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Livestream marketplace Whatnot raised $225M at an $11.5B valuation, after raising $265M at a $4.97B valuation in January, taking its total funding to $968M (Michael J. de la Merced/New York Times)

Adobe unveils Project Moonlight, an AI agent on its Firefly platform designed to act as a creative director for social media campaigns via text prompts (The Verge)

Adobe partners with YouTube to offer a Create for YouTube Shorts feature in the Premiere mobile app, letting creators instantly publish video, launching soon (Kayla Cobb/The Wrap)

Adobe plans to support custom AI models in Firefly, updates Firefly to generate soundtracks and speech, adds an AI assistant to Photoshop and Express, and more (Jacob Roach/Wired)

At its Adobe Max event, Adobe unveils AI tools for Photoshop, Premiere Pro, and Lightroom, and says Firefly Image 5 can generate images in native 4MP resolution (Jess Weatherbed/The Verge)

Appfigures: between September 30 and October 18, OpenAI's Sora had 2.6M iOS downloads, above the Meta AI app, which had 1.1M; Sora is iOS- and invite-only (CNBC)

An ex-OpenAI staffer of four years says it isn't doing enough to protect users, especially those with mental health issues, and needs to offer more than words (Steven Adler/New York Times)

Fireworks AI, which helps developers access AI chips and models, raised a $254M Series C at a $4B valuation, split into a $230M primary and $24M secondary round (Belle Lin/Wall Street Journal)

Sources: Uber plans to invest in the Hong Kong listings of Pony AI and WeRide, deepening its Chinese robotaxi ties, including ~$100M in Pony AI's share sale (Bloomberg)

PayPal CEO Alex Chriss says the company signed a deal with OpenAI to let shoppers use PayPal's digital wallet in ChatGPT to pay for items, starting in 2026 (Hugh Son/CNBC)

Visible Alpha: Apple's Services unit revenue is set to hit $108.6B in the year to September, its first time above $100B and up 13% YoY, ahead of its Q4 results (Financial Times)

xAI's Grokipedia says Grok fact-checked its entries and some "content is adapted from Wikipedia"; some pages, like the PS5's, are almost identical to Wikipedia (Jay Peters/The Verge)

Stablecoin startup ZAR raised $12.9M led by a16z to test USD-backed coins for Pakistan, which the World Bank estimates has the third-largest unbanked population (Faseeh Mangi/Bloomberg)

After AWS's major outage, Signal's Meredith Whittaker says there "isn't really another choice" but to use AWS and "the entire stack" is "owned by 3-4 players" (Emma Roth/The Verge)

Amazon says it will cut ~14,000 jobs from its corporate workforce, after cutting 27,000 across 2022 and 2023; the company had 1.55M employees globally in June (Bloomberg)

OpenAI offers its cheaper ChatGPT Go plan for free for one year to users in India starting November 4, but did not say how long the offer would remain available (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)

Riyadh-based BNPL startup Tabby completes a secondary share sale of existing shareholders' stakes, valuing it at $4.5B ahead of a possible IPO (Reuters)

EU officials are scrambling to resolve a growing trade clash with China over rare earths and chips, as the bloc gets caught between Beijing and Washington (Financial Times)

NXP reports Q3 revenue down 2% YoY to $3.17B, vs. $3.16B est., automotive revenue flat YoY to $1.83B, and expects above estimates Q4 revenue of $3.20B to $3.40B (Juby Babu/Reuters)

Meta and TikTok say they will comply with Australia's under-16 social media ban, taking effect on December 10, but warn the landmark law may be hard to enforce (Agence France-Presse)

Grokipedia, a Grok-based encyclopedia, launches with 885K+ articles, drawing from Wikipedia content; Elon Musk called it "a massive improvement" over Wikipedia (Washington Post)

Sources: the Netherlands took control of Nexperia over fears its ex-CEO Zhang Xuezheng was dismantling its European operations and moving production to China (Toby Sterling/Reuters)

A US judge decertifies a class action that accused Apple of monopolizing the market for iPhone apps, citing errors in the plaintiffs' damages model (Jonathan Stempel/Reuters)

PayPal and Bilt, which offers rewards points for rent payments, say Bilt customers will be able to use Venmo to make rent and mortgage payments starting in 2026 (Paige Smith/Bloomberg)

Chegg plans to cut 388 roles, or about 45% of its workforce, citing the "new realities of AI", and says Executive Chairman Dan Rosensweig is returning as CEO (Vallari Srivastava/Reuters)

Toronto-based Wealthsimple, an online investment management service, raised CA$750M co-led by Dragoneer and GIC at a CA$10B post-money valuation (Josh Scott/BetaKit)

NextEra Energy and Google sign a 25-year power supply deal, which includes restarting the 615MW Duane Arnold nuclear plant in Iowa, shut down in 2020 (Vallari Srivastava/Reuters)

Sources: Forge Global, a leading platform for trading stakes in private startups, is exploring a sale, after its stock fell 90% since its 2021 IPO (Financial Times)

A look at Anthropic's success in corporate AI, which makes up ~80% of its revenue; a July report put its enterprise API market share at 32%, above OpenAI's 25% (Asa Fitch/Wall Street Journal)

OpenAI urges the US to commit to building 100GW of new energy capacity each year to stay ahead of China in AI, and says "electrons are the new oil" (Ashley Capoot/CNBC)

Sources: SAP is considering a new bid for accounting software company BlackLine, after its previous bid of nearly $4.5B was rejected in June (Milana Vinn/Reuters)

Sources: Amazon plans to lay off ~10% of corporate staff, or ~30,000 people, its largest layoffs since 2022, to reduce costs and address pandemic overhiring (Greg Bensinger/Reuters)

Filing: iRobot says its last potential buyer withdrew from the process and its financials remain dire, following Amazon abandoning a 2024 bid; IRBT drops 33%+ (Annie Palmer/CNBC)

Sources: Microsoft's next Xbox will run Windows, letting users play PlayStation titles on Steam and the full Xbox console library, without a multiplayer paywall (Jez Corden/Windows Central)

Internal memo: Vishal Shah, who led Meta's metaverse unit, will now lead AI product management; sources: Vibes was rushed out to get ahead of OpenAI's Sora (Hannah Murphy/Financial Times)

China's MiniMax releases MiniMax M2, an open-source model optimized for AI agents and coding and priced at $0.30/1M input tokens and $1.20/1M output tokens (MiniMax)

OpenAI estimates that around 0.07% of ChatGPT users active in a week show "severe mental health symptoms" like mania, and details its safety improvements (OpenAI)

The current AI investment boom will spark a "wildfire" that wipes out some companies, yet bolsters and enables others by unlocking GPUs, energy, and talent (Dion Lim/CEO Dinner Insights)

Anthropic expands Claude for Financial Services with a beta Claude for Excel integration, additional data connectors, and new pre-built Agent Skills (Webb Wright/ZDNET)

Citigroup and Coinbase say they are exploring on-chain stablecoin payments and simpler crypto-fiat transfers for Citi's institutional clients (Emily Mason/Bloomberg)

Meta launches "ghost posts" on Threads, letting users share "unfiltered thoughts" in posts that disappear after 24 hours; replies will appear as a DM (Marcus Mendes/9to5Mac)

The US forms a $1B partnership with AMD to construct two supercomputers, Lux and Discovery, accelerating research in fusion energy, drug development, and more (Reuters)

The AI buildout, surpassing railroads and the internet, moves Big Tech from being asset-light to asset-heavy, which has historically produced inferior returns (Kai Wu/Sparkline Capital)

Qualcomm unveils two AI inference chips, the AI200, set for 2026, and the AI250, planned for 2027, and says Humain is the first customer; QCOM jumps 12%+ (Kif Leswing/CNBC)

A look at Live Nation's Setlist.fm, a wiki-like site with 80M annual users that changed live music by letting users document songs that artists play at concerts (Marc Hogan/New York Times)

Analysis: Chinese robotaxi companies like Baidu and WeRide are outnumbering their US rivals with more projects progressing from testing to commercialization (Linda Lew/Bloomberg)

IBM launches Digital Asset Haven, a digital assets platform built with crypto wallet provider Dfns for financial institutions, governments, and companies (Anna Irrera/Bloomberg)

X prompts users to re-enroll their security keys for 2FA, and will lock accounts that are not updated by Nov. 10, allowing it to retire the Twitter.com domain (Will McCurdy/PCMag)

Sources: AI contractor marketplace Mercor is finalizing $350M in funding led by Felicis at a $10B valuation; founded in 2023, Mercor manages 30K contractors (Angel Au-Yeung/Wall Street Journal)

Sources: JPMorgan Chase is giving staff the option to use its in-house LLM to write year-end performance reviews, a shortcut to the often painstaking process (Financial Times)