Funding, deals, earnings and the companies building AI.
Epic Games delayed its Disney game and told the team to go "AI first," with "no more hand-written code," Bloomberg reported Oct. 12, citing unnamed sources. If the order holds, a flagship game becomes a public test of full AI production, and the result will be in stores for anyone to judge.
Amazon is in talks to buy Decart, whose software ports AI models between chips, for about $7 billion, the Wall Street Journal reported Sunday. Read it as a bet on Amazon's Trainium chips, and on making your workload easier to move onto them.
Nvidia is in talks to acquire open-weight model startup Reflection AI or invest more in it, the Financial Times reported, days after Reflection announced its 501B-parameter Beam model. Nothing changes for you until Beam's weights ship under Apache 2.0.
OpenAI says Tomek Korbak, Mikita Balesni and Jasmine Wang broke its rules on handling sensitive information. Their letter says the firings chill safety work, and the real fight is over outside auditors' access.
TypeSafe AI raised $870M at a $7.5B valuation for Jev, its decision model. Cloudflare answered with open-weight Clef-omni and a Clef-flash price cut to $0.038 per million input tokens, and a category this young just got a price war.
Google Cloud unveiled the Gemini agent on Thursday, one agent for chat, long-running tasks and code that routes each job to Gemini or Anthropic's Claude models. Google gave no price and no general availability date, so plan for it but don't budget for it yet.
OpenAI told investors its annualized revenue is approaching $50 billion, the Financial Times reported, per TechCrunch on Thursday, about $20 billion below the figure that circulated a week earlier. The gap comes from how the number was counted, and it makes every AI run-rate comparison suspect.
Anthropic released Claude Haiku 5.5 at $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.50 output for prompts up to 100,000 tokens, a tenth of Haiku 4.5's price. Above that line the deal changes, so check your prompt lengths before you celebrate.
Anthropic expanded Claude for Startups on Tuesday: eligible startups get a free year of Claude Team for up to five Premium seats, plus $1,000 in API credits. It is a bid to be your default by year three, and still a fair deal if you read the fine print.
OpenAI says a limited group of US advertisers will start placing labeled visual ads alongside ChatGPT image generation later in October. It picked the most commercial moment in the product, and the new measurement tools say ChatGPT is becoming an ad platform.