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AI News Today: OpenAI Cuts Its Funding Goal by $10 Billion · DX Today | No-Hype Podcast & News About AI & DX

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_03: It's Saturday, October 31, 2026.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_03: You're listening to the DX Today AI Daily Brief.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_03: Today, OpenAI trims its fundraising goal by$10 billion as the AI sell-off deepens.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_03: A report says Anthropic now drives more than a third of SpaceX revenue, and Google gets its first AI answer back from a satellite in orbit.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_03: Let's get into it.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_00: OpenAI has lowered its fundraising goal, cutting roughly$10 billion from the target, according to new reports.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: The Financial Times reported Friday that the Chat GPT maker is now seeking roughly$20 billion at a$1.25 trillion valuation, down from an earlier goal of$30 billion at$1.4 trillion.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_00: The Wall Street Journal reported OpenAI had secured about$11 billion in commitments so far, less than half of the original target.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: The reports cite a sharp sell-off in technology stocks and investor anxiety over the cost of AI infrastructure, along with rival anthropics, planned public listing competing for the same money.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: Skeptics see a sign that private valuations are finally meeting resistance.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: OpenAI has not confirmed the figures, and$11 billion would still rank among the largest private raises on record.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_03: Next, the cloud giant's quarter.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_04: Amazon Web Services just posted its fastest growth in almost five years.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_04: Amazon reported Thursday that AWS revenue rose 39% to$46 billion in the third quarter.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_04: On the earnings call, Chief Executive Andy Jassy said AWS could grow more than 40% in both 2027 and 2028, and floated the possibility that it becomes a trillion dollar revenue business within 5 to 10 years.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_04: Investors were not fully convinced.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_04: Amazon shares fell after the report, as capital spending on AI data centers more than doubled from a year earlier, and trailing free cash flow turned deeply negative.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_04: Analysts are split on whether that spending is a smart land grab for compute or a warning that returns on AI are still years away.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_02: Now an unusual space customer.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_02: Anthropic has become SpaceX's single largest customer, according to Bloomberg.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_02: Citing a person familiar with the matter, Bloomberg reported that the AI lab accounted for 34.5% of SpaceX's third quarter revenue through a deal for computing capacity.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_02: SpaceX's own quarterly filing names the buyer only as Customer B, and neither company has confirmed the identification.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_02: If accurate, Anthropic would rank ahead of the United States government as a source of SpaceX revenue.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_02: Bloomberg described the arrangement as finite, and analysts flagged the concentration risk of leaning on a single AI buyer for a third of sales.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_02: The report lands days after Anthropic filed paperwork for what could be one of the largest public offerings in history.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_02: Turning to chips.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_01: Intel's AI business is booming, but its stock just had its worst day in decades.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_01: Up 78% from a year earlier.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_01: That was not enough.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_01: The company issued a weak fourth quarter outlook and warned the personal computer market would stay soft through at least the first half of 2027 as a global memory shortage drives up costs for PC makers.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_01: Intel shares fell nearly 30% on Friday, dragging down chip stocks around the world.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_01: The results highlight a growing split in the industry, where demand for AI infrastructure is surging while consumer hardware is squeezed by the very same memory crunch that AI data centers created.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_03: Now an inference startup's raise.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_05: Bassettin is set to more than double its valuation in just four months.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_05: Bloomberg reported Friday that the NVIDIA-backed AI inference company is raising about$2 billion in two tranches, valuing it first at$26 billion and then at$30 billion.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_05: Sans Capital is expected to lead the round.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_05: Baston was valued at$13 billion when it announced its Series F in June.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_05: The company runs the infrastructure that serves AI models to users in production, a layer of the stack that has become one of the hottest corners of the market as businesses move from experimenting with AI to running it at scale.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_05: The round has not been finalized, and Baston has not commented publicly on the terms.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_03: Across the Atlantic, a regulator moves.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_00: Britain's competition, Watchdog, has opened a formal investigation into Meta.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: The Competition and Markets Authority said Friday it will examine whether Meta is abusing a dominant position by imposing exploitative terms on publishers and advertisers, terms that could let it use their website content for its own services, including artificial intelligence, without giving them a real choice.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: The probe falls under Chapter 2 of the Competition Act.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: The authority stressed that opening an investigation is not a finding that Meta broke the law, and it noted that Meta has paused the plan changes to its terms.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: The case puts the United Kingdom at the center of a growing global fight over whether tech platforms can fold publisher content into AI products on their own terms.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_03: Wikipedia weighs in on copyright.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_04: The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit behind Wikipedia, has stepped into the biggest AI copyright fight in the country.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_04: On Friday, it announced an amicus brief in the consolidated litigation that includes the New York Times case against OpenAI and Microsoft.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_04: Wikimedia staked out a middle ground.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_04: It argues that training an AI model can be fair use when the resulting model is genuinely new and different from its sources.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_04: But it says retrieval tools that pull in and reproduce content to answer users should respect licensing.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_04: Wikimedia warned that a ruling too strict on training could hurt innovation and the open web, while unchecked reproduction could drain traffic and support from the volunteer projects that AI systems depend on.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_03: Next, open weights from Paris.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_02: Mistral AI has released the downloadable weights for Mistral Large 4, its largest model yet.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_02: The French company made the weights available Thursday, following a public preview earlier this month.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_02: Mistral describes Large 4 as a natively multimodal model with 1 trillion parameters, and says it is the top open model for agentic coding and cyber defense.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_02: The release lets businesses and government agencies run the model on their own infrastructure, a key selling point for organizations in Europe that want control over sensitive data.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_02: The weights come under Mistral's own open weight license, a modified MIT license that requires a separate commercial agreement for certain companies that resell the model as a hosted service.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_02: A software giant goes defense.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_01: TechCrunch and Resilience Media reported the price at about$375 million in cash and stock, although Salesforce did not disclose terms.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_01: Rune will join Mission Force, the Salesforce unit built to sell to defense and government customers.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_01: The deal extends Salesforce from headquarters software down to supply decisions made in the field.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_01: And it continues an acquisition spree as the company pushes its AI agents into new markets.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_03: Now AI from orbit.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_05: Google says it has received its first AI response from space.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_05: The company announced Friday that its project Suncatcher prototype satellite ran an AI model in orbit on a data center class tensor processing unit and sent a complete answer back to Earth.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_05: The onboard Gemma model wrote a haiku.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_05: Chief Executive Sundar Pichai called it a hello world moment.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_05: The satellite was built with Planet Labs and launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket earlier this month.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_05: Project Suncatcher is exploring whether solar-powered satellites could one day host AI computing, sidestepping the power and land limits facing data centers on the ground.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_05: Big hurdles remain, especially cooling chips in the vacuum of space.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_03: Back on Earth, consulting scales up.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_00: Cognizant is putting more than 25,000 people behind OpenAI.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: The information technology services company on Friday announced its OpenAI Frontier Capability Group, which brings together professionals trained to deliver OpenAI products, including Codex and ChatGPT, to enterprise clients.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_00: Cognizant says the group will help businesses move frontier AIDA pilot projects and into production systems, from software engineering to customer operations.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_00: The move reflects a broader race among consulting firms to become the delivery arm for the big AI labs as clients ask for help actually deploying the tools they have bought.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_00: Investors were not impressed on the day, though.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_00: Cognizant shares fell almost 6% after the announcement.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_03: Finally, the human cost.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_04: New research from Goldman Sachs suggests AI job losses may leave lasting damage.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_04: In a note published Thursday, Goldman economist Pier Francesco May found that workers displaced from AI-exposed jobs since 2025 took about a month longer to find new work than other laid-off workers.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_04: They were also, roughly 10 percentage points, more likely to still be unemployed a year later.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_04: Goldman compared the pattern with four decades of earlier technology-driven layoffs, which left workers with earnings losses that lasted for years.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_04: The findings arrive in a month of heavy tech layoffs, and they add weight to a growing debate over retraining and worker protection as more companies replace roles with AI tools.