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Bloomberg reports OpenAI is in talks with investors to raise at least $30 billion in a pre-IPO round valuing the company at about $1.4 trillion. The report cites a 70% jump in run-rate revenue since July, reaching $40 billion in August, following a strategic focus on coding. OpenAI previously raised $122 billion in March at an $852 billion valuation.
Google is partnering with actor Henry Cavill to create a video game showcasing its new Googlebook laptops, which run Android rather than ChromeOS. The companies are targeting a November release, though Google has not disclosed the game's genre or other creative partners involved.
Meta's newly launched Muse AI assistant has drawn scrutiny after security researchers disclosed a zero-day vulnerability that Meta had to patch quickly. Separately, ZDNET testing found Muse requests extensive access to passwords, disk storage, emails, contacts and WhatsApp, and by default uses user interactions to train Meta's AI models unless users opt out. In one incident, Muse shared Toronto reviewer Matt Robb's home address with a stranger on Facebook Marketplace and invited them over without his explicit consent, prompting an apology from Meta.
Apple confirmed shoppers can begin its 'Get ready' process for the iPhone Duo on Monday, October 12, letting buyers pre-select color, storage, carrier, and payment method ahead of time. Actual pre-orders open Friday, October 16 at 8:00 a.m. ET / 5:00 a.m. PT, and completing the setup early is meant to speed up checkout that morning.
OpenAI confirmed elevated error rates across ChatGPT, Codex, and its APIs, including the Agents API, starting around 2:00 PM ET. The company says affected users may see failed requests, login problems, or incomplete tasks, and it is investigating the cause with no confirmed timeline for a fix.
U.S. Postal Inspection Service seized the domain LabelsBank.com and indicted Faheem Akram, 33, of Pakistan, for allegedly running a site that sold counterfeit USPS postage labels at a flat $2 rate regardless of package weight or destination. Investigators say over 5,000 customers bought more than 5.1 million fake labels, causing USPS losses exceeding $126 million. Akram faces conspiracy, counterfeit postage, and wire fraud charges.
OpenAI has introduced a new suite of AI agents called 'dots,' featuring a set of colorful, animated mascot characters, including one named Todd the frog. The announcement focuses on the agents' playful visual branding alongside their functional debut.
Average consumer memory prices have risen sharply since last September, with 2TB NVMe SSDs up 137%, 32GB DDR5 kits up 363%, and some 64GB DDR5-6000 kits up nearly 500%. High-capacity RAM like 128GB and 512GB ECC kits has become scarce or drastically more expensive, and a 4TB Samsung SSD that cost $390 in 2024 now runs $1,100. IDC data cited alongside these figures shows smartphone average selling prices are also expected to climb 27.6% in 2026 amid falling shipments, while Apple has raised prices across much of its product line.
The Interim Computer Museum has taken on a new restoration of Galaxy Game, the 1971 Stanford coin-op version of Spacewar! built by Bill Pitts and Hugh Tuck on a PDP-11/20. The project, prompted by Pitts along with Josh Dersch and Robert Schmuck, has already rebuilt the machine's power supply and gotten the PDP-11 running again, with work now shifting to refurbishing its HP 1300A electrostatic X-Y displays.
Bain and Company's latest technology report estimates the AI sector must generate $6 trillion in annual revenue by 2031 to justify current data centre investment. The firm projects $4.2 trillion of that from new products in areas like search, advertising and physical AI, $1-1.4 trillion from enterprise productivity gains, and $200-400 billion from consumer subscriptions and advertising.
A developer released TurboGPT, an open-source (MIT-licensed) CUDA C++ implementation for training tiny byte-level GPT models. The project's Windows build instructions and CLI usage are documented, and a sample run on a dataset called hn1g reportedly reached 2.52435 bits-per-byte after 1.5 billion training tokens.
At its developer conference in San Francisco, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman introduced 'dots,' a new name and cartoonish branding for what the company previously called AI agents, describing them as always-on assistants capable of handling tasks like building websites or scheduling activities. The announcement came a day after OpenAI said it was delaying the release of its newest model due to safety issues found in internal testing.