This Week in Tech (Week Ending Oct 3, 2025)
TL;DR - 🛑Govt shutdown; ⭐️OpenAI social video app; 🙋🏻♀️Tilly Norwood
Hey folks!
Hope you had a good Yom Kippur, to those who celebrate it ✡️
Happy Friday and Q4 (historically the best-performing period of the year for stocks📈)! 😎 Tech news below.
TL;DR -
😳 President Trump may be militarizing US cities.
⭐️OpenAI launched a social video app called Sora powered by its generative AI video tool, which can generate AI videos featuring copyrighted material unless rights holders explicitly opt out. Sora soared to #3 in the US app store after only 2 days. Plus, lots more news on OpenAI below
🌎 Macro (Economic) and Trends
🔫 President Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth summoned military officials to an in-person meeting in Virginia to communicate an ultimatum to embrace a MAGA vision or quit. “If you don’t like what I’m saying, you can leave the room. Of course, there goes your rank, there goes your future,” said Trump. Trump also said: “we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military”.
🛑 The federal government shutdown: It’s currently unclear when the shutdown will end - Kalshi is wagering it’ll last at least 10 days. Both parties are still far apart on issues like extending health subsidies.
🇩🇰🇳🇴🇷🇺The Danish are freaking out - and for good reason: The reason - Several large drones have appeared over military bases and airports in Denmark. Analysts suspect, and the authorities have implied, that they are part of a Russian strategy to probe Europe’s preparedness and unsettle the public. Norwegian authorities detected unknown drones in their airspace, too, and briefly shut down Oslo airport.
😢⛪️🕍A tragic attack on a church in Michigan left 4 dead, and an attack outside a UK synagogue killed 2 and wounded 4.
💵Corporate debt vs govt debt: Microsoft has lower borrowing costs than the U.S. government, which tells us that demand for corporate bonds is running superhot.
😱✌️🤰➡️Trending - mothers leaving the workforce: More women are leaving the workforce, pushed out by a lack of childcare support and stricter return-to-office policies. 🌎 Big picture: College-educated mothers with very young children are seeing the biggest declines but overall, women’s labor force participation is still higher than pre-pandemic levels.
📉 Trending - lower trust in media: For the third year in a row, the share of Americans who say they have a great deal or a fair amount of trust in mass media has fallen to a record low,
🔬 Micro (Tech Companies)
Of course it is: Meta plans to use data from your interactions with AI products to sell targeted ads on Facebook and Instagram.
🍎Apple just canceled plans to overhaul its Vision Pro headset, instead shifting focus toward AI smart glasses projects designed to compete with Meta’s Ray-Ban lineup.
Apple and OpenAI asked a federal judge to dismiss an antitrust lawsuit brought by Elon Musk’s xAI that alleged the two companies squashed competition in artificial intelligence by steering users toward ChatGPT instead of competitors like xAI’s Grok.
Instagram is testing a new Reels-first UI in India and South Korea to give short videos more prominence in the app.
🚗Tesla quarterly performance surprised Wall Street - global vehicle deliveries grew 7.4% in the third quarter yoy in a surprising reversal of the steep declines it saw this year.
Spotify’s founder and CEO Daniel Ek is stepping down.
ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese parent company, could get as much as 50% of the profits from TikTok’s U.S. business, even after the U.S. arm is split off from ByteDance and sold to a group of investors.
DoorDash launched their creator program for short-form videos, which will compensate users for short-form videos posted on its app, and unveiled Dot, its autonomous food delivery robot.
📺 YouTube has agreed to pay $24.5 million to settle a 2021 lawsuit that President Trump brought against the company and its chief executive over its suspension of Trump’s account after that year’s riot at the U.S. Capitol.
👯 Social IRL apps: Techcrunch compiled a number of social apps that help build friendships and community. The list includes 222, Clyx, Meet5, Pie, Timeleft and more.
✨Shiny new things:
Tony Haile, the founding CEO of both media analytics company Chartbeat and Scroll, a news startup that sold to Twitter, has raised $10.7 million in seed funding to launch Filament, an invite-only professional conversations platform.
ChatGPT co-creator Liam Fedus’ new startup, Periodic Labs, just launched, revealing its mission to build AI scientists that learn from physical experiments rather than internet text — with over 20 researchers from top AI labs.
🤖 AI News
California Governor Gavin Newsom on Monday signed an artificial intelligence safety bill that requires the largest AI companies to write, publish, and comply with their own safety policies for managing severe risks from their technology.
OpenAI
⭐️OpenAI launched a social video app called Sora powered by its generative AI video tool, which can generate AI videos featuring copyrighted material unless rights holders explicitly opt out. Sora soared to #3 in the US app store after only 2 days. As buzzy as it is, several OpenAI researchers seem torn over how the launch fits into OpenAI’s nonprofit mission to develop advanced AI that benefits humanity.
💰 In the first half of 2025, OpenAI generated $4.3 billion in revenue, putting the company on track to meet its full-year revenue projection of $13 billion. The company burned $2.5 billion over the same time period, in large part due to its high research and development costs for developing its AI models.
OpenAI rolled out a safety routing system and parental controls on ChatGPT.
OpenAI is bringing commerce directly into ChatGPT with a new “instant checkout” feature. The move opens up a new revenue stream for OpenAI and could change the way people shop online.
OpenAI has completed a deal to help employees sell shares in the company at a $500 billion valuation, making OpenAI the world’s largest startup.
Thinking Machines Lab, the AI startup founded by ex-OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, shared its first product. Tinker is an API that enables developers to customize frontier models without managing complex infrastructure.
Elon Musk revealed that xAI is building ‘Grokipedia’, which will be a “massive improvement” over Wikipedia and a step towards “understanding the universe.”
Anthropic on Monday released its latest model, Claude Sonnet 4.5.
The Walt Disney Company last week sent a cease and desist letter to Character.AI demanding the personalized AI chatbot developer immediately stop using its copyrighted characters without authorization.
Anything, a vibe-coding startup, nabs a $100M valuation after hitting $2M ARR in its first two weeks
Opera launched its AI browser Neon, which has the ability to create apps through prompts.
Former Yahoo CEO Marissa Meyer is closing the doors on her consumer software startup Sunshine, and is selling the company’s assets to her new AI startup, Dazzle.
🙋🏻♀️ Who’s Tilly Norwood and why is she controversial? Tilly is an AI generated character. Despite not being “real”, agents are fighting for the chance to rep her. SAG already issued a statement condemning Norwood as “a computer program trained on the work of countless professional performers—without permission or compensation.”
a16z releases its first AI spending report that shows which AI-native application layer companies startups are actually spending money on
🤝 Select M&A, Fundraises, IPO, Partnerships
M&A
An investor group including Saudi Arabia’s PIF, Silver Lake and Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners is buying Electronic Arts for $55 billion in cash, or $210 a share, a significant premium to where the videogame giant has been trading in recent years.
Meta acquired chip startup Rivos, seeking to accelerate the company’s internal AI chip development and reduce reliance on Nvidia.
Perplexity has acquired Visual Electric, an AI Design tool.
Gusto, a payroll and HR software company, announced that it agreed to acquire Guideline, a startup offering retirement plans to small and medium businesses.
Fivetran, a startup used by companies to manage and prepare data for analytics and artificial intelligence, is in talks to buy data management company dbt Labs.
Fundraising
Black Forest Labs, a German startup that focuses on image generation, is seeking to raise between $200 million and $300 million in a fundraising round that would value the company at $4 billion.
Grafana Labs received funding from the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, with participation from Sapphire Ventures and Tiger Global.
IPO
In Fermi’s (data centers) trading debut, its stock rose more than 50% to almost $33 a piece following its listing on the Nasdaq exchange
Wealthfront on Monday filed paperwork for an initial public offering that revealed its annual revenue jumped 43% to $309 million during the 12 months through January.
Navan, the travel software company, is planning to raise $750 million in its October public offering. (Analysis on the S-1 here from Clouded Judgment newsletter)
Once Upon a Farm, the baby food start-up co-founded by the actress Jennifer Garner, has filed for an I.P.O. even as its losses grow.
Partnerships
CoreWeave signed a new cloud deal with Meta Platforms, in which it will provide as much as $14.2 billion worth of compute capacity to the firm through 2031.
⚱️ Gold Panning - For those who reached the bottom
🦍 RIP Jane Goodall, whose groundbreaking work documenting the behavior of wild chimpanzees made her one of the world’s most revered conservationists. Goodall passed at the ripe age of 91yo.
💔What does Gen Z divorce look like? Gen Z is reaching the divorce age and they’re uncoupling without shame - and often sharing it on social media.
Nicole Kidman filed for divorce from Keith Urban after nearly 20 years.
🐰 Bad Bunny is going to headline the Super Bowl’s half time show in 2026. Unfortunately, MAGA commentators are lashing out online over the selection. Bad Bunny is one of the most popular musical stars on Earth - He holds the record for most-streamed album on Spotify of all time, and his concert ticket prices this year were the second-highest among all artists.
Everyone loves a love story: NYT Book Review on Lily King’s “Heart the Lover” (4.47 review on Goodreads)
👀 Aaron Sorkin is writing and directing a sequel to “The Social Network” called “The Social Reckoning”. It’s set for release in Oct 2026. Mark Zuckerberg will be played by everyone’s favorite 💕babygirl, Jeremy Strong.
⽟🥚😉 (get it?): Gwyneth Paltrow and her 21-year-old daughter Apple Martin are the new faces of GapStudio
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