Techmeme
October 29, 2025, 3:45 PM

Top News

Jonathan Vanian / CNBC:
Microsoft 365 and Azure suffer outages; users report problems accessing sites and services, and the company says it is investigating  —  Microsoft was hit with outages in its Azure cloud and 365 services on Wednesday, hours before the company's scheduled earnings release.
Cursor:
Cursor launches Cursor 2.0, with its first coding model, Composer, that it says is 4x faster than similar models, and a multi-agent interface  —  Today, we're releasing two big updates that make Cursor the best place to work with agents: our first coding model, Composer, and a new interface for working with many agents in parallel.
Financial Times:
Nvidia opens at a $5T market cap, becoming the first company to hit the milestone, climbing 5% in early trading; NVDA is up 50% in 2025 and 1,275% since 2022  —  US chip giant's stock propelled by strong sales of AI systems and prospect of access to China  —  Michael Acton in San Francisco …
MacKenzie Sigalos / CNBC:
Amazon opens Project Rainier, an $11B AI data center on 1,200 acres in Indiana that trains and runs Anthropic's AI models using 500K+ Amazon Trainium 2 chips  —  NEW CARLISLE, Indiana — A year ago, it was farmland.  Now, the 1,200-acre site near Lake Michigan is home to one of the largest operational AI data centers in the world.
Wall Street Journal:
Sources: OpenAI's restructuring, approved by California's AG, paves the way for an IPO as soon as 2027; Sam Altman says an IPO is likely but gave no timeframe  —  Company assured state officials that it would stay in California as it continues global expansion, which could include a public offering as soon as 2027
Jess Weatherbed / The Verge:
YouTube is using AI to upscale videos uploaded at between 240p and 720p to “HD” and plans to offer 4K upscaling “in the near future”; users can opt out  —  The platform is optimizing its TV experience with new resolution upscaling and shopping features.
Sara Fischer / Axios:
Apollo Global reaches a deal to sell AOL to Bending Spoons, sources say in a deal valued at ~$1.5B; AOL has about 30M MAUs across its email and web properties  —  Apollo Global Management has reached a deal to sell AOL to Italian tech holding group Bending Spoons in a deal valued at roughly $1.5 billion, Axios has learned.
Abner Li / 9to5Google:
Google starts rolling out the Gemini for Home voice assistant in early access in the US, on Nest devices set to English  —  Google is beginning to roll out the Gemini for Home voice assistant in the US for devices set to English on all Nest speakers and displays from the past decade.
Cristina Criddle / Financial Times:
Character.ai plans to limit under-18s to two hours of conversations per day, gradually reducing the time limit before banning them completely from November 25  —  Move comes following growing public and regulatory scrutiny over safety of the technology for young users
Stevie Bonifield / The Verge:
Grammarly rebrands as Superhuman after its acquisitions of Superhuman Mail in June and Coda in December 2024; the standalone writing tool Grammarly still exists  —  ChatGPT changed the game on Grammarly, but now it's adding more AI to pull users back into its sidebar.
Bloomberg:
After Nvidia GTC, Jensen Huang says “I don't believe we're in an AI bubble” and that Nvidia expects to sell 20M Blackwell chips, up from 4M Hopper chips  —  Nvidia Corp. Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang announced a flurry of new partnerships and dismissed concerns about an AI bubble …
Wall Street Journal:
Corporate Europe Observatory:
Big Tech's EU lobbying hit €151M in 2025, up from €113M in 2023 and €97M in 2021; between January and June 2025, Big Tech had 146 meetings with EU officials  —  The EU's digital rulebook is under unprecedented pressure from the Trump administration and a homegrown deregulation wave.
The Verge:
Grokipedia hands-on: many articles clone Wikipedia, but deviate significantly on topics Elon Musk cares about, with inaccuracies on some scientific topics  —  xAI's Wikipedia-like website offers a generous take on Musk's worldview. … On Monday, a new online “encyclopedia” sputtered to life.
Wall Street Journal:
Amazon, UPS, Target, GM, and other major US companies are laying off tens of thousands of white collar workers, as executives hope AI can handle their workload  —  Layoffs at companies ranging from Amazon to Target are sending young and experienced workers alike into an unwelcoming market
Jason Schreier / Bloomberg:
Internal memo: Amazon makes “significant role reductions” to its game division and will cut down on big budget titles, as it doubles down on Luna  —  Tech giant will reduce game development work and eliminate jobs  —  Amazon.com Inc. is gutting its video-game division as part …
Adobe Newsroom:
A survey of 16K+ creators in eight countries: 86% use creative GenAI tools, 60% use multiple, 48% use them for ideation, and 52% for creating video and more  —  - 76 percent of creators say creative generative AI has helped grow their business and personal brand
OpenAI:
OpenAI releases gpt-oss-safeguard, its open-weight reasoning models for safety classification tasks, available in 120B and 20B parameters, under Apache 2.0  —  New open safety reasoning models (120b and 20b) that support custom safety policies.  —  Today, we're releasing a research preview …
Sean Michael Kerner / VentureBeat:
GitHub updates VS Code with Plan Mode for building step-by-step project approaches, MCP Registry integration, definable project rules via AGENTS.md, and more  —  GitHub is making a bold bet that enterprises don't need another proprietary coding agent.  They need a way to manage all of them.
Iain Martin / Forbes:
Sources: legal AI startup Harvey raised $150M led by a16z at an $8B valuation, up from a $5B valuation in June, bringing its total raised to over $1B  —  The San Francisco-based startup that provides artificial intelligence tools for lawyers has raised a new round of funding, its third in 2025 alone …
More: Fast Company
Rashi Shrivastava / Forbes:
Sources: Synthesia, which helps companies generate videos with AI avatars, raised $200M led by GV at a $4B valuation, up from a $2.1B valuation in January  —  Alphabet's venture firm GV is leading the round, which nearly doubles Synthesia's valuation, per three sources.

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