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AI News Today: OpenAI Eyes $30B at a $1.25 Trillion Valuation · DX Today | No-Hype Podcast & News About AI & DX

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_05: It's Friday, October 23rd, 2026.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_05: You're listening to the DX Today AI Daily Brief.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_05: Today, OpenAI nears a$30 billion raise at a$1.25 trillion valuation.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_05: Barclays ties 5,000 job cuts to AI, and a federal appeals court removes a judge over AI-generated errors.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_05: Let's get into it.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_01: OpenAI is close to finalizing a new funding round of up to$30 billion at a valuation of$1.25 trillion before the new money, CNBC reports.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_01: Investors from the United Arab Emirates and the firm COATU are leading the round, which is being described as bridge financing ahead of a potential initial public offering.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_01: Terms were still being discussed, so the round is not yet final.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_01: The new number is notable for what it is not.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_01: Only weeks ago, OpenAI was reportedly pitching investors at$1.4 trillion.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_01: So the new figure sits about$150 billion lower.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_01: For a company spending heavily on computing power, choosing to raise more private capital rather than rush to the public markets says a lot about both sovereign investor appetite and current market conditions.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_02: Now, a rival lab's windfall.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_02: Chinese AI lab DeepSeek has raised about 100 billion yuan, roughly$15 billion, in its latest private financing round, according to Bloomberg, which called it one of the largest ever in China.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_02: The Hangzhou company raised its target at least twice as investor demand built, and China's largest battery maker and the WeChat operator Tencent are reported to be among the biggest backers.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_02: Reuters reports the round could still close in the coming days, so details may shift.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_02: The money is expected to support a faster path to a listing in Shanghai.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_02: The timing stands out.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_02: The raise lands just days after a United States order directing federal civilian agencies to remove deep-seek technology from their systems became public, a reminder that Washington's restrictions have not cooled investor enthusiasm in China.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_04: Turning to banking, Barclay says it will cut about 5,000 jobs, roughly 5% of its global workforce, by the end of this year, as the British bank leans on artificial intelligence to lower costs.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_04: The announcement came Thursday alongside third-quarter results, which showed pretax profit up 12% to 2.3 billion pounds.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_04: The bank's chief executive said about 60% of the reductions fall in support functions, including fewer software developers, because AI tools are making staff more productive.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_04: The cuts are as banks face growing pressure to show that heavy technology spending turns into measurable gains.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_04: By naming AI so directly as a driver, Barclays puts a concrete number on a shift many lenders have only hinted at, and the plans of its rivals will now face closer scrutiny.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_04: Next, the bigger jobs picture.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: A new note from Goldman Sachs suggests the wave of AI layoffs, many feared this spring has not vanished.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: It may simply be waiting.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: Economist Joseph Briggs wrote Thursday that concerns about imminent AI job losses have cooled in recent months.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_00: But under the bank's forecast that AI eventually lifts productivity by 15% in developed economies, Goldman estimates that roughly one in 11 American workers, about 9%, could be displaced over a decade of adoption.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: That is about 15 million people.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: The key new argument is about timing.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: Historically, companies speed up automation during downturns, so Goldman expects the sharpest displacement to arrive with the next recession rather than during a steady economy.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: The bank stresses that being displaced does not mean being permanently unemployed, since many workers eventually move into new roles.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_03: Meanwhile, in Washington, on Capitol Hill, worry about AI and jobs is starting to turn into policy work.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_03: The New York Times reports that some members of Congress are exploring ways to strengthen support for workers if artificial intelligence leads to large-scale layoffs.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_03: Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon is expected to put forward a proposal, and related legislation has already been introduced in the Senate.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_03: Nothing has passed, and the ideas remain at an early stage.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_03: Still, the conversation reflects a shift.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_03: Lawmakers who once focused mainly on AI safety and competition with China are now asking what happens to paychecks if automation moves faster than the labor market can absorb it.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_03: States are moving as well.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_03: California recently signed workplace laws that limit automated firing and restrict certain kinds of AI surveillance of workers.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_05: Now, agents at work.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_01: Uber is putting its entire global workforce on an AI agent.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_01: The company and OpenAI announced Thursday that ChatGPT Work, the enterprise agent OpenAI introduced in July, is now rolling out to more than 30,000 Uber employees, up from a pilot of about 1,000.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_01: ChatGPT Work runs inside ChatGPT Enterprise and is designed to take on complex office tasks, from research and analysis to drafting documents.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_01: It is a rare company-wide deployment of an AI agent at this scale, and a notable win for OpenAI as it competes for enterprise customers.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_01: For other large employers, the Uber rollout becomes a test case, whether agents can move beyond small pilots and deliver productivity across an entire organization without creating new security and data governance headaches.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_02: Next, a new partner push.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_02: The AI company behind Grok, now part of SpaceX, launched a partner program on Thursday to push its models deeper into corporate America.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_02: The SpaceX Superintelligence Partner Network brings together two groups: Transformation Partners, which help businesses deploy Grok across their operations, and marketplace partners, which build products and integrations on the platform.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_02: Apollo Global Management and Nvidia are among the named participants, and the company says more than 130 firms already had early access.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_02: Services companies, including Tech Mahindra, announced their own tie-ins the same day.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_02: The move mirrors the partner ecosystems that OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google have built, and it signals that the next phase of growth for Grok depends less on consumers and more on winning enterprise contracts.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_04: Turning to design tools, Canva has released its first in-house image generation model.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_04: Called CanvaCraft, it was built by the company's own research team to compete with image models from Google, OpenAI, ByteDance, and Meta.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_04: Kraft works in two stages.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_04: It first turns a user's prompt into a layout plan, deciding how a design should be composed, and then it generates the image at resolutions of up to roughly 2,000 pixels across as many as 30 aspect ratios.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_04: The model is available to all users through the The Dream Lab tab and through the Canva Developer Platform.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_04: For the Australian Design Company, owning its own model reduces dependence on outside AI providers and could open new commercial opportunities, while giving its huge base of everyday designers a tool tuned for layouts rather than just pictures.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_04: Now, OpenWaights from China.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: Chinese AI company Minimax has released the OpenWaights for its latest coding-focused model, Minimax M3.1 Flash.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_00: The model has 428 billion parameters in total, but only about 23 billion are active for any given token.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_00: A design that helps keep running costs down.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: Minimax reports strong results on agent and coding benchmarks, including 73.7% on a widely watched software engineering test.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_00: The hosted version launched earlier in the week, and the downloadable weights are now on Hugging Face and Model Scope under the Minimax community license.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_00: Together, AI and NVIDIA made it available on day one.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: The release adds to a steady flow of capable open models from Chinese labs, giving developers more ways to run advanced systems on their own hardware.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_05: Next, Nvidia in Central Asia.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_03: Nvidia has invested in Higgs Field, an AI video generation startup with much of its engineering team in Kazakhstan.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_03: Nvidia and a prominent growth investment firm joined as an extension of the$400 million funding round Higgsfield raised in August, which valued the company at$5.4 billion.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_03: Terms of the new investment were not disclosed.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_03: Chief Executive Jensen Huang confirmed the deal today during his first visit to Astana, where he met the country's president and said Kazakhstan could become a major AI computing hub.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_03: Higgsfield, founded by a former SNAP executive, says the money will fund global infrastructure and hiring.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_03: The investment shows how Nvidia keeps backing the companies that consume its chips while building ties with governments that are eager to host AI infrastructure.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_05: Over to financial data.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_01: Data providers face pressure from AI tools that can summarize and analyze information cheaply, and owning specialized data that is hard to replicate is seen as protection.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_01: Alongside the deal, the group raised its guidance for the year, and its shares rallied in London trading on Thursday.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_05: Finally, AI in the courtroom.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_02: Wingate had earlier acknowledged that a law clerk used an AI tool to help draft an order, which included fabricated legal authorities and factual mistakes.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_02: Writing for the court, Judge Jerry Smith pointed to the embarrassment of the hallucinations and ordered the case reassigned to a different judge.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_02: The ruling did not decide whether the Mississippi law is constitutional, or it is a striking rebuke of AI misuse inside the judiciary itself.