OpenAI hits $500 billion valuation

PLUS: Murati’s OpenAI competitor, Apple’s smart glasses pivot, and robotic chemistry labs

Author

Jelani Abdus-Salaam
October 02, 2025

Welcome back, AI’ers!

Here’s What’s On The Menu For Today

  • OpenAI’s massive $500B valuation

  • Murati’s OpenAI competitor, ‘Tinker’

  • Apple’s AI smart glasses pivot

  • Robotic labs for automated science

AI ON MY MIND

Happy Thursday,

OpenAI is solidifying its position at the top of the AI world, reaching a staggering $500 billion valuation following a new share sale. The company also secured a critical chip supply deal to power its future ambitions.

By securing both immense capital and a vast supply of computing hardware, OpenAI is building a formidable moat around its operations. Is this combination of resources enough to guarantee its long-term dominance in the AI race?

By the way, I've been getting questions about how AI works in practice, so I'm launching a separate newsletter that dives deeper into real business applications and practical advice. [Click here if you're interested].

-Jelani Fuel (Co-founder of Best of AI)

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TODAY’S TOP STORIES

OpenAI's Half-Trillion Dollar Moment

The Recap: OpenAI has cemented its industry dominance, hitting a massive $500 billion valuation in a new secondary share sale. To power its future ambitions, the company also finalized a critical chip supply deal with Samsung and SK Hynix.

Unpacked:

  • The new signed agreement with Samsung and SK Hynix reportedly secures a supply of 900,000 chips per month, locking in the immense computing power needed for next-generation models.

  • This new valuation officially makes OpenAI the world's most valuable private company, surpassing SpaceX and marking a major milestone in the AI industry's rapid growth.

  • The $6.6 billion share sale provides liquidity for employees, acting as a critical retention tool amid fierce competition for AI talent from rivals like Meta.

Bottom line: By securing both immense capital and a vast supply of computing hardware, OpenAI is fortifying its leadership position in the AI race. This combination of resources empowers the company to accelerate the development of more powerful and ambitious AI systems.

Murati's 'Tinker' Enters the Arena

The Recap: Former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati's startup, Thinking Machines Lab, has launched its first product: an API called 'Tinker'. It is designed to simplify how developers customize powerful AI models for specialized tasks.

Unpacked:

  • Tinker operates as a managed service, handling the complex infrastructure needed for training and letting developers fine-tune open-weight models like Meta's Llama and Alibaba's Qwen with simple code.

  • To speed up adoption, the company also released an open-source library, the Tinker Cookbook, with modern code implementations for developers to build on.

  • Backed by a massive $2 billion seed round, Thinking Machines is betting that the future of AI lies not in single, all-purpose models, but in making it easy for anyone to build many hyper-specialized ones.

Bottom line: Tinker's launch signals a major shift toward specialized AI, empowering developers to create custom models without massive resources. This move positions Thinking Machines Lab as a key enabler in the ecosystem, directly challenging the notion that bigger is always better.

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Here’s why:

It’s an AI agent building tool that doesn’t require you to build out the logic using nodes. Instead, you use natural language to build out these agents. But the best thing imo is that you can build AI Agent teams.

Like agents talking to each other completing a goal until its done. It’s nuts. No other tool on the market is doing this. You have to check it out.

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👾 AI Tools We Use Everyday

➡️ N8N for AI Agents - Literally use this everyday to write this newsletter (link)

➡️ Axiom AI - AI Browser automation to scrape anything on the web (link)

➡️ GummySearch - AI Reddit research (link)

Tools are sourced from our database and are not sponsored or affiliated.

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MORE NEWS

Apple's New Vision for AI Wearables

The Recap: Apple is reportedly halting development on a cheaper Vision Pro headset to shift its focus toward AI-powered smart glasses, aiming to challenge Meta's successful Ray-Ban lineup.

Unpacked:

  • The company is fast-tracking two versions for a potential 2027 release, including a model that pairs with an iPhone and another with its own integrated display.

  • The new devices will reportedly rely heavily on an upgraded Siri for voice controls while integrating cameras, speakers, and health tracking features.

  • This strategic pivot is designed to compete with Meta, which recently expanded its own smart glasses line with new Display and athlete-focused options.

Bottom line: The move acknowledges the Vision Pro's high price and slow adoption, trading a niche mixed-reality device for a potential mass-market wearable. This places immense pressure on Apple to deliver a truly capable, next-generation Siri to make the AI-first experience compelling.

AI's New Flex: Robot Armies for Science

The Recap:  A startup from ex-OpenAI and DeepMind researchers, Periodic Labs, just raised $300 million to build automated labs. The goal is to let AI design and run its own real-world physics and chemistry experiments to generate new scientific data from scratch.

Unpacked:

  • AI models are hitting a wall after consuming most of the internet's available text data. To make further progress in complex physical sciences, AI needs to learn from novel, high-quality experimental results, not just existing literature.

  • The timing is critical, as OpenAI’s Chief Scientist recently admitted the field has an eval deficit and needs to tackle real-world problems to measure progress beyond benchmarks.

  • Periodic's system creates a powerful feedback loop: AI agents design experiments, robotic labs execute them with real materials, and nature itself provides the results, generating clean data to improve the models for the next discovery.

Bottom line: This approach moves AI from simply interpreting existing human knowledge to actively generating new scientific insights. It represents a foundational shift that could accelerate breakthroughs in materials science, superconductors, and next-generation chips.

OTHER NEWS YOU MAY LIKE

Metaannounced it will begin using data from user interactions with its AI products to personalize ad targeting starting in December.

Anthropicintegrated its Claude AI directly into Slack, allowing the model to summarize channels, draft responses, and brief users before meetings.

Google updated its Search "AI Mode" with new visual understanding capabilities, allowing users to make conversational queries like "show me weekend jeans for fall".

Google DeepMind unveiled Dreamer 4, an agent that learned to collect diamonds in Minecraft by training entirely within its own predictive simulation of the game.

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THAT’S IT FOR TODAY

Until next time, stay safe.

-Best of AI Team

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