This Week in Tech (Week Ending Oct 24, 2025)
TL;DR - 💎 Louvre heist; ⭐️ OpenAI's browser; 📈Meta AI users spiking with Vibes video feed
Hey folks!
Happy Friday! 😎 Tech news below.
TL;DR -
💎The Louvre suffered a brazen daylight robbery, with thieves escaping with “priceless” jewelry. The heist took less than 10 minutes.
⭐️OpenAI announced Tuesday the launch of its AI-powered browser, ChatGPT Atlas, a major step in the company’s quest to unseat Google as the main way people find information online. Microsoft launched a nearly identical AI browser 2 days later.
📈Meta AI’s app downloads and daily users spiked after the launch of ‘Vibes’ AI video feed.
👂🐛🎶 I’ve got your latest earworm - see below!
🌎 Macro (Economic) and Trends
📈 The S&P 500 almost hit another high on Tuesday, despite the govt shutdown and trade war.
🚫👑 2,700+ “No Kings” protests against the Trump administration in all 50 states happened this past weekend. Organizers said more than 7 million people turned out.
💵✋President Trump is asking the Justice Department to pay him about $230 million in compensation for past investigations into him.
🇻🇪The U.S. military has killed at least 32 people in seven strikes off the coast of Venezuela without telling Congress or the American people who was killed, or on what evidence. Why it matters: The U.S. is eight weeks into a military campaign in the Caribbean Sea with twin aims of stopping drugs and, potentially, toppling Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro.
✨It was Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights, earlier this week.
🇯🇵Japan is getting its first female prime minister, Sanae Takaichi. She’s a heavy metal drummer and a hard-line conservative.
🇫🇷Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy began a five-year sentence at a Paris prison after being convicted of seeking campaign funds from Libya.
💎The Louvre suffered a brazen daylight robbery, with thieves escaping with “priceless” jewelry. The heist took less than 10 minutes.
On Monday, an Amazon Web Services outage disrupted hundreds of websites and apps. The worst part? Eight Sleep mattress users were affected, with some users being awoken by upright beds and haywire temperatures. Yikes!
Digital ad spend still dominated by Meta and Google’s duopoly: The AI era has proven to be a boon to Big Tech giants, helping to maintain their advertising dominance over traditional publishers and smaller platforms.
🔬 Micro (Tech Companies)
🏡Airbnb is becoming more social by allowing users to connect with fellow travelers through features like connections and messaging.
🤖 Amazon aims to avoid significantly growing its U.S. workforce while doubling the volume of products it sells by 2033, apparently by using robots. Amazon has invested heavily in robotics that automate the sorting, packing and movement of packages inside its warehouses.
🚴 Rivian spinoff Also reveals a high-end modular e-bike for $4,500, and Amazon is buying thousands of them because they’re essentially narrow delivery vans that can operate in a bike lane
🍪 Turns out they like being up in your business: Google formally ended on Friday its six-year old effort aimed at ending the use of cookies in its Chrome browser. In a blog post, Google said it would retire a suite of technologies called the Privacy Sandbox that were originally designed to replace cookies.
A federal judge has granted Meta-owned WhatsApp’s request for a permanent injunction blocking Israeli cyberintelligence company NSO Group from targeting the messaging app’s users. Earlier this year, a jury decided that the cyberintelligence company would have to pay Meta more than $167 million following a 2019 campaign that targeted more than 1,400 WhatsApp users, including human rights activists and journalists.
💰↔️ X is going to launch a marketplace for buying inactive handles. Rare handles could be priced at anywhere from $2,500 to over seven figures
👓Amazon unveiled AI smart glasses for its delivery drivers. Amazon likely hopes that the new glasses will shave valuable time off of each delivery by providing delivery drivers with detailed directions and information about hazards directly in their line of sight
📣Earnings:
Netflix reported 17% higher revenue of $11.5 billion, right in line with its projection issued in mid-July, while operating income rose 28% to $3.2 billion. The company’s shares fell 6% in after-hours trading, perhaps because of investor disappointment that Netflix didn’t exceed its projection.
Tesla’s net income fell 37% in the third quarter, despite high vehicle sales due to American shoppers racing to buy electric vehicles before a federal tax credit expired last month. The company attributed the steep decline in profitability to increased research and development costs in areas like AI, as well as a drop in revenue from carbon credits, which fell 44% to $417 million.
📰 The New York Times said it will add a stand-alone destination within its main app that includes a curated mix of short-form, scrollable, vertical news videos, updated daily. Why it matters: It’s part of a broader effort by the Times to bring all of its journalism across mediums into a single, centralized destination, instead of differentiated apps.
📺When you just have to catch up on your latest show while on the road: GM said it’ll introduce an “eyes-off” autonomous driving system on a consumer SUV in 2028. Why it matters: No major automaker has yet commercialized self-driving car technology that legally allows car owners to travel from place to place in their vehicle without keeping their eyes on the road.
Wikipedia has revealed that AI chatbots and search summaries are eating into its page views, down 8% year-over-year. Fewer eyeballs could potentially mean fewer volunteer editors, less funding, and ultimately less reliable content on the internet’s go-to source for information.
🌱🥩🤪Beyond Meat is the latest stock to experience meme-stock-style frenzy as it experienced an almost 700% rally in recent days after Roundhill Investments, which develops thematic ETFs, added the name to its Roundhill Meme Stock ETF (MEME).
Layoffs: Charter Communications is laying off 1,200 employees, or just over 1% of its 95,000-person workforce. Target cut 1,800 corporate jobs in its first major layoffs in a decade.
🤖 AI News
⭐️OpenAI announced Tuesday the launch of its AI-powered browser, ChatGPT Atlas, a major step in the company’s quest to unseat Google as the main way people find information online. Axios recapped OpenAI’s progress in recent weeks:
1️⃣ Web browser: The move positions the company against other AI-fueled rivals with browsers like Google’s Chrome, Apple’s Safari, Microsoft’s Edge and Perplexity’s Comet.
2️⃣ Social Media network: OpenAI’s Sora 2 delivers an endless feed of short, AI-generated videos and has become the first real competitor to Meta’s social media dominance since TikTok. The invite-only app rocketed to — and stayed at — the top of Apple’s download charts.
3️⃣ Shopping experience: OpenAI has also partnered with the world’s biggest retailer (Walmart) to compete with the world’s biggest online retailer (Amazon).
4️⃣ Maybe Hardware: OpenAI’s hardware partnership with former Apple designer Jony Ive have been percolating for over a year.
And also - Microsoft launched a nearly identical AI browser 2 days after OpenAI. Copilot Mode of Microsoft’s Edge browser is the company’s take on the long-hyped AI browser category.
⭐️Meta AI’s app downloads and daily users spiked after the launch of ‘Vibes’ AI video feed. New data shows Meta AI’s mobile app is surging in popularity, jumping from 775,000 to 2.7 million daily active users in just four weeks.
and yet, despite the progress - Meta is slashing hundreds of jobs from its AI unit, even as it continues to hire for a newer AI division. CEO Mark Zuckerberg grew concerned several months ago that the company’s existing AI efforts weren’t leading to sufficient breakthroughs.
🫨 The U.S. Federal Trade Commission received at least seven complaints that ChatGPT caused people to experience severe delusions, paranoia and emotional crises
🤖Anthropic now lets developers spin up Claude Code agents, and manage them, from their web browser on desktop and mobile.
Anthropic is trying to reinforce its relationship with the Trump administration in the wake of criticism from White House AI czar David Sacks. Context: Sacks last week said on X that “Anthropic is running a sophisticated regulatory capture strategy based on fear-mongering.”
🗣️ Andrej Karpathy, an OpenAI cofounder, appeared on a podcast and criticized the “year of agents” narrative that has become ubiquitous in Silicon Valley. Karpathy claims much of the output is still slop and are still a decade away from solving deeper problems. Karpathy is still incredibly optimistic about the long-term potential of AI, but his realistic tone stood in contrast to executives at model developers that are raising money and might need to pitch more aggressive timelines for AI that can perform as well as humans on most tasks.
🤝 Select M&A, Fundraises, IPO, Partnerships
M&A
Warner Bros. Discovery’s board of directors said it had begun a “review of strategic alternatives” as a result of “unsolicited interest the company has received from multiple parties for both the entire company and Warner Bros.” The announcement comes a few weeks after news reports said David Ellison’s Paramount Skydance had approached WBD about a possible acquisition.
OpenAI has acquired Software Applications, Inc., the startup behind Sky — an AI-powered natural language interface for Mac that can view your screen and take actions in your apps
Dataminr is acquiring the cybersecurity start-up ThreatConnect, which monitors internal data sources for threats, in a $290 million cash-and-equity deal.
Veeam acquires data security company Securiti AI for $1.7bn.
DraftKings agreed to acquire Railbird Technologies, a trading platform licensed by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, as it moves to expand from sports betting into prediction markets.
The activist investor Starboard Value has pushed TripAdvisor to sell itself or divest its restaurant review business, TheFork.
Fundraising
OpenEvidence, a medicine-focused startup, has raised $200 million at a $6 billion valuation. The new round came after it raised $210 million in July at a $3.5 billion valuation. The company aims to be an A.I.-driven tool for medical providers. OpenEvidence draws on journals from JAMA and the New England Journal of Medicine.
Suno, the AI music generation startup, is in talks to raise over $100 million at a valuation over $2 billion,
An entity, Blue Owl Capital, being used to fund Meta Platforms’ large-scale data center in Louisiana sold more than $27 billion in debt with an interest rate about 2.25 percentage points above the U.S. Treasury yield. Meta is raising the debt, maturing in 2049, for a roughly $30 billion special-purpose vehicle the company is using to fund the construction of a data center called Hyperion, which could eventually use as much as five gigawatts of power.
Partnerships
Anthropic is in talks with Google to access additional computing power in a deal in the high tens of billions of dollars. Google is an existing cloud provider for Anthropic. Google also has previously invested in the company.
IPOs
⏸️ The federal government shutdown, started 3 weeks ago, means the SEC is not reviewing any IPO prospectuses filed by companies.
⚱️ Gold Panning - For those who reached the bottom
🎾 Jannik Sinner won the latest matchup between him and Carlos Alcaraz, taking home $6 million in Six Kings Slam prize money.
🥐 The top 25 essential pastries to eat in NYC, according to the NYT. (I’m obsessed with the chocolate babka at Breads Bakery, and the Pineapple Linzer Cookie at Té Company - which you can order online!)
🪄To readers based in NYC, if you’ve got time this Saturday: Mysterious posters popping up around NYC read “See My Friend Jesse Perform a Magic Trick. 1pm @ Tompkins Square Park, Saturday October 25” and many fans believe the ‘trick’ is going to feature Academy Award-nominated Jesse Eisenber, performing promotionals for the third Now You See Me movie.
The latest viral Tiktok viral song to hit streams - a mashup of Taylor Swift and BSB, “Everybody, Elizabeth Taylor mashup”, which has even caught the attention of the 2 bands (see below). My favorite part of the whole thing is that the creator of the song is just another tech worker, Lydia Getachew, who apparently just started a DJ’ing class earlier this year. A good reminder to get your creative juices flowing and have some fun with it! 😄✨
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Thanks for writing this, it clarifies a lot! My book lists are readdy for ChatGPT Atlas!