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 …

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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: