I’m not going to call the bursting of artificial intelligence bubble yet, not with all that money still pouring into every hardware and software company with AI in their pitch decks. But we got a little taste this week.
OpenAI told investors this week that it actually had $18 billion less revenue than the $68 billion it said last month. That knocked down the stocks of Nvidia, CoreWeave, Oracle and Nebius, among others, on Thursday.
Fifty billion dollars in revenue is nothing to scoff at, of course, but the market is all about expectations, and investors are growing increasingly wary — not least because some of the frontier AI model companies such as Anthropic may be getting a little pushback from their biggest customers. And by the way — will this finally put ARR to bed? Or maybe IPOs to come, with disclosures of real numbers, will make it all moot.
Still, nobody’s slowing down much despite persistent worries about AI’s downsides. Google this week debuted its one-stop Gemini assistant that can act autonomously, generate code and complete work across any device, including web, mobile and desktop. And a bunch of other new models came out from OpenAI, Anthropic and others.
Mathematicians want OpenAI out of math research, but the argument they offered this week sounds weak. As a writer and editor under the unrelenting threat of AI, I understand the concern, and sympathize. But as Pradeep Viswanathan of Neowin asks: “Why would anyone need permission from professional mathematicians to work on open mathematical problems?” To think that chatbots only a couple years ago had trouble with multiplication…. That said, they aren’t always doing a good job on the papers.
One of the biggest promises AI backers make for the technology is much more rapid drug development. I’m not sure we’ve seen that much yet, but Alphabet spinoff Isomorphic Labs just got another presumably huge slug of money at a reported valuation of up to $50 billion to prove it.
Quantum computing continues to get more attention and, increasingly, investment money. This week two more companies with different approaches raised significant funding — Oratomic $475 million and Universal Quantum more than $100 million.
What did Microsoft do to piss off Trump? It and other companies are now barred from further participation in a federal program that enables U.S. companies to apply for green cards for employees There’s reason to think many companies abuse the H-1B system, but whatever they’re doing, they’ve done for decades. 🤷♂️
Here’s all of this week’s enterprise and emerging tech news and analysis from SiliconANGLE and beyond:
Analysis, opinion and food for thought
Sam Altman says people need to accept ‘some bad things’ are going to happen if they want AI Which bad things? Kinda matters.
Fired OpenAI researchers ask company to preserve visibility into AI reasoning (per the Wall Street Journal)
SiliconANGLE will continue to use the term “artificial intelligence” to describe artificial intelligence, and is very happy to be the enemy of this Super Idiot (SI).
AI and data: Model hopscotch
Policy
Trump launches Super Intelligence Force with Jay Clayton as AI czar
Meta teams up with Bret Taylor’s Sierra Technologies on new standards for AI agent commerce
New models and services
Google Cloud introduces Gemini agent to change enterprise work
OpenAI publishes 722 AI-generated math discoveries in major scientific milestone
With GPT-6, ChatGPT’s responses are much more visually appealing and interactive
Anthropic releases Claude Haiku 5.5 small model and halves Sonnet 5.5 cache read prices
Mistral launches open-source Mistral Large 4, details AI roadmap
Google expands EmbeddingGemma beyond text to images, audio and video
Google debuts SynthID Detector tool for flagging AI-generated content, but it’s far from perfect
Reflection AI debuts open-source Beam model with 501B parameters
Dell’s AI Data Platform gets a knowledge graph for agents and faster Nvidia processing
SAP expands Joule into an agentic work layer as Autonomous Enterprise goes live
Kore.ai launches Autoloop to keep tuning enterprise AI agents after they go live
Microsoft slashes internal Claude spending by a third (per The Information)
Exclusive: Gamma revamps presentation platform to make output look more human
Atlassian lays groundwork for humans and AI agents to work side by side
Anaconda expands beyond Python with agent swarms and AI security testing
Precisely launches unified AI data platform and AI Studio library of agents and apps
Equs launches a personal AI platform with private storage to give users greater control over data
Cohere unveils North 2 AI agent platform with rebuilt orchestration and token spending caps
Exclusive: Iterate.ai’s Lifeboat runs up to six times more AI agent sessions per GPU
Money matters
AI stocks crumble on report that OpenAI’s annualized revenue is much lower than believed
US venture deal value reaches record $515.8B as exits fail to keep pace
Alphabet spinoff Isomorphic Labs reportedly raising funding at up to $50B valuation
SAP to acquire TechWolf, giving enterprises evidence-based view of work in the age of AI
Automation Anywhere acquires Boost.ai to expand customer-facing voice AI
AI agent developer Manus raises $500M+ at reported $4B valuation
Vinci reels in $250M for its engineering simulation platform
Nvidia, Samsung back $90M round for AI agent startup Nous Research
Mecka, the “data engine for physical AI,” raises $60M Series B led by Sequoia Capital
Gallatin AI raises $50M in funding for its military logistics platform
Healthleap raises $38M for its AI that flags hospital patients who may need a closer look (per TechCrunch)
AI agent hardware startup Ghost, led by its 19-year-old-founder, raises $11M
Around the enterprise: Google goes nuclear
Money matters
Schneider Electric to buy engineering software giant PTC for $23.7B
Atomic Machines raises $250M to launch Matter Compiler, an AI-native manufacturing system that builds micro-machines from code
Harness acquires Augment Code to bridge software engineering from idea to deployment
Multiply Labs raises $75M to optimize pharmaceutical manufacturing with robots
Stuut cashes in on agentic order-to-cash automation with $52.5M in funding
Turba Labs raised nearly $52M in combined seed and Series A round, aiming to double world’s available compute with data center digital twins.
Namespace raises $42M to build out developer-focused compute cloud
Samsung forecasts world record-breaking $80B profit
New products and services
Arista takes Ethernet into the rack, and the network becomes the backplane
Cisco broadens agentic features in Webex collaboration platform
And coverage of the keynote from Zeus Kerravala: At WebexOne, Cisco’s Jeetu Patel argues the agent era will be won on context, cost and control
Docusign adds a desktop PDF editor to its Intelligent Agreement Management platform
LeapXpert brings governed WhatsApp client messaging into Cisco’s Webex
Promevo launches Insights to track Gemini Enterprise adoption and AI agents
OneSpan Sign takes aim at the slow work around bank agreements
Caloroga Media launches Linnet, an AI-assisted podcast studio that runs in the browser
Policy
White House bars Microsoft from sponsoring green card applications as JD Vance accuses it of fraud
Cyber beat: Identity as the agentic control plane
New services
In the agentic era, standing privilege must go: Key thoughts from the SailPoint Navigate keynote
Anthropic folds Project Glasswing into an expanded three-tier Cyber Verification Program
Anthropic launches critical infrastructure program and free OSS Scanner for open source
Elastic’s AlertZero puts AI agents to work on security alert overload
Tanium expands Security Operations with Atlas-powered detection, response and hunting
Darwinium launches two intent intelligence capabilities to catch fraud by AI agents
Hack The Box’s AI Range Enterprise Edition tests whether AI agents can do their jobs
LawVu launches Lens to provide legal teams visibility into contract law
Money matters
Hadrian raises $40M for AI agents that find the weaknesses attackers can exploit
Rein Security raises $25M to rein in insecure AI agents
Attack & response
IBM and Red Hat patch 400-plus unknown Java flaws, open Clearinghouse for fix requests
Elsewhere in tech: Quantum rising
Oratomic raises $475M for neutral-atom quantum computing, Universal Quantum nets $100M+
US government, tech giants and Biohub commit $1.8B to AI biology initiative
Robotics startup RobCo valued at $1B+ in $40M funding round
Comings and goings
Robotics firm Boston Dynamics named 12-year Amazon veteran Rohit Prasad CEO. Most recently he was SVP and head scientist for Alexa and artificial general intelligence.
Pinterest appointed a new chief financial officer: James Dibbo, former CFO of Amazon‘s global entertainment, advertising and corporate development.
Margaret Hamilton, computing pioneer who led software development for the Apollo program, died Sept. 30 at age 90.
What’s next
Events
Oct. 12-15: Workday Rising, Las Vegas
Oct. 13-15: Semicon West, San Francisco
Oct. 13-15: TechCrunch Disrupt, San Francisco
Oct. 14-16: MWC Las Vegas
Oct. 15: Vercel Ship, San Francisco
Earnings
Wednesday, Oct. 14: ASML
Thursday, Oct. 15: TSMC