Techmeme
October 2, 2025, 7:50 PM

Top News

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 …
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.
Jason Koebler / 404 Media:
M.G. Siegler / Spyglass:
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 🍌 …
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 …
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.
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 …
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 …
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.
Jess Weatherbed / The Verge:
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.
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.
Janko Roettgers / Lowpass:
Amazon's Fire TV Stick 4K Select, which comes with Vega OS, will use cloud app streaming to run Android versions of apps that haven't been ported to Vega  —  Ingenious, or Luna-cy? … Vega OS is finally here: On Tuesday, Amazon officially unveiled its new, custom-built Vega entertainment …

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.
Cloudflare:
Cloudflare Connect 2026: The Agentic Conference  —  Stop preparing for agents.  Start running them.  100+ sessions, workshops, and speakers from OpenAI, Arm, and Cloudflare across AI, security, and performance.
Zoho:
Pro Tips: 4 tips to overcome data problems in your CRM  —  Most CRM data problems don't look like problems.  At a glance, your CRM looks fine: records exist, fields are filled, and reports run.
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

Lenny's Podcast:
The grief, loneliness, and burnout sweeping through the tech industry right now | Molly Graham
Interviews with world-class product leaders and growth experts to uncover actionable advice to help you build, launch, and grow your own product.
Subscribe to Lenny's Podcast.
Big Technology Podcast:
Meta's Muse Revival, Frontier AI Under Threat, The Rise Of Dopamine Sites
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.
Sources:
Satya Nadella on Microsoft's agent bet and AI's trust problem
Candid conversations with the leaders shaping what's next in AI and the broader tech industry. Hosted by Alex Heath, who has covered Silicon Valley for more than a decade.
Subscribe to Sources.
Channels with Peter Kafka:
Meta's New $1300 Glasses and the Fight to Control AI
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.
Great Chat:
Doomers at Dreamforce
A podcast mostly about tech. Brought to you weekly by Angela Du, Sally Shin, Mac Bohannon, Helen Min, and Ashley Mayer.
Subscribe to Great Chat.
Invest Like the Best:
Gabe Stengel - Building Investing Superintelligence
The leading destination to learn about business and investing. We do this by showcasing exceptional talent and ideas.
Subscribe to Invest Like the Best.
 

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 7:50 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.

More News

Financial Times:
Samanth Subramanian / The Guardian:
More: The Overspill.  X: @dolphinsands and @samanth_s
Bluesky: @marklemley and @sarahpinsker.  Forums: Slashdot

Earlier Picks

Anna Nicolaou / Financial Times:
Matt Durot / Forbes:
Rebecca Szkutak / TechCrunch: