Techmeme
October 30, 2025, 4:40 PM

Top News

Mackenzie Hawkins / Bloomberg:
President Trump says he and Xi Jinping discussed Nvidia and other chipmakers' access to China, and that they didn't discuss approving sales of Blackwell chips  —  US President Donald Trump said he didn't discuss approving sales of Nvidia Corp.'s Blackwell chips to China with his counterpart Xi Jinping …
Mark Anderson / Bloomberg:
China's Commerce Ministry says it will work with the US to resolve issues related to TikTok, stopping short of saying it agreed to a deal touted by Trump  —  Beijing pledged to work with Washington to resolve the fate of TikTok's US business, stopping short of saying it's agreed to a deal touted …
New York Times:
Trump and Xi Jinping agree to a yearlong truce that rolls back many contentious tariffs and retaliatory measures; the current deal expired on November 10  —  China agreed to suspend for a year some of its limits on exports of rare earth metals, while the U.S. halved its fentanyl-related tariffs.
Keith Bradsher / New York Times:
Financial Times:
Google, Meta, and Microsoft collectively spent nearly $80B on AI infrastructure in Q3, dividing the market on whether they can translate huge capex into income  —  Alphabet, Meta and Microsoft divide the market over whether they can translate huge capital expenditure into income
Sabrina Ortiz / ZDNET:
OpenAI launches Aardvark, a GPT-5-powered autonomous cybersecurity research agent that can identify and help patch vulnerabilities, in private beta  —  ZDNET's key takeaways  — OpenAI has launched Aardvark, a cybersecurity researcher agent.  — Aardvark is powered by GPT-5 and is in private beta.
More: OpenAI, The Verge, and Axios
X: @gdb and @openai
Sara Fischer / Axios:
Milan-based Bending Spoons, which buys and seeks to revitalize tech brands like AOL, raised $710M led by T. Rowe Price at an $11B pre-money valuation  —  Bending Spoons, an Italian holding company that buys and seeks to revitalize tech brands like AOL, on Thursday announced a $710 million equity raise …
Ivan Mehta / TechCrunch:
Canva launches a foundational design model that generates editable layered designs, expands Canva AI, makes Affinity free for all users, and more  —  Creative suite company Canva launched its own design model on Thursday that understands different layers and formats today to power its features.
Maximilian Henning / Euractiv:
The ICC plans to switch from Microsoft Office to Open Desk, a European open source alternative, amid concerns about public bodies' reliance on US tech companies  —  The court will move its internal work environment to Open Desk, a German-developed open source software
Reuters:
Sources: OpenAI is preparing for a US IPO that could value it at ~$1T and has explored raising $60B+, filing as soon as H2 2026, and listing in 2027  —  OpenAI is laying the groundwork for an initial public offering that could value the company at up to around $1 trillion …
Cognition:
Cognition releases SWE-1.5, a new coding model in Windsurf, saying it partnered with Cerebras to serve SWE-1.5 at speeds up to 13x faster than Claude Sonnet 4.5  —  Today we're releasing SWE-1.5, the latest in our family of models optimized for software engineering.
Adamya Sharma / Android Authority:
Google updates Play Store policy in the US to let developers link to external app stores and payment options, following the Epic v. Google injunction  —  Android users in the US are finally getting real app store freedom.  —  •  —  TL;DR  — Google is opening up the Play Store in the US …
New York Times:
Q&A with Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar on surveillance, AI, the future of war, data, privacy, the US military, ImmigrationOS, the DHS, ICE, the UK's IDs, and more  —  The tech company's C.T.O. on surveillance, A.I. and the future of war.  —  Few companies in Silicon Valley inspire as much paranoia as Palantir.
@appliedcompute:
Applied Compute, which wants to create custom AI agents trained on latent company knowledge, raised $80M from Benchmark, Sequoia, Elad Gil, and others  —  Generalists are useful, but it's not enough to be smart. Advances come from specialists, whether human or machine. To have an edge, agents need specific expertise, within specific companies, built on models trained on specific data. We call this Specific Intelligence. It's [image]
Will Knight / Wired:
Extropic, which says its chips using probabilistic bits can be 10,000x more energy efficient than current AI chips, shares its first chip with some AI labs  —  A startup hopes to challenge Nvidia, AMD, and Intel with a chip that wrangles probabilities rather than 1s and 0s.
Jagmeet Singh / TechCrunch:
Google partners with Reliance to offer free AI Pro access to Jio 5G users in India for 18 months; Perplexity has a similar deal with Bharti Airtel  —  In a push to expand its AI footprint in emerging markets, Google has partnered with billionaire Mukesh Ambani-led Reliance Industries to bundle …
Jess Weatherbed / The Verge:
OpenAI's Sora app adds new features, including “character cameos” to create AI deepfakes of pets, illustrations, and more, clip stitching, and leaderboards  —  Users can now create character cameos and combine clips together to make longer multi-scene videos.
Bloomberg:
Sources: Nvidia plans to invest $500M to $1B in AI coding startup Poolside, which is in discussions to raise $2B at a $12B valuation  —  Nvidia Corp. plans to invest as much as $1 billion in the artificial intelligence company Poolside, according to people familiar with the matter …
More: Reuters
Marc Schneider / Billboard:
UMG and Stability AI announce a partnership to develop music creation tools powered by “responsibly” trained AI  —  Following its Udio pact, the label group says it will team up with Stability AI to build AI tools that are “trained responsibly” and with proper licensing.
Katherine Sayre / Wall Street Journal:

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Dylan Butts / CNBC: