- 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 the workforce, citing the "new realities of AI", and says executive chairman Dan Rosensweig returns as CEO (Vallari Srivastava/Reuters)
- Toronto-based Wealthsimple, an online investment management service, raised CA$750M co-led by Dragoneer and GIC at a post-money valuation of CA$10B (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 with corporate AI, which makes up ~80% of its revenue; a July report put its enterprise API market share at 32% vs. 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 software company BlackLine, after its previous offer of $66 per share, or 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: Meta's head of AI product Nat Friedman says Vishal Shah, who previously led the metaverse unit, is joining his team to lead AI product management (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)