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Andrej Karpathy unveils nanochat, a full-stack training and inference implementation of an LLM in a single, dependency-minimal codebase (Andrej Karpathy/@karpathy)

Sources: Raymond Zage and James Lu, who control most of Grindr, are in talks to take it private after a Temasek unit sold shares pledged for personal loans (Liz Hoffman/Semafor)

Apple says iPhone Air will go on sale in China on October 22, after initially delaying the launch due to regulatory issues with the device's eSIM-only design (Ryan Christoffel/9to5Mac)

Apple says that its Apple TV+ streaming service has been renamed Apple TV, "with a vibrant new identity" (Eric Slivka/MacRumors)

California Governor Gavin Newsom signs AB 1043, which requires device makers and app stores to verify users' ages; Google, Meta, and OpenAI supported the bill (Tyler Katzenberger/Politico)

California Governor Gavin Newsom signs SB 243, which mandates safety protocols for AI chatbot companions, the first US state law to regulate such AI chatbots (Rebecca Bellan/TechCrunch)

California Governor Gavin Newsom signs AB 56, which requires that social media companies show users under 18 warning labels for "profound" mental health risks (Tyler Katzenberger/Politico)

Anduril plans to deliver ~100 units of its AI-powered EagleEye helmet and eyewear to the US Army by Q2 2026, replacing Microsoft's IVAS; Meta provided some tech (Brandi Vincent/DefenseScoop)

Salesforce plans to invest $15B in San Francisco over the next five years, including for an AI Incubator Hub and workforce programs; CRM is down 25%+ in 2025 (Connor Hart/Wall Street Journal)

At Dreamforce 2025, Salesforce unveils Agentforce 360, a unified agentic AI stack to connect humans, AI agents, and more, and positions Slack as an "agentic OS" (Larry Dignan/Constellation Research)

Sources: the Trump administration cut 176 CISA jobs last week, as part of laying off 4,000+ US federal workers, and is likely to make further mass CISA layoffs (Cynthia B Brumfield/Metacurity)

OpenAI and Broadcom agree to co-develop and deploy 10GW of custom AI chips to run OpenAI's models over four years; sources: the deal is worth multiple billions (Wall Street Journal)

Amazon plans to hire 250K workers for the 2025 holiday season, the same as in 2023 and 2024, including full-time and part-time, and will pay $19/hour on average (Spencer Soper/Bloomberg)

Slack is testing an AI-based version of Slackbot that acts as a personalized assistant, operating via AWS' virtual private cloud, rolling out at the end of 2025 (Emma Roth/The Verge)

NYC- and London-based ClaimSorted, which uses AI to help speed up settling insurance claims and works with 20+ insurers, raised a $13.3M seed led by Atomico (Robert Olsen/Forbes)

Sources: London-based self-driving tech startup Wayve is in early stage talks with Microsoft and SoftBank to raise between $1B and $2B, valuing Wayve at ~$8B (Financial Times)

CoinGecko: crypto's combined market cap rises 6%+ to hit $4T, recovering from a brutal weekend selloff as President Trump tries to calm US-China trade war fears (Bloomberg)

Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion, and Peter Howitt win the Nobel Prize in Economics for their work on how tech progress and sustained economic growth are related (Eshe Nelson/New York Times)

Ofcom fines 4chan £20K under the OSA for failing to provide info on the risk of illegal content; the UK's tech minister says the government "fully backed" Ofcom (Paul Sandle/Reuters)

Sources: UK security services including MI5 step up work with the country's largest companies over hacking fears and to improve UK cyber warfare preparedness (Financial Times)

Tencent is investing in shooting games, traditionally dominated by Western companies, after the 2024 success of Delta Force, which still has 30M players daily (Bloomberg)

A profile of eBay CEO Jamie Iannone, who said the platform was "too complacent" in 2020 and now focuses on its power users, boosting its stock by ~50% in 2025 (Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson/Semafor)

Parisians and BHV Marais staff protest Shein's 1,000-square-meter store, set to open November 1, as France tries to curb the company's presence in the country (New York Times)

Data center proposals are facing growing opposition from towns across the US, as residents and officials raise concerns about water and electricity use (Daniel Wu/Washington Post)

Strava CEO Michael Martin says Strava plans to launch a US IPO; Sensor Tower says Strava has 50M MAUs and users spent $180M+ on Premium in the year to September (Stephanie Stacey/Financial Times)

Q&A with journalist Jacob Silverman on his new book Gilded Rage, the radical politics of certain tech elites, AI's impact on Silicon Valley politics, and more (Calder McHugh/Politico)

OpenAI's blockbuster deals with Nvidia and AMD add a new layer to its complicated ownership structure and will dilute existing shareholders like Microsoft (George Hammond/Financial Times)

Warburg Pincus agrees to acquire German industrial software company PSI for over €700M, offering €45 per share; PSI's stock closed at €33.20 on October 10 (Reuters)

Wingtech's Shanghai-listed stock plunged 10%, its daily limit, after the Dutch government moved to exert control over Nexperia, which Wingtech acquired in 2018 (Bloomberg)

John Searle, known for "the Chinese Room" thought experiment on AI consciousness, died on Sept. 16 at 93; his UCB tenure ended over alleged sexual harassment (Alex Traub/New York Times)

The Dutch government takes control of Chinese-owned Dutch chipmaker Nexperia under the Goods Availability Act to safeguard chip supply for European industries (Financial Times)

Young people in China are turning to AI chatbots like DeepSeek and Doubao for therapy to save time and money, while avoiding stigma around mental health (Yi-Ling Liu/Rest of World)

Robots that collaborate with humans, or "cobots", are bringing automation to even the smallest US factories, as the US tries to reshore foreign manufacturing (Christopher Mims/Wall Street Journal)

AI sparks a new wave of competition in the browser market, as agentic AI browsers like Perplexity's Comet and Opera's Neon compete with Gemini-enhanced Chrome (Fortune)

How modern media consumption is converging toward a continuous flow of episodic video, across streaming providers, podcasts, and social media apps (Derek Thompson)

Sora videos depicting dead celebrities spark backlash from families; OpenAI says reps of "recently deceased" public figures can request likenesses be blocked (Washington Post)

Judges in Latin America are struggling to rule on cases of AI-generated images even as courts increasingly adopt AI tools to clear case backlogs (Juliana Bedoya/Rest of World)

Taiwan says it expects no significant impact from China's new export controls on rare earth minerals, as it uses different rare earths in chip manufacturing (Ben Blanchard/Reuters)

Sources: Apple's glasses may run full visionOS when paired with Mac or a lighter UI with iPhone; Apple may unveil M5 iPad, MacBook Pro, and Vision Pro this week (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)

How culture and regulations are shaping AI companion platforms worldwide, with US platforms primarily targeting men and Chinese platforms mainly targeting women (Zilan Qian/ChinaTalk)

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A profile of Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan, whose estimated 11% stake is now worth $1B+ following ICE's $2B investment, as its rivalry with Kalshi intensifies (Forbes)

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Qantas says 5.7M customer records stolen in a July breach of a third-party platform have been released online, and it is assessing the extent of the exposure (Jason Gale/Bloomberg)

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Foundation Health, which develops an AI assistant to automate patient communication and prior authorization workflows for pharmacies, raised a $20M Series A (Heather Landi/Fierce Healthcare)

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1Password founders sold a $75M stake as part of a $100M secondary sale, valuing the company at $6.8B, the same valuation as its $620M Series C in January 2022 (Jeff Stone/Bloomberg)

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Sources: xAI is building world models for use in gaming and robotics, and has hired two AI researchers, Zeeshan Patel and Ethan He, from Nvidia to work on them (Cristina Criddle/Financial Times)

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New evidence shows the Aisuru botnet, which outpaces all other IoT-based botnets, is drawing most of its firepower from hacked IoT devices hosted on US ISPs (Brian Krebs/Krebs on Security)

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Google adds Gemini 2.5 Flash Image, aka Nano Banana, to Search's AI Mode and Google Lens, on Android in the US for those with an account opted into Search Lab (Abner Li/9to5Google)

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Sources: Securitize, a blockchain company that tokenizes investments, is in talks to go public via a SPAC started by Cantor Fitzgerald at a $1B+ valuation (Bloomberg)

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AMD's SVP of AI Vamsi Boppana says the company's AI software, designed with input from OpenAI, helped secure the multi-billion dollar deal with OpenAI (Richard Nieva/Forbes)

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SEMI: US chip fab investment to outpace China, Taiwan, and South Korea from 2027, driven by AI demand and US policies, rising from $21B in 2025 to $43B in 2028 (Nikkei Asia)

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