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Nov 14, 2025
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Supported by
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TGIF! Mira Murati's Thinking Machine Labs is in talks to raise funds at a $50 billion valuation. Tesla is working on incorporating Apple's CarPlay into its vehicles. Blue Origin lands a new rocket.
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Thinking Machines Lab, the AI company cofounded by ex-OpenAI Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati, is in talks to raise money at a roughly $50 billion valuation, according to a report from Bloomberg. The talks come just five months after the startup announced its last round at a $10 billion valuation. Since its official launch in February, Thinking Machines has released Tinker, an application programming interface that allows developers to finetune, or tweak, open-source models. Murati has also told investors that the
company aims to produce models customized to key performance indicators, specific business metrics that companies track, typically related to revenue or profit growth. Thinking Machines also plans to release a consumer product, such as an AI-powered assistant consumers can speak to, The Information has previously reported. Thinking Machines is one of a number of startups founded by former OpenAI executives and researchers that have landed high valuations in recent months, including Ilya Sutskever’s Safe Superintelligence and Liam Fedus’ Periodic Labs.
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Tesla is working on supporting Apple’s CarPlay system in its vehicles, Bloomberg reported on Thursday, in what would be a significant reversal of CEO Elon Musk’s opposition to working closely with the iPhone maker. The report said Tesla has been internally testing Carplay, which lets users connect their iPhones to vehicles’ infotainment systems more seamlessly, and could make the feature available to drivers in the coming months. While many vehicles made by other large automakers like Toyota, Ford and Volkswagen support Carplay,
Tesla has never supported the feature. Musk is a frequent public critic of Apple, which at one point had tried to develop an electric vehicle to rival Tesla. In August, Musk’s startup xAI sued Apple for allegedly favoring OpenAI’s ChatGPT over xAI’s Grok in its app store. However, Musk has previously pitched Apple
on using SpaceX’s Starlink to provide connectivity to iPhones, and the two companies may do a Starlink deal in the future, The Information reported in October.
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Blue Origin, the space company founded and owned by Jeff Bezos, took a major step forward by successfully launching its giant New Glenn rocket and landing its booster stage on a barge off the coast of Florida. It was a landmark achievement for Blue Origin in its ambitions of creating reusable rockets capable of delivering satellites into orbit and eventually astronauts and cargo to the moon. As part of Thursday’s launch, Blue Origin also successfully deployed its payloads in space, including two NASA spacecraft headed to Mars as part of the agency’s Escapade mission. Blue Origin is mostly known for sending tourists to the edge of space on its reusable 63-foot tall New Shepard rocket. New Glenn, in contrast, is 321-feet tall and will allow Blue Origin to compete for commercial and government launch contracts against
Elon Musk’s SpaceX. New Glenn is in a similar class to Starship, SpaceX’s new 400-plus foot tall rocket. While SpaceX has successfully launched hundreds of rockets and dominates the commercial space business, it has also struggled with technical mishaps that have caused multiple explosions of its Starship rockets. Blue Origin landed New Glenn on its second launch attempt.
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Anthropic recently cut off access to its AI models for several hackers who were using the technology to carry out cyberattacks and espionage, the company said Thursday. Anthropic said the hackers, who were linked to the Chinese government, used its Claude Code tool to try to hack into 30 targets, including tech companies, financial institutions, and government agencies in mid-September. Anthropic said the hackers succeeded at breaking into targets “in a small number of cases” before the AI startup cut off their access to the tools. The episode illustrates how AI tools are making it faster and easier for hackers to carry out cyberattacks. In this case, the hackers used Anthropic’s models to automatically write code that was used for the hacks, and to connect to other software like password crackers. The hackers were able to “jailbreak” Claude, meaning they overrode Anthropic’s safety guardrails which are supposed to prevent the software from being used for malicious purposes, Anthropic said. The startup said it has since strengthened Claude’s guardrails to prevent similar cyberattacks.
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Chinese tech giant Tencent Holdings said it is “upgrading” its team that develops artificial intelligence foundation models by stepping up recruitment efforts. “We are hiring more top-notch talent especially in the research area,” to complement the team’s strength in engineering, President Martin Lau said in a conference call Thursday after the company reported quarterly earnings. For example, Tencent a few months ago hired Yao Shunyu, a researcher who was working for OpenAI. Yao is known for his research on agentic AI. Tencent’s AI model team has struggled to compete against domestic rivals such as Alibaba Group and ByteDance. But Lau said there is no clear winner in the market yet. “At this point in time, we actually do not believe that there is a decisively better model in China, as everybody is locked in a pretty close race…..We don’t believe we are behind,” he said. Despite Tencent’s focus on AI model development, its capital expenditure in the quarter decreased 24% from a year earlier. That’s in part because Tencent has enough chips stockpiled from previous purchases to keep developing its own AI models, according to Lau. Separately, Bloomberg reported Thursday that Tencent had reached an agreement to allow Apple to process payments and collect 15% commissions from transactions in mini apps that operate within Tencent’s WeChat messaging app.
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