systems used to screen DNA orders for potential biothreats  —  A team at Microsoft says it used artificial intelligence to discover a “zero day” vulnerability in the biosecurity systems used to prevent the misuse of DNA.
Financial Times:
Asahi says most of its 30 factories in Japan have not operated since September 29 following a cyberattack, leaving Japan with just days of Asahi Super Dry stock  —  Vast majority of factories of nation's most popular beer have stopped work this week  —  Japan is just a few days away …
Maya Dharampal-Hornby / Sifted:
NYC-based Dash0, which offers AI agents to monitor and troubleshoot cloud, app, and infrastructure issues, raised a $35M Series A, taking its funding to $44.5M  —  The platform has over 300 paying customers including Starling and Porsche  —  Dash0, an AI-native observability platform …
Anna Nicolaou / Financial Times:
Sources: Universal Music and Warner Music are nearing landmark AI licensing deals with companies like Google, Spotify, ElevenLabs, Stability AI, Suno, and Udio  —  Universal and Warner seek payment structure similar to streaming as more disruption looms  —  Universal Music and Warner Music …

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About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 5:45 PM ET, October 2, 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.

From Mediagazer

Benjamin Mullin / New York Times:
Arkansas PBS severs ties with the PBS network, the first state public TV system to do so since Congress cut CPB funds, citing the annual $2M+ membership cost

Sam Roberts / New York Times:
Arthur L. Carter, who started a Connecticut newspaper in 1981, bought and sold The Nation, and founded the New York Observer in 1987, has died at 93

Pamela McClintock / The Hollywood Reporter:
Disney's Zootopia 2 surpasses $1B at the global box office, the fastest PG-rated film to do so after just 17 days in release

More News

Samanth Subramanian / The Guardian:
A book excerpt details Tonga's 2022 internet outage after a colossal underwater volcanic eruption ripped apart the cables connecting the country to the world
More: The Overspill.  X: @dolphinsands and @samanth_s
Bluesky: @marklemley and @sarahpinsker.  Forums: Slashdot

Earlier Picks

Matt Durot / Forbes:
Elon Musk became the first person to surpass a $500B net worth, after Tesla's shares climbed 3.5% on October 1; Musk is $150B ahead of runner-up Larry Ellison
Rebecca Szkutak / TechCrunch:
Salesforce launches Agentforce Vibes, an enterprise vibe-coding tool and IDE built on a fork of open-source AI coding agent Cline's Visual Studio Code extension
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