Good evening!
Thursday, 8 pm and October all have the same energy
Here are the 7 things you missed today:
1. 🤑 OpenAI becomes world’s most valuable private company after stock sale
A secondary sale of $6.6B in employee-held shares valued OpenAI at $500B, the highest ever for a private company. Buyers included SoftBank, Dragoneer, Thrive Capital, MGX, and T. Rowe Price. Proceeds went to current and former employees via a tender offer, not to OpenAI. The most recent primary round was in August at a $300B valuation; OpenAI has also committed to spend $300B on Oracle Cloud over five years. (Yahoo Finance)
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3. 👔 Anthropic names new CTO with focus on AI infrastructure
Rahul Patil, former Stripe CTO, has been appointed CTO; co-founder Sam McCandlish moves to chief architect. Patil will oversee compute, infrastructure and inference, while McCandlish focuses on pre-training and large-scale model training. Both will report to president Daniela Amodei. Patil previously held senior roles at Oracle, and engineering roles at Amazon and Microsoft. Anthropic said the shift comes as it faces surging demand for Claude from enterprise customers. (Tech Crunch)
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5. 📈 OpenAI’s Sora climbs to No. 3 on the U.S. App Store
Invite-only and limited to the U.S. and Canada, the AI video app reached No. 3 in the U.S. Top Overall chart by day two. Appfigures estimates 56,000 iOS downloads on day one and 164,000 installs over the first two days (Sep 30–Oct 1). Day-one comps: ChatGPT 81k, Gemini 80k, Grok 56k, Claude 21k, Copilot 7k. The Sora app was launched Sept. 30 alongside the release of the Sora 2 model. Its quick climb highlights OpenAI’s fast entry into consumer apps. (Tech Crunch)
6. 🧵 Threads launches ‘Communities’ to rival X’s groups
Meta is introducing 100+ official communities for topics like basketball, TV, K-pop and books, available worldwide. Communities are created by Meta (users can’t create their own), and posts can surface in For You and Following feeds. Each community includes a custom “Like” emoji; profile badges for active builders are coming. Threads now has over 400 million monthly active users. Meta said the goal is to give users structured hubs, similar to Reddit, but within Threads’ existing network. (Engadget)
7. ☄️ Perplexity makes Comet browser free; Max users get background assistant
The Comet AI browser is now free globally; previously it was limited to $200/month Max subscribers. A sidecar assistant summarizes pages, manages content and navigates; free users get that core assistant. Max subscribers also get early access to a new “background assistant” that runs multi-step tasks and connects to more apps. Perplexity says “millions” joined the waitlist; a $5/month Comet Plus is planned. TechCrunch notes the company sees Comet as central to competing with Chrome and Safari. (CNBC)
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