Hey folks!
Happy Friday! 😎 Twas a bit of a short week with Indigenous Peoples’ Day. Tech news below:
TLDR -
🏫 A school collapse in Pakistan killed at least 34 children and a teacher.
🧠 Google and Meta introduced heavyweight AI models as Microsoft challenged Nvidia with its Maia 300 chip.
🏦 JPMorgan blocked outside AI agents from customer accounts over unauthorized-access risks.
🪦 Character.AI filed for bankruptcy, with Disney paying $20 million for selected assets and a technology license.
💸 AI and fintech funding stayed exuberant, led by Ramp’s $1.85 billion raise at a $60 billion valuation.
🌎 Macro (Economic) and Trends
📊 Inflation and markets delivered a plot twist: producer prices jumped 1.3% in September, more than double forecasts, yet the Dow rose 1.1%. For the week, the Dow gained 1.0% while the Nasdaq shed 2.4%.
🏫 Pakistan’s deadliest school collapse killed at least 34 children and a teacher and injured more than 50 when the roof of a private school in Peshawar gave way during morning classes.
🔬 Micro (Tech Companies)
🏠 Apple’s HomeView is a $299, seven-inch command center for Siri, entertainment and smart-home controls that recognizes six household members, putting Apple’s revamped assistant on the kitchen counter.
📺 Netflix is cutting nearly 1,000 jobs, or 6% of its workforce, largely across product, technology, legal and HR as YouTube, TikTok and Instagram compete for the same finite supply of eyeballs.
🏦 JPMorgan is blocking outside AI agents from logging into customer accounts, warning that credential-wielding bots could turn automated errands into unauthorized banking.
🦤 Colossal Biosciences trained GenoMorph on developmental data and skull measurements from more than 70 bird species, producing roughly 2,300 possible DNA-editing targets for its dodo revival project.
🏭 TSMC is adding another 3-nanometer factory in Taiwan for 2028 as AI orders pile up; quarterly revenue rose 41% to $46.7B and profit jumped 69% to a sixth consecutive record
🦋 Bluesky plans to add payments within months, letting its 47 million registered users sell products and raise money without turning the decentralized network into another billboard farm.
🥄 Berkshire Hathaway and Bending Spoons are deepening their unusual courtship: Berkshire will invest another $330 million in the serial software acquirer, lifting its stake to 4% and sending the Italian company’s shares up 40%.
🍯 Honeyjar drew 10,000 waitlist signups in 24 hours for an AI communications suite that drafts announcements, builds media lists and scouts speaking opportunities, with Nextdoor and Bloomberg Beta among its testers.
🔐 Pluto Security emerged from stealth with $42 million and $2 million in recurring revenue after finding that 60% of detected AI risks came from apps vibe-coded by non-developers.
🎙️🐝 Amazon’s Bee launched a $75 wearable and $100 phone-mounted recorder that turn conversations into summaries and tasks. Raw audio is deleted after processing, but unlimited memory costs $11.99 a month.
🤖AI News
💸 Anthropic told prospective IPO investors that quarterly revenue reached $16.8 billion, up 45% from Q2, with an 11% adjusted operating margin ahead of a possible pre-Thanksgiving listing.
🧯 OpenAI’s next flagship model is stuck in a safety tune-up: its looping architecture can make reasoning harder to monitor, prompting the company to redirect roughly 10% of its compute toward alignment and harden testing sandboxes.
🧯 Cursor investigated whether internal usage data, potentially including customer and partner information, reached SpaceX for AI training. The outcome remains unclear; Cursor subsequently excluded employee usage from training and restricted personal email.
🧠 Google’s Gemini 4 Argon landed Tuesday with a unified one-million-token input/output window, 40-plus app connections and an introductory API price of $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens.
🪦 Character.AI. which lets users create AI characters and have conversations with them, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, following a slew of lawsuits and struggles to scale its popular platform. Disney will pay $20 million for selected assets and a perpetual technology license, while the chatbot’s future awaits another bidder.
🧠 Meta’s Muse Wonder marks the company’s first frontier-model swing, matching Fable 5.1 and GPT-6 Astra on Meta’s tests while emphasizing “active memory” across days or months; API pricing starts at $4 input and $20 output per million tokens.
🧮 Microsoft’s Maia 300 is Nadella’s latest bid to loosen Nvidia’s grip: Microsoft says its homegrown AI chip is 40% more efficient than leading GPU systems, with multiple gigawatts scheduled for deployment next year.
🤝 Select M&A, Fundraises, IPO, Partnerships
M&A
🚘 Applied Intuition received offers valuing its autonomous-vehicle software business at $30 billion, double its June valuation, and could raise at least $1 billion despite already having $1.2 billion in the bank.
🎬 Reese Witherspoon teamed with France’s Mediawan to buy Hello Sunshine back for low-to-mid eight figures, a dramatic markdown from the $900 million valuation Candle Media paid in 2021.
Fundraising
💰 SoftBank is seeking as much as $100 billion from Gulf investors for Masayoshi Son’s next round of AI bets, revisiting the region that helped bankroll the original Vision Fund.
🎧 Ambi raised $26 million for an ambient assistant spanning iPhone, Mac and Apple Watch; continuous capture is off by default, but disclosing the digital eavesdropper remains the user’s job.
💳 Ramp raised $1.85B at a $60B valuation, up from $44B four months ago, after passing $2B in annualized revenue and $275B in annualized purchase volume.
IPO
📱 Jio Platforms is seeking $3.2 billion at a potential $108.3 billion valuation in what could become India’s largest IPO; $2.9 billion of the proceeds would repay telecom debt.
⚱️ Gold Panning - For those who reached the bottom
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