Techmeme
October 17, 2025, 2:30 PM

Top News

Simon Willison / Simon Willison's Weblog:
Anthropic's Claude Skills, which are conceptually extremely simple, may become a bigger deal than MCP, whose high token usage is its most significant limitation  —  Anthropic this morning introduced Claude Skills, a new pattern for making new abilities available to their models:
Hayden Field / The Verge:
Alex Sherman / CNBC:
Apple and Formula One announce a five-year US media rights deal for all races, starting in 2026; sources: Apple is paying ~$140M/year, up from ESPN's ~$85M/year  —  Apple and Formula 1 announced a five-year media rights deal Friday that will bring every F1 race to Apple TV beginning in 2026.
Emanuel Maiberg / 404 Media:
Wikimedia says Wikipedia is seeing a significant decline in human traffic, as more people access the site's information via AI chatbots without clicking through  —  The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization that hosts Wikipedia, says that it's seeing a significant decline …
Maxwell Zeff / TechCrunch:
OpenAI says it paused Sora's ability to generate videos resembling MLK Jr. at the request of his estate, after some users created “disrespectful depictions”  —  OpenAI announced Thursday it paused the ability for users to generate videos resembling the late civil rights activist …
Joseph Cox / 404 Media:
Hacker group Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters posts the alleged names, phone numbers, and addresses of hundreds of US DHS, ICE, FBI, and DOJ officials on Telegram  —  A group of hackers from the Com, a loose-knit community behind some of the most significant data breaches in recent years …
Heather Knight / New York Times:
Docs: Salesforce pitched ICE on using its AI tech to help the agency nearly triple its workforce by hiring 10K new officers, to improve investigations, and more  —  The San Francisco-based firm has told ICE that it could use A.I. to help the agency nearly triple its staff.
Bloomberg:
Sources: Nintendo has asked its manufacturing partners to produce up to 25M Switch 2 units by the end of March 2026, surpassing analysts' estimates of 17.6M  —  Nintendo Co. has asked suppliers to produce as many as 25 million units of the Switch 2 by the end of March 2026 …
Robert Hart / The Verge:
Dwarkesh Patel / Dwarkesh Podcast:
Q&A with Andrej Karpathy on AGI still being a decade away, why reinforcement learning is terrible, superintelligence, his AI education startup Eureka, and more  —  Transcript 00:00:00 - AGI is still a decade away Dwarkesh Patel 00:00:00 Today I'm speaking with Andrej Karpathy.
Kosta Andreadis / TweakTown:
Steam hit a record 41.6M+ concurrent users on October 12, up from 37M+ users in August 2024, after the releases of Battlefield 6 and Hollow Knight: Silksong  —  41,666,455 million PC gamers were online and on Steam on October 12, 2025, setting a new CCU (concurrent user) record for the platform.
Amanda Silberling / TechCrunch:
Amazon's Ring partners with Flock to let law enforcement agencies request footage from Ring doorbell users for “evidence collection and investigative work”  —  Amazon's surveillance camera maker Ring announced a partnership on Thursday with Flock, a maker of AI-powered surveillance cameras …
Bloomberg:
Sources: Revolut is nearing the completion of a $3B fundraising round that values the company at $75B, up from $45B in a 2024 secondary share sale  —  Revolut Ltd. and its backers are nearing the end of a $3 billion fundraising spree that values the London-based fintech behemoth at $75 billion.
Tom Warren / The Verge:

Sponsor Posts

ElevenLabs:
ElevenAgents by ElevenLabs  —  You know us for voice.  Now meet ElevenAgents — featuring Expressive Mode, our most human-sounding AI voice technology in 70+ languages with ultra-low latency.  Hear it for yourself.
Intel:
5G's most deployed platform  —  Powering live networks with built-in Inference across Core and RAN.  That's the power of Intel Inside®
Zoho:
Introducing intelligent document processing with Zoho RPA  —  Documents are a major bottleneck at many organizations.  Invoices, contracts, forms, ID cards, receipts: They all arrive in different shapes and sizes …
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

Grit:
How Kevin Mandia Built the Most Trusted Name in Cybersecurity
Grit explores what it takes to create, build and scale world-class organizations.
Subscribe to Grit.
Lenny's Podcast:
Anthropic's $1B to $19B growth run: how Claude became the fastest-growing AI product in history | Amol Avasare
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:
OpenAI buys TBPN, SpaceX's $2 Trillion IPO?, Iran Disables Amazon Infrastructure
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.
Hard Fork:
The Future of Addictive Design + Going Deep at DeepMind + HatGPT
The future is already here. Each week, journalists Kevin Roose and Casey Newton explore and make sense of the latest in the rapidly changing world of tech.
Subscribe to Hard Fork.
Great Chat:
Go touch some grass (but don't tweet about it)
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.
Tools and Weapons with Brad Smith:
Ryan Roslansky: Turning AI Anxiety into Skills for the Future of Work
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 2:30 PM ET, October 17, 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

Foreign Affairs:
Claudia Cohen / Bloomberg:
William Wan / Washington Post:
More: IJRX: @washingtonpost, @chrisd9r, and @kyoshinoLinkedIn: Ashley Wilson
Bluesky: @damonberes.com and @abbeyarlettoThreads: @karaswisherForums: r/redscarepod

Earlier Picks

David Ingram / NBC News:
Reuters:
Jennifer Hiller / Wall Street Journal:
Jeremy Stern / Colossus: